Joe Biden's done-before-it's-begun presidential campaign says less about Biden (who, as recently as last December took public pride in the fact that his Delaware was once a "slave state") and more about the Left in general and their paradigm shift to the fore as the purveyors of racial insensitivity. To be sure, for every Joe Biden there's a Trent Lott who isn't afraid to publicly pine for the good ol' days of segregation. But the right early on has learned to read the writing on the walls, recognize the setting of the sun on their lily empire and get with the new; embrace ideologically aligned minorities who are, in Biden's assessment, "good blacks," "articulate and bright and clean," and "nice-looking:" Thomas and Rice and Paige and Powell of most prominence. Of course, to name any is to risk a shout out from the left that they are all nothing but an "Aunt Jemima," a "Brown Sugar," an "Uncle Tom" and a "house nigger." That Harry Belafonte could get away with calling Colin Powell a "house nigger" with nary a ripple from the media speaks to their tacit approval of racism from the left toward the right. Hate the politics of conservative blacks all you like. But if Powell were to refer to Barack Obama as a "lefty coon," I can assure you the presses would stop, the special bulletins would fly and the excoriating would begin. But the liberal plantation is where modern and accepted racism has taken up residence. And unfortunately Barack Obama will be the target of a campaign that is instigated by the soft bigotry that the worst paternalists of the left wield so well. Obama, different from, say Sharpton or Jackson, isn't beholden to liberal paternalism. And after decades of having blacks under their thumb there's nothing more frightening to the leftist old schoolers than an ascended and independent black man. Prime Exemplar: In the short history of our new millennium has there been a more public racist diatribe than Stanley Crouch's recent piece in the Daily News; What Obama isn't: Black Like Me? Crouch, who is apparently the arbiter of all things black, dismisses Obama being a member of the tribe based on his biracial background. Crouch: "when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about." Take close note. Crouch speaks of "black Americans." Interesting, as it's the left that since the early eighties has brow beaten the public into using the dismissive and often wrongly applied appellation African American when speaking of all black people. Now that a man of direct African descent is poised to be president, according to Crouch, it's good "black Americans" who are being bamboozled by him. Crouch ends his rant by dismissing Obama as having to run for president as the product of a "white woman and African immigrant" who, if elected president, will have gotten into the White House through the "side door." As opposed to, say, Al Sharpton who deserved to stroll right through the front of the joint. Not all the left-leaning slams against Obama have been so obvious. CNN has been engaged in a stealth war against Obama for months. From their promo department "accidentally" running the caption "Where's Obama?" under pictures of Osama Bin Laden, to CNN correspondent Jeanne Moos mocking the similarity of Obama's first name to Bin Laden's and Obama's middle name of Hussein to the former Iraq dictator. Her piece was replete with a split screen contrasting Obama with the Middle East's most wanted. CNN analyst Jeff Greenfield compared Obama to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because they both tend to dress business casual: jacket, collared shirt and no tie. Greenfield insists it was just a joke. Sure. Same as the anti-Harold Ford "call me" ad was just a little Republican mischief. But most inexplicably, in the middle of a decidedly apolitical interview with Rick Warren, CNN's Wolf Blitzer inexplicably blurted: "Is America ready for a black president," essentially positing a negative for his audience. Wolf, a whole lot of America has been ready for a black president ever since we got dumped here off the boat from the motherland. The question isn't "is America ready for a black president," the question is: can American afford one more rich old white guy as president? Though it seems CNN has had its considerable left-leaning phasers set to kill, I gotta cut the network just a tad of slack because Dick Parson's is, literally, "the man" up top. But that doesn't mean his minion's got the memo that the "lighten up, it's just a black joke" soft bigotry is as damning as the straight up old school Jim Crowisms of the right. As Soledad Brother George Jackson taught us the Left and Right are just tentacles of the same beast. When it comes to bigotry I don't expect the left to be better than the right. I would, however, appreciate if they learned to keep it to themselves.
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