Democrats Have A 2014 Strategy: Pretend That All Republicans Hate Black People
THINKSTOCK
During a Senate hearing this week, West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, lamented that President Barack Obama has dealt with gratuitous Congressional gridlock because the Nation’s commander in chief is “the wrong color.”
The Senator was in the midst of a diatribe against fellow lawmakers who have resisted an increase in the Nation’s gas tax to increase Federal transportation funding when he made the remark in a Tuesday Finance Committee hearing.
“It’s an American characteristic that you don’t do anything which displeases the voters, because you always have to get reelected here,” Rockefeller said. “I understand part of it. It has to do with — for some, it’s just we don’t want anything good to happen under this president, because he’s the wrong color.”
The lawmaker said that political self-interest has led to lawmakers resisting funding “to keep ourselves from dropping into rivers and rolling over bridges” because of fear of being linked to the Administration.
Rockefeller is one of many Democrats who believe that resistance to their policies can only be racially motivated.
In similarly questionable musing on race and politics, Democratic Representative James Clyburn attacked Republican Senator Tim Scott for not being progressive enough. Both men are black lawmakers representing South Carolinians.
“If you call progress electing a person with the pigmentation that he has, who votes against the interest and aspirations of 95 percent of the black people in South Carolina, then I guess that’s progress,” Clyburn told The Washington Post.
The Post article, focused on Scott’s campaign style, goes on to explain:
Scott got an F on the NAACP annual scorecard. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he voted to hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress, opposed the Congressional Black Caucus’s budget proposal and voted to delay funding a settlement between the United States and black farmers who alleged that the federal government refused them loans because of their race.
Clyburn’s message is a familiar one for progressives: A black lawmaker who espouses any views more conservative than Obama’s agenda or fails to toe the Democratic line will not be tolerated. That’s why it’s easy to lose count of how many times black lawmakers or pundits have hatefully referred to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as an “Uncle Tom.”
Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson (Miss.) demonstrated the finer points of the all-about-race strategy speaking in April on a New Nation of Islam radio program.
“I’ve been in Washington. I saw three Presidents now. I never saw George Bush treated like this. I never saw Bill Clinton treated like this with such disrespect,” Thompson said. “That Mitch McConnell would have the audacity to tell the President of the United States — not the chief executive, but the commander-in-chief — that ‘I don’t care what you come up with we’re going to be against it.’ Now if that’s not a racist statement I don’t know what is.”
There’s no question where he got the idea that any attempt to hold the current Presidential Administration accountable is racist. Earlier in the month, Attorney General Eric Holder insisted that government oversight mandated by the Constitutional balance of powers is actually just racism when it happens to his Department of Justice.
Referencing an exchange with House lawmakers, Holder said at an Al Sharpton-hosted event:
I’m pleased to note that the last five years have been defined by significant strides and by lasting reforms even in the face, even in the face, of unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly, and divisive adversity. If you don’t believe that, if you look at the way, forget about me, forget about me, if you look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House Committee, it had nothing to do with me, forget that, what attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?
Holder would likely also agree with Thompson’s insistence that the small government movement is racist and only began when Obama was elected.
“Now all of a sudden, government is the worst thing in the world since a black man became president,” the lawmaker said in the New Nation of Islam interview.
Furthermore, in Thompson’s view, Americans who oppose Obamacare do so “just because a black man created it.”
“Then there’s Uncle Tom Clarence Thomas,” the lawmaker insulted the Supreme Court Justice for opposition to affirmative action, adding, “it’s almost to the point saying this man doesn’t like black people, he doesn’t like being black.”
Thompson later defended his remark during a CNN interview, noting that calling a sitting Supreme Court Justice “Uncle Tom” is inappropriate for a white person.
“But I’m black,” he said.
“You’re asking me the question, and I’m giving you a response,” he added. “The people that I represent, for the most part, have a real issue with those decisions-voter ID, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act-all those issues are very important and for someone in the court who’s African American and not sensitive to that is a real problem.”
The bottom line for Democrats is that white conservatives are simply racists; and black conservatives, harder to label as racists, have sold out or, worse, don’t value their “blackness.”
