Maybe Just Tell Us What’s Not Racist

There is nothing, nothing, in politics more infuriating than the Democrats’ relentless use of racial division to cement the kind of thinking Courtland Milloy illustrated in his latest Washington Post column. The ever-expanding list of things that are considered racist to criticize so long as Obama is president is perhaps the most absurd manifestation of this line of thinking. Nearly all of these fail “the John Edwards test” for things Republicans would quite reasonably have been expected to say if Edwards rather than Obama had been the next Democratic nominee and president. But even in that context, Martin Bashir of MSNBC has reached a new low.
Via the National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, we have Bashir claiming that “IRS” is the new “n-word”: “the IRS. Three letters that sound so innocent. But we know what you mean”:

I wish I was making this up. You really cannot satirize the desire of Obama’s defenders to deploy his race as a sword and shield to override even discussion of how the federal government uses its power over ordinary citizens. The entire purpose of this relentless drumbeat is to create an environment in which rational discourse and debate is impossible.
Voters who vote on the basis of race are – as you can see from Milloy’s column – not voting on the basis of the actual policy decisions, competence and integrity of the people they vote for, and indeed may end up making every possible excuse to avoid holding those people accountable. It’s deeply corrosive to democracy to approach politics this way – it invariably leads to a corrupt, incompetent one-party government, secure in the knowledge that it can play its trump card to keep the voters at bay and avoid political competition. (Indeed, the Democrats’ use of race in the Jim Crow South held back for years the movement of many white Southerners to their more natural home in the GOP, and the use of ethnic and racial wedges has been a staple of corrupt urban machine politics for centuries).
Racial politics are the true last refuge of the scoundrel. We should be unsurprised to see ever more of them, the more Obama’s Administration struggles under the weight of multiple scandals.

14 thoughts on “Maybe Just Tell Us What’s Not Racist”

  1. That was the dumbest video I’ve seen in a while. It took me a minute to recall where I heard the name Ali Bashir before. He was a minor character in one of the Harry Potter books who wanted to export flying carpets to Britain. I guess the real Ali Bashir likes fiction too.

  4. Why do you suppose the crashing of the world’s economy in 2008 (caused by fraud on the part of financial institutions), was blamed on the CRA so quickly. If it’s not “when the shit goes down, blame brown”, what was it?
    While we’re at it, why are you still excusing Ronald Reagan’s use of the Southern Strategy? Waving-off St. Ronnie’s wooing of racists and bigots isn’t going to help you convince anyone of the argument you’re trying to make in this post.

  5. No one in the Party of Al Sharpton can lecture Republicans on race. No. One.
    The reasons liberals resort to this vile tactic are 1. It works, and 2. They suffer no consequences. There is every incentive to do it, and nothing to discourage it.
    The normal referee in such matters, the news media, is dominated by Democrats and is not interested in tampering with the weather beaten narrative that Only Republicans can be Racist.
    The fact is, only one party uses overt racial politics – Democrats. And only one party still espouses a colorblind society – Republicans. Chew on that one.
    It’s long past time for Republicans/conservatives to implement this rule: All false charges of racism will be treated as racism itself.

  6. in full disclosure Crank please explain the 1948 Dixiecrat boycott. Being willing ignorant of past history is just shameful.

  7. Berto, Eisenhower broke the stranglehold of the KKK backed Democrat Party I the South. Are you fool enough to call him a racist when Al Gore, Sr. and Grand Kleage Robert Bryd are democrat party heroes?

  8. Paul V,
    In English, please. (Or Spanish, those are the 2 languages I can understand).
    Also, Eisenhower, Gore Sr., and Byrd are dead.
    Is this another defense of the GOP’s wooing of racists and bigots by citing a history which stopped in 1965? What happened between ’65 and 2010? (Hint: the GOP wooed racists and bigots to help elect Republicans. And there is no bigger hero to Republicans than the guy who kicked-off his Presidential election by speaking about “states rights” in Philadelphia, MS).

  10. . . .”Eisenhower, Gore Sr., and Byrd are dead”
    Says the man railing against Ronald Reagan – whose funeral Robert Byrd attended.
    Looks like you’ll need a new distraction from the inconvenient.

  11. True that.
    I’ve needed that distraction since modern conservative economic policy crashed the world’s economy so badly, they needed the federal government to save it.
    What we really need is the distraction of perp walks, trials and imprisonment for the bankers who committed the fraud.
    Since that won’t happen, I’ll distract myself by reminding fools on the internet who wish they lived in a world where the GOP hasn’t wooed bigots and racists for electoral advantage for more than a generation about the reality of the situation.
    I know Reagan’s an albatross you don’t want hung around your neck, but you don’t forget the worst President in the history of the nation, just because he’s dead.

  12. The “Reagan kicked-off his Presidential election by speaking about “states rights” in Philadelphia, MS” talking point is the true mark of a moron. Let us count the ways this is emblematic of Democratic deception on this issue:
    -The speech did not kick off his campaign; it was the first post-convention stop in August 1980. Reagan kicked off his campaign with a televised speech in November 1979. History rarely records where a campaign makes its first stop after the convention.
    -It was a single-day event squeezed into Reagan’s schedule before a week-long pitch to black voters, including a speech to the Urban League, a tour of the South Bronx and interviews with Ebony & Jet magazines. Reagan was plainly trying to illustrate that the same candidate could appeal to both audiences. Sadly, black voters stuck with Carter (who had carried the whole South in 1976) despite his manifest failure.
    -The speech was not in Philadelphia, but at the Nashoba County Fair a few miles away, which had been the subject of a positive profile in National Geographic that June. It was that profile that gave Reagan’s team the idea to do a speech there. Michael Dukakis campaigned at the same fair in 1988.
    -Reagan’s sole reference to “states rights” was, if you listen to the audio, not even an applause line. He spent more of the speech arguing that welfare recipients would work if you gave them the chance and were being victimized by a self-interested federal bureaucracy.
    You should read this column on the race record of Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding compared to Woodrow Wilson for a taste of the scale of liberal/progressive revisionism.

  13. Nice try Crank but “You can bring facts to a Liberal but you can’t make him think!”

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