Who was this member of the flying gentry ginning up a class warfare denunciation of the president on Rupert Murdoch's network? Karl Rove? One of the Koch brothers? A white-robed leader of the tea party?
None of the above. It was Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television. In a 2008 profile, the Washington Post noted Johnson had made more than $2 million in campaign contributions since 1990, 99 percent of which went to Democrats.
Internet commentators labeled Johnson an “Uncle Tom” and “Oreo.” Reprehensible as that is, he is immunized against the accusation of racism that is routinely hurled at Obama critics.
Not so long ago, criticizing the president was regarded as an admirable expression of political dissent and the highest form of patriotism. Now almost any untoward reference to Obama can be justification in polite society to label you a racist.
Slate's Timothy Noah lambasted a Wall Street Journal story on Obama's skinniness as a coded appeal to racism because “any discussion of Obama's physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that's most on their minds.”
Karen Hunter, a journalism professor and MSNBC analyst, said an Associated Press transcription of an Obama speech was “inherently racist” because it accurately recounted the president's deliberate dropping of Gs —“Stop complainin'. Stop grumblin'. Stop cryin'.” — a rhetorical device he frequently uses to sound more folksy.
Melissa Harris-Perry, a Tulane professor who also does commentary for MSNBC, declared that a failure to re-elect Obama in 2012 would be proof of the irredeemable racism of even liberal America. “If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate,” she wrote in The Nation, “then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.”
This is moonbattery. But nowhere is the racist calumny more cheaply employed than in the left's ritual smearing of the tea party. And what did those alleged tea party racists just do? According to a new CBS poll, they put Herman Cain in a tie for the lead in the GOP presidential race. About which unfunny comedienne Janeane Garofalo quipped to the even less funny Keith Olbermann, “Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican Party.”
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