By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
If you are sick and tired of seeing politicians and
others playing the race card, or if you are just disgusted with the grossly
dishonest way racial issues in general are portrayed, then you should get a
copy of Ann Coulter's new book, "Mugged." Its subtitle is:
"Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama."
Few things are as rare as an honest book about race. This
is one of the very few, and one of the very best.
Many people will learn for the first time from Ann
Coulter's book how a drunken hoodlum and ex-convict, who tried to attack the
police, was turned into a victim and a martyr by the media, simply by editing a
videotape and broadcasting that edited version, over and over, across the
nation.
They will learn how a jury -- which saw the whole unedited
videotape and acquitted the police officers of wrongdoing -- was portrayed as
racist, setting off riots that killed innocent people who had nothing to do
with the Rodney King episode.
Meanwhile, the people whose slick editing set off this
chain of events received a Pulitzer Prize.
Even the Republican President of the United States,
George H.W. Bush, expressed surprise at the jury's verdict, after seeing the
edited videotape, while the jury saw the whole unedited videotape. Even
Presidents should keep their mouths shut when they don't know all the facts.
Perhaps especially Presidents.
Innumerable other examples of racial events and issues
that have been twisted and distorted beyond recognition are untangled and
revealed for the frauds that they are in "Mugged."
The whole history of the role of the Democrats and the
Republicans in black civil rights issues is taken apart and examined, showing
with documented fact after documented fact how the truth turns out repeatedly
to be the opposite of what has been portrayed in most of the media.
It has long been a matter of official record that a
higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats, in both Houses of Congress,
voted for the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Yet the great
legend has come down to us that Democrats created the civil rights revolution,
over the opposition of the Republicans.
Since this all happened nearly half a century ago, even
many Republicans today seem unaware of the facts, and are defensive about their
party's role on racial issues, while Democrats boldly wrap themselves in the
mantle of blacks' only friends and defenders.
To puff up their role as defenders of blacks, it has been
necessary for Democrats and their media supporters to hype the dangers of
"racists." This has led to some very creative ways of defining and
portraying people as "racists." Ann Coulter has a whole chapter
titled "You Racist!" with examples of how extreme and absurd this
organized name-calling can become.
No book about race would be complete without an
examination of the role of character assassination in racial politics. One of
the classic injustices revealed by Ann Coulter's book is the case of Charles
Pickering, a white Republican in Mississippi, who prosecuted the Imperial
Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.
Back in those days, opposing the Ku Klux Klan meant
putting your life, and the lives of your family members, at risk. The FBI had
to guard Pickering and his family. Later, Pickering went on to become a federal
judge and, in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated him for promotion to the
Circuit Court of Appeals.
As a Republican judge, Pickering was opposed by elite
liberal Democrats in Congress and in the media who, in Ann Coulter's words,
"sent their children to 99-percent white private schools" while
"Pickering sent his kids to overwhelmingly black Mississippi public
schools."
Among the charges against Pickering was that he was bad
on civil rights issues. Older black leaders in Mississippi, who had known
Pickering for years, sprang to his defense. But who cared what they said?
Pickering's nomination was defeated on a smear.
"Mugged"
is more than an informative book. It is a whole education about the difference
between rhetoric and reality when it comes to racial issues. It is a much
needed, and even urgently needed education, with a national election just weeks
away.
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