Clinton will still receive some support from some black Democratic loyalists, and celebrities although some of them are beginning to distance themselves from the couple after the Iowa and New Hampshire smears against Obama, but a large number of black people, who helped elect Clinton, twice, will defect.
Representative James E. Clyburn, a black congressman from South Carolina, told The New York Times (January 11, 2008) that “he may abandon his neutral stance in his state’s primary, based in part on comments by Senator Hillary Rodman Clinton about President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” He and other blacks interpreted Hillary Clinton’s remark about the two as implying that Johnson did more for the cause of civil rights than King, who, like Obama, made great speeches.
Also one wonders whether Henry Louis Gates, Jr., media-appointed leader of the Talented Tenth (a phrase that W.E.B. DuBois used to appoint the black elite as the true leaders of the Negro masses, an insult to grassroots leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer), will follow suit. While smearing a number of black male writers as misogynists, in the Times and elsewhere, when Bill Clinton was caught with his pants down, Gates, Jr. said we will “go to the wall for this president.”
Are the Clintons new in a South where husbands like George Wallace extended their power by getting their wives elected? Hardly. Take the Fergusons.
In Texas there was a couple called the Fergusons, affectionately called “Ma and Pa Ferguson.”
Miriam Ferguson was a quiet, private person who preferred to stay home in her big house in Temple, Texas, and take care of her husband, raise her two daughters, and tend to her flower garden.
But in 1923 she was elected governor of Texas, the first woman governor elected in the United States.
Her husband, Jim Ferguson, served two terms as governor, but during his second term he was impeached, which meant he could not run again for public office. So Miriam agreed to run to clear his name and restore the family’s honor.
She served two terms as governor: from 1925 to 1927 and from 1933 to 1935. She and her husband became known as “Ma and Pa Ferguson.” Her campaign slogan was, “Two Governors for the Price of One.”
Remind you of anyone?
The Crazy Rev. Wright3
(The Media and the Clinton campaign sought to break candidate Obama by associating him with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Predictably, Wright’s complex theology was reduced to an inflammatory sound bite. So effective was this campaign that Obama had to make a speech denouncing Rev. Wright. Largely ignored by the media were the ties of John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Mrs. Clinton herself to ministers who were authors of controversial comments.)
Nothing is more uplifting than watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where wealthy Anglicized Irish Americans like Joe Scarborough, Chris Matthews, Tim “Little Russ” Russert and Pat Buchanan hold forth on the topic of race. During the week beginning March 17, 2008, the talk was all about whether Barack Obama should distance himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Presumably in the same manner that they distanced themselves from Don Imus.
Buchanan has been awarded more time to discuss race and the bigotry of Rev. Wright than the scores of black intellectuals and scholars, who could provide some insight. According to U.S. News & World Report (January 16, 1992), Pat Buchanan said in 1977 that Hitler was “a political organizer of the first rank,” a man of “extraordinary gifts,” “great courage” and elements of “genius.” Yet there was his sister, Bay Buchanan, debating Roland Martin, one of a handful of token black commentators with any kind of bite. This was on CNN, March 21. She was in a tizzy about the Rev.’s anti-Americanism, yet Hitler, her brother’s hero, was responsible for the deaths of one hundred and twenty thousand Americans.
Why doesn’t Dan Abrams at MSNBC just go ahead and offer Minister Louis Farrakhan a commentary? Why aren’t the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress, so quick to pounce upon blacks who say silly anti-Semitic things, all over MSNBC for Buchanan’s position as Dan Abram’s resident authority on race.
Tim Russert, his colleague, was employed by the late Daniel Moynihan. Moynihan’s report on the black family has guided public policy and been cited in hundreds of Op-Eds and editorials. Black intellectuals who opposed Moynihan’s report have cited the fact that the majority of women on welfare at the time of the report were white women. In fact it was a Nazi, Tom Metzger, who told Larry King that the average welfare recipient was a white woman whose husband has left her, while neo-cons and black tough-lovers ignore this possibility. Isn’t it ironic that one can gain a more accurate picture of welfare in this country from a Nazi than a neo-con? Most of those white welfare recipients were probably Celtic, members of Moynihan’s tribe.
It was Daniel Moynihan who accused black women of “speciation,” of reproducing mutants, the kind of thing that the Nazis used to say about their victims. Did Russert disown the senator after this remark? Some of those in the media who are now criticizing senator Obama’s pastor are Irish Catholics. They dominate the panels on Morning Joe. (His token black guests are passive participants, grateful-to-be-on camera types.)
Have these panelists, who are so critical of Rev. Wright, disassociated themselves from a church that had to pay two billion dollars to people who’ve been sexually abused by priests? Both the last pope and the current one attempted to cover up the scandal. Would they fly to Rome to scold the pope, which is what they demanded of Obama who wasn’t even present when Rev. Wright preached about 9/11? Have they had a one-on-one with their priests during which they criticized the church’s cover-up of the epidemic of pedophilia infecting the church?
The classic indicator for racism has been the double standard applied to blacks and whites. This still exists for blacks in everyday life. In the criminal justice system, the mortgage lending industry, and the treatment of blacks by the medical industry, etc. Why is Rev. Wright crazy for citing racism in the criminal justice system? The infamous three strikes law where poor people might receive a life sentence for stealing a pizza pie? Even the Bush administration has documented racial profiling. MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson flew into a rage when Marc Morial of the Urban League mentioned racial disparities in the criminal justice system. I sent Carlson documentation, including data from the Sentencing Project. He still probably denies it, and his misrepresentations go out unchallenged to millions of viewers. It’s appropriate that he and his colleagues dance on variety shows. They’re entertainers, not news people. Could you imagine Edward R. Murrow appearing on Dancing With The Stars?
When Rev. Wright talks about AIDS being an ethnic weapon, those critics who denounce him haven’t examined the speculation that it might have originated in the Koprowski’s polio vaccine experiment that was conducted out of Philadelphia. Those who embrace this theory might find some support in the book, The River: A Journey Back to The Source of HIV and AIDS by Edward Hooper (Penguin, 2000). A white man wrote this book.
I did a considerable amount of research for my recent off Broadway play, Body Parts, which was dismissed by The New York Times as “angry.” I found that the pharmaceutical companies use Africans to test drugs that might have bad side effects without the knowledge of those being tested. The Washington Post did a series about this scandal. A series written by whites. They mention the Tuskegee experiments. According to Harriet Washington in her book Medical Apartheid, such experiments that date back to the days of slavery continue. Tuskegee was just the tip of the iceberg. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present was reviewed in The Washington Post on January 7, 2007 by Alondra Nelson under the title “Unequal Treatment: How African Americans have often been the unwitting victims of medical experiments.” She wrote: