As black critics of President Obama are being told to shut up and ignore the facts out of "racial loyalty," black critics of Herman Cain are enjoying mainstream amplification in the pages of the New York Times and Time Magazine. Someone who calls himself "Toure" has written an especially vicious column about the current GOP frontrunner for Time's website. A sample:
This presidential election has not lacked for clowns, and in a circus Herman Cain fits right in. But as the Black clown, Cain’s foot-in-mouth moments mostly involve insulting the Black community. This could be to establish his independence from the community in order to earn his bona fides with the GOP electorate or a way of appeasing the white conservatives he’s courting. Or it could be that his foot and his mouth are magnetized. Whatever the reason, as a Black person, the Hermanator experience has been as distasteful as rancid, spoiled, stinky, curdled milk....
Cain is a clown. You see it in the way he constantly mollifies white audiences with self-effacing, racialized comedy that borders on minstrelsy (referring to himself as “black-walnut ice cream” or suggesting that the Secret Service call him “Cornbread”). You see it in his stunning gaps in knowledge and understanding of foreign policy and domestic affairs. He says if you don’t have a job, don’t blame Wall Street, because it’s your fault, which in a crippling recession with historically high unemployment numbers means he’s either frighteningly blind or offensively ignorant. This is not a man of serious intellect or realistic solutions or admirable character. This is a buffoon.
Cain is what I long imagined the first Black President would be like: a Republican who many Blacks find unctuous. But is he really the most unctuous Black man in America? I’d say it’s a race between Clarence Thomas, Flavor-Flav and the Hermanator, and if Cain isn’t No. 1, he’s no worse than tied.
Toure also referred to the former Pizza CEO as: Cain't, the Black Sarah Palin, Hermy, and Big Daddy. His conclusion compares Cain and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas -- both highly succesful African Americans who have accomplished far more than "Toure" could ever dream of -- to a pop cultural figure and reality television star best known for wearing an oversized clock around his neck, who was twice imprisoned for domestic abuse, and who has battled an addiction to crack. Politically liberal black leaders are zealously protected by the mainstream media. Look no further than our current president. Politically conservative black people are savaged by that very same media, which trots out liberal black critics to twist the knives. What a cynical artifice, and what a sick double standard.
When Rick Perry, who has been dogged by allegations of racial insensitivity because of a hunting camp his family leased, called Herman Cain, the only black person on the Las Vegas debate stage Tuesday night “brother,” he raised a racial antennae among some viewers.
Gwen Ifill tweeted this: “Why is @GovernorPerry calling @THEHermanCain brother? Are they related? #scandal.” And speaking on MSNBC today, political analyst and strategist Karen Finney remarked that she was slightly bothered by Perry’s use of the term “brother” to refer to Cain. She later e-mailed me the phrase simply “hit my ear the wrong way.”
Perfect. Many liberals evidently have no problem exploiting Cain's skin color if it helps them imply
another Republican is a racist (which, in this case, requires ignoring the part of the
Washington Post story that explains how Perry regularly calls people of
all ethnicities "brother"). Just as soon as this alternate line of attack against Perry outlives its usefulness, they'll cheerfully go back to printing cruel, personal broadsides against Cain. They'll be authored by black people, though, so it's totally cool. See how this works?
Conservatism is the overriding enemy, and Leftists will do whatever they think it takes to crush the enemy -- even if it means engaging in repulsive racial politics. Shame on these people for racializing
everything to the hilt. By all means, let's talk about Herman Cain's buggy 9-9-9 plan, Rick Perry's problematic immigration stance, and President Obama's failed economic policies. But these racial games are beneath contempt.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member