We’re barely a month into Barack Obama’s presidency, and as near as I can tell, the greatest threats to our freedom are Rush Limbaugh and some cartoonist from the New York Post.
Race-baiter, shakedown artist, crass opportunist and attention-whore extraordinaire, Al Sharpton, is leading the predictable call for a boycott of the New York Post in retaliation for the publication of a cartoon that people who don’t know much about how government works (or how humor works, for that matter) claim compares Barack Obama to a chimpanzee. Frankly, the biggest surprise was that Sharpton didn’t accuse the Duke lacrosse team of drawing the cartoon.
The cartoon was, in reality, directed at the “authors” of the stimulus, including Blinky McTaxalot (aka Nancy Pelosi) and the rest of Congress who both wrote and supported it. When I first saw the cartoon, I took it to imply that everything about the “stimulus,” just like the pet chimp that went bananas, has turned into a knuckle-dragging, out-of-control, runaway beast that’s wreaking havoc on many lives. Of course, it could have been a reference to George W. Bush, who also had a stimulus package and was often compared to a chimp. Who knew Bush was black?
Where was Al Sharpton when some cartoonists depicted Condoleezza Rice as a “house negro,” complete with exaggerated features and speaking in a language like any stereotypical, scarf on the head, shufflin’ mammy you’d see in “Gone with the Wind”? Sharpton was agreeing with the depiction. That’s what he was doing.
But Rice is a Republican, and, as Harry Belafonte reminded everybody a few years ago when he referred to African-Americans serving in the Bush administration.” Poor Condoleezza Rice never defiantly broke the stereotypical mold the way Belafonte did it: By singin’ and dancin’ for crowds of white folks.
Gratuitous and false charges of racism cheapen the legitimate claims – not unlike false rape accusations (nudge, nudge, Rev. Sharpton). People genuinely concerned with civil rights should in fact be outraged more by Al Sharpton’s methodology than by cartoons in the New York Post.
If you’ll recall, the “chimp/stimulus” isn’t the first Obama-related cartoon to cause a stir. This hyper-sensitivity over a cartoon most of us wouldn’t have seen if it hadn’t been so aggressively pointed out was reminiscent of last summer when the New Yorker published a cover featuring the Obamas in extremist garb doing a “fist bump” while a picture of Osama bin Laden hangs on the wall and an American flag burns in the fireplace.
At the time, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” had the best line about outrage over the New Yorker cartoon’s Muslim/terrorist overtones: “Barack Obama should in no way be upset about the cartoon that depicts him as a Muslim extremist, because you know who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists.”
If some cartoonist ever draws a picture of a chimpanzee with a bomb on its head, Al Sharpton and CAIR will trample each other to death getting to the nearest television camera.
Unfortunately, the madness doesn’t end with cartoons. House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., the highest ranking African-American member of Congress, said governors who don’t accept stimulus funds are guilty of racism. Oddly enough, the only way to avoid becoming a victim of racism is to allow yourself to be enslaved by Democrats.
Attorney General Eric Holder, a black man holding high office in a country that just elected its first black president, said last week that the U.S. is a “nation of cowards” when it comes to addressing and resolving racial tensions. If more than 600,000 people dying in a war that culminated in part in the end of slavery counts as cowardice, I don’t want to see Holder’s definition of bravery.
As for Al Sharpton and a few others, they need to be reminded that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. advised everyone to judge people not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character – not the content of their wallets.
Running beneath the surface in recent days is a United Nations report saying that Iran now has enough low-grade enriched uranium to begin building a nuclear weapon. Given what seems to upset liberals the most these days, our best shot at saving the United States might be to forget the nuke fear and instead convince the left that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been drawing anti-Obama cartoons and aggressively opposing the stimulus package as well as the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.”
