| Singer/activist Harry Belafonte viciously lashed out at
Secretary of State Colin Powell, calling Powell a house slave and a lackey
to "master" George W. Bush. "You got the privilege of living in the house,"
said Belafonte, "if you served the master exactly the way the master
intended to have you serve him. Colin Powell's committed to come into the
house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than
what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture."
Belafonte later got off a second round, this time pronouncing
Powell "a tragic failure," while reiterating the slave reference, presumably
because of Powell's support for possible military action against Iraq.
Powell, with his customary calmness and class, dismissed Belafonte's remarks
as "unfortunate."
Suppose some Republican, whether Powell or, say, Senator Trent
Lott, R-Miss., started the fight by calling Belafonte an "anachronism who
keeps black people mired in the self-defeating and destructive
white-man-holds-you-back-don't-trust-Republicans mindset."
History tells us people like Belafonte often dish it out, but
when criticized, they scream like banshees and seek vengeance.
-- Director Spike Lee calls racism America's No. 1 problem,
denounces interracial black/white couples, and put dialogue in his movies
that some perceived as anti-Italian and anti-Semitic. Yet when a reporter,
following extensive interviews, wrote an article titled "Spike Lee Hates
Your Cracker Ass," the director threatened to refuse future interviews
conducted by whites.
-- Danny Bakewell, a black Los Angeles-area contractor/activist,
routinely plays a race card to win sweetheart deals from the guilt-ridden
city councils, a shakedown-like tactic employed by the likes of Rev. Jesse
Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton. Jill Stewart, a former Los Angeles Times
writer and then New Times columnist, called him a "race hustling poverty
pimp." Bakewell sued for defamation. Not only did he lose, but also the
presiding judge ordered Bakewell to pay Stewart
$25,000.
-- Congresswoman Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, routinely stirs
the pot with race-card playing antics. Although she refuses the many
invitations extended to appear on my radio show, she appeared on another Los
Angeles radio show and urged listeners to disrupt my show by jamming the
phone lines. Waters refers to the Republican Party as "the enemy," and once
called former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan "a plantation owner." Yet
when the head of the Los Angeles Police Commission, in a private
conversation, allegedly referred to her as a "bitch," she demanded an
apology and his resignation.
-- Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black Los Angeles
columnist/activist, appears on many local and national television shows.
Most recently on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, Hutchinson quite responsibly
took Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton to task for their silly attack on the
movie "Barbershop." A few years earlier, however, Hutchinson wrote a book
called "The Assassination of the Black Male Image," in which he argued that
the media intentionally put on the worst possible images of black males.
After I criticized the book as unfounded, emotional and distorted, he called
me a "shock jock." He also participated in a stealth letter-writing campaign
urging angry blacks to send letters to my sponsors demanding that they
withdraw support from my show. Hutchinson's underground effort -- ultimately
unsuccessful in removing me from the air -- nevertheless resulted in
millions of dollars of lost advertising revenue.
-- Rev. Sharpton appeared as a guest on a CNN program I recently
guest-hosted. After I dared question his ethics for falsely accusing a man
of rape in the Tawana Brawley case, he phoned CNN executives, and threatened
to sue the network and me for defamation.
-- Rev. Jackson and I, some years ago, appeared on a television
program to discuss whether blacks now possess fundamental civil rights.
Jackson talked about the wealth disparity between blacks and whites. I
informed Jackson that wealth was not a civil right, and that as to matters
like voting and equal rights, yes, blacks have, for the most part,
triumphed. Jackson promptly accused me of "identifying with white males" and
later cursed-out the producer for pitting me against him.
-- Rev. Jackson and Rev. Sharpton both demanded apologies from
the producer of the movie "Barbershop." Jackson, who refuses to see the
film, along with Sharpton sought and obtained an apology from the producer.
Not satisfied, the duo demands that the filmmakers edit out the offending
passages in the video and DVD versions.
-- Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, five years ago, entered the
Abner Louima case. New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser lamented, "Johnnie
Cochran will say or do just about anything to win, typically at the expense
of the truth." Cochran, race-card player extraordinaire, the man who once
said, "Race plays a part of everything in America," and likened Mark Fuhrman
to Adolph Hitler, sued for defamation. A judge dismissed the lawsuit.
Apparently, angry black victicrats can't stand the heat, yet
demand an air-conditioned kitchen.
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