[Peace-discuss] An appalling bigot

[C. G. Estabrook]

That's probably the appropriate way to defend Clinton against the charge of
racism...

The liberal practice for a generation has been to police language scrupulously 
("He said '*Negro*'?!") while allowing inequality to grow at a rapidly 
accelerating pace.

Talk right to the people you destroy.


E.Wayne Johnson wrote:
> "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.
> 
> ###
> 

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