Racism as all-purpose accusation by black politicians was normed by Obama
Lori Lightfoot is blaming her political demise on racism as well as misogyny, although these two characteristics of hers – being black and being a woman – were already in evidence when she was first elected mayor of Chicago:
“I’m a black woman in America. Of course,” she replied when asked by a reporter if she had been treated unfairly, according to the New York Post. Lightfoot neglected to mention that Johnson [who came in number 2] is also black.
In the NY Times, Charles Blow helpfully expanded on Lightfoot’s claim:
Blow interviewed Lightfoot 4 days before the first round of the election (in which Lightfoot, with 2 candidates outpolling her, failed to advance). About Paul Vallas, the white man who came in first with 34% of the vote, she said:
“He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.”
And:“People who are not used to feeling the touch of violence, particularly people on the North Side of our city, they are buying what he’s selling.”
She’s insinuating that it’s racist to care too much about your own physical safety.
It’s obviously impolitic to say that too clearly. Blow also proceeds gently (and abstrusely!):
“In this moment, when the country has still not come to grips with the wide-ranging societal trauma that the pandemic exacerbated and unleashed, mayors are being held responsible for that crime. If all politics is local, crime and safety are the most local. And when the perception of crime collides with ingrained societal concepts of race and gender, politicians, particularly Black women, can pay the price.”
What’s he saying other than the obvious reality that mayors are held responsible for crime? Does he really mean to say that black mayors — or women mayors — are held more responsible?
I think it’s a mistake to believe that either is saying anything especially logically coherent. They are both saying whatever they think will deflect Lightfoot’s responsibility for Chicago’s decline, and to accuse her critics of whatever “ism” they can pin on them, whether those critics actually demonstrate such bigotry or not.
And this, in my opinion, is Obama’s gift to us. He was the first major politician I can recall to attribute virtually all criticism of himself to racism. It was the all-purpose charge (see this as well as this, for example). I noticed it early on in his campaign, and it continued throughout his candidacy and his eight years in office, picked up immediately and expanded on by the press and other Democrats.
Now it is simply standard operating procedure, and has expanded outward into blaming any problem in the black community or failure by a black official on racism, “systemic” or otherwise. It has had a pernicious effect on not just race relations in this county, but on our entire society.
Kinda best part of it all is that it was Obama’s “white” half that done it (this “gift” to us) ’cause no way his “black” half could do any pernicious thang like that.
[wink]
One of the best tweets of all time.
https://twitter.com/exjon/status/537007913353883649
During Obama’s 2008 campaign a friend and I agreed Obama was going to set back race relations by decades.
Today I round that to a half-century.
In Blow’s and Lighfoot’s telling, Vallas’s essential failing is his skin color (and I don’t think he’s a Republican, despite what Lightfoot says).
huxley, Nice.
Before I came to Neo’s blog, I used to read a blog entitled Robin of Berkeley. The title was borrowed from Robin of Locksley I believe. She was more deeply embedded in the Democrat, left-wing world than Neo, but became a political changer.
Why? Because she was a Hillary supporter, and (expletive) Obama’s people attacked Hillary as a racist. The last straw.
The insufferably smug and entitled Charles Blow is an exceptionally loathsome individual (on par with the “Reverend” Al, and equally privileged and well-compensated for race-baiting and race-hustling), but NYC’s Met recently saw fit to produce, to nearly universal acclaim, a mediocre non-opera based on his memoir. Such are the depths to which have sunk our finest cultural institutions (including Manhattan’s other Met).
A few years back, I listened to interviews with three different black people talking about the racism they encountered. And the vast majority of the instances they recounted were likely because of rudeness, (or some other reason), not racism. Tanahesi Coates told a story about being pushed as he was getting on an escalator in Manhattan. I’ve been there. It’s the movie theater near Lincoln Center. People are constantly pushing and shoving to get on the escalator ahead of anyone they think will be slow. One woman listed ten instances of racism she encountered. And everyone one of them had more to do with people just being rude.
(Another guy talked about his alma mater dropping men’s track for coed sailing, attributing it to racism. The reason was HIGHLY likely the “Dear Colleague” letter that went out during the Obama administration.)
Now I think that every time I give the finger to some driver who cut me off, for example, that if they are black, they are thinking, “That person is racist for flipping me off!” Whereas I’m throwing a rude gesture their way because they cut me off. And I’d tell anyone cutting me off in traffic, that they were number 1.
On the up side, nobody believes it any longer Not even enough to dispute it. It’s either ignore it or P&L (Point and Laugh).
Can you compare her musings and it’s implications with what Dilbert guy said
In Lightfoot’s (and Blow’s) defense, it can now be stated unequivocably that she lost not to one white guy but to TWO: a white Black guy and a white Latino.
“Lori Lightfoot Blames Racism for Mayoral Loss But Lost to a Black Guy, Mexican-American Guy”—
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/03/lori-lightfoot-blames-racism-for-mayoral-loss-but-lost-to-a-black-guy-mexican-american-guy/
Can’t those white dudes EVER fight fair????
TommyJay, I too used to follow Robin of Berkeley. She was good — witty reports from that trash burg by a caustic heretic walking (warily) among them.
Was it Robin who related a time when she’d been in some kind of trouble and only the conservative men–she knew them–helped her out?
Charles. Blow.
A more insufferable ass has never walked this earth, and been so handsomely compensated. He even surpasses the former half-black president…and that’s saying something.
The comments at the NYT on his op-ed are lit!
In Lightfoot’s (and Blow’s) defense, it can now be stated unequivocably that she lost not to one white guy but to TWO: a white Black guy and a white Latino.
Paul Vallas family is Greek. Brandon Johnson is black. The Chicano in the race was Jesus Garcia, who finished 4th, behind Lightfoot. Seven of the nine candidates on the ballot were black. Collectively, they won 52.6% of the vote reported thus far. Chicago’s population is 29% black. #racism.
A few years back, I listened to interviews with three different black people talking about the racism they encountered. And the vast majority of the instances they recounted were likely because of rudeness, (or some other reason), not racism.
==
Maybe the blacks in question think white people are peasants and should only speak deferentially to them.
Richard A.,
I do recall the story about when she was shopping in Emeryville, IIRC, and she got mugged and a severe beating. I don’t recall the part about conservative men helping her. Could be different story.
‘from a certain point of view’ lightfoot and villaraigosa and adams, and who ever is in charge of atlanta, succeeded terrifically, it’s just not the goal we thought one would want, destroying american cities, more thoroughly then any foreign army could do,
And Portland…
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
The dangers of fighting back against CRT in the classroom…and one courageous teacher:
“…’A lot of reason to be afraid,’ says censured teacher critical of the woke revolution in classrooms;
“Teaching is now a political act that involves indoctrinating children instead of educating them”—
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/a-lot-of-reason-to-be-afraid-says-censured-teacher-critical-of-the-woke-revolution-in-classrooms
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
Neo: Lori Lightfoot is blaming her political demise on racism as well as misogyny.
If racism were a major cause for her defeat, Lori Lightbrain would have had solid support from black voters. Chicago, unlike Gaul 🙂 , is divided into 50 Wards. Here are the results from some Wards that Lori Lightbrain won, compared to the percent of blacks in the Ward’s voting-age population. Compare the percent of votes that Lori Lightbrain won, compared with the percent of blacks in the voting-age population.
Ward _Lightfoot% _Black %
7 _39.25% __ 92.69%
8 _41.64% __ 97.81%
9 _39.97%__71.11%
17 _40.27%__88.16%
18 _30.64% __56.20%
20 _29.83% __75.61%
21 _40.32% __97.27%
28 _36.57% __71.41%
29 _33.08% __68.98%
In the above Wards she won, she carried about half the black vote. If Lori Lightbrain couldn’t carry the black vote, how could she blame her defeat on racism? (Art Deco makes the same point.)
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-chicago-united-map-wards-20220511-7mhfwqvkhvfsbixmhqyupd6xye-story.html
https://www.nbcchicago.com/chicago-mayoral-election-2023/election-results-how-did-your-ward-vote-for-how-each-chicago-ward-voted-in-the-2023-mayoral-election/3083914/
Nothing Marxists or Leftists ever do is their fault, it’s always opponents or people out to get them or doing acts against the Marxists.
Someone Else- I agree, sometimes just normal rudeness can be attributed to racism. Occasionally I encounter a store clerk who is rude to me for no apparent reason, and it almost feels like like there is something about my appearance that angers them. In reality it’s probable that they are having a bad day, or are worried about something going on in their life. But I have often thought that if I were black I would have attributed it to racism.
Why? Because [Robin] was a Hillary supporter, and (expletive) Obama’s people attacked Hillary as a racist. The last straw.
TommyJay:
I recall Kevin DuJan who was a gay pro-Hillary supporter, turned conservative or at least anti-Obama on similar grounds.
DuJan had a blog called HillBuzz and dished a lot of dirt, as a Chicago local, on Obama as a gay man among other things. DuJan’s standard epithet for Obama was “Dr. Utopia.”
DuJan and HillBuzz seem to have been scrubbed from the web. Here’s one quote I find and strongly suspect is true about Obama and Benghazi.
___________________________
If you’ve ever known anyone who is a drug addict, you’d see it’s obvious that Barack Obama was high on cocaine the night of Benghazi; it is the only logical explanation for his disappearance and the White House’s refusal to comment on what he was doing at the time. Since this was a night of great crisis for our country, the only logical reason that the White House won’t explain where the president was is if this man was high as a kite on illegal narcotics at the time. He reappeared again the next day, briefly, before jetting off to fabulous Las Vegas for a fun-and-games fundraiser event he had scheduled there (where, it also should be noted, not only Chippendales but also Thunder From Down Under male revues are regularly held.)
–Kevin DuJan
Gringo:
Easy peasy. The black people in those wards who voted against Lightfoot are either white supremacist black people (if they voted for Vallas) or black misogynists (if they voted for Johnson).
Systemic DIEversity
TommyJay:
I remember Robin of Berkeley too. In fact neo did a post on her back in the day:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2010/04/14/robin-of-berkeley-says-a-funny-thing-happened-to-her-on-the-way-to-the-revolution/
Unfortunately, neo’s link to Robin’s changer story is dead and I can’t find it as yet. She wrote for American Thinker for a while but all her articles and her webiste seem to have been scrubbed.
I did find a couple of articles which Catholic.org picked up such as:
__________________________
If I’m being completely honest here, my main activities during the holidays were ranting and raving. For instance: Why should we celebrate Thanksgiving when the holiday marks the slaughter of Native Americans? Why do these cashiers keep cheerfully extolling me to “have a Merry Christmas!”? And if I hear one more [censored] Christmas song, I will lose my frigging mind.
Of course, I was just one of the progressive pack, parroting the party line. Being a Leftist means honing in on every possible injustice. Never-ending gripes and grievances are the glue that keeps progressives cemented together.
But then, three years ago, the bottom fell out of my life. Slowly but surely, it dawned on me that everything I had held as sacrosanct was a lie. I woke up — and now I behold the world with fresh eyes. Consequently, I am celebrating my First Thankful Thanksgiving.
Instead of laser-focusing on every unfairness, I am now moved by life’s bounty. I finally see my great fortune in being born in this country, in this moment in time. Although I used to lambaste the United States and everything it stood for, I realize that I was like a spoiled child — ungrateful, mean-spirited.
I was under the delusion that living in another country, any other country, would be better than in the world’s oppressor, the U.S. of A. And now that I’ve actually gotten a clue, I thank my lucky stars that I was not born a woman in Iran, Ethiopia, China — actually anywhere aside from the United States.
I realize all of this now, but also much, much more. Because not only is this my first Thanksgiving as a patriotic American, but it’s my first as a true believer. With my spiritual evolution, my life has come full circle.
–“Robin of Berkeley, “My First Thankful Thanksgiving”
https://www.catholic.org/news/hf/faith/story.php?id=39319
__________________________
I was happy she quoted from a W.S. Merwin poem at the end.
Eureka! I managed to find Robin’s changer story on the WayBack Machine:
____________________________
But a funny thing happened on my way to the revolution. That lightning bolt hit, and I changed forever.
And now I see that that progressivism is simply children acting out, thumbing their noses at Mommy and Daddy and God Himself. This explains the perpetual temper tantrums and the lost, vacant looks.
While kids are naturally self-centered, when adults behave this way, they’re narcissists. Growing up means no longer placing oneself at the center of the universe.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100415235415/http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/a_funny_thing_happened_on_my_w.html
I miss Robin of Berkley.
Progressive leftists, dragging the world down into a new Dark Age. In the afterlife, may they reap the reward they so richly deserve.
}}} although these two characteristics of hers – being black and being a woman – were already in evidence when she was first elected mayor of Chicago:
Logic is not really a strong suit in the liberal deck.
In fact, it’s more of an Uno card stuck into the Pinochle deck they are using to play Hearts…
For the Robin of Berkeley fans:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100330155411/http://www.americanthinker.com/robin_of_berkeley/
Just in case you did not spot it.
Also:
}}} Each day, I’m sucker-punched by the people whom I had trusted — the Nancy Pelosis and Obamas of the world. I thought that Leftists were mini-messiahs who would save me. They are, in fact, “power-hungry, delusional demigods,” as Mark Levin put it so pithily.
It has always been thus. Peeps just keep missing it:
https://www.americanheritage.com/eight-days-harry-truman
Someone Else and Chris B,
Comedian Adam Carolla has a funny bit about white privilege. It goes like this:
“I agree that white men in America have a privilege others do not. They have the privilege of knowing that a lot of their fellow Americans are *ssh*les. When someone treats them rudely, or is a jerk to them they can see, ‘Hey, that guy is an *ssh*le.’ Other people wonder; ‘Maybe it’s my skin color, or ethnicity or because I’m a woman.’ But white men can’t blame racism, or xenophobia or misogyny. The only answer is; *ssh*le. And the world is full of them.”
It seems to me that reflexive charges of racism have been a part of the kultursmog for 50 years or more. I don’t recall a time when they weren’t there and I’ve never had the impression BO was promiscuous practitioner of it. Just struck me as gassy and episodically spiteful.
DuJan had a blog called HillBuzz and dished a lot of dirt, as a Chicago local, on Obama as a gay man among other things. DuJan’s standard epithet for Obama was “Dr. Utopia.”
Sorry, not buying the gay thesis or the cocaine thesis.
Art Deco:
I wrote that Obama was the first major politician I can recall to attribute virtually all criticism of himself to racism.
I cannot recall another before him, and I’ve been around a long time. Sure, plenty of people yelled “racism” about this or that action. But major politician? Who were the major black politicians (not people like Sharpton, but mayors or members of Congress) who were yelling “racism” every time they lost an election or whenever they were criticized in any way? Obama and his supporters did that; no one else.
Obama and his supporters did that; no one else.
==
If you say so. I’m not recalling BO doing this. There’s a class of partisan Democrats who make those accusations as readily as normal human beings breathe, of course.
Art Deco:
They do it post-Obama. Tell me a major black politician who did it before him. I don’t recall one.
I put two links in my post noting when Obama did it, and how he did it. They weren’t the only times.
Part of the Obama magic slight-of-mouth that is confusing the Neo/Art-Deco exchange above is: Barack Obama almost always kept his hands clean. It was his operatives and surrogates who slung the mud. As I inferred at 2:54 PM, it was always Obama’s people who suggested that Hillary might be a racist.
______
Thanks to OBloodyHell for the list.
This one is relevant to the mindset of the left and changing.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/how_i_became_so_conservative_s.html
And this one has something about the Obama v. Hillary matter. She even uses the “final straw” verbiage. I just pulled “the last straw” off the top of my head.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/letter_of_amends_from_a_recove.html
The final straw for me was when a close friend flew into a rage at me when she learned I wasn’t supporting Obama. The political became personal when she began impugning my character. Worse yet, she tried to intimidate me into changing my mind by threatening to dump me.
Suddenly a light went on. The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone (if it even existed to begin with except in my imagination). The Democrats had morphed into a power hungry Thought Police, and I was done with them. My new motto in life: don’t PC on me.
It wasn’t really my impression that Obama did that or that he was the first. For the media it’s been common for decades to blame racism when an African-American loses a big city mayoral race. I look at the 2008 quote as part of the perennial Democrat strategy of portraying Republicans as frightening and reprehensible. You can see Biden doing that now. Race and a funny name were what Obama had and he made them positives by accusing the Republicans of trying to make negatives out of them. That was unfair, but it’s what politicians, Democrats in particular, do. McCain went out of his way not to make voters scared of Obama, perhaps because he didn’t want to look racist. That didn’t help his chances come election day.
I don’t doubt that Obama had some racial resentments but it’s not easy to separate them from his partisan animus against those on the other side. Obama looks more like a divider than a unifier to me, but I wonder how much of that had to do with race and how much had to do with partisanship and ideology. Did Obama really hate or disdain the “bitter clingers” because of their race, or were there other more significant reasons? The many whites in his administration don’t seem to have been objects of his anger. I do notice that Michelle Obama, more “authentically Black” than her husband, can’t stop talking about race. She has an awful lot of resentment that she hasn’t been able to get rid of despite rising to the very top of American society.
Abraxas,
It wasn’t just the media who made racist accusations against Obama’s opponents in his first presidential campaign, and it wasn’t Obama himself. It was people inside his extended campaign team who did it. It was orchestrated.
Art Deco:
That’s OK. I buy few of your claims either, especially the one-liners.
Abraxas:
Obama took it many steps further than that, as I describe in those links. He didn’t wait till he’d lost an election – early on, he said his opponents would be playing the race card in a sneaky manner (when they had not done any such thing). I remember lots of discussions of words that were proxies for race (and Obama introduced that idea when he said the following):
Others said that “skinny” was a code word for criticizing Obama’s blackness (see this) and that “socialist” was a code word for black (see this). I had never before heard such preposterous condemnation of any and every criticism of a black candidate as being racist, usually a racist “code word.” That was all new.
The funny thing about Obama
He wasn’t African American, he was WASP -Kenyan.
His American half was not only not black, but was Slave owning.
His American half benefitted from Jim Crow
His Chicago accent was faked
Even though his family was slave owning scum, he got to steal affirmative action slots from those whose families were owned and raped by his
etc etc
Obama is the cause of my addiction to political blogs.
I started reading Ed Morrissey’s “Captain’s Quarters” because of his commentary on the election campaign of 2008 and followed him over to Hot Air, where he continued with the Obamateurisms of the Day (it started out as a weekly feature, but soon he had more than one faux pas or inanity per day; the feature was discontinued after the first year) and more sober analysis of the political landscape. (I dropped Hot Air when they curtailed comments, but glance at it occasionally for old times sake.)
Powerline was only an occasional ‘stop’ back then, because of their tour de force outing Dan Rather as a liar about the Bush National Guard Memo forgery, but they also seemed to have always something interesting to say about the current events, and now they are a daily read, in addition to being a gateway to their Headline Picks, which is more curated than some of the usual aggregators.
I would often close up at night thinking, “I’ll take tomorrow off, because the Democrats can’t possibly do anything more outrageous than this week’s crisis,” and I was always wrong (and still am, although sometimes a day or two goes by between new episodes of “you can’t make these things up,” which was actually one of my bookmark folders, but it got used so often I gave up on it).
And then I discovered more web-zines like National Review (not so much anymore because of their Trump Derangement Syndrome), American Thinker, Red State, Ace, Conservative Treehouse, and so forth and so on to today’s new crop of Substack writers (especially the disaffected Democrats, because, schadenfreude).
And of course a host of great individual observers of the zeitgeist (Hanson, Turley, Jacobson, etc.), who are all in second place after our esteemed Hostess, Neo.
Reading blogs uses up 6-8 hours a day/night (depending on what kind of roll the Babylon Bee / Not the Bee are on), which is a full-time job.
I think I need an Intervention.
And yes, I had the same skepticism about Obama as most of the commenters here have expressed, for the same reasons and with the same vindication.
Get woke, go broke.
Or: live in a woke city, go broke.
Or: Adams correctly advised sane corporate behavior.
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/03/02/portlands-mayor-turns-down-nikes-request-for-help-with-theft-walmart-closing-remaining-stores-in-the-city-n534547
I don’t suggest that all of the thieves are of a particular melanin community; robbery is an inclusive profession, after all. However, the circumstances that have directly led to this problem are a result of the “anti-racist” racism of the BLM activists and their allies.
Obama is the source of my internet name – FOAF stands for “friend of a friend” (I bet you thought it was something obscene). I used to have a co-worker who was a classmate of Obama at that fancy private school in Hawaii. Money quote – “Barry was one of the stoners!” Not news any more.
“Now it is simply standard operating procedure, and has expanded outward into blaming any problem in the black community or failure by a black official on racism…”
This is very familiar: When I was a kid in public school, racism was the “explanation” for any sort of failure: Black kid flunking English? Racism. Black kid suspended for fighting? Racism. Black kid arrested for assault and robbery? Racism. And sometimes that complaint of racism would result in a riot.
…It has had a pernicious effect on not just race relations in this county, but on our entire society.”
Yes indeed. And the blame lies on the heads of foolish black people and unprincipled white lefties.
“…unprincipled white lefties…”
Hmmm, I’d say “uber-principled”; in fact they’re so uber-principled they’ve come out the other side… (Yes, the mind is a fabulous rationalizer, a superlative perverter. The more intelligent the more you have to keep your guard up….)
So beware the principles of the burn-it-all-down crowd, the destroy-it-to-save-it gang, the viciousness-is-virtue syndicate.
These kinds of principles and virtue one could do very well without, thank you…
I agree with neo. Obama was the first national African American politician to blame (substantially) all criticism on racism. I remember that there was still some uneasiness in 2008 when Obama started with his preemptive speech about his “funny name” and “have you heard that he’s black?” That subsided quickly and then the entire leftist blob picked up the same kneejerk tic.
That was really the point when dispassionate political discussion became impossible. During the Obama years, you could make an argument to a leftist and no matter the argument, the reply would be that you were just opposing Obama because of racism. At some point, a person on the right just stops trying to discuss matters. Why bother if you are dealing with a bunch of wind-up automatons who just keep spouting racial insults?
A related malign habit of Obama was his constant appeals to what I call the “imaginary Eisenhower Republicans in his head.” Obama never gave an inch in negotiations with Republicans unless it was the last possible option. Instead, he would “pre-negotiate” with what he deemed to be a “reasonable” Republican position. Then he would announce his opening position and declare it to be a “compromise” because, in his head, he had moved from what he really wanted towards something Mitt Romney had supported as Governor of Massachusetts or something that some blue state Republicans had supported in the 1980’s. I believe he actually did have to go as far back as the 1950’s a few times to find a suitable “reasonable” Republican foil, hence “Eisenhower.”
Of course the message was that “reasonable” Republicans would support Obama’s policies and that the real flesh-and-blood Republicans from 2009-2017 were only opposing Obama because of his race.
The most incredible part to me is the way that Democrats picked up this narrative and ran with it. Obama had some sort of pied piper-like hold on his supporters that utterly blinded them to the racial games he was playing. There was no good faith towards neighbors and family members. None whatsoever. I had famliy members accuse me of being a racist because I supported spending cuts and opposed Obamacare. These are people I’ve known my whole life and who knew my political beliefs about spending and health care long before Obama was on the scene, and yet they just blindly parroted the narrative from the administration and the press. Again, this is when dispassionate political discussion became impossible.
Obama was and is the single most toxic politician of my lifetime, and maybe in American history.
A related point – as Tim Scott gears up to run for president he is becoming, in a lot of ways, the anti-Obama.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that he should be the R nominee in 2024, but I think his message is important.
Obama was a very destructive force in this country a significant vector of the pathogen we see here
Tim scott is just too nice he honestly believes in police reform his interlocutors dont
The funny thing about Obama He wasn’t African American, he was WASP -Kenyan.
Really the guy from nowhere.
His American half was not only not black, but was Slave owning.
Don’t think so in any significant way. I’ve traced some of his maternal-side ancestry. I suppose if I traced it a few more generations back, you might find someone in Ann Dunham’s family who owned a slave.
His American half benefitted from Jim Crow
Not really. His mother’s family’s from central Kansas.
His Chicago accent was faked
He did not and does not have a distinctive regional accent.
Boy, if Vallas got a third of the vote in Chicago based on a hate fueled campaign against those that aren’t Republicans, that’s quite an accomplishment, considering the percentage of Chicago residents that are Republicans!
Bauxite: “Obama was and is the single most toxic politician of my lifetime, and maybe in American history.”
Spot on. We’ve sparred on other issues, but I agree with you 100% on this. On the magic-spell effect: I dated a progressive but thoughtful (white) woman during the Obama years. I once asked her why she supported Obama so strongly. Was it his policies? His appointments? She looked at me like I was a moron and slowly said “Because he’s black.”
“Robin” of Berkley left the interwebs and requested that all her previous writings at, e.g. American Thinker be deleted, because she had received threats against herself and against her family. I would certainly guess that she long ago left Berkley, and is just now planting her Spring garden in Florida or Texas, still, so far, the Land of the Free. Read The Gulag Archipeligo, for pity’s sake. The takeover of the communists was not finished in “Ten Days that Shook the World” The entire process took fifteen or so very bloody years. Nevertheless, the skirmishes we see in the history of that period are frighteningly similar to what we see around us today. My guess, my very strong hunch, is that our Second Amendment is the factor slowing down our slide, which is why they are so determined to get rid of it, piecemeal or in one fell swoop.I know a great many very reasonable people who say that a major assault on the 2A would be the signal for an unequivocal action. I have a grandson who will be of draft age in a year and a half. I do not like to see the way these things are shaping up, no, not at all.
How Obama came to be a major political figure.
It’s a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.
Why was that ? In 2002, the Democrats took over the Illinois legislature, not because of Bush as the reporter says, but because the Republican governor got caught selling drivers’ licenses to truckers with bad driving records. A disastrous truck accident splashed the whole story across the newspapers and the Democrats took over in the next election.
The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.
Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
I wrote that blog post in 2008
Just look at how Obama orchestrated the Trayvon Martin fraud. Remember, Trayvon was the reason cited by BLM’s Marxist founders for starting. Trayvon-ization of America’s racial politics has been extremely destructive. It was a deliberate strategy during his re-election campaign of 2012.
All of the lies and slanders at the core of the Trayvon coverage were the work of Obama’s Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. [Christian Adams and others have written about this poisonous part of the DOJ that was totally radicalized under Obama.] The DOJ had a special unit that travelled to Florida to coordinate news coverage. They also went to Ferguson (IIRC).
An MMA fighting, career criminal, gangbanger who posted on social media of his love for making people bleed, was turned into an innocent little boy. Obama specifically said that Trayvon could have been his son.
George Zimmerman, a Hispanic immigrant with a black grandmother (or great-grandmother) was turned into America’s first “white Hispanic” and a Florida news station doctored audio tapes to make him sound like a racist. Zimmerman was castigated throughout national media as a racist because he had the temerity to get out of his car while in his neighborhood. Further, he doubled down on his racism by walking on the sidewalk in his neighborhood! No wonder Trayvon tried to kill him by bashing his brains in.
No self-respecting presidential son can be expected to remain calm and peaceful while white Hispanics exit vehicles and walk on sidewalks in their neighborhood. Pull that crap and anyone should expect to die. If you don’t agree, you are obviously a vile racist. Just ask Barack.
And somehow, Zimmerman’s refusal to be murdered (and who isn’t even a cop) was proof that cops all over America roam the streets gunning down innocent little black children.
Just look at how Obama orchestrated the Trayvon Martin fraud.
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The behavior of the Administration was unsalutary, but the primary author of the extravaganza was Angela Corey and her minion Bernardo de la Rionda. Gov. Scott was snookered into appointing her special prosecutor in the case. What he did not realize is that her office had a history of abusive treatment of people who defend themselves with firearms. Another contributor was Benjamin Crump and his associate Ryan Julison. They were pushing against an open door of course. The local NBC affiliate deliberately slandered Zimmerman and got away with it.
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Tangling with a number of gliberals and leftoids online discussing the Zimmerman case, you got an education in how committed Democrats view the world. They think in cartoons and their baseline impulses are fundamentally malicious.
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The culture of the Democratic Party is the problem. Obama was and is an epiphenomenon.
Mike K – I think another big factor in Obama’s rise was the Iraq war. I can grudgingly admit now that Obama was probably right about the second Iraq invasion being a mistake. Obama greatly benefited from being the “only candidate who opposed the war from the beginning,” even though he was a back-bench state senator at the “beginning.”
The funny part is that I don’t see anything in how Obama conducted himself in office to indicate that he understood why he was right about Iraq. He made his own share of foreign war messes in Syria and Libya.
(Frankly, I think that Trump’s willingness to admit that Iraq was a mistake is a big reason that he won the 2016 Republican nomination. There was a striking contrast between Trump stating the obvious and Jeb! taking that as an affront to his brother’s honor. Also, I think there is a significant portion of the Republican coalition that didn’t consider Baghdad to be a hill worth dying on, yet the idea of center-right America arguably died there.)
I think another big factor in Obama’s rise was the Iraq war.
Only to the extent that the implementation failures in Iraq benefited the Democratic Party generally. Obama wasn’t implicated in congressional endorsement of the Iraq War, and that may have given him an advantage over HRC.
@Bauxite
Agreed, though I think it had more to do with war weariness, a relentlessly hostile media, and the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to defend its own achievements and especially hammer the WMD and terrorist connections. The fact that its political enemies managed to secure prime positions to write the history (which is where the endless, dronelike repetitions of there being “no DIRECT connection” between Al Qaeda and Saddam come from) did not help.
I honestly don’t, though I do think that the execution of it and especially the occupation was a mistake. And even then our occupation policies and warfighting in Iraq were almost certainly better than those in Afghanistan since we had a government that – for all of its MANY problems – was not hopelessly corrupt, unpopular, and impotent and which could do something to bridging the gaps.
Agreed, especially given the media.
I think it was more of a knee jerk leftist push than any actual principle. The sympathies for the Mullahcracy in Iran did not help. His issue with Saddam probably had less to do with the man himself or his regime than his PR and which side he did.
Quite possibly. Though I think Trump’s memoirs at the time make it clear he also didn’t understand why “he was right” if indeed he was.
Honestly I find it hard to fault Jeb for THAT in and of itself. I’ve made no secret that I support Trump, and still do more than many. I also believe that Dubya’s cravenness in response to literal blood libel against him and his family and the troops like my friends is indefensible, especially given how petty he is against Trump.
But I do think that Trump happily took snipes at his brother’s honor, and did so in part by playing to the left’s narratives. His peddling that Saddam kept terrorists out was ALMOST enough to make me abstain from voting for him, but I realized Hillary was the worse choice and likely would end the legitimate trail of US Presidents.
One thing both Trump and Dubya did was that they ultimately let down the troops and legacy of the War on Terror. Dubya by refusing to forcefully defend his record, especially in light of the evidence found in Iraq, and Trump by chameleonlike abandoning his more or less mainstream support of the war in favor of opportunistically reading from the Left’s script. With the result being that the truth of the war, what justified it, and what didn’t is even further buried.
I’m not naive enough to think there weren’t a lot of GOP Establishment Goons who weren’t going to go out for Trump’s scalp no matter what he did, but I do think that Trump’s categorical playing to the Left’s Iraq War narrative helped worsen that split on the right. It certainly did for ME, and I’m someone who was always more receptive to support Trump and ultimately did and do so. I wonder if Liz Cheney’s clownery might have come in part from that, but ultimately that’s irrelevant and her own actions discredit her enough.
But I can only imagine how it went down with those more on the fence.
The issue I see with that is twofold.
Firstly: Sooner or later you die. This is the exact complaint we have about the GOP Establishment where no hill is worth dying on, and sooner or later you have to fight.
Secondly: If not Baghdad, then where?
Saddam Hussein was a truly repulsive human being, as I know from various friends.
That alone isn’t a huge factor in foreign policy, especially post-9/11 foreign policy.
But the fact that he was either cultivating or retaining WMD materials, and ABOVE ALL made the decision to not only sponsor assorted terrorist outfits but to INTENSIFY support for them in the aftermath of 9/11, resulting in things like Zarqawi and assorted AQ/Taliban VIPs convalescing in Baghdad in 2002 while Iraqi Embassy Staff were caught helping Abu Sayyaf conduct terrorist ops ordered by OBL, more than justified his removal from a moral and legal point of view.
Whether or not you think doing so was wise or practically justified is beside that particular point.
I find it bitterly ironic that for all of their many achievements and failures, white shoe, probably-mostly-left-leaning law firms did a better job defending the justifications for the Iraq War than any Republican in positions of Leadership (Dubya, Trump, the Cheneys, etc) did.
And that was primarily because they were conducting civil suits on the matter and doing things like first justifying payouts of seized Saddam government assets to the victims of 9/11 (and thus themselves) and then defending said status quo. And they did so brilliantly, utterly CRUCIFYING any idiot, liar, or charlatan dumb enough to come to court and peddle the “Akshually there was no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda’ narrative by absolutely burying them under documentation and witnesses who knew better and could prove it.
Not out of any great political conviction, or ethical imperative, or abiding respect for our troops and material. But out of getting their slice.
One of the best examples of the profit motive I can think of, and also a truly dismal sign of what I think is a deeper problem in American culture, especially in terms of defending its policies and justifying them.
This December 2009 Robin of Berkeley article was one of my favorites: https://web.archive.org/web/20100829055138/http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/the_hypocrisy_of_the_left.html
FOAF wrote:
I got it long ago from Jan Harold Brunvand’s books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Harold_Brunvand#The_Vanishing_Hitchhiker
Minor note about the “white Hispanic” business: that was not just an invention of the media. The official Federal racial classification system was modified a while back to make “Hispanic” a yes/no checkbox separate from race. So, for official government purposes, you can in fact be a white Hispanic, a black Hispanic, an Asian Hispanic. And I guess a Hispanic Hispanic.
I was only aware of this because I work with software systems that have to conform to federal standards in that (and many other) areas. I never even bothered to try to find out why that change was made. Since then the feds have introduced a multi-racial category.
Which doesn’t change the fact that the media’s use of the term was mendacious, malicious, and deliberately inflammatory.
A leftist friend of mine still occasionally posts a picture of ten-year-old Trayvon Martin with remarks about his “murder” at the hands of a white guy and the extremely guilty white guy’s escape from justice
Turtler:
You say Trump abandoned his mainstream support of the War on Terror. I don’t know exactly what you mean, but he certainly tried to support it by stopping the immigration here of people from countries that had supported terrorism and he wanted to institute better vetting of people from those countries. He also supported keeping terrorist prisoners at Guantanamo. As for the Iraq War, he never had supported it in the first place, as far as I can tell. He is on record with some fairly early objections long before he became president. I wrote a piece about it that’s now behind a paywall, here, but this is a quote:
Somewhere else I recall reading his objections to the Iraq War went back to its beginning. In April of 2004, he apparently criticized Bush and the war in a Howard Stern interview. I don’t know exactly when his opposition began, but there’s no question he objected to it quite early.
Mac
A leftist friend of mine still occasionally posts a picture of ten-year-old Trayvon Martin with remarks about his “murder” at the hands of a white guy and the extremely guilty white guy’s escape from justice
Then refer him to this link: zimmerman bloody face. (In reply to Obama’s saying that if he had a son, he could have been killed like Trayvon: would Obama’s son have been pounding someone’s head into the pavement, as Trayvon did to George Zimmerman?)
Obama may have been the first prominent black politician to play the race card, but playing the race card was far from unknown in previous decades. I speak from experience. But it wasn’t universal, either. I speak from experience.
What got me about Obama was he was always playing the victim card. He had the worst case of innocent bystander I ever saw. He was always claiming he didn’t know anything about that until he read about it in the newspaper.
@neo
Apologies, and I should have been clearer.
But Trump’s history on the matter is pretty complex, and I will say that his support for the war was always much more cautious and less wholehearted than that of most of his peers (including – as the campaign trail showed – Hillary Clinton), especially when his response to Stern in 2002 was a “Yeah, I guess” and mentioning that he wished “the first time” had been done “properly.”
However, he did voice such cautious support at various times, such as in his writings (where he used Saddam and his continued amassing of WMDs as points). He largely began to change his tune over the course of 2003 and 2004 (which again is much quicker than most), but the 2010s really saw him escalate and take a much more caustic role, especially regarding his (justly in my view) infamous claim that Saddam kept away terrorists (one of the few things that would prompt leftists to admit that Saddam was a sponsor of terrorism).
I would argue those feed in more to his view on the home front than to the Iraq War per se, though credit is where credit is due; those policies were correct and the time will come where we will long for them.
Agreed re: fairly early objections, though see above. He was relatively happy being on the train prior, but that changed as the years go on. Credit is where credit is due, it was apparently more deeply rooted and sincere than the likes of Clinton and co. Though discredit is also due by what I view as petty and dishonest sniping at his rivals like Bush on Saddam’s track record.
He did start objecting rather early, and I do think Stern is a useful template for this, since two interviews with Trump (in 2002 and 2004) help both show his change, and how rather shaky and hesitant what support he did have was.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/howard-stern-trump-was-kinda-for-the-iraq-war-on-my-show-in
Yes, it’s Buzzfeed and thus biased leftist garbage, but it does feature quotes from Stern himself and make authentic reference to the 2002 interview.
Apologies; I should have clarified better.
In any case, that is still something I hold against Trump, especially when he escalated his attacks over the course of the 2010s. It’s one thing to express hesitancy or even opposition to a war, but another to outright denigrate the reasons for it or whitewash the terrorist sponsoring butcher involved. Again, this very nearly got me to boycott the election because of what a raw nerve this is, especially to those friends of mine that served or otherwise suffered directly.
But ultimately he was still the lesser evil, and I do not regret the vote. Especially given his accomplishments and the nobler parts of his personality. But I can already see truth dropping down the Memory Hole like it did with the Indochinese Wars, and Trump helped abet the left in that process.
A leftist friend of mine still occasionally posts a picture of ten-year-old Trayvon Martin with remarks about his “murder” at the hands of a white guy and the extremely guilty white guy’s escape from justice
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He’s impervious to factual data. Or he begins with the assumption that Martin had a franchise to beat up someone who caused him mild annoyance. I’ve seen both dispositions in discussions of that case.
@ NateWhilk > “This December 2009 Robin of Berkeley article was one of my favorites:”
Thanks for the link. I was not reading American Thinker during Robin’s tenure there, but I certainly would have if I had ever encountered her posts.
Her accounts of why she left the Left / Democrats — because she finally noticed that the principles they allegedly championed were not the ones they displayed in practice — are very much like the changer stories we are familiar with from Neo’s own blog and others that became public, from pundits (some are still just on the edge of changing, but they are seeing the rot and calling it out) or just plain people (#WalkAway).
The second-most depressing thing about reading Robin’s post (the anti-Christian minister’s actions are the first), and two more accessed from her links there, is that the warning signs of decay and destruction have been visible since at least 2009, when she was writing, and probably much earlier, although she also feels that Obama’s election was the tipping point for their evil (I no longer think that word is hyperbole or debatable) to come out into the open.
Two more of Robin’s posts from 2009 – the title speaks for itself; the content could have come from any recent news report:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100829060906/http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/the_lefts_corruption_of_youth.html
Calling out the vicious misogyny (her word) of the left / Democrats:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100829064624/http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_wilding_of_sarah_palin.html
I was not aware of the sexual predators in the schools at that time, as our school system in Texas was not yet corrupted (it may be by now, of course); however, the degree to which the Democrats and press savaged Governor Palin showed how far they had gone into the tank for power over all else.
However, they were also once more revealing the double standards that I already knew existed from their support of Bill Clinton’s abusive behaviors — the spectacle of the Feminist leadership tossing away every woman-supporting principle they had ever claimed to have changed my own view of the “professional” Democrats from “people with different political policies” to “people with despicable personal principles.”
The individual Democrats I knew then, and now, are IMO deluded but not deranged.
My recollection is that as early as 2004 Trump was cutting up the Bush Administration on the prosecution of the Iraq War. He said at the time something to the effect that the result of the disorder would be that the biggest baddest meanest figure in the Iraqi firmament would take charge “and he will have weapons of mass destruction”. His verdict on Bush was ‘your fired’, and he said just that. (This proved to be a faulty prediction).
@ Ray > “He was always claiming he didn’t know anything about that until he read about it in the newspaper.”
That used to grate on me about Obama as well: he was the President for crying out loud! He’s supposed to know at least some of those things before the rest of us do!
However, now that we know for a fact that the bureaucrats purposely withheld information from President Trump, and it appears Biden doesn’t know anything substantively useful about what his administration is doing, I’m far more willing to accept that the people actually running our government didn’t always tell Barry what was happening.
But Obama admitting his ignorance on national tv was just embarrassing.
Then refer him to this link:
You could also send him the autopsy report (which demonstrate that Martin was over top of Zimmerman), the eyewitness statement of the resident standing 30 feet away, maps of the complex, &c. Won’t make any difference. You cannot reason someone out of a view they were never reasoned into.
well jesse jackson, although he didn’t have a formal office, was a precursor to obama, on a parallel track,
of course obama’s opposition, to the iraq war, was mostly for show, in the 2002 contests, when he got into the senate in 2004, he continued to vote for funding because of tony rezko one of his patrons, and the baathist fixer, whose name escapes me now, he decided the afghan war was the good war, then mostly gave it up after 2009,
well jesse jackson, although he didn’t have a formal office, was a precursor to obama, on a parallel track,
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Disagree. Jackson was quite different. Fun fact: the Robinson family knew the Jackson family personally, and Mooch babysat for some of JJ’s younger children.
An MMA fighting, career criminal, gangbanger who posted on social media of his love for making people bleed, was turned into an innocent little boy. Obama specifically said that Trayvon could have been his son.
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There was no question he was a problem. When Tracy Martin discovered his son was missing, the first place he called was juvenile hall. Trayvon was in Orlando because he’d had a falling out with his mother and she put him on a bus from Miami and told his father you and your new gf are taking him for a while; he’d only been there a couple of weeks. It’s a reasonable inference that he’d been responsible for at least one burglary in Miami and MMA was one of his hobbies. Do not believe there was any evidence of gang membership. Since he was just 17, referring to him as a ‘career criminal’ is de trop.
the link is martin, brown, gray, and lloyd, to name four examples where operating abberantly, but the narrative made their behavior seem noble, to those not paying attention, encouraging exactly the wrong behavior,