While I was busy having fun writing about the macho power struggles that helped lead to a dozen or so bigoted statements in radical fringe 15-30 year old Ron Paul newsletters, per the below, modern day bigotry by more main stream types came pounding out of the television set and wafting over my computer. So I thought I’d devote an entry to them, just to put the Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, et al story in perspective.Item: Bill Clinton attacked Barak Obama on his anti-Iraq war position saying "this whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." Was he saying that a black man for president was a "fairy tale?" There were two days of media blathering about that ambiguous statement.
Item: Hillary Clinton makes a less ambiguous diss of Martin Luther King Jr. when she asserted his dream "began to be realized when President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964." She said “It took a president to get it done.” Like the public pressure from the black community would have just faded away if it wasn’t for their white male protector??
Item: Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Arun Gandhi, a long time proponent of nonviolence who has visited Palestine, blogs a psychological analysis of the roots of Israeli violence in historic grievances and ends up making several overly broad statements about all Jews. He apologized with a much better statement making his points - and of course was still attacked as an anti-Semite. Gandhi wrote as a participant in a Newsweek/WashingtonPost religion discussion site edited by Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham. Despite their apology for the post, and repeated questions in the comments section, neither revealed if they in fact had approved the initial post, which would make them clear co-conspirators in the "infamy." They have not kicked Gandhi off the blog and he's posted on another topic.
Item: Golfweek magazine fired its editor for depicting a noose on the cover of the latest issue to illustrate a story about a sports caster who said on air that Tiger Wood’s opponents might have to "lynch him in a back alley" in order to win. Yes, the joke-cracking bigot in assumedly sophisticated media types does live on, does it not?
Item: Mike Huckabee makes an obnoxious comment that certainly could be interpreted as being directed specifically at blacks. In reference to the South Carolina’s past flying of the confederate flag, which angry blacks protested into oblivion, he said: "You don't want anyone from out of state comin' down and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag we'd tell them where to put the pole."
Considering some New York cops sodomized a black arrestee Abner Louima with a stick a few years back, one has to assume the worst about what Huckabee was thinking! This is the same Mike Huckabee who shot off a loaded gun just over the heads of reporters and then joked about the birds he killed: "Well ... these three birds all said they would not vote for me on caucus day. You see what happened?" Thank heavens we aren’t likely to get this probably bigoted and homicidal maniac for president.
The moral of the story? Except for Huckabee, who stonewalled on the pole issue, these people all apologized for their stupid mistakes and moved on. Of course, the “noose editor” was fired. And major Jewish organizations raised such a fuss that Gandhi had to offer his resignation to the University of Rochester board of his Gandhi Institute of Nonviolence. We’ll see if he is punished for his foolishness after he meets with them next week. At least Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell don’t face such nasty sanctions for their long ago follies of, at the very least, oversight of the writings of their employees and interns - and at worst promoting bigotry for fun and profit. Just like Mike Huckabee?? Bleah...
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