He was right. On the January 5 edition of Hard Ball, Matthews said that Obama was being “hit by the right as well as the left. Where are his supporters on the Democratic side?”
Nobody from cable asked me to make a prediction for the next decade. Here it goes: Two thousand ten will see more cooperation between the white left and right. Frank Rich commented about this coalescing of interests when he left no degrees of separation between President Obama, Tiger Woods and Enron. This coalescing of the white right and left will continue. The white right will continue to try to break Obama. For its part, the white left from the time of the Abolitionist movement to today has never been comfortable with black leadership. Signs of cooperation between white right and left groups have become so visible that by the mid 2010s you might see a left-wing version of the tea party movement, with a Provincetown contingent waving banners along side one from South Carolina.
Why not? The progressive movement is now dominated by the white LGBTers and the white middle-class feminist movement. White, because black gays and lesbians say that they’ve been excluded from the mainstream LBGT movement and black women have been complaining about racism in the feminist movement for over one hundred years.
Proof that blacks and Latinos are excluded from the progressive movement comes in the form of a progressive like Ed Schultz warning President Obama that he is losing his “base,” and Frank Rich writing that the president has “bamboozled us.” On progressive Pacifica Berkeley’s KPFA, two white Buddhist males were talking about how their generation had access to luxuries denied even emperors and kings of former time.
One of them said that “we” can walk into a supermarket and be exposed to a variety of goods. Which “base” and which “us” and which “we”? Moreover, did you ever think that you’d see Jane Hamsher from Firedog Lake signing petitions with Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who says he wants to reduce government to so small a size that you can strangle it in a bathtub? Maybe it’s not so surprising. While Norquist is called “a radical rightist,” Ms. Hamsher might be called a radical leftist. Norquist, a right-winger so powerful that former President Bush sent representatives to his meetings, described President Obama as “John Kerry with a tan.” Not to be outdone Ms. Hamsher thought it clever to alter the facial color of Senator Joseph Lieberman. Her blackface Lieberman was so outrageous that Arianna Huffington, of The Huffington Post, pulled the photo. Maybe if The Huffington Post employed more blacks they’d get some advice that wouldn’t make it necessary for them to always have to pull things. Writer John Dickerson was outraged, he wrote:
It pains me to no end that this appeared on none other than The Huffington Post, because I honestly can’t believe Arianna Huffington would be a willing party to such racist trash. This may not make me any friends at the HuffPo but, seriously, someone at HuffPo needs to come out and address Hamsher’s actions immediately.
But I guess that since “gender” is the “most restrictive force in American life,” progressives like Ms. Hamsher are allowed to go blackface from time to time. An even more shocking alliance between the right and the left was a writer from the Revolutionary Communist Party, comrade Annie Day, agreeing with Barbara Bush about the merits of the movie, Precious. A movie that is being used to suggest that incest is a widespread practice in the black community. A movie that supports Draconian welfare policies and the sterilization of black women. For my criticism of the movie, Ms. Annie Day called me — are you ready for this—“a misogynist,” yet Ms. Day serves a white patriarch who has built a cult of personality around himself. At least white cultural nationalist outfits like The Huffington Post and Salon.com appear to have women in charge. Also, is this Maoist suggesting that I should use Mao Tse Tung as an example of how men should treat women? And given her attitudes toward black men, revealed in her article criticizing my CounterPunch essay about the film, Precious, her co-writer, Carl Dix, a black man, will never ascend to the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The Revolutionary Communist Party and Barbara Bush. Bizarre bedfellows.
As the domination of the country by an Anglo-Protestant culture, one that began in 1607, gives way to an American mosaic of cultures there will continue to be a merger of the white left and right. As the Obama administration continues on its course, Negro Mania will increase.
The year began with Barack Obama being hanged in jeopardy in a Georgia town. The tea baggers who came to Washington carrying signs of Obama as a witch doctor, Hitler, and The Joker, a socialist, a terrorist, etc., were up to their tricks. On January 5, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, footage was run of a tea bagger dressed in a black gown and hood like an Inquisition executioner, flogging a man with an Obama mask and a woman with a mask of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. They were covered with fake blood. Even with this kind of showing of racist imagery, which has become standard for the tea-party pageants, David Brooks of The New York Times gave them his grudging respect though he said he disagreed with them. He received a ton of mail for his remark after the earthquake that the problems of Haiti were cultural.
Is it the country that is addicted to Negro mania or is it the media, which believes that they are spreading the hysteria for profits? Up to their old tricks. Why else would extensive Michael Jackson stories be more important than news about the Iraq war, or why would The New York Post feel that news about Tiger is more important than news about 9/11 which resulted in three thousand lives lost? Reasons offered by David Carr don’t quite explain it. There is something deeper going on. Susan Block, a psychologist tried to explain the Tiger mania by citing testimonies from her white male patients. I wish that she’d interviewed some of the white women at Salon.com and The Huffington Post to discover what excites them about Tiger.
One may disagree with Block’s analysis but her bringing the subject of Tiger mania and yes Obama mania (MTV portrayed Obama as a sexual Mandingo in bed with Hillary Clinton — yes, they had to pull it) under a more sophisticated analysis than the one offered by Carr opens the door for further research.
Maybe we need experts from other professions to analyze Negro mania, an American sickness. I’m using “American” in the same way that the Jim Crow media use it. By the beginning of 2010, the Jim Crow media had done its job. By giving a small band of angry white voters a platform just for screaming and shouting and calling themselves tea baggers, a movement begun by a Fox News correspondent and supported by the insurance companies, a few billionaires and insurance-industry-backed phony “populist” organizations like Freedom Works, they had, according to commentators gloating over the election of a tea-bagger senator from Massachusetts, broken Barack Obama. An all-white panel on CNN was just about jumping for joy over the election of a man whom Keith Olbermann described on January 19 as “horrifically unqualified.” Two of the most thrilled were Obama critics, Dana Bash and Gloria Borger, white women, and though the new tea-bagging Senator Scott Brown had a record that was unfriendly toward women’s rights, without the votes of white women he would not have been elected. Keith Olbermann described him as “a homophobic racist reactionary sexist ex-nude model and advocate of violence against women.” Rachel Maddow said that he campaigned “dishonestly.” But Maddow and Olbermann were the exceptions. Because of low-intelligence commentators, or at least intellectually incurious commentators, resulting in low-information voters, fifty-two percent of Americans say President Obama has accomplished nothing or not very much after almost a year in office, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted January 12–15, 2010. (Forty-seven percent believe he has accomplished a great deal or a good amount). Those fifty-two percent probably got all of their information about Obama’s record from Saturday Night Live, a comedy show written by uninformed white writers.