Posted by William A. Jacobson Saturday, August 6, 2011 at 6:02pm
This is the latest in a series on the use of the race card for political gain:
It never ends. The attempt to turn disagreement with the policies of the Obama administration into a racial issue.
In the past weeks, as there was a dispute over raising the debt ceiling, claims were made that raising the debt ceiling was an issue only because Obama was black:
As the debt ceiling talks progressed, I followed the updates on Twitter over the weekend. While traditional news outlets posted various status updates, “Black Twitter” was up to something else. The hashtag #beforeBlackpresidents emerged some time Friday evening.
You see #beforeBlackpresidents, it would have been deemed unpatriotic to say you wanted the president to fail. If you raised the debt limit 18 times, as in Ronald Reagan’s case, you would’ve been hailed a hero by the GOP and gotten an airport named in your honor. Intelligence was admired back then. We had a space program and everyone generally recognized that Hawaii was a state….
The real deal is they don’t want a deal — not on the debt ceiling or anything else. The president was right to wonder if there was anything the republicans could say “yes” to. The answer is no.
But it isn’t because of some trumped up commitment to so-called core principals. The truth is today’s Republican party is controlled by a fringe group of players who are after one thing: Making sure the first black president is the last.
And thus emerged the Twitter hashtag #BeforeBlackPresidents, with this tweet:
Here are a couple of examples of what emerged, pretty much predictable reduction of every criticism of Obama’s policies to racism:
But it didn’t take long before there was a counterattack, with various conservative bloggers making fun of the “point” of the hashtag, including Aaron Worthing of Patterico (who also wrote a blog post about it):
And Jim Treacher of The Daily Caller:
James Taranto wrote an article at The Wall Street Journal putting the hastag in the context of the overall “Obama as victim” narrative, Victim in Chief, and the erroneous assumption that because something happens for the first time under Obama, it is motivated by racism:
The broader point is that there’s a first time for everything, and it is obviously fallacious to think that everything that happens for the first time between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 20, 2013, is the result of racism against a black president.
Still, by now it is clear that a significant number of people are determined to believe that racism is what is ruining Obama’s presidency. The proposition can be argued against, but it cannot be proved false, because it is vague enough that disagreements will persist over just what would constitute proof.
It just never ends. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to fight it.
Push back, quickly, and mock.
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