RACE FOR THE CUCKOO BANANAS

President Barack Obama:


“ 'There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,' Obama said in the article by David Remnick, appearing in the magazine’s Jan. 27 edition. 

 'Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president,' Obama said in his most direct comments on how race has affected his political standing since he’s been in office."


The wingnut blogsphere went berzerk.  Google and read for yourself. I haven't the stomach to link to their rot.

President Obama made an evident statement that has nothing to do with blaming anyone or anything.  He spoke a truth.  And that should be the end of it.  But the rightwing noise machine will have none of it.  They've misquoted, misrepresented, and plain lied about what he said, hence the controversy.  It's all so witheringly predictable.

Charlie Pierce of The Atlantic explains the knee-jerk reaction from the howler monkeys of the rightwing noise machine:

"If that isn't the perfect Barack Obama quote, I don't know what is. Some people hate the idea of the black man in the White House, but some people think it's cool, and so it goes. Not only is it the perfect Barack Obama quote, but it is the perfect illustration of the rhetorical limitations that have been put on this president simply because he is the black man we elected. For lack of a less historically freighted term, the president is our common property in the most ordinary times, and these are far from the most ordinary times. From the start, and partly as a result of his own rhetoric, this president has worked within limits much tighter than those within which any of his predecessors have worked. Anger -- real, righteous anger -- never has been an option for him. Occasionally, it has leaked out -- when he called out the Supreme Court, "Continue, Governor." -- but that generally has resulted in a swift stampede toward the fainting couches. Throughout his presidency, I have thought of that moment in The Great White Hope, the one that the exiled Ali once made James Earl Jones re-enact on the streets of Manhattan, where the Jack Johnson character shakes his fists at the sky, and bellows at his distant, cowardly tormentors, "Here...I...is!" That kind of moment for this president always, always had to be subtext, lest it make people nervous about the person on whom they had bestowed this great blessing. He could never be Truman, threatening to kick a newspaper critic in the 'nads. He could never be LBJ, goddamming his way to legislative victories, one after another. He had to be conciliatory. He could not be the Angry Black Man. After all, we white folks let him be president. Where was the gratitude there?" 




Ta-Nahisi Coates, one of The Atlantic's best writers, forcefully and perceptively cuts through the b.s. while talking about the kerfluffle over Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks. Coates' words explain why so many people went cuckoo bananas over the simple truth President Obama said in his interview in The New Yorker:


"And then there is us, ashamed at our own nakedness, at our humanity. Racism is a kind of fatalism, so seductive, that it enthralls even its victims. But we will not get out of this by being on our best behavior—sometimes it has taken our worse. There's never been a single thing wrong with black people that the total destruction of white supremacy would not fix."