Why It’s Okay to Call Obama a Radical
October 29, 2008 3 Comments
Perhaps because I am a child of the 1980′s (born in 1975) it makes it impossible for me to understand every nuance of language when discussing African Americans. Even that ‘History of the 1960′s‘ class I took in college seems to have left me sorely uninformed and so it was with genuine surprise that I learned it is racist to call a black person a ‘radical’ no matter how much their background and their associations may suggest it.
Luckily for me, Ross Douthat explains perfectly why charges of racism against McCain and his surrogates are ridiculous. As he points out, Obama is a radical because of his political background, not his skin color.
“…then I think we’re talking about a narrative that has everything to do with the fact that Obama emerged from a political milieu that’s considerably more tolerant of what I think it’s fair to describe as anti-Americanism than the environment that produced a John Kerry or an Al Gore or a Bill Clinton.
Does this narrative bleed into unhinged fever-swampage, and vice versa? Sure. But would it exist in anything like it’s current form if Barack Obama hadn’t built his career in a political environment where unrepentant left-wing terrorists can become pillars of the community, and practiced his faith in (and lavished money on) a church where America-bashing and far-left conspiracy theorizing seem to have been just part of the scenery? I think not. “
I was talking to someone today and we were discussing the way that race has been thrown around by the Left in this election. To frame not only John McCain, who to my knowledge has never had a mark against him concerning race, but Bill Clinton as racist…is beyond the pale. I think the fall-out for this will build if Obama is elected and more and more of his critics are called racist as a way of stifling dissent. Eventually they will reach too far and this is going to fall down on their heads.
So I’ll ask the impertinent, Whacky Liberal question – runnign for President of the United States is an expression of Anti-Americanism? I was born in 1971 and I don’t get that.
I think that some people would approach the Presidency as an opportunity to weaken the pwer of the United States globally and to change the face of our country to more closely resemble other countries which they think are better. So in that sense you can seek the Presidency and have anti-American goals.
So does that mean that Pres. Bush, who has succeeded in weakening our power globally is un-American? He certainly didn’t start out in that direction or so I keep being told, but I also keep looking at results, not rhetoric. It’s the scientist in me.
And as to changing the face of our country, the Census statistics keep telling us that is happening from a population standpoint anyway.