So says Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist. And so the description of Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth” stance joins the list of racist words. Remarkable.
The “socialist” label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.
Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization; Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice; and A. Philip Randolph, who founded and was the longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leading advocate for civil rights for African Americans.
McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.
Shame on McCain and Palin.
Surely he’s kidding. This is a parody, right? A quarter of Americans can’t identify the Vice President of the United States, yet Team McCain assumes a term Hoover supposedly used to describe African American equality fighters is going to click in people’s minds in order to get them voting against the black candidate? Is Diuguid smoking something?
22. October 2008 at 4:41 pm
whatever this “journalist” is smoking, I would like some of it. Maybe it would cure my fibromyalgia…or the dysphoria I experience at the thought of the socialist One taking up room in the Oval Office.
What is amazing here is the further attempt to silence dissent by declaring words verboten. Any criticism is racist by the very nature of its critical form.
George Orwell could not have dreamed such a fabulist novel. Nor would anyone have bothered to read it anything so…so beyond the realm of even satire. Some ideas are just too far-fetched…that is, until you are forced to live them or suffer ostracism for your refusal to bow down to the naked little emperors of our time.
Such shenanigans have made our blog a pariah, even to many on the right. The fact that the left loathed us was an indication we were on the correct path.
But then we dared to *speculate* (and it was definitely speculations framed in the form of alternte scenarios) on the possibility of genocide in Europe because of the horrific immigration tsunami rolling over that continent. For daring to talk about it we were banned from Pajamas Media and ordered to remove their various widgets.
Looking back, it was a relief in practical terms. Now our blog loads quickly — or rather, more quickly — and there are no more skyscraper ads filling up the sidebar. Makes our readers happy. Happy enough to more than make up in donations what we were receiving from PJM.
But to be pushed out beyond the pale merely for thinking “what if” is a worrisome example of how crippled our languaage — and thereby our critical faculties — has become due to the pressures of the p.c. rules on all of us, from Larry Summers to Joe the Plumber to you and me.
And now, slouching toward us, is the Fairness Doctrine, breathing righeous fire.
And beyond that beast is Google’s overt desire to be part of the crack-down on blogs in the EU, just as it was in China (the EU “Constitution” has draconiain measures in mind for bloggers. Things like jail and loAss of livelihood, pension and medical care).
Thus, Google’s CEO has endorsed Obama. Could it be the anti-trust matters facing Google, Yahoo, etc?
Soon, we may be reduced to samizdat communications. Ah well, the average Russian Ivan will have much to teach us….