Richard Cohen Blames the Racists
By streiff Posted in 2008 | obamessiah — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Richard Cohen getting his butt handed to him, courtesy of commenters Shaggy Dog and ptort
Richard Cohen is in a huff. Hillary supporters are racists.
I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance.[...]
I acknowledge that some people can find nonracial reasons to vote against Obama [wow, that's mighty big of you, Richard, I'm sure Hillary's supporters are elated to know this] -- his youth, his inexperience, his uber-liberalism and, of course, his willingness to abide his minister's admiration for a racist demagogue (Louis Farrakhan) until it was way, way too late. But for too many people, Obama is first and foremost a black man and is rejected for that reason alone. This is very sad.
Barack Obama sought racial validation and inoculation against challenges to his racial authenticity, a prerequisite for running for political office from his Chicago district, in the arms of various race pimps and hatemongers which he has only recently disavowed. If the aptly named Larry Johnson is correct he may have married one.
Here is where Cohen gets it wrong. Obama broke into politics and built his political career, to quote Cohen, "first and foremost" as a black politician, not as a politician who happens to be black. These are not the same things. This type of racial identity politics is abhorrent in most area of America and the fact that this backlash is hitting Obama now as his background gets more attention should surprise no one.
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Richard Cohen Blames the Racists 9 Comments (0 topical, 9 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
that only folks from and around Obama's hometown are aware of. Our political machine is way radical. Of course, it is. Think about how radical the political machine must be in order to ingratiate a former domestic terrorist and make them a power player in the political machine.
The irony is that here in Chicago Obama's associations are not that radical. In fact, it would have been really next to impossible for Obama to rise through the ranks without coming into direct contact and getting close to a bunch of radicals. In reality, Obama's problems don't stem from his unusual closeness to radicals, but to his typical embrace of the political machine that makes far too many radicals their power players. Here is how I wrote about it.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor
To make his bones among Chicago's chic Left, Obama had to embrace racists, thieves, and terrorists to go anywhere. I suppose someone as insulated from reality as Obama was as he rapidly ascended didn't realize those things matter so much in downstate Illinois let alone the rest of the country. He truly appeared shocked to learn people found Wright, Ayers, Pfleger and even his wife a wee bit radical.
deserved on 9/11, or that America is a rapist (two concepts fondly endorsed by Obama's spiritual mentors).
To some, this is race. (!)
and blathering idiot on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning...not that it took much. I don't do YouTube but that is a nugget to behold.
(sorry I don't know how to embed)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDIROMhhpeg
It is every bit the smackdown of cohen you say it is, he's an absolute deer in headlights when Buchanan challenges his racial pronouncements.
But another interesting point of note from the clip- maybe its suprising only because I haven't watched MSNBC in a long time - but how unabashedly enthused cohen and the female moderator were about the chance to elect an African American candidate, simply for some sort of of national racial transcedence event.
John McCain is in for a long campaign, he shoud expect every other week time/newsweek/etc running black and white cover photos of Obama gazing into the distance with the headline of "Obama and Race in America." This is an MSM journalist's wet dream. This is why these clowns became journalists- to cover this kind of "history in the making" event and they are going to do everything in their power to ensure that their moment to say they were there covering it when history was made is not cheated from them with a win by another old white Republican.
at youtube there is box that says "Embed:" with the html string needed to place the video elsewhere. Copy the string and paste it into your reply.
What Cohen said is exactly what I would have expected a white liberal to say:
It's perfectly OK and understandable for a black voter to prefer a black candidate over a white candidate (all other things being equal).
It's racist and wrong for a white voter to prefer a white candidate over a black candidate (all other things being equal).
In an op-ed column she wrote for last Friday's Boston Globe, Geraldine Ferraro wrote this:
My take: Remember Obama's bizarro campaign slogan, "We are the ones we have been waiting for!"?
By "we," evidently Obama means his coalition of blacks, college students and white liberals. Well, the flip side of "We are the ones we have been waiting for" is: "For everybody else, their day is over." That's the message that everybody else is getting: If you're older, if you're white, if you don't buy into trendy left-wingism, then with the coming of Obama, your day is over.
And that's threatening.