NY: Liberals have been distracted from playing the race card for a couple of days while they hope people forget Vice President Joe Biden told a largely black audience that Republicans want to “put y’all back in chains.” But considering the alternative is talking about President Obama’s horrible, failed record, you knew it was only a matter of time before it came back.
And it’s back.
According to the nydailynews report, Keli Goff, “political correspondent” for TheRoot.com (described as a “leading online source of news and commentary from an African-American perspective”) who wrote a piece this week entitled, “Does Paul Ryan’s Black Ex-Girlfriend Matter?”
In this incredibly dumb piece, Goff asks the all-important (to no one) question, “Is the fact that Ryan has dated interracially a noteworthy detail to consider when analyzing his politics and policies?
The simple answer is “no.” But to race-obsessed liberals the simple answer has no place in politics.
Goff then goes off on tangents about Lou Dobbs and Strom Thurmond, wondering why they didn’t bring up the fact that they have family members who are of the racial group they were routinely accused of hating. (Dobbs is married to a Mexican woman, Thurman had a black daughter.) She does this under the guise of the old “But some of my best friends are black!” defense against a racism charge.
This pointless piece ends up taking the long way around to implying Ryan is bad for black people and may not like them much, despite the fact that he has a black sister-in-law and a black ex-girlfriend. He’s bad, but probably not a racist.
To drive this point home, she ends the piece with this, “For the record: No, I am not calling Ryan a racist. I am saying, however, that if you want to know where a politician's heart lies when it comes to a particular community, it may be best to look at that person's policies -- such as his or her record on civil rights -- rather than personal relationships.”
So Ryan is probably not a racist, but his policies sure tap-dance on the edge of that line.
In the piece she links to in the above quote, another winner entitled “What We Know About Paul Ryan and Blacks,” she starts with the most basic info about Ryan, then adds “We also know that he has no problem attacking President Obama. (His remarks on Saturday included the quip (which I'm paraphrasing), ‘I have good news and bad news. The bad news? Barack Obama is president. The good news? He won't be in November.’)”
Her next line, in response to that standard campaign boilerplate, is telling – “But beyond that, we know little else about Ryan's thoughts on black Americans and race…”
So criticizing the President is based on race and reveals his thoughts on the subject? There’s really no other way to read it – he doesn’t have a problem “attacking” the President, “beyond that, we know little else about Ryan’s thoughts on black Americans and race.” Those are her words, that is the order in which she put them, and that is what they mean.
As evidence of Ryan’s record on pigment-based pandering she cites two liberal groups who don’t like him or anyone with an R after their name – the formerly venerable, currently sadly partisan NAACP and the left-wing advocacy group National Poverty Center. Unmentioned in either piece is the increased poverty rate and unemployment rate in the black community under the deficit spending policies of the current President.
Can’t we get past this garbage? I expect this sort of race-baiting from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and people of that generation. They lived through the horrors we read about in text books, but the “sky is falling” constant charge and implication of racism, while it now earns them a good living, does nothing to help anyone of any color. It’s flung around like a hacky-sack at a Phish concert to the point that it has little meaning anymore, which causes genuine cases of racism to be greeted with the same glazed eyes as bazillionaire Tyler Perry blaming race for his being pulled over by police for making a left turn from the right lane.
Yes, racism, real racism, still exists. But this isn’t 1920 and the entire country is not the Jim Crow Democrat controlled south. A mutant here, a pocket of mutants there are racists, but it’s hardly the norm. And society as a whole, not just one political party, condemns it.
We hear talk about how Democrats can capture more of the “white vote,” but accept Obama will get 95%-98% of the “black vote.” Until we can get to the point when race-based blogs don’t exist, when we admit that self-segregation is just as damaging to the nation as forced segregation was, this will be the world in which we live and have to function.
But you can’t fix a problem until you admit something is a problem, so here’s my offer for some non-controversial common ground: I happily admit that NOT voting for President Obama because he’s half black is racist. Will Keli Goff, or any liberal, admit that voting FOR him for that reason is equally so? I’m waiting.
