There is no purpose to publicizing a public figure’s address other than to help deranged crackpots plot a physical confrontation. But liberals only worried about racists when it came to left-wing blacks. The imaginary racists populating liberal imaginations vanished from their memories when it came to conservative blacks.
None of these threats were of the slightest interest to the media. Not liberals’ publicizing Republicans’ home addresses, not mock decapitations, “Kill Bush” T-shirts, effigy burnings, “Assassins Wanted” on a late-night comedy show, a decapitated Bush head on an HBO program, an award winning movie about President Bush’s assassination or liberals’ constant assertions that they’d like to kill Bush.
But during the 2008 presidential campaign, there was a hair-on-fire story about an alleged heckle against Obama at a Sarah Palin rally. The Scranton Times-Tribune claimed that someone in the audience shouted “Kill him!” after Palin mentioned Obama’s name.
ABC, MSNBC and CNN, among many others, repeated this claim from the Scranton Times-Tribune. It was reporter David Singleton’s moment in the sun!
This was just the sort of thing the racism hunters had been expecting! A rumored shout at a Palin rally allowed them to shift their terror over Obama’s safety to rage at the Republican Party for inspiring violence with their anti-Obama rhetoric. We are running this wonderful man for president and it’s really frightening to hear him criticized.
In fact, it was so perfect, you’d think liberals had made it up. Which, it turned out, they had.
Even before the Secret Service thoroughly debunked the allegation, it was highly implausible. The non-Fox media were scouring the Earth for dirt on McCain. The New York Times had put four reporters on gossip about a McCain affair, and when they turned up nothing despite months of looking, the Times printed a front-page story on the affair anyway, quoting the speculation of anonymous staffers.54 It seems highly unlikely that people were shouting “Kill him!” at McCain-Palin rallies and the New York Times decided not to mention it to spare McCain the embarrassment.
Reporter Singleton evidently didn’t realize the Secret Service takes such remarks extremely seriously. This time, one of his little pop-offs in the Scranton Times-Tribune was going to be fact-checked with a complete Secret Service investigation.
The agents interviewed law enforcement officers, reporters and ordinary citizens who were at the event. Not one supported Singleton’s story. A dozen Secret Service agents had been spread throughout the audience, but none of them had heard it, either. Nor could Singleton produce anyone else who heard it or describe the person who had supposedly yelled it. After a massive manhunt, David Singleton remained the only person who claimed to have heard “Kill him!” shouted at the Palin rally.55 (It’s really a shame that reporters can’t be outfitted with some sort of recording device capable of capturing such moments.)
Consequently, the Secret Service concluded that it never happened. “We had people all over,” agent Bill Slavoski said, “and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.”56 As Alex Koppelman wrote in the very liberal Salon.com, “the Secret Service takes this sort of thing very, very seriously. If it says it doesn’t think anyone shouted ‘kill him,’ it’s a good bet that it didn’t happen.”57
Thanks to more bogus reporting by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, the Secret Service was also required to investigate his claim that someone in the crowd at a Palin event in Clearwater, Florida, had yelled—in an amazing coincidence!—“Kill him!” at the mention of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers’s name.58 After listening to tapes, the agents determined that Milbank had heard “Tell him!” not “Kill him!”59
If liberals are so worried about Obama’s safety, maybe they should stop wasting the Secret Service’s time by forcing them to investigate imaginative press reports about nonexistent heckles at Republican rallies.
Dozens of newspapers, TV networks and magazines had breathlessly told the original story about someone yelling “Kill him!” at a Palin rally. The story was repeated hourly on MSNBC. But apart from Fox News and CNN’s Lou Dobbs, very few news outlets ever corrected the false report.
It wasn’t just excitable journalists who were carrying on about the “Kill him!” hoax. It was repeated by the next president of the United States, even after he knew it was false. During the third presidential debate, McCain complained that Obama supporter, no-longer-a-hero Representative John Lewis, had compared the McCain campaign to “segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace.”
Obama defended Lewis and raised the issue of the Sarah Palin rallies, “in which all the Republicans, reports indicated, were shouting—when my name came up—things like ‘terrorist’ and ‘kill him,’” and “your running mate didn’t mention, didn’t stop, didn’t say ‘Hold on a second, that’s kind of out of line.’”60
Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball called Obama on his baldfaced lie, noting that “even before Obama cited ‘reports’ of the threats at the debate, the U.S. Secret Service had told media outlets, including Newsweek, that it was unable to corroborate accounts of the ‘kill him’ remarks.” Hosenball also said that “according to a law-enforcement official, who asked for anonymity when discussing a political matter, the Obama campaign knew as much.”61
Obama thus became the second U.S. president to knowingly lie about his fellow Americans by accusing them of racism during a major presidential campaign event being watched by—in Obama’s case—sixty million viewers.
The Obama campaign responded to Newsweek’s inquiries about the candidate’s lie by saying that even if the report wasn’t true, “what is true is that the tone of the rhetoric at McCain–Palin campaign events has gotten out of hand.”62 It was just like what radical lawyer William Kunstler had said of the Tawana Brawley hoax: “It makes no difference whether the attack on Tawana really happened. It doesn’t disguise the fact that a lot of black women are treated the way she said she was treated.”63
The Obama campaign was a welter of race-mongering dirty tricks, from outright lies, such as the “Kill him!” fairy tale, to hothouse-flower racial sensitivities, such as the commotion over Hillary Clinton’s Bobby Kennedy remark.
It never mattered if any of the Obama campaign’s charges of racism were factually true. They should have been true. To cite facts in such circumstances is to impose crime lab statistical analysis on works of imagination and musical charm.
CHAPTER 15
OBAMA, RACE DEMAGOGUE
I read Obama’s books to help me understand just what it is that makes black people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.
The above paragraph is a precise paraphrase of what Obama wrote in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, explaining why he read Joseph Conrad’s 1902 classic, Heart of Darkness, with “white people” switched out for “black people.”1
Obama’s childhood consisted of a Beverly Hills, 90210 existence at the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu (2006 winner of “greenest” school in America!). And yet he still managed to develop a racial hair trigger. Reading about Obama’s race fixation in the middle of suburban banality is akin to reading Hitler’s obsessive musing on his Germanic identity.
Obama’s autobiographies—there’s more than one!—are bristling with anger at various imputed racist incidents. As biographer David Maraniss says, Obama sees the world through a “racial lens,” presenting “himself as blacker and more disaffected than he was.”2 He’s spent his life hungry for reasons to be angry.
Obama tells a story about taking two white friends from the high school basketball team to a “black party.” He says they “made some small talk, took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor,” but Obama found it disturbing that “they kept smiling a lot.” (Probably like Rachel Maddow around a black guest.)
Then, in an incident reminiscent of the darkest days of the Jim Crow South…they asked to leave after spending only about an hour at the
party! If having your friends want to leave a party before you do is racist, I’m practically Emmett Till.
In the car on the way home, Obama says one of his friends empathized with him, saying: “You know, man, that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties…being the only black guys and all.” And thus Obama felt the cruel lash of racism! He actually writes that his response to his friend’s perfectly amiable remark was: “A part of me wanted to punch him right there.”3
Listen, I don’t want anybody telling Obama about Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” line.
Wanting to punch his white friend was the introductory anecdote to a full-page psychotic rant about living by “the white man’s rules.” (One rule he missed was: “Never punch out your white friend after dragging him to a crappy party.”) Obama’s gaseous disquisition on the “white man’s rules” leads to this charming crescendo: “Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”4
For those of you in the “When will Obama play the ‘N-word’ card?” pool, the winner is anyone who chose page 85 of Obama’s first book. Congratulations! As is usually the case, no one involved had used the N-word except the victim-wannabe Obama.
Another illustration of the racial “hang-ups” of white people, according to Obama, was a tourist to Hawaii who, upon seeing Obama swimming as a little boy remarks, “swimming must come naturally to these Hawaiians.”5 It was essentially a verbal lynching. But it was not racism when his Kenyan father praised little Obama for doing well at school, saying, “It’s in the blood, I think.”6
Luckily, Obama married into a family that was also on red alert for incidents of racism to pass down as part of the family lore. Here’s the one that was worthy of inclusion in Obama’s book Dreams from My Father: His wife’s six-year-old cousin was told by some nasty little white boys that they wouldn’t play with him because he was black—as opposed to the four billion other reasons kids say they won’t play with other kids.7
The story swept like wildfire through the entire Obama extended family. They’d been waiting twenty years to feel the rush of racial victimhood and finally a six-year-old cousin-in-law of Obama’s gave them their racial validation!
At Princeton, Obama’s future wife, Michelle Robinson, wrote her thesis on—guess what? “How I Feel About Being a Black Person,” which was fast becoming obligatory for every black college student. She wrote to four hundred black Princeton alumni, but only ninety considered the topic of “Being Black at Princeton” worthy of a reply. Robinson expressed disappointment that the ones who did reply didn’t have more racial resentment, but had simply gone out and become successful. Being at Princeton was so alienating that Robinson sought to replicate the experience by going to Harvard Law School.8
Of course she’s angry at her country. She’s angry because she knows America, black and white, is snickering at her behind her back. Here she had the opportunity to get a first-class education at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, and all she could think to write about was being black.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama explains that the reason black people keep to themselves is that it’s “easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.”9 Here’s a little inside scoop about white people: We’re not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly charming about it.
He shared with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”10
This forms the entire basis of Obama’s political career more than a quarter of a century later.
Note that he was talking about his own mother in that passage. In his much-heralded “race” speech during the 2008 campaign, Obama disparaged the white grandmother who raised him, describing her as mired in racial stereotypes. But as Obama says: “Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.”11 Say, do you think a white person who said that about black people could become president? White Americans voting for this guy was like a chapter out of Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.
The postracial president, who was supposed to allow the country to move past race, mau-maued white America from day one of his campaign.
Indeed, the only firm evidence that there are any actual racists left in America is the fact that so many white people voted for Obama. They must have felt guilty about something. Not harboring any racist impulses, I was free to vote Republican.
Obama’s 2008 campaign Web site appealed to every group in America. But not white men. There was a section for Latinos; women; First Americans; environmentalists; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people; Americans with disabilities; Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and on and on and on. But there were no sections for either white people or male people.12 His sole appeal to white men was to offer not to call them racists if they voted for him.
Obama’s pandering calculation went like this:
Women would get abortion and welfare;
Latinos would get amnesty and welfare;
Blacks would get a black president and welfare;
Environmentalists would get no drilling, no Keystone Pipeline, no industrial advancement, and welfare;
LGBT Americans would get gay marriage and tax breaks; and
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders would get affirmative action and welfare.
White men got the possibility of not being called racists.
The status of white men didn’t improve after Obama became president. In a 2010 midterm election video sent to thirteen million supporters, Obama said: “It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African Americans, Latinos and women who powered our victory in 2008, stand together once again.”13
In Obama’s 2008 swipe at people in small towns who “cling to their guns and religion” he also called them racist xenophobes. Although generally unnoticed because of the show-stopping “guns and religion” part, Obama said these “bitter” small town people harbor “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”14 Only liberals could attack people who are different from them by saying they dislike people who are different from them.
A few months later, Obama began warning in his stump speech that Republicans were going to attack him for being black. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”15 No Republican had said anyone should be “afraid” of Obama because he was black—the idea is absurd. Race mongering is the Democrats’ thing. Obama was so desperate to be attacked for his race that he was launching racist attacks on himself and blaming Republicans.
Amazingly, Obama proclaimed: “We know the strategy because they’ve already shown their cards”—cards that were apparently so free of racism that he had to race-bait himself. “Ultimately I think the American people recognize that old stuff hasn’t moved us forward. That old stuff just divides us.” He was both a victim of racist attacks—delivered by himself—and a uniter against those who would make racist attacks!
Over the next month, Obama expanded on his self-race-baiting. Warming to the theme that Republicans were going to attack him because he was black, Obama said, “John McCain and the Republicans, they don’t have any new ideas. The only strategy they’ve got in this election is to try to scare you about me. He’s got a funny name. And he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five-dollar bills.” The press took little notice of Obama’s claim that Republicans would attack him for being black until July 31, 2
008, when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis called Obama on using the race card and “play[ing] it from the bottom of the deck.”16
For the next twenty-four hours, the Obama campaign pleaded innocence, stoutly denying that Obama’s dollar-bill remark had anything to do with race.17 Maybe he’d be the first Hawaiian on a dollar bill. Apparently, there were limits to the press’s credulity and eventually, the Obama campaign admitted that, yes, the dollar bill line was about race.18
Liberals went gaga over Obama because he was a very left-wing candidate, whose blackness could insulate him from criticism. The media would simply brand any opposition “racist.” It used to be left-wing women who couldn’t be attacked. But then Hillary got dumped for the left’s trophy wife, Obama. We’re growing apart, Hillary. Obama makes me feel alive and opens a whole new world for me. Can’t you be happy for me? From that moment on, charges of sexism would take a backseat to charges of racism.
During the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton was assigned the role of Bull Connor, instead of some hapless Republican.
In March, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary’s finance chair and Walter Mondale’s history-making female running mate, gave an interview in which she said: “A woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign—a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against.” She said the media had gotten caught up in the idea of the first black president, adding, “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position…He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”19