The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Don’t Get Too Fixated On The Raaaaace Card, Jonah

Posted on | December 21, 2012 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

I tried out Ricochet, which gave a free login to Goldberg at the NRO:

Just this week, in an essay for the New York Times, Adolph Reed attacked South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — the first female Indian-American governor in America — for appointing Representative Tim Scott to retiring senator Jim DeMint’s seat. Scott is a black man and a conservative Tea Party favorite.

So obviously, this is a very clever ploy to restore Jim Crow.

“Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment,” Reed writes, “so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests.”

That’s it exactly. Indeed, that’s what the Tea Party was always about: undermining black interests.

When Herman Cain — another inconveniently black man — was the overwhelming preference among Tea Party activists for the Republican presidential nomination, a historian writing in the New York Times suggested that Cain could be seen as proof the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan lives on.

You know you’ve been pounding a square peg into a round hole for too long when you find yourself insinuating that a black man from Georgia represents the KKK tradition in contemporary politics.

But it’s really not about the card as such. Abstract a bit. The race card is just a cheap means to the end of amassing political power. If, indeed, the insertion of race/color/creed divisions loses its power generation capability, substitutes will be found. Class warfare for example.

The interesting question is how much longer conservatives can continue to hang out with the likes of a Tim Scott or a Herman Cain, or nominate Mia Love, and so forth, before the whole Racism Industrial Complex begins to crumble.

But who wants to listen to my pigment-deprived self?

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Comments

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    I saw an article the other day that indicated Ricochet was struggling financially. I’m guessing they have salaries that are too high for the medium to support well.

    I joined there about a year and a half ago, but found I just didn’t ever bother to read much at the site. I think the squish factor was too high for me. (And I’m far more libertarian than I am conservative, so my own squish tolerance is higher than the hard right would be.)

    I like Lileks and appreciate Robinson’s interviewing skills over at NRO. So that much was what attracted me to the place. But I just didn’t mesh with the vibe. Reminds me too much of HotAir in the post-Malkin era. I think they need a little more Mark Steyn, and a little less Rob Long.

    Not bashing, just noticing.

  • Pingback: Jackie Wellfonder - Raging Against the Rhetoric – Raaacism and Conservatives

  • Finrod Felagund

    Heck, I wanted Condi to run in 2012, and I’d like to see her run in 2016.

  • Quartermaster

    Hot Air and NRO are squish sites these days. Buckley never really was hard right and he strived to be acceptable among the left. Malkin could not have cared less, but since Morrisey has taken over at Hot Air, it’s become more “reasonable,” and so less valuable to Conservatioves. I still regularly go to Hot Air, but that’s not the case with NRO, particularly since that callow youth and coward, Rich Lowry, runs the place.

    Frankly, I don’t care what Goldberg gets hung up on. He’s a bigger idiot than Lowry is and deserves only contempt.

  • http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

    Compounding your raaaaacism with a war on women, eh?

  • http://twitter.com/jimmiebjr Jimmie

    So, they let a guy named Adolph write that column, huh?

    Well played, New York Times.

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    I won’t waste more of Stacy’s space here bashing those sites, but I will say I wish they were pro-restoration. This go around, if a supposed right-sider isn’t pro-restoration, I won’t waste my time with ‘em.

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    If she isn’t pro-restoration, why bother? For the next go ’round, that’s really the only issue left. And I have never been a single-issue voter. But it’s all we have left thanks to Obama.

  • Finrod Felagund

    I prefer black women that will tell Harry Belafonte that they don’t need him to tell them about the black experience.