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By Maureen Dowd:  Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.  Now it has made Wilson an overnight right-wing hero.  Fair or not, what I heard from that South Carolina Republican was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president ... convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.  I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.  For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

Obama is at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension.  This president is the ultimate civil rights figure — an educated black man whose air of elegance, manners, and erudition makes the right wing more angry at him.  Wilson's outburst has to do with delegitimizing him as a president.  In South Carolina politics, the olive branch very seldom works. You have to come from a position of strength, remembering that silence gives consent.  [Excerpts from:"Boy, Oh, Boy", By MAUREEN DOWD, New York Times: September 12, 2009] 

By Yael T. Abouhalkah:  The knives are out for former President Jimmy Carter for telling the truth: Racism is hurting President Barack Obama.

 1 min


Look at the facts, which show there's a great racial divide in America regarding Obama.  In the 2008 elections, for instance, Obama got 10 percent of the white vote in Alabama, 11 percent in Mississippi, 23 percent in Georgia and 26 percent in Texas.  Even outside the South, Obama received 31 percent of the white vote in Utah, 33 percent in Idaho, 40 percent in Kansas and 42 percent in Missouri.

It's not at all untoward to look at those results and conclude that there were plenty of white people in those states judging Obama by his skin color, not the merits of his positions vs. GOP candidate John McCain.

And as Carter pointed out Tuesday, that kind of racial divide continues to exist in America as Obama tries to carry out his policies.  Obama doesn't want this furor on his hands right now, given all the incredibly important policy decisions he's handling.  But critics are off base when they carp about Carter and his comments. They were truthful. And they sting.  ["Obama battles great racial divide", Kansas City Star Editorial]

Turning Sotomayor supreme court nomination to race.                                

 8min


"Rapping Joe’s Knuckles," MAUREEN DOWD, New York Times, September 15, 2009

 

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