RICHARD COHEN: Michelle Was Right About Her Country

IBD Editorials ^ | November 22, 2010 | By RICHARD COHEN

[Kaslin]

When I was 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the nation's capital. I have only vague memories of that trip — the heat, the expanse of the White House's grounds, the Jefferson Memorial.

I do remember we took Route 1 through Baltimore (no I-95 yet), and it was there that I saw my first sign with the word "colored" on it — a rooming house, I think. This was 1952, and the United States was an apartheid nation.

It is Sarah Palin who brings back these memories. In her new book, she reportedly takes Michelle Obama to task for her supposedly infamous remark from the 2008 campaign: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

Instantly, Republicans pounced. Among the first to do so was Cindy McCain, who said, "I have and always will be proud of my country." It was a cheap shot, but her husband's selection of Palin for the ticket and plenty of cheap shots from Palin ("death panels," etc.) were yet to come.

Michelle Obama quickly explained herself. She was proud of the turnout in the primaries — so many young people, etc. Evan Thomas, writing perceptively in Newsweek, thought — as I did — that she was saying something else.

He dug into her senior thesis at Princeton — "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" — to find a young woman who felt, or was made to feel, "more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before." This was not a statement of racism. This was a statement of fact.

[Kaslin]

That’s a given

[anglian]

I guess he thinks Michelle was right in Wisconsin:

“Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, through Republican and Democratic administrations. It hasn’t gotten much better.”

and in South Carolina:

America is “just downright mean” and “guided by fear. We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day.”

[Old North State]

Why would anyone accept such a self absorbed subject for a thesis? You would think someone at Princeton would have had the courage to point out how devoid of content the idea is.
“You want to write a thesis about your feelings? Why don't you write a pop song, this is a University.”
Of course if they were honest in admissions she would have never been there to embarrass herself and the school.

[Kaslin]

IBD articles by Cohen, Dionne, Marcus and Robinson always get a barf alert from me

[Kaslin]

I had my mind on something else, but hey are both left wing lunatic dim bulbs

[Minn]

EUGENE ROBINSON is an IDIOT!!

And so is the author of this piece, Richard Cohen. It'd be hard to determine which of the two is more stupid. They both have perfect tens in all their routines as far as anybody can tell. I'd have to go with Cohen at this point. Everything he writes lately is some walk down irrelevant memory lane. It's like he's starting to have acid flashbacks or something.

[AlaskaErik]

It's appalling that Palin and too many others fail to understand that fact — indeed so many facts of American history. They don't offer the slightest hint that they can appreciate the history of the Obama family and that in Michelle's case, her ancestors were slaves — Jim Robinson of South Carolina, her paternal great-great grandfather, being one.

Even after they were freed they were consigned to peonage, second-class citizens, forbidden to vote in much of the South, dissuaded from doing so in some of the North, relegated to separate schools, restaurants, churches, hotels, waiting rooms of train stations, the back of the bus, and the other side of the tracks, the mortuary, the cemetery and, if whites could manage it, heaven itself.

Yes, everything in the second paragraph is true. Equally true, but erased from history, is the fact that the Democratic Party was the impetus for all those transgressions. A fact seemingly lost on most black Americans.

[okie01]

The Obamas are living proof that affirmative action is a simply terrible idea.

[RobbyS]

Blacks are generally ignorant of the world outside their “tribe”. This a . Tom Sowell— a conservative—is among those who have bothered to look at the world as it is, where today the poor people of China suffer in sweatshops not unlike those of the New York garment district a hundred years ago. The tragedy of thge Civil Rights movement is that its leading intered into a corrupt bargain with the Federal Government. Put so much of their faith in it, and expected too much from it.

[GladesGuru]

Said the smarmy Mr. Cohen, “Should she forget it all simply because she went to Ivy League schools?”

Uhhh - what’s it to her?

Unless one allows ones self to dive into the pool of unending cess that is Liberalism/pop psych, the self declaimed ‘weltschmertz’ of a brilliant, black, female professional lawyer/racist means nothing.

Cohen is like all to many American Jews who think that somehow, if they pander sufficiently, American blacks will not hate them.

They are, of course, wrong.

[steve8714]

Obama puts on black like the coat you need at certain restaurants.

[anglian]

Jonah Goldberg on Liberal Fascism (And how Barack Obama fits in)
Hugh Hewitt Show ^ | 2/21/2008 | Jonah Goldberg
HH: Cut number three:

MO: We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another, that we cannot measure our greatness in this society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure out greatness by the least of these, that we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I’m here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

MO: Barack, as Oprah said, is one of the most brilliant men you will meet in our lifetime. Barack is more than ready. He’ll be ready today, he’ll be ready on Day One, he’ll be ready in a year from now, five years from now. He is ready. That is not the question. The question is what are we ready for? Wait, wait, wait, because we’re ready for change. We say we’re ready for change, but see, change is hard. Change will always be hard. And it doesn’t happen from the top down. We do not get universal health care, we don’t get better schools because somebody else is in the White House. We get change because folks from the grass roots up decide they are sick and tired of other people telling them how their lives will be, when they decide to roll up their sleeves and work. And Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better, and that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

HH: Jonah Goldberg, we’re looking at each other as we hear this, because this is the antithesis of limited government.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1975051/posts

[SuziQ]

If Michelle was concentrating on race, in her determination of whether or not she could be ‘proud’ of her country, it shows how narrow-minded she is. Sure black people felt like second class citizens for many years, but many still had great pride in this country, because they could clearly see the difference between the US and every other country on the face of the Earth.

[mas cerveza por favor]

Further down in the article Cohen scolds that Blacks were segregated in "the mortuary, the cemetery and, if whites could manage it, heaven itself."

Cohen hates this country as much as Michelle, dredging up grievances from beyond the living memory of most Americans. Instead of praising the liberality of that generation who long ago ended segregation, he puts a guilt trip on Sarah to pay moral reparations to Michelle. The media manipulators will forever impose racial grievance and guilt from the past until they are ostracized.

[WilliamHouston]

Every single column Eugene Robinson writes at the Washington Post is about his race and the “racism” of others. I have never seen him write about anything else. He is as race obsessed as they come.

[SlightOfTongue]

I'm still compiling my 'political phrases and definitions' dictionary.

"Omnipotent self-appointed liberal journalist" will be only one example and defining phrase next to this dope, Cohen's picture.

[EDINVA]

That’s all well and good, Richard, except that Michelle Obama was BORN in 1964 the year the landmark Civil Rights Act was enacted. She never personally experienced the segregation and racism to which this article refers.

Michelle (and Barack) Obama benefited from affirmative action that was put into place before she had any cognitive abilities. Otherwise, she would never have gone to either Princeton or Harvard Law School. By her own admission, her grades and scores would not have warranted admission to such competitive entry prestigious schools. So maybe she should have been proud of her country the day she entered those ivied walls.