Defenders of Barack Obama and his anti-American pastor have alighted on a
new
claim: that Obama is the victim of a racist double standard. Here is how a
New
York Times editorial made the case last week:
It is an injustice, a legacy of the racist threads of this
nation's history, but prominent African-Americans are
regularly called upon to explain or repudiate what other
black Americans have to say, while white public figures are
rarely, if ever, handed that burden.
Senator John McCain has continued to embrace a prominent white
sup****ter, Pastor John Hagee, whose bigotry matches that of Mr.
Wright.
Over the weekend, times columnist Frank Rich repeated the argument:
Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee's
calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright's.
But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace
of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to
this: Mr. McCain was not a pari****oner for 20 years at Mr.
Hagee's church. . . .
it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn't a double standard
operating here. If we're to judge black candidates on their most
controversial associates--and how quickly, sternly and completely
they disown them--we must judge white politicians by the same
yardstick.
And it isn't just the Times. The Nation's Katha Pollitt--best known for
declaring, after Sept. 11, that "the [American] flag stands for jingoism
and
vengeance and war"--repeats the claim of a double standard, although she
does
not allege it is racial:
The fact is, if Wright were a white wing-nut, the news
media--and the voters--would give him the pass they give
Hagee--and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the other
radical-right preachers, who say vicious, bigoted, nutty
things that violate common sense and common decency all
the time.
The news ****trays these divines in various ways—respectable
men of the cloth or shrewd political operators or occasionally
even as crazy old coots—but it doesn't get anywhere near as
worked up about them, or about their closeness to Republican
politicians, as it did about Wright.
This is all just silly. For all we know, Hagee's views are as invidious as
Wright's. We don't find the question interesting enough to investigate,
for
the simple reason that it wouldn't tell us much about McCain, whose
relation****p with Hagee, by all accounts, is purely political.
Does anyone really doubt that if a Republican presidential candidate were
a
pari****oner in Hagee's church, if Hagee had been variously described as
his
spiritual mentor and adviser, and if the candidate had taken the title of
a
campaign manifesto from a Hagee sermon, that the relation****p between the
politician and the pastor would have come under just as much scrutiny as
Obama
and Wright's?
Indeed, if anything, the double standard here works the opposite way.
Journalists and Democrats routinely criticize Republicans for their
party's
association with the likes of Hagee, Falwell and Robertson. But Democratic
candidates campaign in black churches all the time, and this is
treated--perhaps rightly--as perfectly ordinary.
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
|
