Oprah

While in the UK to promote her factually-inaccurate movie "The Butler", Oprah Winfrey decided to let the British people know a little bit about how things are here in the Colonies.  While on the BBC, Oprah blasted the American people.  According to her, the criticisms and falling poll numbers for Obama are the result of.....drum roll please.....racism.

Over at NRO Corner, Victor Davis Hanson takes apart Ms. Winfrey.  In part, he writes:

Aside from her historical ignorance, Oprah Winfrey has increasingly turned to the race card to explain the president’s plummeting polls. In her race-obsessed world, Syria, Benghazi, the NSA, IRS, AP, and ACA messes do not explain why a reelected president crashes from a recent 60 percent approval rating to less than 40 percent in less than a year.

Instead, in Oprah’s no-win, racialist world, to the degree that Obama is popular, Americans are considered for the time being as not racist; to the degree that he is not, the country suddenly is collectively under suspicion (e.g., “everybody’s thinking it”).

That Obama might be utterly inexperienced in the manner of Jimmy Carter, less than veracious in the manner of the impeached Bill Clinton, or suffering the same second-term blues of Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra or popularity crash of George W. Bush after Katrina simply cannot for Oprah be true of an African-American president, who for some reason must not suffer the same fate and treatment as almost all who have held the highest office. Instead, in this raciallyobsessed world of Oprah, that Obama is faring no different from his predecessors is now the country’s fault. And as remedy, he must be given deference if the country wishes to avoid the latest therapeutic rant from Oprah.

In fact, Oprah has no record of worrying about the level of disrespect shown the office. If she did, she might have said something a few years ago when her president was routinely being compared to a Nazi, and often by her own fellow celebrities, writers, politicians, civil-rights activists, and filmmakers. That she said nothing then, but now says a lot, explains not America’s problem with race, but her own race obsessions, which have blinded her to her own prejudices and hypocrisies.

Hanson calls it "The Moral Decline of Oprah".  I'll be a bit more direct.  It's the reverse racism of a privileged liberal who sees racism everywhere except in the mirror.

Read the whole NRO piece HERE.  And VDH has a regular column at PJ Media, Works and Days, which can be found HERE.

Racist!!

Dana Loesch reports at Breitbart:

At a recent Obama rally in Ohio, prospective attendees were told to brandish their photo IDs if they expected admittance to the rally. No word yet on whether Attorney General Eric Holder plans to file suit against the Obama campaign for infringing upon Ohioans' right of peaceful assembly by way of a racist photo ID rule.

Where's Eric Holder?  Oh, yes, now I remember.  He's in the Justice Department building - where you have to show your photo ID to enter.

Photo ID requirement = Racist??

One of the great hypocrisies of the Obama administration (and there are so many to choose from ) is that the Department of Justice requires presentation of photo ID to enter their building in Washington DC, while at the same time declaring that laws requiring photo ID for voting are discriminatory.  Really?

John Hinderaker at Powerline shares a new photo ID requirement:

Here is one more item to add to the list: you can’t get Michelle Obama to autograph her book without “an official photo ID (driver’s license, passport).” So I guess Michelle must be a racist.

Go to the embeded link in the quote for the whole story, via MRC.

Pay No Attention

One of my favorite movie lines comes from The Wizard of Oz.  In it, you hear the great and powerful Oz saying "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."  Same thing in Democrat politics.

In the latest transparent attempt by the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party to make the 2012 election a referendum on supposed racism and not Obama’s dismal performance, House Democrats received training this week on how to portray neutral free-market rhetoric as racially charged.

Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion, whose statements were distributed at a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, cynically called conservative messages “racially coded … right-wing rhetoric has dominated debates of racial justice – undermining efforts to create a more equal society, and tearing apart the social safety net in the process” for over 25 years.

Wiley was invited to the caucus by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif  to run the Democrats "through their strategy and how they message and talk about stuff" pertaining to race and fiscal policy.

Yes...let's pay no attention to the results of the last 3+ years of an Obama administration.  It's all about racism.  Make those honky crackers feel guilty about thinking negatively about The One.

Read the story at Breitbart.

Proving the point

Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard looks to the case of Naomi Riley  It deserves a full repost.

Late last night, in a shameful example of editorial cowardice, the Chronicle of Higher Education fired Naomi Schaefer Riley. Naomi is a good friend of mine, a sometimes contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and a fine writer. And the story of what happened to her is highly instructive.

Naomi joined the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm Blog” a little over a year ago. It was a good hire—she’s written two insightful books on academia, God on the Quad and The Faculty Lounges, along with dozens of articles on the subject. Her postings were smart and entertaining. (For a couple of samples, click over to “If this is art, your middle-school daughter is Picasso” and “No sex for you.”)

Last week she wrote about the world of “Black Studies” in a post titled “The most persuasive case for getting rid of Black Studies? Read the dissertations.” You should read the whole thing, because it’s only 520 words, but here’s the gist of Naomi’s argument:

I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Naomi then went on to dissect two other incredibly silly “Black Studies” dissertations. One of these was written by TaSha B. Levy. Here’s how the Chronicle itself—not Naomi—described Levy’s work:

Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have “played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.”

Chronicle readers were outraged. Not that a graduate student was earning a doctorate by claiming that Sowell, Thomas, and McWhorter are threats to civil rights. Oh, no. They were outraged because Naomi would dare poke fun at such insanity. Because, you know, that’s racist.

Eight days and 497 comments later, the Chronicle’s Liz McMillen fired Naomi. Here’s how she explained her decision:

[S]everal thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us.

We’ve heard you, and we have taken to heart what you said.

We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. . . .

[M]y Editor’s Note last week inviting you to debate the posting also seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not. I also realize that, as the controversy unfolded last week, our response on Twitter did not accurately convey The Chronicle’s message.

I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.

Which is simply craven nonsense. If Naomi’s post was self-evidently egregious, she would have been fired immediately. Instead, on May 3, McMillen defended the post as being part of the blog’s intellectual ferment and encouraged readers to debate it. Which makes it obvious that the reason they gave Naomi the boot wasn’t because of anything she wrote, but rather the effect her writing had on their readers, who generally reacted as though they were suffering from a case of the vapors. One of her fellow Chronicle bloggers accused Naomi of committing “hate speech” and an online petition called for Naomi’s firing. In fact, McMillen admits as much, saying that Naomi’s post “distressed” readers and made them feel “betrayed.”

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education can fire and hire whomever it pleases—for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. That’s its business; that’s its prerogative. But the publication ought to at least have the sand to admit what it’s doing. They didn’t fire Naomi Schaefer Riley because of what she wrote. They fired her because their readers didn’t like it.

The great irony, of course, is that the whining and gnashing of teeth from the “Black Studies” crowd only reinforces Naomi’s point about the “discipline.” You’d never see chemists or physicists or mathematicians worked into a hysterical mob by a critical blog post. Because they study actual fields of knowledge—and don't simply tend the garden of their own feelings.

Last has it nailed.  The whole "Black Studies" concept, like "Women's Studies", is just a sham on the part of academia.  One more way to get fellow travelers into the faculty and then churn out new adoring members of the progressive class.

A link to the original blog posting is HERE.  A link to the Chronicle's response is HERE.

Frozen brains?

In Duluth, Minnesota, a group of non-profits, including four colleges, are posting billboards with the theme "It's hard to see racism when you're white".

John Hinderaker at Powerline sums it up well:

I am guessing that these billboards were paid for, overwhelmingly, with taxpayer money; i.e, yours and mine. A considerable amount of that money, if you trace it back, was no doubt borrowed from Asian banks and governments. So, consider this: Chinese peasants are saving their money so that their banks can lend many billions of dollars to the Obama administration, which in turn passes some of those dollars on to universities and other non-profits so that they can spend millions to erect billboards accusing white Americans of being racists. Is this a great country, or what?

Still a great country in spite of the efforts by the left to make it less so.