Is Frank Rich the Only Non-Racist Left in America?

Reason Magazine ^ | April 5, 2010 | Michael C. Moynihan

[2ndDivisionVet]

Last week, I attacked Frank Rich's nonsense article about race and the Tea Parties, in which he prosaically (and not-at-all-like those heavy-breathers on the right) compared recent health care protests to a famous Nazi pogrom that presaged the Holocaust. It's always helpful when demonizing your opponent to invoke Nazism—they are that bad—but Rich's real message was embedded in his headline: The rage is not about health care. And I suspect I won't spoil the ending if I reveal that health care protesters are collectively motivated by race hatred.

Yesterday he revisited the issue, sharing an email from one of his chums (a "prominent liberal Obama supporter") who came to the shocking conclusion—one so appalling, yet so plausible, that it gobbled up two paragraphs of his column—that Rich and his correspondent are perhaps the last anti-racists in America. Indeed, even those leftists critical of Obama—think Glenn Greewald, Naomi Wolf, Jane Hamsher—could also be motivated by subterranean racial bias!

Last week, after I wrote about the role race plays in some of the apocalyptic right-wing hysteria about the health care bill, a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point. He theorized that race also plays a role in “the often angry and intemperate talk” he has been hearing from “left-liberal friends for the past many months about what a failure and a disappointment” the president has been. In his view, “Obama never said anything, while running, to give anyone the idea” that he was other than a “deliberate, compromise-seeking bipartisan moderate.” My friend wondered if white liberals who voted for Obama expected a “sweeping Republicans-be-damned kind of agenda” in part — and he emphasized “in part!” — because “they expect a black guy to be intemperate, impetuous, impatient” rather than “measured, deliberate, patient.”

Am I the only one who thinks this is getting a wee bit ridiculous? Instead of a post-racial America, are we now stuck with the racial politics of the university, where we presume that everyone is motivated by hate until they conclusively prove otherwise? The rest of Rich's column is, as usual, flimsy scaffolding holding together a few Coulteresque points. Take this not-so-subtle dig at our previous president, of whom there is much to say without going all reductio ad Hitlerum:

[Obama] is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Funny how few people compared George W. Bush to anyone but Hitler and his parents.)

Get it? If you are confused by that parenthetical, I think the "and his parents" refers to George H.W. and Barbara Bush, not the elder Schicklgrubers.

Last week, newspapers, blogs, and political talk shows were thick with stories about David Frum's dismissal from AEI. According to those sympathetic to Frum, he was relieved of his duties after attacking the Republican Party leadership on health care, bemoaning the coarsening of rhetoric on the right, and accusing the "movement" of shunting more moderate conservative intellectuals to the side. The nub of his criticism is this: in celebrating Beck and Limbaugh, conservatives are putting ratings, viewers, and readers first and ideas that could reinvigorate the party second. Regardless of his tactics and ignoring the plausibility of his prescriptions, there is much to be said for this argument. But while Obama's supporters have gleefully picked up on Frum's AEI firing, and divined quite a bit about the modern conservative mindset from it, who on their side will be the first to pull a Frum and denounce the over-the-top rhetoric of people like Rich, Paul Krugman, and Ed Schultz?

In other news, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) explains that the Tea Partiers are marching "without robes and hoods," inspired by George Wallace, and that the health care protests on Capital Hill were—guess what?—on the "verge of Kristallnacht."

[2ndDivisionVet]

Comments?

[skully]

Oh nos!! They're playing the race card again....

[tophat9000]

So is this where we get the expression "That's Rich!" for something full of sh-t?

[Altura Ct.]

Quick, Everybody run around in circles!

[onona]

ummm, what were you asking ??

[Billthedrill]

Rich was projecting again. The commonality between recent events and Krystallnacht is that the latter was a systematic campaign of violence directed against the regime's perceived political opponents that was preceded by baseless accusations of violence and triggered by the assassination of a minor Nazi diplomat. What followed, incidentally, was gun control directed at the target population.

So, yes, Mr. Rich, there are resemblances, but it's your side wearing the jackboots.

[ETL]

"Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal".--James (Jim) Cone,
African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Paperback)
by Cornel West (Editor), Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Editor)

SEAN HANNITY: But Reverend Jeremiah Wright is not backing down and has not for years and in his strong stance on the teaching of black liberation theology is nothing new. He had the same things to say last spring when he appeared on "Hannity & Colmes:"

WRIGHT: If you're not going to talk about theology in context, if you're not going to talk about liberation theology that came out of the '60s, systematized black liberation theology that started with Jim Cone in 1968 and the writings of Cone and the writings of Dwight Hopkins and the writings of womynist theologians and Asian theologians and Hispanic theologians, then you can't talk about the black value system.

HANNITY: But I'm a — reverend

WRIGHT: Do you know liberation theology, sir?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354158,00.html

[ETL]

From HumanEvents.com...
April 29, 2008

"Obama did not address the [Rev Wright] issue squarely until forced to justify his relationship with Wright, his pastor at Trinity United Church in Chicago, for over 20 years. In a speech several weeks ago, Obama denounced Wright’s comments but justified them by saying that America didn’t really know Wright. Obama’s connection to the pastor runs deep, as he titled his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” after a sermon Wright gave. Wright also baptized Obama and his children as well as performing the marriage ceremony of Michelle and Barack Obama."

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26261

[onona]

Jeremiah Wright - Proud veteran of the USMC. Prayers be with him.

[J Edgar]

To answer the question posed in the title without reading further - I say YES OF COURSE.
The very existence of Liberals is based upon the undeniable observation that ‘they’ are not racists!
Of course some low life people might ask “who are the observers”? LOL

[nolongerademocrat]

“[Obama] is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Funny how few people compared George W. Bush to anyone but Hitler and his parents.)”

That explains to me why he is batsh*t crazy. (DID formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder.)

[ETL]

You forgot the sarc tag. The guy hates America. Benedict Arnold was a hero of several battles before he turned. Korean War vet Charlie Rangel now cozyies up to the pro-North Korea Workers World Party. John Kerry “served in Vietnam”, on and on and on.

[Lorianne]

It passed the absurd point a while back.
We’re in uncharted Absurdistan now..

[hstacey]

No kidding...When’s the next train out of here!!

[Nonstatist]

This libertarian doesent like conservatives, apparently. His objections to the leftist whackos seems tepid, IMO

[Brad from Tennessee]

I’d like to see Rich move to the South Bronx and spend some weekends working in a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen. On some of his free nights he could mentor minority students. To paraphrase Stokely Carmichael: Most affluent white liberals talk a good game as long as they are insulated from the changes they advocate.

[ZirconEncrustedTweezers]

Methinks America’s Kristallnacht will be initiated by the left...

[cammie]

Frank Rich is a theatre critic. The fact that The Times elevated him from his position as theatre critic to the position of public intellectual says nothing about Rich’s candlepower and everything about the Times’ lack thereof.

[Inwoodian]

Rich’s commentary is like the opinion of the loudest girl at the Mah Jong party.