[Peace-discuss] An appalling bigot

[E.Wayne Johnson]

"The black men Clinton favored were of unprincipled  character..."

I don't think he was bigoted about his favourtisms...seems to me that
all of the people Clinton favoured were "of unprincipled character".

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 6:30 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] An appalling bigot


>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.

_______________________________________________
Peace-discuss mailing list
Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss


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