Of all the poisonous, ugly, and intellectually vapid controversies ginned up in my lifetime, the current breakout of St. Vitus’ Dance over the “racist” opposition to Barack Obama may be the most egregious.
Al Sharpton tells CNN’s Larry King that decent and racially sensitive Americans shouldn’t let a small minority make health care into a “racial issue.”
Someone in the control room surely yelled, “Cue the laugh track.”
In case you don’t get the joke, this entire “debate” over whether opposition to Obama’s health-care reform is racist is totally, completely, and in every way conceivable an invention of the left.
Oh, sure, there are some racists who oppose Obama. Shocking news, that.
And, yes, a tiny, tiny fraction of the signs at the Tea Party protests last weekend were racially insensitive. But if that’s how we’re going to score, then opposition to the Iraq war is anti-Semitic.
After all, I saw a bunch of signs at antiwar protests that said bigoted things about Jews.
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.
Left-wing writers spent the week droning on about how it’s now racist to say “I want my country back.” These amnesiacs are blissfully unaware that “taking back” America was the rallying cry of the Democratic Party for eight years under George W. Bush. Anti-white racists all?
Jimmy Carter sighs, “It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”
Well, ditto. Except I think the abominable circumstance is the Vesuvian eruption of nonsense belched forth from distempered liberals frustrated by their inability to win a public policy debate.
Really, President Carter? Based on what? Polls you’ve studied? Which ones? Or did you descend from the temple of the Carter Center, flee your enabling entourage of sycophants, and canvass some neighborhoods yourself? How many people told you they don’t think a black man should be president? One? Two? Zero? Or are you simply reading minds again?
And, in fairness, when it became clear that Carter had turned this “debate” from mere fraud to farce, it suddenly dawned on some Democrats, including those in the White House, that smearing millions of constituents and swing voters (many of whom voted for Obama) as racists isn’t the best politics.
Jonah Goldberg is a syndicated columnist. A version of this commentary was originally published by Tribune Media Services.