This past February, at the Conservative Political Action
Conference, the late great Andrew Breitbart correctly predicted that this would be the year of the “dog
whistle” election, that the media would hurl charges of racism at President
Obama’s opponents at every opportunity. How right he was.
When the Republican National Convention got underway with
great fanfare last week, the now-openly leftist media went all out to
perpetuate their narrative that candidate Mitt Romney is “stoking
the racial politics of yesteryear.” The ever-reliable propaganda organ
known as The New York Times, for example, accused
the Romney campaign of making the election about race, a case of psychological
projection if there ever was one. It’s the progressive left that is doing their damnedest to make this election entirely about race. It’s the only
weapon they have in their impotent arsenal.
In order to paint Republicans a whiter shade of pale, the media
cut
their RNC coverage of conservative speakers of color, and when they did acknowledge non-white conservatives,
it was only to dismiss
them as patronizing tokens. After all, to the left, non-white conservatives
are white “on the inside” anyway – hence such derogatory labels as “Oreos” and
“coconuts” – and are therefore just as racist as their white counterparts.
And the (now former) Yahoo! News Chief David
Chalian snidely remarked on a live mic that the Romneys “are happy to have
a party while black people drown” – an insane and hateful reference to the New
Orleans victims of Hurricane Isaac. As Newsbusters’ Matthew Sheffield noted,
Chalian neglected to mention that “the Republican National Committee canceled
the entirety of Monday's program or that President Obama did not cancel any of
his regularly scheduled campaign fund-raising parties that night.”
The media salivated over a suspicious incident in which two
conventioneers tossed peanuts at a black camerawoman and made racist remarks,
for which they were thrown out. (Seriously now, does anyone believe that those
two were anything but progressive plants?)
Adding fuel to conservative momentum this election is Dinesh
D’Souza’s remarkably successful documentary 2016:Obama’s
America, which posits that Obama is driven by a deep-seated
anti-colonialism. So of course, it was targeted as racist by the media. Entertainment Weekly’s avowed lefty
movie reviewer Owen
Gleiberman writes: “The basic thesis of 2016: Obama’s America makes
almost no sense, to the point that a lot of viewers may be tempted to laugh it
off.” (Actually, not only is the thesis very easy to comprehend, but D’Souza’s
is an exceedingly well-crafted argument; perhaps Gleiberman is simply incapable
of understanding it.) He goes on to say that
By now, most of us understand that
the “birther” theory — the preposterously unfactual notion that Barack Obama
wasn’t born in the United States — is really a code for race. And what’s insidious
about 2016: Obama’s America is that the whole movie, in a sense, is
code for the birther theory.
It’s unclear how the “birther” theory could be “preposterously
unfactual” if there is no factual evidence to disprove it, which is precisely
why the birther theory persists. But what really “makes no sense” is how it’s a
“code” for race. What does being born in or out of the United States have to do
with race? Absolutely nothing, except in the race-obsessed minds of
progressives who are fanatical about manufacturing racism where there is none –
and they have seized upon the brilliant practice known as racial coding to do
that.
Racial
coding allows progressives to point to anything a conservative says, or
doesn’t say, and call it racism. This is what enables them to dismiss all
criticism of Obama as racism, and to divert attention from their own raging
racism. How can the left condemn criticism of Obama as racist and yet attack black
Republicans Allen West, Mia Love, Condoleeza Rice, or Herman Cain? Because the
left holds itself to be incapable of racism; hence there will be no outcry from
them about purported comedian Bill
Maher’s comment that Rep. West belongs to “the Party of the Apes.” Imagine
the media feeding frenzy if Rush Limbaugh had said that about Obama.
Gleiberman’s frothing attack on 2016 reaches an insane crescendo when he labels it “the moral
equivalent of the old anti-Semitic propaganda hoax The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.” So an intellectually defensible critique of Obama’s
worldview is just as heinous as a fake document designed to demonize Jews and
justify their genocide. You have to give Gleiberman credit for creativity, if
not a sense of moral or historical proportion.
As
I’ve written before, opposition to Obama’s “otherness,” as the left is fond
of calling it, has nothing to do with his skin color and everything to do with
his rejection of American exceptionalism and his anti-capitalist,
anti-American, pro-Islamist, divisively racist, agenda. There is not a single
shred of evidence, outside of the fevered imagination of increasingly desperate
progressives, that Mitt Romney is running a race-baiting campaign.
If I were a Democrat, I would be mortified that my team had
nothing more politically and philosophically substantial to offer in this
upcoming presidential contest than perpetual, phantasmic accusations of racism
directed at the opposition. But the left has nothing else. They cannot tout
Obama’s disastrous economic policies.
They cannot claim that the world “likes” us more now, in the wake of his
abominable treatment of our allies and his contemptible embrace of and/or
submission to our enemies. They cannot defend his racial polarization of a
nation that elected him to be a unifier. They cannot point to the election
promises he failed to keep. They have nothing positive to attract voters to
their policies, so their platform must consist only of smears.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 9/7/12)
