Mark Tapson
This past February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the late great Andrew Breitbart correctly predicted that this would be the year of the “dog whistle” election, that the media would hurl charges of racism at President Obama’s opponents at every opportunity. How right he was.
When the Republican National Convention got underway with great fanfare last week, the now-openly leftist media went all out to perpetuate their narrative that candidate Mitt Romney is “stoking the racial politics of yesteryear.” The ever-reliable propaganda organ known as The New York Times, for example, accused the Romney campaign of making the election about race, a case of psychological projection if there ever was one. It’s the progressive left that is doing their damnedest to make this election entirely about race. It’s the only weapon they have in their impotent arsenal.
In order to paint Republicans a whiter shade of pale, the media cut their RNC coverage of conservative speakers of color, and when they did acknowledge non-white conservatives, it was only to dismiss them as patronizing tokens. After all, to the left, non-white conservatives are white “on the inside” anyway – hence such derogatory labels as “Oreos” and “coconuts” – and are therefore just as racist as their white counterparts.
Even actor Clint Eastwood’s harmless and much-discussed performance art at the RNC was deemed racist by someone named Jay Fernandez at IndieWire. How was Eastwood racist? Fernandez doesn’t say, except to note that Eastwood’s public “criticism of a sitting president” was “disrespectful” and “crass.” (Since when is the public criticism of a sitting president not allowed? When he’s a black Democrat, that’s when. Or when totalitarians are in charge.) So where was the racism? Nowhere except from Fernandez himself, who, in a racist (as well as agist and sexist) spasm of his own, called Republicans “the party of old white men.”
And the (now former) Yahoo! News Chief David Chalian snidely remarked on a live mic that the Romneys “are happy to have a party while black people drown” – an insane and hateful reference to the New Orleans victims of Hurricane Isaac. As Newsbusters’ Matthew Sheffield noted, Chalian neglected to mention that “the Republican National Committee canceled the entirety of Monday’s program or that President Obama did not cancel any of his regularly scheduled campaign fund-raising parties that night.”
The media salivated over a suspicious incident in which two conventioneers tossed peanuts at a black camerawoman and made racist remarks, for which they were thrown out. (Seriously now, does anyone believe that those two were anything but progressive plants?)
Adding fuel to conservative momentum this election is Dinesh D’Souza’s remarkably successful documentary 2016: Obama’s America, which posits that Obama is driven by a deep-seated anti-colonialism. So of course, it was targeted as racist by the media. Entertainment Weekly’s avowed lefty movie reviewer Owen Gleiberman writes: “The basic thesis of 2016: Obama’s America makes almost no sense, to the point that a lot of viewers may be tempted to laugh it off.” (Actually, not only is the thesis very easy to comprehend, but D’Souza’s is an exceedingly well-crafted argument; perhaps Gleiberman is simply incapable of understanding it.) He goes on to say that:
By now, most of us understand that the “birther” theory — the preposterously unfactual notion that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States — is really a code for race. And what’s insidious about 2016: Obama’s America is that the whole movie, in a sense, is code for the birther theory.
It’s unclear how the “birther” theory could be “preposterously unfactual” if there is no factual evidence to disprove it, which is precisely why the birther theory persists. But what really “makes no sense” is how it’s a “code” for race. What does being born in or out of the United States have to do with race? Absolutely nothing, except in the race-obsessed minds of progressives who are fanatical about manufacturing racism where there is none – and they have seized upon the brilliant practice known as racial coding to do that.
Racial coding allows progressives to point to anything a conservative says, or doesn’t say, and call it racism. This is what enables them to dismiss all criticism of Obama as racism, and to divert attention from their own raging racism. How can the left condemn criticism of Obama as racist and yet attack black Republicans Allen West, Mia Love, Condoleeza Rice, or Herman Cain? Because the left holds itself to be incapable of racism; hence there will be no outcry from them about purported comedian Bill Maher’s comment that Rep. West belongs to “the Party of the Apes.” Imagine the media feeding frenzy if Rush Limbaugh had said that about Obama.Gleiberman’s frothing attack on 2016 reaches an insane crescendo when he labels it “the moral equivalent of the old anti-Semitic propaganda hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” So an intellectually defensible critique of Obama’s worldview is just as heinous as a fake document designed to demonize Jews and justify their genocide. You have to give Gleiberman credit for creativity, if not a sense of moral or historical proportion.
As I’ve written before, opposition to Obama’s “otherness,” as the left is fond of calling it, has nothing to do with his skin color and everything to do with his rejection of American exceptionalism and his anti-capitalist, anti-American, pro-Islamist, divisively racist, agenda. There is not a single shred of evidence, outside of the fevered imagination of increasingly desperate progressives, that Mitt Romney is running a race-baiting campaign.
If I were a Democrat, I would be mortified that my team had nothing more politically and philosophically substantial to offer in this upcoming presidential contest than perpetual, phantasmic accusations of racism directed at the opposition. But the left has nothing else. They cannot tout Obama’s disastrous economic policies. They cannot claim that the world “likes” us more now, in the wake of his abominable treatment of our allies and his contemptible embrace of and/or submission to our enemies. They cannot defend his racial polarization of a nation that elected him to be a unifier. They cannot point to the election promises he failed to keep. They have nothing positive to attract voters to their policies, so their platform must consist only of smears.
Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/racism-racism-racism/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment