Thread: Bob Herbert OP - White men's claims of racism belie history!

Again as always; For a LACK of defensible arguments the Pro-ILLEGAL Elitists, Elitist Politicians, Elitist Political Contributors, ILLEGAL EMPLOYERS, and other Special Interest Groups benefiting from the ILLEGALS always fall back on name calling, attacking anyone who disagrees attempting to label them as racists.

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/fromcomments/295606.php

White men's claims of racism belie history

Opinion by Bob Herbert
New York Times News Service
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.04.2009

One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in America.

It's hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, now regrets his rants on Twitter that Sotomayor is a "Latina woman racist."

Karl Rove sneered that Sotomayor was "not necessarily" smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.
The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there's a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan.

Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is "a Latino KKK without the hoods and the nooses," said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.
Here's the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They're so concerned that they're fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn't for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!
Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don't remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.

Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: "By 1968, you can't say '******' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights . . . that stuff."
Never a peep did you hear.

Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states' rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by bloodthirsty racists?

We've heard ad nauseam Sotomayor's comments — awkwardly stated but hardly racist — about what she brings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have we heard the hateful position offered by William F. Buckley, the right's ultimate intellectual champion? He declared, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, that whites had every right to discriminate against blacks because whites belonged to "the advanced race."

Right-wing howls of protest? No.

Sotomayor's nomination is a big deal because never before in the history of the United States has any president nominated a Latina to the highest court. Only two blacks have ever been on the court, and the one selected by a Republican has been like a thumb in the eye to most African-Americans.

The court is a living monument to America's long history of exclusion based on race, ethnic background and gender. Where is the right-wing protest against that?

It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the United States was moving into some sort of post-racial nirvana. But there is reason to hope that we've improved to the point where the racial and ethnic crazies will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.

Bob Herbert is a columnist for The New York Times.
96 Comments on this story

I wish the New York Times would go ahead and close.... oh I forgot they were bought up by a Mexican financier.

W

I laughed so hard when I read this drivel, tears were coming out of my eyes.