McCarthyist race-baiting by the left: Ferreting out Republican racists
By Murray Soupcoff
web
posted December 23, 2002
Trent Lott's ill-advised comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday
party, praising Strom's Dixie-loving, civil-rights-loathing 1948 tilt
at the presidential windmills, were not exactly an example of enlightened
civility as far as the unintended targets of Mr. Lott's ill-chosen words
were concerned. Senator Lott's apparent zeal to restore the glorious heritage
of the Confederacy -- likely including separate drinking fountains for
black folks, "colored" washrooms and stress-relieving vigilante lynchings
of uppity "nigrahs" -- couldn't be expected to sit well the intended victims
of this Dixiecrat revival. And in this author's opinion, black Americans
had every right to suspiciously wonder whether they were seeing the real
Trent Lott (if there is one under that silly hairpiece of his) as he (
in his own inimitable words) "winged it" on the occasion of celebrating
Strom Thurmond's hundredth year on this planet.
However, now that we've got that observation out of the way, let's get
right to the main theme of this opinion piece. And that is the left-lib
crowd's increasing proclivity to play the "race-card" by smearing their
enemies with a dose of race-based McCarthyism. We're talking about their
life's work of ferreting out alleged "racists' in every nook and cranny
of the American Republic -- but almost always in the inner sanctums of
the Republican Party or the conservative opposition (white and black)
to today's hairbrained, America-hating, racial-preferences "civil-rights"
stratagems.
How far will the chattering classes go in distorting reality to discover
new "right-wing racists" and black "Uncle Toms" to chastise and excommunicate
from public life? Well, a recent Inside
Politics column by Greg Pierce in the Washington Times
reminds us what a cynical and manipulative bunch they are. Here's how
Mr. Pierce puts it:
In the upside-down world of People for the American Way, a vote for a black Supreme Court justice apparently is evidence of racism.
The liberal group, taking advantage of Sen. Trent Lott's troubles, put out a press release yesterday purporting to show that potential successors to Mr. Lott of Mississippi have voted to "undermine civil rights protections." The evidence? Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell and Oklahoma Sen. Don Nickles voted in favor of Clarence Thomas' nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991.
That was just one of what PFAW described as "16 key civil rights votes over the past 20 years" in which the above-named Republicans almost always failed to vote the liberal way. It included such issues as racial quotas in federal contracting, in which, of course, those opposed to discrimination are deemed to be foes of civil rights.
Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist and Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum were included in the scorecard, although they could not be denounced for supporting Mr. Thomas, since they were not in the Senate at that time. However, they could be rebuked for such anti-civil rights sins as voting for John Ashcroft for attorney general.
"These dismal voting records make it clear that the Republican Party's civil rights problem is far broader and deeper than Trent Lott," PFAW President Ralph G. Neas said.
Shades of George Orwell! Defining a confirmation vote in favor of a black jurist of integrity such as Clarence Thomas as a racist act, and as a civil rights problem "far broader and deeper" than the Trent Lott fiasco? Gimme a break!
What have the loopy denizens of the contemporary civil-rights establishment been smoking lately? Their mission -- to eliminate any vestiges of the tolerant, color-blind society that Martin Luther King dreamed of (a dream that ironically is now closer to becoming a reality in spite of the civil-rights establishment) and replace it with an inegalitarian, race-based Orwellian nightmare of government-imposed racial quotas in education, racial gerrymandering at the ballot box, racial favoritism in federal and municipal contracting, and stigmatization any black person who makes it by virtue of his own talent and ambitious energy -- is sheer stupidity and race-baiting demagoguery.
It's a prescription for more racial divisiveness in America, more white resentment, more black economic underachievement and poverty, and even more hopelessness in the deteriorating slums which the contemporary liberators of the black underclass seem determined to condemn them to forever.
The new racial McCarthyism of today's civil rights establishment, and their allies in the media, universities and Democratic Party, is nothing but a cynical attempt to stigmatize anyone who would challenge their cushy sinecures (for example, Jesse Jackson's lucrative race-baiting corporate shakedown schemes), or criticize their self-serving, irrational, America-hating agenda.
Martin Luther King may have had a dream. But given their way, these supposedly enlightened racial demagogues would engulf America in an ever-worsening race-based nightmare.
Murray Soupcoff is the author of 'Canada 1984' and a former radio and television producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He also was Executive Editor of We Compute Magazine for many years, and is now the Managing Editor of the popular conservative Web site, Iconoclast.ca
 Printer friendly version |
 Send a link to this story |
|
|
Get weekly updates about new issues of ESR!
