“The Democratic Party is the architect of modern-day racism.”
That’s a direct quote from Frances Rice, the (black and female) chairman of the National Black Republican Association and a former US Army Lieutenant Colonel. And despite a well-documented 150-year history of racism (Michael Scheuer calls Dems the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism), you don’t have to re-read your high school history book to see that Ms. Rice’s statement is true.
Just re-read the rhetoric of the recent past – the past few weeks. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times says South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson is racist for calling President Obama a liar. The increasingly irrelevant Rev. Al Sharpton, of course, sanctimoniously agrees.
Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson worries that people will suddenly be donning “white hoods and white uniforms again and riding through the countryside" if we don’t root out this conservative racism spreading across the nation.
Former President Jimmy Carter goes on hiatus from his usual discourse of Palestinian apologia and rank anti-Semitism to call “an overwhelming portion” of President Obama’s critics racist.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pretends to publicly weep at the racism she sees across the country, in the faces of elderly grandmothers who are worried about Medicare cuts at health care town halls in Wichita.
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And even formerly-funny man David Letterman tries to lure Obama into another disastrous admission that the country (that just elected a black president) is racist. Of course, the first one hit when Obama inexplicably announced his buddy Skip Gates had been a target of racial profiling by the Cambridge police who arrested him outside his home. That ended with a bizarre Benetton beer summit in the rose garden, with a white police officer, a black professor, and a biracial president. Oh, and Joe Biden was there, too.
The old-guard, tried-and-true Democratic tactic of turning the race argument on Republicans is so staid and transparent, it’s almost become a parody of itself. Where illegitimate charges of racism were once potent enough to silence an opposing point of view, now they merely elicit laughs and head shakes from a generation who isn’t informed entirely by the angry identity politics of the past.
And if the Democrats continue to cling to this preposterous fear mongering, without a word of admonition from high-ranking Democratic officials who are all too happy to let the practice carry on underneath and around them, eventually my generation will dismiss them entirely as out-of-touch, embittered dinosaurs who are using race just to win votes.
And the more they reach for the race card, the more they devalue legitimate instances of racism. But even worse, they reveal that their policies are meant to keep black America under their thumb, victims, vulnerable to persuasion, dependent on their handouts.
As Rice puts it, “The message that Democrats give to poor blacks is despicable. If you remain poor, uneducated and vote for Democrats, we will celebrate your victimhood. If you get a good education, get a good job and vote for Republicans, we will denigrate you as ‘acting white,’ a ‘sellout,’ an ‘Uncle Tom,’ and worse.”
Thomas Friedman acrobatically proved irony’s full range in a recent New York Times column in which he suggested the critical rhetoric against Obama from the “right fringe” will destroy the legitimacy of the presidency. (I doubt he was equally as concerned when the left fringe continuously compared President Bush to Hitler, burned him in effigy, or mocked him as a chimpanzee.)
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But it’s the Jurassic-era race-baiting by the Democrats that is chipping away at the shiny veneer of the presidency, victimizing the president himself, and marginalizing liberals to the extreme corners of relevance. Now that there’s a black man in the White House, rather than embrace the post-race America that Al Sharpton and his cohorts so excitedly promised Obama would deliver, Sharpton knows that would mean he’d be out of a job. And so the buffoonery continues, at the peril of black America , Democrats, and even Obama.
I asked Rice what GOP leadership could do to kill this lame line of attack once and for all. She wasn’t optimistic. “What are their options? Issue a public statement admonishing the Democrats for their incivility? Issue a public statement condemning Democrats for denigrating black Republicans? The likely reaction by black Democrats and liberal journalists would be to trash the GOP leaders as racist.”
She’s right. The condemnation has to come from the left, from within the Democratic Party. And who better than our first black president to say to the Sharptons and Dowds and Carters and Pelosis, “Enough is enough. You’re making us all look bad.”
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