Although it wasn’t made
a prominent issue in the news, Sarah Palin came under fire for a “racist” comment in her address to the Tea Party
convention on February 6. Palin remarked, “They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in
chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”
Read that again: “They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing
at the lectern.”
I was struck by only one thing
in Palin’s comment. She properly used the word lectern, while most of the
population—and 99.9 percent of television commentators—incorrectly call it a podium.
(For the record, a podium is the raised platform or stage on which the speaker
stands. A lectern is the usually wooden apparatus with the slanted top, behind
which the speaker stands and places his notes.) As far as racism in Palin’s statement, I missed it. I assume everybody
else did too.
But not Charles Ogletree, Jr.,
who says that referring to Obama as a “professor” comes close to referring to him as “uppity.” In
the past, the term “uppity Negro” has been used by racists to criticize blacks who “don’t know their
place.” (At the risk of being called racist, I should note that Ogletree is a Harvard professor. Frankly, I would think
Harvard is the derogatory word in that statement, not professor.)
Ogletree explains, “The
idea is that he’s not one of us. He [Obama] has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s
palling around with terrorists—those were [the] buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as
an African American who was out of place.” (Arguably it probably is true
that most Americans believe Obama is “not one of us”—but not because he is half-black. It is precisely because
he does have “these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist,”
and “that he’s palling around with terrorists.”)
Needless to say, Ogletree is
the racist here. Obsessed as he is with skin color, he cannot imagine anyone being alarmed that Obama has socialist ideas
and considers domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn his friends. According to Ogletree, Americans can’t
possibly have a problem with someone who advocates socialism and has SDS-member
buddies who bombed a San Francisco police station, killing Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell. Because Ogletree is a
leftist he assumes everyone else should be as well, and those who do not get a thrill up their leg when Obama speaks must
be racists. Ogletree follows the MSNBC rant: anyone who does not agree with Obama is a racist.
Harvard professor or not, Ogletree
is incredibly stupid. He fails to see what is plain as can be and directly in front of him. Most Americans do not want socialism—period.
Obama’s poll numbers have dropped not because he is half-black, but because he is pursuing a far left agenda. MSNBC’s
ratings have not dropped because Obama is half-black, but because its on-air “personalities” are pushing that
same far left agenda.
Professor Ogletree is an Obama
friend and advisor; he served on Obama’s “black advisory council” during the campaign. (Some might question
why a candidate who pretends to be “above race” needs a black advisory council.) Ogletree is also the attorney
for Henry Louis Gates, a black studies professor at Harvard and Obama fundraiser. (Gates made the news when he was arrested
for being belligerent with a white police officer who was investigating a possible burglary at Gates’ home. Gates, who
had inadvertently locked himself out, was breaking into his own front door and someone called the police. Obama created a
furor by saying the police “acted stupidly,” before he himself knew all the facts.) Ogletree was the faculty advisor
to the Black Law Students Association when Obama attended Harvard
Law School. One can assume that
Obama’s impressionable student mind was jammed full of racist claptrap by his professor’s rantings.
Ogletree is joined by Thomas
L. Haskell, a history professor at Rice University,
who stated, “For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual.
But what does that mean to John Q. Public? I don’t know. John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially
because this particular intellectual is a black.” (“Frightened of these people” is improper; the correct
term is “frightened by these people.” One would think a professor should
know better… especially one who looks down his nose at the American people because he considers them so intellectually
inferior.) Haskell, like Ogletree, believes Americans are afraid of Obama “because he is an intelligent black man.”
Their message is that white Americans want to “keep blacks in their place, picking cotton on the plantation” and
are frightened by any black who challenges their historical hold on power. (Haskell and Ogletree may want to ask why white
Americans have not been similarly frightened by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
authors Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, or Florida’s
22nd Congressional District candidate Lieutenant Colonel Alan West. It should not be too difficult for the two learned professors
to use their considerable superior intelligence to discern the philosophical differences between that group and Obama…
and realize that it is those differences that are significant, not their skin color. For that exercise, Ogletree and Haskell
will have to turn their focus away from skin color—something of which they may not be capable.)
Ogletree and Haskell believe
that referring to Obama as a “professor” is racist. One can avoid that transgression by not calling Obama a professor.
That is quite simple inasmuch as Obama never actually was a tenured professor; he was merely a law lecturer. (Obama’s
media toadies liked to say he was a law professor to make him seem smarter than the stupid Americans who have silly beliefs,
such as “Federal spending should not exceed federal revenue,” or “The term ‘natural born citizen’
means born on U.S. soil to parents who are both U.S. citizens.”)
A few weeks after Palin’s
“racist remark” about Obama, his administration announced a deal with black farmers nationwide to give them $1.25
billion as reparations for alleged past discrimination in the Department of Agriculture’s loan programs. Congressman
James Clyburn (D-SC) thanked Obama “for his leadership on this issue” and said, “I especially want to congratulate
my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus for keeping the focus on the plight of black farmers.”
Newsmax.com noted that “The
National Legal and Policy Center some years ago examined slave reparations activism and found one proponent calling for the
federal government ‘to pay $500,000 to every slave descendant,’ which would total ‘more than $15 trillion
and require a surtax of roughly $50,000 on each non-African American man, woman and child in this country…’”
Those who are intent on the passage of slavery reparations legislation will no doubt not be mollified by a mere $1.5 billion
paid to black farmers, especially when one of their proposals calculated that white Americans owed black Americans a whopping
$97 trillion “…based on 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619
and 1865, plus six percent compounded interest.”
“Slavery reparations”
is the concept of descendants of slaves being paid “retributions” by white Americans—even though there are
no longer any living former slaves or former slave owners in the United
States, and even though most white Americans are not the descendants of slave owners. Obama
has been a proponent of slavery reparations—but he disguises it in “universal” federal programs that primarily but not exclusively assist blacks.
(He can tolerate the redistribution of some tax dollars to poor whites as long as most of the dollars go to blacks.)
Obama’s pal Ogletree
is not only a strong advocate of reparations; he is the co-chair of the Reparations Movement Coordinating Committee. No doubt
influenced by Ogletree, in 1994 Obama taught a class titled, “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” Among the
topics Obama covered was slavery reparations, with questions such as, “Do such proposals
have any realistic chance of working their way through the political system?” and “Would there be any legal impediments
to such a broadly-conceived reparations policy?” Required reading assigned by Obama included works by Derrick Bell,
another of his professors at Harvard. (Bell had demanded that
a black woman be appointed to the law faculty. Obama supported Bell’s
racist and sexist demand and, in turn, was elected president of the Harvard Law Review—despite being unqualified. Coincidentally—or
perhaps not—Saudi Arabia’s
Prince al-Waleed bin Talal donated $20 million to Harvard to fund Islamic studies.)
Bell is a proponent of “critical race theory,”
which argues that the centuries-old framework of law in the United States
should be replaced by a new system of justice that takes into account past inequities like slavery. Bell argues that the law should treat people not just as individuals; it should also have
different rules for different groups. Because of the injustices of slavery and past discrimination, for example, a convicted
black crack cocaine dealer should be treated less harshly in his sentencing than a white drug dealer—he should get a
lighter sentence because his ancestors might have been slaves owned by whites.
As
long as we are passing out trillions of tax dollars based on past discrimination, why should we stop with blacks? Are blacks
the only Americans who have been the victims of discrimination? What about the many Chinese who built the railroads? What
about the discrimination faced by Irish immigrants? And what about the discrimination later faced by Italian immigrants, after
the Irish gained a foothold in America?
Read this 1923 letter to the Mayor of Chicago, written by the Commissioner of Police:
