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Posts Tagged ‘McCarthyism’
July 27th, 2012 at 3:33 pm
Jonathan Chait is Vermin

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.