Democrats Slay Themselves With The Double-Edged Sword of Their Own Race Baiting

2-14-2005

For years the media has done it’s part to saturate the press with misleading characterizations of Conservative Republicans as racist by broadcasting the demagogic generalizations offered by liberals to skew the American mindset towards their own ideological preference.

As time has passed, an evolution in America has taken place where more minorities are better educated, have a tighter control on their own economic destiny and the mainstream media has lost it’s stranglehold on what information is being disseminated to the masses.

During this evolution liberals have become more and more bitter and the hatred they have been allowed to promote publicly in the past as ‘main stream’ American ideology has started showing itself for the divisiveness it has always been.

Such is the case with the growing trend in minority communities towards Conservatism and the Republican Party. Recently, an ever growing number of media outlets have begun to allow Conservative minority voices to be heard, where they were once silenced in the ‘liberal’ media.

Pushing this trend forward has been the progressively diverse cabinet of the Bush administration, starting with his first appointments up to his present ones. By actually putting a face on what has continued to be little more than empty Democrat rhetoric of the importance of diversity as displayed by Democrat’s own actions, President Bush has given many minority leaders the confidence to now speak out openly about their Conservatism, where they were once silenced by fear from liberal attacks.

Those attacks are now coming from all sides in a liberal tirade of racial recrimination. From attacks by the press to liberal Democrats, the bombardment has been incessant and the cacophony is getting louder.

Why?

Because the Democrat linchpin for racial equality was founded on the premise that equality among races could only be established if the foundation was based on making race the predominant, if not exclusive, factor. In the process they effectively pushed aside merit and racial neutrality as a means to ‘level the playing field’.

Democrats ramped up the race factor to use as a divisive tactic to bludgeon Republicans in a race battle that was manufactured by Democrats in the sixties to gain the support of the minority population despite the fact that Republicans had always championed the civil rights of minorities, starting with Republican President Abraham Lincoln, the formation of the NAACP, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act where Republicans were the ones who carried the vote, through to today where the Bush Administration has more minorities in high level positions than any in the history of America.

So why isn’t that being heralded in the press? In reality, just the opposite has taken place where even the appointment of the first African-American female as Secretary of State was denigrated by Democrats and the press when a seemingly unending stream of editorials attacked her as being the ‘puppet’ or ‘parrot’ of the President‘s ‘plantation‘.

As more minority appointees in the Bush administration find themselves under attack by the very people who once touted the diversity their minority status alone would supposedly encourage, Republicans have begun to stand up to the ‘flip-flop’ Democrats have now instituted on this issue.

Take for instance a recent column on this subject by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne in which he is incensed that Republicans would hold liberal Democrats feet to the fire of their own indoctrination of past racism that he terms ‘political correctness’.

Upset that Senator Orrin Hatch pointed out to Democrats who voted against the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General that, “Every Hispanic in America is watching,” Dionne responded. “Hatch and everyone else knew perfectly well that Democrats voted against the new attorney general not because of his ethnicity, but because they wanted to hold Gonzales and the White House he served accountable for the appalling policies that led to the mistreatment of prisoners.”

Suddenly, according to Dionne, Democrats put morality above race baiting. First, Gonzales and his policy had little if anything to do with ‘mistreating prisoners’, or as they were calling it, torture, it was about interrogation techniques. The liberal press has done a masterful job of juxtaposing the two so that now questioning enemy combatants is synonymous with torture.

Second, ethnicity has always been first and foremost the deciding factor in garnering Democrat support for minorities. It is, after all, the mandate of Affirmative-Action. He asserts Conservatives are pulling a bait-and-switch over Gonzales where, “Democrats thought it appropriate to use Gonzales’ nomination to launch a debate about torture policy. Gonzales is Latino. Therefore, Republicans insisted, Democrats who wanted to debate torture policy were anti-Latino.”

Why did they need to use Gonzales to debate torture policy? They didn’t seem to feel the need to debate the devastating effects of drug use in minority communities when Marion Barry was re-elected Mayor of Washington D.C. after being caught doing crack cocaine with a prostitute.

Dionne referred to a comment made by Senator Hatch during the attacks by Democrats on judicial nominee Miguel Estrada’s character. “Hatch neatly mixed the ideological and the ethnic. If Estrada were rejected, Hatch said, it would close the door to any nominee who was ‘number one Hispanic, number two Republican, number three possibly Conservative, and number four, may have some idea of his or her own’.”

Senator Hatch drove a dagger into the heart of the vampire with that statement and pushed Dionne to destroy his own rhetoric when he used the double-edged sword of race baiting in a comment from House Democrat Caucus Chairman Bob Menendez: “Republicans and Senator Hatch in particular can’t have it both ways. They can’t blatantly call for the end of Affirmative Action by characterizing it as a quota system while, at the same time, demanding that we support all Hispanic nominees simply because they are Hispanic.”

Of course, Affirmative Action mandates that a person be given privileges based solely on race, so Democrats can’t on the one hand support someone because of their minority status, then not support another minority because of their differing political ideology.

It’s just another case of Democrats playing by the rules they create, then also have the temerity to change those rules to something else whenever they see something that works more to their advantage later.

Dionne alludes to this when he acquiesces, “No political camp in our country can claim utter innocence when it comes to racial politics. But is it too much to ask that those who constantly accuse their opponents of using ‘political correctness’ as a bludgeon at least be a trifle embarrassed over how often they wield it themselves?”

Democrats are finally realizing the suffering inflicted by the double-edged sword they’ve ‘wielded’ for years to attack Republicans and now that those Republicans are fighting back, are Democrats beginning to feel a ‘trifle embarrassed’ for the years of scars they’ve inflicted or are they just seething with rage? You can’t always have it both ways, even if you’ve been allowed to get away with it in the past.

Lee P Butler