Pirate's Cove

There’s an old rule in the Leftist media that if you want to tell the truth, bury it deep in the article. There’s another rule that wonders whether liberals actually read what they write. One of those is in play within this Joan Walsh screed “The Blackening of the president”

When South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson screamed “You lie!” at President Obama Wednesday night, he dragged the paranoia and anti-Obama contempt that marked so many August “town hells” into the chambers of Congress. Wilson’s shriek also served as an exclamation point on an undeniable trend: Obama steadily lost support among white voters during this long, hot summer of hate, with his white approval rating dropping by almost one-third, from 63 percent to 43 percent between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

In other words, all Whites are racists. Personally, I find the use of the word “white” to be racist. I demand that is changed to “Americans Of A Neutral Color.”

Of course Obama never had the support of whites like Joe Wilson, a solid son of the South who served as an aide to segregationist Strom Thurmond and who publicly doubted and derided Thurmond’s biracial daughter, Essie Mae, when she went public about her dad’s identity. Obama lost South Carolina to John McCain handily, just as he lost most of the rest of the region. No one expected anything different. Outside of the South, though, the 2008 election was remarkable for the minor role race seemed to play as the nation chose its first African-American president.

In other words, all Southerners are racist. No mention of the fact that Obama is half-white. Robert Byrd was unavailable for comment.

I wrote about the role race played in these ginned-up controversiesat the time: Birthers and Deathers (who tended to be the same people) were focused on marginalizing Obama as scary, “the other.” Race was central to their fears, from the Birthers’ obsession with Obama’s literal origins as the product of miscegenation; to the Deathers and the Town Hellers’ insistence that healthcare reform was, in Glenn Beck’s idiotic formulation, Obama’s idea of “reparations” for slavery. The cries of “socialism” were just another way to mark him as “other,” scary and foreign. Watching scenes of shrieking, sobbing people pleading to “take our country back,” it was hard not to ask, From who? The president who got a larger share of the vote than Ronald Reagan in 1980 or George Bush in 2000? What exactly is it that makes this particular commander in chief an interloper?

Conservatives are racists. Bad boys and girls! No biscuit!

Eleven paragraphs in

A few cautionary words. The timeline is intriguing, but correlation isn’t cause, and we can’t prove these events directly led to the decline in Obama’s white support. Ever the optimist, I’d even argue that racism is probably not the main cause. For one thing, the surge in white approval around Inauguration Day was lovely, but predictably ephemeral; it reflected people’s pride in the country’s having elected a black president more than their belief in him. (His current 43 percent white approval rating could be cited as proof that Obama has simply come back down to earth after more than seven months in office, since that’s the exact share of white support he got on Election Day.)

“Yeah, about those racism charges in the first 10 paragraphs? My Bad!”

After that admission of reality, Joanie goes back on the racist war-path, pointing out questioning whether Obama is competent to run the country and questioning his agenda are racist, the hundreds of thousands of TEA Party folks are all racists, oh, and White Democrats are racists, too.

She then suggests that the best way Obama can do away with all the racism is to vigorously pursue his goals. Which happens to be the reason why all you whiteys have become racist in the first place.