The Great Tea Party Rip-Off
By FRANK RICH
NYT
Even given the low bar set by America’s bogus conversations about race, the short-lived Harry Reid fracas was a most peculiar nonevent. For all the hyperventilation in cable news land, this supposed racial brawl didn’t seem to generate any controversy whatsoever in what is known as the real world.
Eugene Robinson, the liberal black columnist at The Washington Post, wrote that he was “neither shocked nor outraged” at Reid’s less-than-articulate observation that Barack Obama benefited politically from being “light-skinned” and for lacking a “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Besides, Robinson said, Reid’s point was “surely true.” The black conservative Ward Connerly agreed, writing in The Wall Street Journal that he was “having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive.”
President Obama immediately granted Reid absolution. A black columnist at The Daily News in New York, Stanley Crouch, even stood up for the archaic usage of “Negro.” George Will defended Reid from charges of racism as vociferously as Democrats did. Al Sharpton may have accepted Reid’s apology, but for once there’s no evidence that he ever cared enough to ask for one. So who, actually, was the aggrieved party here? What — or who — was really behind this manufactured race war with no victims?
It would be easy to dismiss the entire event as a credulous news media’s collaboration with a publisher’s hype for a new tell-all-gossip 2008 campaign book, “Game Change,” which breathlessly broke the Reid “bombshell.” But this is a more interesting tale than that. The true prime mover in this story was not a book publicist but Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican Party and by far the loudest and most prominent Beltway figure demanding that Reid resign as Senate majority leader as punishment for his “racism.”
(More here.)
NYT
Even given the low bar set by America’s bogus conversations about race, the short-lived Harry Reid fracas was a most peculiar nonevent. For all the hyperventilation in cable news land, this supposed racial brawl didn’t seem to generate any controversy whatsoever in what is known as the real world.
Eugene Robinson, the liberal black columnist at The Washington Post, wrote that he was “neither shocked nor outraged” at Reid’s less-than-articulate observation that Barack Obama benefited politically from being “light-skinned” and for lacking a “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” Besides, Robinson said, Reid’s point was “surely true.” The black conservative Ward Connerly agreed, writing in The Wall Street Journal that he was “having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive.”
President Obama immediately granted Reid absolution. A black columnist at The Daily News in New York, Stanley Crouch, even stood up for the archaic usage of “Negro.” George Will defended Reid from charges of racism as vociferously as Democrats did. Al Sharpton may have accepted Reid’s apology, but for once there’s no evidence that he ever cared enough to ask for one. So who, actually, was the aggrieved party here? What — or who — was really behind this manufactured race war with no victims?
It would be easy to dismiss the entire event as a credulous news media’s collaboration with a publisher’s hype for a new tell-all-gossip 2008 campaign book, “Game Change,” which breathlessly broke the Reid “bombshell.” But this is a more interesting tale than that. The true prime mover in this story was not a book publicist but Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican Party and by far the loudest and most prominent Beltway figure demanding that Reid resign as Senate majority leader as punishment for his “racism.”
(More here.)
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