[Peace-discuss] An appalling bigot

[C. G. Estabrook]

 From <http://www.counterpunch.org/>:

...if the late Ted Kennedy was quoting Bill Clinton correctly, the former 
president most certainly was making a racist remark when he said to Kennedy of 
the black man then battling  Mrs Clinton for the Democratic  presidential 
nomination, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

The only way Clinton could have wriggled out of that one is to claim that he was 
actually trying to express to Kennedy his delighted amazement at Obama’s 
candidacy and at how far America had come in shaking off its racist past. But he 
hasn’t taken that tack, and Kennedy, in furiously retailing Clinton’s remark, 
left no doubt about his opinion that it was a racist  put-down by Bubba Clinton.

Clinton reinforced the racist interpretation when he called Kennedy after the 
senator endorsed Obama and snarled, “the only reason you’re supporting him is 
because he’s black.”

Clinton had it coming to him. For years he’s coasted along on the black novelist 
Toni Morrison’s supposed compliment that he was “our first black president.” 
What Morrison actually wrote in 1998, when Clinton was impeached, was as 
follows: “Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard 
the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black 
President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our 
children’s lifetime.” And what Morrison meant, so she said a decade later, was 
that  “President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was 
surrounding him ... like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. 
I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race."

There’s plenty of evidence that in terms of effective politics Clinton was an 
appalling bigot. Fighting for political survival amid the Flowers sex scandal in 
the 1992 presidential campaign he raced back from New Hampshire to Arkansas to 
be present in the governor’s mansion to ensure no last minute hitch occurred in 
the execution of a mentally retarded black man, Ricky Ray Rector.  Later in the 
campaign he made a great show of denouncing a rap singer, Sister Souljah.

In office Clinton consistently demonized black teenage mothers, and promoted 
legislation, on crime and welfare -- delightedly backed by Republicans -- that 
impacted blacks with particular savagery. As with Tiger Woods, his sexual 
rampages appear to have detoured black women, possibly in Clinton’s case because 
Bill thought that while he might survive a fling with a nice Jewish girl, 
getting blow jobs in the Oval Office from a black woman would have been 
immediate political suicide. Among the black men he caused to suffer were the 
musicians invited to the White House who had to endure his inevitable intrusions 
with his saxophone, which he played very badly. Imagine Obama, or any other 
president, sticking a fiddle under his chin and rushing up to saw away on the 
instrument amid a White House recital by Itzhak Perlman.

The black men Clinton favored were of unprincipled  character, like Ron Brown 
and Vernon Jordan. Jesse Jackson was summoned to counsel Clinton, not about 
improving the lot of the poor, but to publicly  pray with and spiritually guide 
  the president  out of  the moral darkness of the Lewinsky scandal. (This is an 
ongoing  duty for which  the Rev presumably exacts some form of material quid 
pro quo, though he may have waived it in Clinton’s case, on the grounds that it 
was reward enough to be invited to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at that momentous 
hour.  Jackson has similarly counseled  beleagured politicians like  Trent Lott, 
the Republican minority leader of the Senate, who got into bad trouble for 
saying on Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday that the country would have been 
better off if the south’s most notorious racist had been running the show. The 
stricken Lott connected to Jackson via Clinton’s lawyer-fixer Lanny Davis, which 
shows that in matters of spiritual regeneration there can be found the beauty of 
bipartisanship – or perhaps a complicated plot to finish off Lott. Maybe through 
his servant Jesse the Almighty  hinted to Lott that he would be more forgiving 
if the Mississippi senator resigned from the post of Senate Minority Leader – 
which Lott duly did.

The Republicans are sticking it to Reid to distract attention from the fact that 
the prime activity of their chief spokesmen at the moment – Glenn Beck and Rush 
Limbaugh – is to convey to the general population in as vivid terms as possible, 
short of putting on white robes and cone hats, that the country’s going to the 
dogs, prostrating itself before Islamic terror, because a black man is ensconced 
in the Oval Office. On his radio show Wednesday Limbaugh said the earthquake in 
Haiti will play right into Obama's hands by allowing him to play up his 
"compassionate" and "humanitarian" credentials, and that the President will use 
this crisis to "boost his credibility with the black community."

Limbaugh, like many Republicans,  thinks that Uncle Sam should be stinting in 
aid to stricken Haiti: "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. 
income tax."  Pat Robertson, America’s top right-wing Christian, announced on 
his tv show Wednesday that Haiti’s sufferings  were the result of a "pact with 
the devil" that Haitian rebels made in the 18th century. “Something happened a 
long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were 
under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And 
they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if 
you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay 
it's a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and 
got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the 
other. “

The offhand way Robertson said “true story” to the visibly embarrassed young 
black woman sitting next to him in the 700 Club studio reminded me very much of 
his fellow Yalie, George Bush Sr., recycling cherished historical nonsense.

Of course Obama has gone in for Clinton-style grandstanding about blacks to 
white audiences. Bill and Hillary went after black teenage moms. Obama prefers 
to talk about the irresponsibility of young black males. He’s not had time to 
inflict the damage that Bill supervised against poor blacks generally, but his 
eagerness to bail out bankers rather than bankrupts has been conspicuous from 
the getgo. As Kevin Alexander Gray recently remarked on this site, “So as 
wealth, poverty, education and health disparities between blacks and whites grow 
wider, and as the number of black homeless, jobless and incarcerated increases, 
there is a host of questions blacks need to find answers to and act on. How do 
they pursue a political agenda, recognizing that Obama is not the ‘president of 
black America’ and is unwilling to go to the mat for black Americans or any 
really progressive policies? …And if Obama is not part of the solution, he’s 
part of the problem. Right now, he’s the latter.”

It’s always sadly comic to listen to these arguments about decorum and whether 
Reid said something bad or not. It implies that America is sensitive to issues 
of race. But the indices of rampant, unchanging racism inscribed in almost every 
economic statistic put out by the US government proclaim exactly the opposite. 
Bickering about decorum is a useful red herring.

	###

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.