Stupid even when smart

The following is an extract from my forthcoming magnum opus: ‘Liberals: Born Free but Everywhere Feeding us to the Lions,’ Chapter Three: Guardian writers-outthought by yeast.

It's nasty. It's scary. But face it, it's not new – America was built on racism

Jimmy Carter's blast against Barack Obama's opponents was just, but the left too has problems with people of colour

Bonnie Greer

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 September 2009 21.30 BST

When it comes to respect for former president Jimmy Carter's staunch and consistent anti-racist stance and his fearlessness in speaking what he considers to be the truth without fear or favour, I take a back seat to no one.

That would be this and this and this and this and this and this. Nil points Ms. Greer. But it’s early days yet.

He has stated that much of the ire aimed at President Obama's healthcare reforms, his spending plans and other initiatives is based on racism, that there is an inherent sense in America that no African American should be president of the United States. Inherent?

Anyone over three years old knows the United States was built upon race, among other things,..

Clever Ms. Greer. She’s heard of all that near-universal adult literacy, reformed Christianity, religious toleration, scientific and engineering education, high levels of agricultural and craft skills, metalworking, (some) respect for women, plus widespread knowledge of classics and literature, and commonplace (but by no means universal) freedom of speech and movement. there’s hope yet.

… and that it remains utterly race-addicted on all sides.

Which is utterly dented by this far-Right, arch-segregationist, pillowcase-masked, jackbooted, blood-and-soil Germanic revivalist website.

BEWARE. DO NOT BROWSE TO IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WITHOUT FIRST TAKING PROTECTIVE MEASURES TO KEEP YOUR SOUL SAFE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Yes, it’s official folks.

In The Liberal to English Dictionary TM, the innocent phrase “In a Gallup poll from 2/9-11, Americans were asked the question: If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be black, would you vote for that person? 94% of Americans answered yes” actually translates as We sho’ want no niggers here, no sir.

Sooner or later, race will always step forward and take a bow. But in the matter of calling opponents to President Obama racists, Carter needs to take the advice he gave to Hillary Clinton during last year's presidential primaries and "give it up".

Good Ms. Greer: good. You can see from this is how liberals can think of themselves as being smart. From time to time they pass the Clue Thong around at Comment is Free staff parties and this was the day for the bonny Bonnie.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you would have to have had a heart of stone not to laugh as the comment pages, the cable networks' politico-comedians, the blogosphere, the twitterati and 24-hour news feeds came alive as a result of Congressman Joe Wilson's boorish and crass outburst on the floor of the House during Obama's address last week.

For the benefit of Martians and people who only get their news from the mainstream media, Congressman Wilson said ‘Tell the truth’ and 'You lie' when President Obama was reciting one part of the list of blatant lies and distortions which was his let’s socialize healthcare speech to Congress.

He said

The man shamed his office, his state, his party and his mother, but he apologised to the president, and the president accepted. But for many, this was not enough. One prominent columnist even opined that "boy!" was the unsaid coda to the outburst.

Fox News's Glenn Beck –…

He’s the one who exposed Obama’s Green Jobs Czar as a communist and a 9/11 truther when ABC, NBC, CBS, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times,Time Magazine, Air America, PBS and CNN were investigating Sarah Palin’s hairdresser’s ex-boyfriend’s half brother for a marijuana offence in 1997 and searching for the now-notorious but mysteriously missing photo of her standing over the still-warm body of the last polar bear in Alaska.

I suppose it takes a Right-wing moonbat to make a bogey out of green jobs.

…a real-life Howard Beale, that crazed broadcaster from the 70s film classic Network – must be rubbing his hands in glee. Once again, the left has stepped in the mess and can't smell it yet.

I watched in horror during the campaign last year as the media, the left and liberals alike jumped on what they thought was surely going to be some kind of post-racial love train with Obama as train driver, conductor, ticket collector and onboard entertainment. For them, nothing was going to stop their revenge – I mean, righteousness.

To call the anti-Obama healthcare protesters in the main racists is to overlook the small but potent coalition that it is.

She clearly means that it’s wrong to accuse a large movement of the sins of a minority. She’s being right. Sensible. Correct. My brain hurts. This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen

.

Now let’s look at how the rest of the Left conflates that minority (whose existence within conservatism we shall not question here), shall we?

This is a melange of classic anti-big government,

Big government being axiomatically anti-racist. You only have to think of Germany in the 1930s to realise that that’s so true.

…pro-small government people:

Because as evr’ schoolkid in the ‘hood knows, if the gummint just be enforcin’ the law an’ keeping the Russians out of Europe an’ Cincinatti, an’ building the roads an’ keepin’ the peace an’ makin’ da kids go to school, that be huge racism right there.

….garden variety fiscal conservativesv…

Low taxes and burning crosses go hand in hand like slow, stupid, defeated relay runners.

…the hardcore "end-of-days" Christian right,

Who are so concerned with the Jews returning to Israel and the Rapture that they have no time for colour coding the saved and the damned, but hey, everyone knows from films and stuff that American Christians are inbred, canoeist-raping, homosexual Mafia-deniers and therefore obviously racists, and who needs facts for that?

…pro-gun…

That lead, it’s a metal much more attracted to, and indeed mostly to, the hearts and the rhythms of Africa and their sufferings much more than those from the British Isles and the European plains…

… and anti-abortion elements,…

Because Whitey, he sure do love to see all those little picaninnies born alive, don’t he?

…staunch anti-communists….

Because disagreeing with, and wishing to prevent repeat performances of, Communist multi-million genocides is just crazy talk,

…and yes, of course, ye olde racists.

So there you have it.

The other disagreeable people above weren’t racist at all.

Greer is right and clever, and honest. Only the actual racists are racists.

Seriously.

But they've always been there. Sorry, but where's the news?

And to say, as some do, that no president has been as maligned as Barack Obama is not to have read American history very closely. I can recall, during anti-Vietnam war protests in my student days, marching behind a sign that read: "LBJ Pull Out! Like Your Daddy Should Have Done!" Andrew Jackson's wife was called a prostitute, Wilson insane.

Plus all that ‘Bush=Hitler’ and ‘Death of a President’ and ‘Reagan listened to little voices that tell him to bomb Russia.’ I expect she repudiates all that as the trash it was and still is.

In the 44th president's case, race is added to the usual anti-Washington, anti-administration mix. It's nasty. It's scary. It makes you angry. But this is what it is.

Right on. I’m amazed. I actually have no argument with Ms. Greer, here.

But we know this already. Even the official Left knows that it’s possible for a tiny, unrepresentative minority to have nothing to do with a fundamentally decent majority. For example, when someone says something like: ‘Women were created by Allah to be defective,’ the Left can take the side of the minority that holds that the Hadiths aren't canonical, or when someone that Kaffirs are to be subjugated, they can pick on anyone who says otherwise - irrespective of the numbers involved.

Only…

Here comes the money quote: the fly in the ointment (presumably myrrh) of what hitherto, despite my shadow fisking, was actually a comprehensive de-coupling of racism from anti-Obama conservatism by Greer.

I can indeed hear and recognise the code words being shouted out: "give our country back"; "the American people"; "defend the constitution". Add to these words like "tyranny" and "fascism", and anyone can see what President Carter means.

They all clearly translate as ‘Nigger, get out of the White House.’

"give our country back"; can’t exclusively mean ‘from overgrown Marxian statism’ - it just can’t. Conservatives plain aren’t allowed to believe what we say we believe. They have to mean what the stupid, non-Greer Left calls all conservatives as clearly distinguished from racists by her above.

"the American people"; must mean ‘only white people’. It doesn’t mean these people. This chap. Or this chap.

"defend the constitution" – that inconvenient document that followed a declaration that proclaimed that all men are created equal, and in the pursuit of which generations of Americans have moved from a slave-owning rebel republic to a superpower with a half-black President.

like "tyranny" and "fascism".

Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, my dear Ms. Greer.

If we think that Obama is dishonest, a demagogue, and the deliberate subverter of a constitution intended to limit the growth of over mighty government, why can’t we just mean it?

But conservatives and rightwingers are not the only racists.

I think she slipped and missed out the respectable ‘some’ between ‘but’ and ‘conservatives.’ But still.

I cringed during the campaign at the drooling of male broadcasters over the candidate's physique; the "cool black guy" envy many of them subliminally expressed in their words and their writing which risked reducing Obama to some kind of fantasy. There still are those lachrymose liberals who can't stop welling up every time they see a black face in their vicinity. And there is the syndrome, whose name is even now being invented by psychologists, for those white people who feel that they can say things to black people that they would not have done before, simply because they stepped up to the plate and voted for Obama.

That’s so complicated and obscure that I don’t even want to try to figure it out.

Racism cuts both ways.

Obama's campaign slogan was "Change". We on the left need to change. Change our tired, ideologically driven responses to events. Change our moth-eaten rhetoric. Change our demands on what people of colour, women, disabled people, gays and lesbians ought to be when they attain positions of power. Change the arrogance and class bias too often buried in the language the US left uses, such as "astroturf", "cracker nation" and "faux-News" – and change too the establishment oligarchy that shapes our opinions and forms our images.

In other words, ‘The Left needs to stop being The Left.’ Good luck with that one. Really.

Above all, we must change the unspoken belief that Barack Obama is our president. However else this presidency ends up, it will be primarily the creation of the person elected to office. Before our eyes, he is building his mission, reshaping, reconfiguring, adjusting.

We have a great man in the Oval Office. With him, we are in uncharted waters. Let's help him keep the ship of state steady – and let's shut up.

Hmm, because the last thing he needs right now is a bunch of Left-wing race-baiters around him calling his critics racists, except for the particular bunch of Left-wing race-baiters he’s had around him all his adult life; some of whose pals he’s appointed to public office.

So, apart from her one paragraph of two lines reversion to type, Ms. Greer is incisive, observant, rational and right.

And that’s the problem with liberals today. It’s not that some liberals can’t see faults in themselves (or more likely their programmes and style) that don’t merely translate as ‘Not Left-wing enough.’ Some clearly can. Nick Cohen and Melanie Phillips have taken that step backwards to the hard core of classical social-liberal belief and are trying to apply that core to a world that contains things not recognized by machine liberalism: real-world Islam being distinct from Anglicanism-with-coriander-and-garlic; moral poverty as the major cause of the economic sort in industrialised countries; the scarcity of resources.

And gravity.

But when otherwise perceptive, fair and honest Left-liberals just plain can’t accept that we other people hold to what we believe in and say what we mean, then they’re always going to assume that conservatives have a terrible and unredeemable dark heart.

In misinterpreting conservatives, even the best of them voids their own – increasingly scarce – moral honesty. Lose that and they’ve really only got the folk songs to fall back on…and it’s not looking good.