It's created some stir...Jimmy Carter, True Son of the South, Hits Nail on Head by Kai Wright that says in part:
And as a result, a statement as obvious as Carter’s—that the tea-baggers hate President Barack Obama because he’s black—can be passed off as controversy in 2009.
It’s self-evident that a movement that calls the president a lying, socialist, Nazi eugenicist with a fake birth certificate is about something more than deficit spending. People don’t brandish automatic weapons and pray for the president’s death because they want to keep their employer-sponsored health plans. But to name the stalking beast is more than we can bear.
Countered by articles out there like one by Jonah Goldberg, A Tackle Box Full of Race Bait that says in part:
Meanwhile, no significant conservative politician, pundit, or intellectual has said that they object to Obama's agenda because he's black. Rather, they've said they oppose his agenda for precisely the same reasons they oppose Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's and Barney Frank's agendas. They stand athwart Obama yelling "Stop!" just as they did with Clinton and Democratic presidents before him.
Magically, the alchemic powers of Obama's black skin transmogrify the same arguments and the same rhetoric into racism. Saying "you're wrong" to a white politician is a disagreement; saying it to a black politician is like shouting through Bull Connor's megaphone.
I know some of the tea baggers, I can't say I agree with them on all of their positions, frankly a few of them scare me, but I also don't think the ones I know that dislike or even hate Obama are basing it on race. This reminds me of when I didn't support Obama as a presidential candidate, it was suggested I was racist when it had nothing to do with the color of his skin, it had do with the content of his character...Yet it was attempted to be used against me because if they could make the "racist" charge stick then it deflected any arguments I had as to why I didn't feel he was the right candidate for president. I could be ignored as a "racist" rather than have anything I said be considered.
Jimmy Carter was one of my favorite Presidents, but I can't say I agree with him on this one. If Hillary would have been elected and was trying to do the same things President Obama is? I'm willing to bet that not much would be different except that people wouldn't be as up in arms about the first woman President being attacked...
2 comments:
I don't think it's as much about race as it is about "sour grapes" -- no democrat in office right now would get a free ride of any kind, no matter how right they might happen to be. This is payback for what Bush had to deal with, and no one in the GOP will be happy until they get their pound of flesh. Were Hillary the president, we'd be hearing about how people are against her because she's "a woman."
Of course, they'll die before they admit that.
Race? Of course that's a factor. Like it or not, we humans come by our xenophobia honestly. But I think race isn't enough of a factor (at least at the top) to be counted as significant.
I am sick and tired of hearing people being called racists just because they disagree with soem of Obama's decisions and what he wants to do. I was just as bad when people who disagreed with Bush were called traitors.
I didn't vote for Obama. It wasn't because he was black (or half black), it was because I didn't agree with his agenda. I feel he is too left leaning and that his social programs won't work. I feel that we will soon live in a whole like Ann Rynd's Atlas Shrugged, where all the captains of industry go in hiding to live in their our society because the government didn't allow captialism to continue. The result was that the country was a welfare state and 99% of the polulation was in poverty. So people were all equal; equally poor.
Don't throw a false label on me because I disagree with the controlling government. I vote for a person who i think will do less damage to the country and to my living. I haven't voted once for a person who I believed in.
It is sad that over forty years ago that Martin Lurther King, Jr. wanted everyone to be judge by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. All I see is the minority gaining control by calling white people racists. I guess when the content of character isn't there, you must gain control by exploiting the color of the skin. A very sad perverse twist to a noble man's dream.
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