From the moment that Barack Obama threw his hat into the ring for President, Democrats have been accusing those who disagree with him of being racists. They are of course being disingenuous, pernicious and at the end of the day, most importantly, wrong.
But what if they weren’t? Let’s say somehow the entire universe of conservatives was made up of racists… so what? Does it change the veracity of their stated disagreements with President Obama? If it were in fact the case that conservatives hate him because he is black does that mean that their well thought out, reasonable and clearly articulated reasons for opposing him are somehow less valid? No, of course it doesn’t.
This issue makes me think of hate crimes. I’ve never been a supporter of hate crime legislation. Not because I like crimes or hate, but because it’s the act that makes something a crime, not the real or imagined hate. If someone beats up someone else because of their race or sexual orientation or religion, they should be prosecuted for assault, period. Is a victim any less injured or dead because the perpetrator assaulted them for their money instead of their – fill in the blank characteristic? No, obviously not. That’s ridiculous. The criminal justice system should deal with the crime and not worry about trying to look into the soul of the criminal.
In the same way, politics should focus on people’s words and actions and not try and look into the souls of the various participants. Why? Because that is all we can really know about a person. As George Bush discovered with Vladimir Putin, it’s impossible to look into someone’s soul and know what is going on in there. Along those same lines, when Steve Jobs died I wrote that it was possible that he was selfish son of a bitch, but I’d never know. What I do know however is that his words and actions did a great deal of good for hundreds of millions of people around the world. It didn’t matter if Jobs thought PC users were mental dwarves when compared to the Mensa like intelligence demonstrated by those who use Macs. He opened up iTunes to everyone and changed the world of music. It’s what he did that changed the world not what was going on in his soul. But of course race plus politics is something altogether different.
Race has been an issue swirling around Barack Obama since he first declared his candidacy and then continued once he became President. There was the whole Jeremiah Wright deal and Obama’s spending two decades in his church but somehow inexplicably never hearing a single racist comment. There was his knee jerk reaction that the Cambridge police department “acted stupidly” without knowing the facts of the case. There was his attorney general dropping voter intimidation charges against the demonstrably guilty New Black Panther Party. And just last month the President revived African-Americans for Obama. Can one imagine the outrage if Mitt Romney created a Whites for Romney organization?
To the degree that race is an issue for President Obama, it’s either been because he is making it so or because his party is using it as a red herring to deflect criticism of their agenda. The most obvious example of the latter was during the ObamaCare debate when the Democrats famously accused protesters of using racial epithets and spitting on black congressmen. The late Andrew Breitbart did a good job of dispensing with those charges.
That brings us to the basic element of liberal politics. Their default position towards anyone who opposes Barack Obama and the Democratic Party’s socialist agenda is to accuse them of being racist and that is supposed to be the end of the conversation. In that kind of an environment a conservative simply cannot win – how do you disprove something for which the mere accusation itself is seemingly enough to prove guilt? You can’t. My suggestion therefore is to take a different tack altogether: Don’t try. Rather, I suggest playing the hypothetical card. Instead of trying to disprove the undisprovable, instead suggest: “Ok, let’s pretend I am what you have painted me to be, and let’s assume that’s not going to change… now let’s talk about the issues.”
Now of course many of the good and principled liberals will demure to discuss the issues because they feel it’s inappropriate to discuss politics with racists other than to demonstrate their own non-racist bona fides. In that case you might then suggest to them that if their leader can advocate sitting down and talking with people who want to wipe the United States off the face of the planet they might deign to talk with people who simply want to discuss things like the tax code, the EPA and healthcare.
Don’t hold your breath however. Apparently liberals / Democrats believe that if one is racist (or more accurately, is labeled racist by them) then you are simply not qualified to have a voice in the political arena and your issues need not be addressed. That’s quite a leap for a party whose Senate leader for a decade was a man who had been an Exalted Cyclops of the KKK and filibustered to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Conservatives need not acquiesce to the liberal’s attempt to stifle public discourse. By calling their bluff and taking the non sequitur of racism off the table, conservatives have the opportunity to expose the liberal agenda for what it is, nothing but a recipe for disaster of a cleptocratic nanny state. In doing so and by discussing the facts rather than letting Democrats malign the messengers of the messages they fear, perhaps we can once again allow the American people to focus on the real issues facing the country rather than parrying with shadows of a Democrat created illusion with no basis in reality.
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To listen to the Democrats call Republicans racist is sick sick sick. The most disgusting racist in politics in 0-bama.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones but being told I’m a ‘so-called’ racist by a Liberal will “never” deter me…..
I dislike Obama. I dislike him for his policies, his ideological viewpoint, and his un-Constitutional power grabs.
And because of that, liberals call me racist.
I ask you, who are the ones concentrating on race here?
Liberals realize most conservatives are not racists. They only use the name-calling tactic because it works. It also incites emotions among their minority constituents.
Our nation is hyper-sensitive to the race issue, even though my international students often said America was among the LEAST racist of countries. (In Saudi, for example, Americans and Saudis stand in one bank line, while Jordanians, etc., stand in another.)
No, the evils of racism are slowly being eradicated. What we are upholding, instead, is something much worse. The killing of the unborn.
misuse of the word makes it lose its sting
after all, all conservatives ARE racists, homophobes and misogynists
RIGHT?
btw, I’m a conservative
I ask you, who are the ones concentrating on race here?
Or just ask the leftist to rebut Bob Parks recitation of history at http://www.black-and-right.com/the-democrat-race-lie/
Dems, liberals, big Obama supporters all have one thing in common: when you can’t win a debate on merits, scream ”race!”
Did you know that more than half of Obama’s 47 biggest fundraisers, those who collected at least $500,000 for his campaign, have been given administration jobs.
Nine more have been appointed to presidential boards and committees.
24 Obama bundlers were given posts as foreign ambassadors (two have already been removed for partying instead of working*).
40 percent of Obama’s appointees to be Foreign Service officers were bundlers.
Eric Holder was a bundler.
Julius Genachowski Obama’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission was, too.
Bundler Steve Spinner, Obama’s liaison in the Energy Department, pressed for DOE to finalize a government loan for Solyndra, later lying about it until emails proved he did.
*Nicole Avant partied until she was removed as Obama’s Bahamas Ambassador and is now back to being a full-time bundler.
Cynthia Stroum served in Luxembourg but was removed for not doing her job only to be replaced by another Obama bundler, Robert Mandell.
Merit is not even part of the picture.
No wonder RACE is the only reply when Obama’s policies are blown apart.
the first time i was called a racist I was shocked and stung and hurt and didnt know how to respond
the second time it hurt, but not like the first
progressively it totally lost any sting
right now if someone calls me a race simply because i am white by appearence(technically i’m mixed(paert Native American)) and i disagree with this administrations policies, i claim it and say oh yes, and then list off a number of my positions that prove race has nothing to do with my oppositions
i also sarcastically add i must be h a homophobe too because i don’t support “gay marraige” but support getting the government totally out of the marriage business
by that point, the person that called me racist feels like an ant
In the study of biology, two species do not mix because of chromosonal differences barring them. Cats and dogs do not make dats or cogs. Fish and birds do not make bish or firds. That human beings of different hues of skin color can mate and procreate children tells us simply that race is not a scientific issue. It is purely political. Since intermarriage is a somewhat normative thing, and there are so many mixes between “races,” the conclusion is that race is not a bar physiologically to one human relating to another human. What is a bar is political mentality. The reason the racists demand one play their game — and I include the Southern Democrats of the segregation era in American history as well as today’s “Harvard” racists who continue the practice in other guises — is because they cannot win debate on the merits of proof. Ergo ad hominem. For decades now, “race” has been taught by the political Left, as has gender and other perceptions which would fuel such accusations as “racist” and “hater,” but this is all grooming to make a people compliant and obedient. Nothing more. The concept of “race” was purported to have been scientific, but if we can recall, Marx’ theory was called “scientific socialism,” and Max Weber’s game was to make “social science” a science, when it is not a science at all. I find the term, “racialist,” intriguing. It enters the dialogue and reminds me of this quote from 1911:
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Booker T. Washington was forward-seeing, and he saw with great clarity and vision that which is occuring today. Obama and Bell and their ilk want tp stoke the fires about inequality between “races” because it serves their purpose, which is wholly political and seeks to gain power and wealth from others. It is this stance which is the modern slave master, or would be excepting the dialogue and narrative behind it are falling apart as it continues.
“Racist” is become a dull and inarticulate tool for those wielding it, and “racialist” is a fine term to describe their political intent, a plain and ugly attempt to gain mastery over others by pretending to be the offended party, all the while offending others greatly.
There is no scientific description of “race,” and the taxonomic varieties change with the political climate. When I studied anthropology in university, the five “races” were Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid, Capoid and Australoid. That taxonomy in only forty years has shifted so many times, it is astounding. Much as has “global cooling” become “global warming” become “climate change,” with the ensuing ad hominem trotted out of “denier.”
Let us continue to smartly becomes deniers of the political concept of “race.” There is no scientific basis for a taxonomic distinction based on skin color. If there were, “acting white” by a Supreme Court justice would never be allowed as vald. There is no “black” culture, because there are many cultures as there are languages. The American blacks, passionate about their skin color, rarely express interest in learning one of the indigenous African languages, six groups with as many as several thousand subsets. Which public African-American has begun to learn one? Since I have a nodding acquaintance with a half-dozen langauges, I can tell you that a human being can learn several.
How many does President Obama speak? Only English, that “colonialist” European language. Which African language has Attorney General Holder sought to learn? Which African language did Professor Bell choose to learn? But they all avidly choose to learn a political philosophy rooted in a German-speaking amateur economist who live, died and was buried in England’s Highgate Cemetery. Odd how culture and language can clarify issues? Mister Obama clarified well when he fumbled as suggested that Austrians speak “Austrian.” Dummmheit!
The “racists” and “racialists” in today’s news are American Leftists who think they are very informed, when in fact they are uninformed toadies to a long dead, “white” German theorist who was 1) a racist and 2) a mysoginist, and bragged that his fantasy was “scientific” when it was nothing of the sort.
Best wishes.
Just saw this on yahoo!
Thought it might be just the thing for all of you racist bigots!
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/feeling-racist-blood-pressure-pill-propranolol-may-open-223450211.html
Disliking Obama as much as I do, I must be a pretty racist individual. Probably ought to take double the recommended dosage.
To a racist, all “…well thought out, reasonable and clearly articulated reasons….” are just clever rationalizations for covering up their true motive. You could ask George Wallace, but he’s dead.
blabla/dddd…. you are playing sock puppet here. Pick one cyber handle for your spam, or you will go the way of other sock puppets.