That was fast! This morning in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web column, James Taranto wrote:
One other thing we expect is to start hearing about race again–not from the president himself so much as from his supporters, especially in the media. Here again, the message will be a negative one: not “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a black president?” but, “If you vote to fire the first black president, you’re racist.”
And…here’s Tavis Smiley of PBS first out of the gate with exactly that rhetoric:
“I said over a year ago that this was going to be, this presidential race, Lawrence, was going to be the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic,” PBS host Tavis Smiley said on MSNBC.
The president is of course, a former acolyte of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright, and liberally sprinkled such epithets as “typical white person,” and bitter clingers displaying “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them,” during the 2008 primaries. So to be fair, one could say that of course the president will once again interject divisiveness and racial epithets into the election, no matter how bad the optics, and Smiley is simply concurring with Taranto. But considering that Smiley began 2009 by saying, “We’re all working for Barack Obama,” and is primarily employed by state-run PBS, it seems safe to say that he’s referring not to the president, but to the other side of the aisle.
But considering that the 2012 president race will likely be fought by two moderate Republicans, I’m not sure what the cause of all of the expected sturm und drang will be.
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