Finding Racism Everywhere

You have to read Maureen Dowd’s column in full to understand how far the left will go to try to make any disagreement with this administration into racism. They still believe that the political correctness they’ve attempted to impose on the country over the least few decades makes that charge into a magic bullet they can use to stifle debate.

No matter how tortured the logic, now matter how spare the evidence, and despite how much evidence to the contrary they have to ignore, if they can swing it, the big “R” card is going to be played.

And of course it all emanates from the liberal premise that the right in the is country is obsessed with the president’s race and therefore all opposition against him is based in racism.

How does Dowd set it up? With her imagination, of course – assuming unspoken but racially charged words:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys – a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club – Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

Of course that’s what she heard – she’s the racialist. She hears the word “racism” in the caw of a crow. She’d certainly have no problem imagining that’s what Wilson was really saying, would she?

And naturally, she introduces race immediately in a very subtle way with her description of the Republicans present. The use of “middle-aged white guys” is a sure sign that a racialist is about to pounce.

Then there’s this sweet little move:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer – the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids – had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids – from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

One assumes the “shrieking lunacy” of the past 8 years completely escaped Dowd’s attention (it didn’t – she contributed to it), but her denunciation of what has happened this summer (and yesterday in DC) is he way of calling everyone both a loon and a racist: “I’ve been loath to admit the shrieking lunacy of the summer … had much to do with race.” But the implication is unmistakable – she does consider them to be about race, loath to admit it or not.

So now that she has the “you’re all racists” group tarring done, this is where she again works from some false assumption to bolster the case. She, of course, has the prefect foil for the task at hand – Joe Wilson. She describes him in lovingly racialist terms – member of the Sons of Confederacy (I wonder if she checked to see if he had ancestors that fought for the confederacy), wanted to keep the Confederate flag waiving on the capital, and apparently mistakenly denounced as a “smear” the claim that a black woman was the daughter of Strom Thurmond who she feels obliged to remind us ran as a segregationist candidate for President in ’48 (She conveniently forgets to remind us that Thurmond was a Democrat at the time then as well).

However now having set Joe Wilson up properly, she leverages that to make everything that has happened on the right this past summer to be tinged with race. And then she plays what she believes is the most damning bit of “evidence” to wrap it all up in a neat little Dowdified racist ball.

After extensively quoting James Clyburn of SC – who sees a racist behind every tree – she lays this out there:

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

Rusty DePass? Who in the heck is Rusty DePass and why is he included with DeMint and Sanford, or even Wilson? Well, quite simply, without DePass Dowd has nothing. A little known political activist in SC, who has never successfully run for office (gee, wonder why?) makes a racist joke on his Facebook page and that somehow links DeMint, Wilson and Sanford to him? Does DePass’ inappropriate joke mean that DeMint’s opposition isn’t based in an understanding of the damage this president’s agenda would do to the country, or Sanford’s desire to not take the money isn’t rooted in his belief state’s rights without federal strings, or that Wilson’s outburst, as inappropriate as it was, couldn’t be about actually believing that he was being lied too?

Nope, they’re all racists trying to bring down the black president. It’s an amazing performance by Dowd, but it is so poorly crafted and unconvincing that even the White House has blown it off.

But this isn’t the last you’ll see this contemptible tactic used, believe me. The side obsessed with race is not the right. The side who makes everything about race is not the right. And, as with this example, the side that looks more and more desperate when it plays the race card is not the right.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty tired of it.

[Crossposted at QandO]

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