Freedom Line Blog

Yesterday I was attacked in cyberprint, bizarrely and scurrilously,  by liberal professional race-baiter Jonathan Chait. Somehow, apparently, calling Barack Obama “haughty” makes me at least somewhat an “heir” to vicious slave overseers. I responded at NRO today, at length, but not in kind, instead trying to keep the debate on a constructive plane — with this being one of the key passages:

Chait gives far too little credit to conservatives under 50, to so many of us who grew up as admirers of the famously minority-friendly Jack Kemp, for being perfectly well aware of, and greatly saddened by, what he calls the “still-extant residue” of the more virulently racist society that once existed. If he would only look, he would find plenty of examples of conservative thinkers and writers expounding thoughtfully and sympathetically on problems still faced by black Americans and on the Right’s own failures to address them.

It’s hard to make progress in good faith when the other side refuses to assume you possess good faith to start with.

But in trying to stay on the topic of constructive race relations, I deliberately avoided a few other highly legitimate rebuttals or explanations that need saying but that didn’t serve my main points. Let me address them here.

First, consider the source. It is truly bizarre to be told by Fulminator X that it is off limits, supposedly because it is latently and effectively racist, to use somewhat harsh language to criticize a president who happens to be black, even if such language is less harsh than that used by Fulminator X to criticize a white president. How is it a sign of racial equality to treat a black president as a creature too fragile to be subject to mean, hateful words such as … er… “haughty”?

Consider my supposedly off-limits paragraph:

Every time decent people think the scandals and embarrassments circling Barack Obama will sink this presidency, we look up and see Obama still there — chin jutting out, countenance haughty, voice dripping with disdain for conservatives — utterly unembarrassed, utterly undeterred from any assertion of power he thinks he can get away with, tradition and propriety and the Constitution be damned. The man has no shame, no self-doubt, not a shred of humility, no sense that anybody else has legitimate reason to question him or hold any other point of view.

Now compare that to the breathtaking treatment, in Jonathan Chait’s most (in)famous essay ever, that Chait afforded George W. Bush:

I hate President George W. Bush…. I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing– a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more…. … Conservatives believe liberals resent Bush in part because he is a rough-hewn Texan. In fact, they hate him because they believe he is not a rough-hewn Texan but rather a pampered frat boy masquerading as one, with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to disguise his plutocratic nature…. …Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident.

But isn’t it such a shame that I called Obama “haughty?”

MOVING RIGHT ALONG….

The truly outlandish thing Chait writes is that it is “factually bizarre” — not even a strange opinion, but “factually” bizarre — to accuse Obama of being haughty and unembarrassed. (Somebody needs to explain to Chait that a “fact” is something inarguable, provable, not subject to disagreement.) Why? Because in a recent press conference Obama supposedly was (get THIS!) “profusely and even flamboyantly contrite.” Huh? Flamboyantly? I just re-read the press conference transcript, and it is full of mild acknowledgments that the ObamaCare web site isn’t working perfectly while all bracketed in an insistence that everything still is better than it seems and will get better still. While he mouthed several pro forma acceptances of responsibility — “it’s on me” — there were plenty of observers who noted that he didn’t always seem to really mean it.

To quote the ever-left Dana Milbank on the president’s attitude:

Even as he accepted responsibility for the debacle, he couldn’t resist transferring some blame to the assembled press (“the things that go right, you guys aren’t going to write about”) and to Republicans (“repeal, repeal, let’s get rid of this thing”).

But Obama seemed genuinely puzzled by the notion that his leadership may have been the cause.

Yet it is supposedly “factually bizarre” for me to fail to appreciate this president’s supposedly self-evident humility. Right. Look, if I were the only one who finds Obama generally haughty and self-referential, that would be one thing. But a Google search would quickly produce hundreds and hundreds of similar judgments.

I could go on.  But the takeout should be this: Just as Obama’s skin color should play no role in any criticism of him, nor should it shield him from criticism, much less to accuse his critics of the ultimate political sin of some version of racism.

Maybe somebody should tell Chait that, to stoop to such unfair insults rather than to engage in legitimate debate, one might be charged with being a “dullard lacking any moral constraint.”

Please forgive me if that headline is too strong. But I’ve always thought so, and now I know. Chait is actually suggesting that racism is driving the negative reaction to Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark. Give me a break. What a skunk this guy is. The last refuge of a scared, cheap-shot, leftist scoundrel is to yell “Racism” in a clouded, weirder way than ever attempted before. As in:

Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. …The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans….The entire key to the rise of the Republican Party from the mid-sixties through the nineties was that white Americans came to see the Democrats as taking money from the hard-working white middle class and giving it to a lazy black underclass. Reactivating that frame is still the most mortal threat to the Democrats and to Obama. …

What a steaming load of diseased dung this is. The time has come to call this “racism” wolf cry what it really is: the Left’s version of McCarthyism. As with the original, the game is to accuse adversaries of something awful, and awfully untrue, purely for political effect, to cause a political wound. (The difference is that at least McCarthy had some small basis for his vilely overstated accusations, as the Venona documents have since shown; this cry of racism, here as in so many of the Left’s uses of it in recent years, has not even a shred of truth to it.)

I associate myself with the remarks of John Nolte at Breitbart, who called Chait’s dung heap “equal parts hilarious, maddening, unAmerican, and just plain pathetic.”

The reason Barack Obama’s outlook is alien to the American tradition is not because he is black; it is because he was mentored by a Communist, raised by leftists, inculcated with foreign values in Indonesia, befriended (and willing befriending of) some of the vilest radicals and terrorists on American soil, studied and emulated the evil Saul Alinksy, and consciously chose (by his own testimony in his crafted, semi-fictionalized “autobiography”) the persona of a man disaffected from and antagonistic to many of the values historically adopted and admired by most Americans.

He says we cling to guns and religion as a way to deal with our own bitterness; he says we didn’t build our own businesses (or the roads and such paid for by taxes on the profits from our own labors); he says Americans have been arrogant and dismissive of Europe and that we are “still struggling” with the legacy of Jim Crow; he runs roughshod repeatedly over religious liberties; and again and again, he shows disdain for the actual workings of the free market that is the means of our prosperity.

I don’t care if it is his “white” half or his “black” half that is demonstrating these attitudes. When the pasty white Ted Kennedy showed some of the same tendencies, we conservatives opposed him just as fiercely. Race has nothing to do with it. But vicious McCarthyism of the Left, such as that exhibited by Chait, will target anybody who exposes hard truths about their own left side of the political debate.

But just as blackness is no reason to attack Barack Obama, so is it also no defense for his supporters to use as a crutch every time he sticks his feet in his mouth. Black feet taste no worse than white feet. But very few feet are tasty dishes — and when both of somebody’s feet are left feet, the likelihood is for stumbles of the sort that cause those feet to end up in one’s mouth.