skippy the bush kangaroo: the president is a ni-*clang!*

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

the president is a ni-clang!

the hardly-ever-right wing is once again getting the vapors in their pearl-clutching apoplexia over a "quote" from harry reid, which is found in mark "i can fix it" halperin/john heilemann's new book "game change." usatoady:

one paragraph -- but enough to get harry reid in big trouble.

here it is, from game change: obama and the clintons, mccain and palin, and the race of a lifetime:

years later, reid would claim that he was steadfastly neutral in the 2008 race; that he never chose sides between barack (obama) and hillary (clinton); that all he did was tell obama that "he could be president," that "the stars could align for him." but at the time, in truth, his encouragement of obama was unequivocal. he was wowed by obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as obama -- a "light-skinned" african-american "with no negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," as he later put it privately.

that's it.

one graf, but enough to threaten reid's job as senate majority leader, further complicate an already tough re-election bid back in nevada -- and add yet another chapter to the volume of washington political book frenzies.

the hardly-ever-right wing insists that reid should resign, because, after all, trent lott was forced to resign as majority leader when he said that if strom thrumond had been elected president, "we wouldn't have had all these problems," referring, ostensibly, to the negro problem.

dems and the left insist that reid's remarks, while insensitive, do not rise to the level of nostalgically wishing for nation-wide segregation to make things better.

we have not been impressed w/harry "where's my balls" reid's leadership over the past few months, but to have him resign for such a silly slip about race would be ludicrous (or, to stretch a pun, ludicris).

it's funny to watch the racist repubbbs become politically correct. and their biggest problem on this issue, in our opinion, is that what reid said was actually true.

discussing race doesn't make one a racist, as limbaugh keeps harping on. and racism is like pornography on the supreme court. we know it when we see it.

and it isn't here.

just to keep track, and to garner as many memeorandum hits as possible, here's the latest score: russ feingold is refusing to support reid, while conversely, john ensign thinks the gop should lay off, as does tom cockburn.

posted by skippy at 10:05 AM |

4 Comments:

What Harry Reid meant to say was only that Barack Obama can speak to everyone, black and white, in their own dialects, and be understood. It's hardly worth even criticizing for the content, but for poor word choice he loses points.

commented by

mahakal, 11:16 AM PST

What he said was a poor choice of words in a private conversation.
While it could have been said better, what he said was true. Even George Will (that well-known librul) defended him.

commented by

Kulkuri, 12:08 PM PST

I had the misfortune to be in my dentist's waiting room yesterday where they had Fox News playing. Between 12:30 and 1:00. They had a guy going on and on about a 60 Minutes interview with the authors in which they broke out a timeline of who was discussed. They were clearly "shocked" that Harry Reid wasn't mentioned once for even a nanosecond (his words, not mine)during the course of the interview but Sarah Palin was discussed the most for so many minutes. They never mentioned when the interview took place, as in did it take place before that one paragraph in a book of several hundred pages get picked up by the national press. They never mentioned how much of the book was about Harry Reid.

So like any other Fox viewer, I was left largely uninformed but vaguely angry at the world.

commented by