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Are You a Racist?

When Obama won the 2008 election we heard that he had transcended race.   A black man had been elected president and the highest of glass ceilings had been broken.  Race, it seemed, was no longer a major issue in our country.  A new era had been ushered in.  What the heck happened?  It seems like people are being called racists by a myriad of public figures on a daily basis.  Why isn’t anyone talking about all that transcending race stuff anymore?

Racism seems to have been redefined in recent months. It no longer means judging someone by the color of their skin.  It now means disagreeing with Obama and the Democrats.  If you support Obama you are a virtuous, enlightened, knowledgeable soul.  If you disagree with him, you are a racist, Nazi, brown shirt, member of a mob, and (insert your favorite liberal insult here).

Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change, wrote a piece for National Review Online where he disused the racism claims.  According to Goldberg,

It was Obama’s supporters who hinted, teased, promised, and prophesied that Obama would help America “transcend race.” But now, it is they who shrink from their own promised land.

After all, it was not Obama’s detractors who immediately fell into the comfortable groove of racial grievance and familiar “narratives” when Henry Louis Gates insisted that a police instructor in racial sensitivity had to be a racist. That was Obama and his choir of heralds.

From Day 1, Obama’s supporters have tirelessly cultivated the idea that anything inconvenient for the first black president just might be terribly, terribly racist…

…Now that he’s president, if you question his tax policies, energy plans, or health-care ambitions, you are “hoping he will fail” — and that, with the help of roundabout reasoning, is tantamount to hoping we cannot transcend race.

Loading the deck in such a way is a gift of Obama’s. Time and again, he pre-empts dissent by claiming he’s open-minded, pragmatic, and non-ideological, and therefore if you disagree with him, you must be some sort of zealot.

His shock troops make the same argument about race, sometimes with sophistication, sometimes with the kind of lucid clarity only profound stupidity can provide. For instance, actress Janeane Garofalo summed up the tea parties thusly: “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”

How did this happen?  If we disagree with Obama’s policies his minions immediately cry racism!  So, either we submit and go along with him or we are racists.  Are these people serious?  Does this remind anyone else of how dictators brainwash people in order to obtain more power?  Conservatives are being demonized by liberal politicians and the media simply for having a different point of view.  This is what happened in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany.  Why is it now happening in America?

Goldberg goes on to say,

Two weeks ago, town hallers were supposed to be members of the Brooks Brothers brigade, Astroturf division. Now they’re well-armed anti-government militias. At this rate, they’ll soon be android ninjas with laser vision. Wait, strike that. They’ll be really racist android ninjas with laser vision.

Suddenly, if conservatives want to transcend race, we have to agree to massive increases in the size of government and socialized medicine.

That’s not transcending race, it’s using Obama’s race to bully the opposition into acquiescence. Actually transcending race would require treating Obama like any other president. Which is pretty much exactly what conservatives have been doing. Seriously, if Hillary Clinton were president, would conservatives really be rolling over for the same health-care plan because she’s white?

Sure, racists don’t like Obama. (In less shocking news, bears continue to use our national forests as toilets.) But that doesn’t mean everyone who dislikes Obama is therefore a racist.

What’s dismaying is how the press and Democrats are so desperate to obscure this point. The only notable political violence at a town hall was against a black man, roughed up by pro-Obama toughs. The assault weapon lawfully carried to a demonstration was carried by a black man. That supposedly racist poster depicting Obama as the Joker (an LA Weekly writer fumed, “The only thing missing is a noose.”) That was created by a Palestinian-American supporter of left-wing garden gnome Dennis Kucinich. Whoops!

Never mind. They’ll keep trying until they find a scapegoat that works, because that is what they do.

Why do liberals resort to name calling, bully tactics and demonizing the opposition to get their way?  Could it possibly be because the weight of history and reason are against their policies?

Related posts:

1. Jimmy Carter Thinks I’m a Racist
2. Racism at the Tax Day Tea Party
3. A New Insult from the Left, “If You Don’t Support the Health Care Bill, You are Racist!”
4. Tea Party Protesters are Violent Racists

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