Are Obama's Lefty Foes Racist?
The question turns out to be more than a joke.
By James Taranto
"Man, oh man, oh man, ladies and gentlemen, the left, what a bunch of racists!" So said Rush Limbaugh last week, commenting on the progressive rebellion against President Obama: "I mean, they're all over MSNBC. They are all over the New York Times, the Washington Post. I have never seen such a collection of racists, all these liberals criticizing Obama on this compromise on the tax bill. I mean, well, every bit of criticism of Obama's always been said to be racist, hasn't it?"
As NewsBusters.org reports, Ed Schultz of MSNBC took Limbaugh's remark personally: "[Limbaugh] is now accusing me of being a racist," the talking horse said on MSNBC's "The Mr. Ed Show."
This leads NB's Noel Sheppard to observe: "Any person with even a room temperature intelligence quotient would know that Limbaugh was claiming racism because any time anyone on the right has criticized Barack Obama since the moment he threw his hat into the presidential candidacy ring in February 2007, said person has been accused of racism by the Left." Sheppard thinks Schultz didn't get the joke, which seems unlikely. After all, Limbaugh explained the joke.
But maybe it's not entirely a joke. That thought is prompted by a pair of opinion pieces that appeared in liberal newspapers over the weekend, both by black writers: columnist Colbert King in the Washington Post on Saturday and novelist Ishmael Reed in the New York Times on Sunday. Neither man goes quite so far as to call Obama's progressive critics racist, but both travel a significant distance in that direction.
Reed, it's fair to say, accuses the progs of racial insensitivity. His central argument is that those who "criticize President Obama for keeping his cool"--who urge him "to 'man up' " and start "slapping people left and right"--do not understand the cultural constraints under which black men operate in America: "If President Obama behaved that way, he'd be dismissed as an angry black militant with a deep hatred of white people."