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Racist Attacks on President Obama: Early and Often
Posted by: | CommentsA blogger over at DailyKos (blackwaterdog) has raised a question I have been thinking about for nearly a year now. How is President Obama being treated differently than other presidents and leading white politicians?
He first notes the differential treatment by the mass media in regard to President Obama’s intense and innovative meeting this week with Republicans:
With anyone else, CNN wouldn’t dare go to commercials every time the president speaks, like they did during that summit on Thursday. They wouldn’t dare counting how many minutes George Bush or Bill Clinton were talking. Chris Mathews wouldn’t dare making an issue out of Ronald Regan calling members of congress by their first name. . . .They fully cooperate with the Right-Wing smear machine when it comes to president Obama’s national security performance – even if almost every independent and military expert actually thinks that he’s a terrific Commander in Chief.
photo credit: Embajada de Estados Unidos en Bolivia
Not just the white supremacists and extreme rightists have constantly quibbled about or directly disrespected our President:
On Thursday, almost every Republican had no trouble interrupting him in the middle of a sentence. They looked like they’re going to vomit every time they had to say “Mr. president”
Much has been made in various media about Obama being “professorish” and/or “arrogant,” but clearly this is a stereotyped way of putting down his distinctive intelligence and grasp of the facts on many issues, including health care. Many folks accuse him too of being
elitist (because he uses big words that they don’t understand). He is weak on national security (because he actually thinks about the consequences). He divides the country (well, he did that the day he had the audacity to win the election). Worst of all, he actually thinks that he’s the president.
The racist imaging has obviously come from the far right wing and white supremacists, but some criticism is also coming from the white left, which can be seen in the left political blogs:
. . . there’s also some hidden and maybe subconscious and disturbing underline tone behind some of the things . . . throughout the Left blogosphere…. “He’s weak, he’s spineless, he’s got no balls, primary him in 2012.”
Adia and I predicted some of this attack in our Yes We Can? Book, but it is already clear that we need to add a chapter to that book on how quickly and severe these attacks have become, and not much more than a year into his pathbreaking Presidency. What do you make of the many attacks on President Obama so far?
Racism at Play in Congressional Ethics Probes?
Posted by: | CommentsRep. Maxine Waters (D-California) is now under investigation for ethics violations. Waters, who is African American and one of the most progressive members of Congress, has been added to the growing list of members of Congress being investigated for possible violations by the House Ethics Committee, including Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York). The House Ethics Committee is predominantly white, although it does have one African-American member, G.K. Butterlfield (D-North Carolina). While that fact in and of itself doesn’t suggest racism may be at play in these ethics probes, another fact does. All active ethics investigation are of black lawmakers. There is not a single white lawmaker under investigation. It’s not that white lawmakers have not been suspected of ethics violations. They have.
According to a document leaked to The Washington Post in late October of this year, nearly three dozen lawmakers have come under scrutiny this year by either the House Ethics Committee or the Office of Congressional Ethic (OCE)i. While the list contained a substantial number of white lawmakers, the ethics committee has not yet launched formal investigative subcommittees of any of the white lawmakers — as it has with the seven African-American members. Black lawmakers can be “easy targets” for ethics watchdog groups because they have less money — both personally and in their campaign accounts (which can be used to pay members’ legal bills) — to defend themselves than do their white colleagues.
A story by John Bresnahan at Politico.com (which originally ran this story on Nov.4, 2009) quotes an aide to a senior black Democrat saying:
“It is kind of crazy. How can it be that the ethics committee only investigates African-Americans? It doesn’t make sense.”
Crazy, indeed, especially given the kinds of shenanigans that white lawmakers have been involved in, such as Tom DeLay. Currently, a number of white lawmakers — including senior House Appropriations Committee members John Murtha (D-Pa.), Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.), Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) and Jim Moran (D-Va.) — have drawn the attention of the committee and the OCE. The two congressional ethics watchdogs are looking into these members’ ties to the PMA Group, a now-defunct lobbying firm that won tens of millions of dollars in earmarks from members of the Appropriations Committee. The lawmakers who arranged for the earmarks received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from PMA’s lobbying clients. The Politico.com article says it seems unlikely that the PMA case will become the subject of a full-blown ethics committee investigation. The Justice Department is also looking into the PMA allegations; the FBI raided PMA’s office last year, and Visclosky and his former chief of staff have been served with document subpoenas. And under ethics committee rules, the panel cannot conduct an investigation of any member or staffer already being probed by a law enforcement agency.
While racism is likely not the only factor operating here – we are, after all, talking about the bloodsport of beltway politics – it seems more than plausible that racism is one of the factors contributing to a racially disparate pursuit of ethics violations among lawmakers.
