Friday, June 22, 2012
‘Here’s a little secret,” Keith Olbermann told viewers in
2010. “When racist white guys get together and they don’t want to be caught
using any of the popular epithets that are in use every day in this country
about black people . . . the racist white guys resort to euphemisms and code
words.”
At least Olbermann acknowledged that not all white people
are racist; but three and a half years into the first “post-racial” presidency,
one might get that impression. Take the list Olbermann enumerated on air:
“Cocky, flippant, punk, and especially, arrogant.” Last week, Congressional
Black Caucus executive director Angela Rye added cool to the list: “Even cool,
the term cool, could in some ways be deemed racial.”
Liberals have spent the past four years tearing out page
after page of Merriam-Webster. “Articulate” and “bright” were forbidden early
in the 2008 primary season, with Obama defenders dredging up a classy Chris
Rock joke that “articulate” is “some s**t you say about retarded people that
can talk.” But CNN, Legal Affairs, and other media outlets had bestowed the
same compliment on John Edwards during his meteoric rise years before. A 2004
Slate headline called Edwards “bright and articulate and really, really
youthful,” while Steve Benen wrote at the Carpetbagger Report in 2003 that
“Edwards is a very bright, articulate, and aggressive lawmaker.”
In April, Mitt Romney unveiled a new campaign slogan at a
stop in Ohio: “Obama Isn’t Working.” Racist, cried Mediaite’s Tommy
Christopher: It evokes “the stereotype of the ‘lazy,’ ‘shiftless’ black man.”
Van Jones, Obama’s erstwhile “green-jobs czar,” said in a web chat that the
slogan set off “racial fire alarms.” But as the Romney campaign explained, the
slogan was a tribute to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party, whose “Labour
Isn’t Working” poster, designed in 1978 when the Iron Lady was running for
prime minister, was named by Campaign magazine the poster of the century: Its
image of a winding unemployment line “pointed to Britain’s economic climate of
rising unemployment, rising inflation, and a growing national debt.” Sound
familiar?
Criticism of Obama policy is also racist. During debates
over the president’s health-care overhaul, NPR claimed that “a sharp divide
[exists] between whites who have a liberal outlook on racial issues compared
with those who have a conservative outlook on racial issues.” Meanwhile,
responding to South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst
during the president’s 2009 health-care address to Congress, New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, “But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word
in the air: You lie, boy!”
Reflecting on C-SPAN on Obama’s election to the
presidency, filmmaker Michael Moore said Obama succeeded among young voters
“because they’re not as racist as the previous generations,” implying that all
those older white folks who rejected Obama at the polls were racist.
And if liberals can find racism in Obama’s electoral
victories, they can certainly locate it in his defeats. After a federal
prisoner received more than 40 percent of the vote against Obama in May’s West
Virginia primary, state Democrats blamed the racist voters. But, of course, in
a closed Democratic primary, those could not be bigoted Republican voters. The
state Democrats condemned their own.
The Left hears so many “dog whistles” in today’s public
discourse that one fears to say anything at all. And that’s the point. Liberals
use the accusation of racism as a cudgel to cow political opponents. But the
refusal by so many on the left to approach with honesty disagreements on
questions of policy indicates intellectual bankruptcy, and many are growing
savvy to the invocation of race to forestall substantive debate. Furthermore,
what anti-black racism does exist in America could not possibly account for the
nearly 50 percent of voters who disapprove of the president’s performance, or
his policies’ frequent failure in the courts, or his poor performance in his
own party’s primaries.
In his book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, Josef
Pieper wrote, “The dignity of the word, to be sure, consists in this: through
the word is accomplished what no other means can accomplish, namely,
communication based on reality.”
Liberals have spent the last four years manipulating and
excising words because they refuse to confront reality.
But then, we already knew that.
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