SOME QUESTIONS ON BASES, HOWEVER BASE, WHEN IT COMES TO RACE

Barack Obama has been a man often deserving of praise for phrase, but, in one of his radio follow-ups to his speech last week on race, he used a phrase better left in the future, well unused. It (the phrase he used) was in describing his grandmother as “a typical white person”. He’s getting some flack for it and that’s understandable, but there’s something we at the Faux find challenging and just . . . a little creepy and that is that on the subject of blacks, and Jews, people in the political center, and left of center, are held to a much, much higher standard, and are politically on a much shorter leash and we all know the examples. When, for instance, Hillary Clinton hugged Sulha Arafat or Jeremiah Wright had some do-wacky-do moments, it’s major spin (and grin) by the right wing columnists, especially the Jewish ones, but yet again, somewhat creepily, when a sitting president (Richard Nixon) is known for anti-Semitic tirades, it doesn’t seem among those columnists anyway, to affect his historical standing. When an aspiring president (Ronald Reagan) opens his campaign at a rally where the KKK murdered civil rights’ workers, and its an historical fact that many of the Klan were in the audience that day and that this same president while in office honored a cemetery noted as a burial place for many SS in Germany, the right to this very day can’t honor and emulate him enough. Again, what these men did was when they were in the Oval Office, not after they left, as opposed to Jimmy Carter, where ever mentally he’s wandered to. There are many other examples, onto the present when Mitt Romney opened his Republican campaign at the museum honoring Henry Ford, and the fact that Ford is one of the more notorious anti-Semites in our country’s history did not seem to matter. Aside, if Mr. Romney wanted to honor a Ford in Michigan, he had Gerald’s Library. No, honoring Henry Ford for this conservative republican was not an issue, what was an issue, with the right anyway, was that Romney was a Mormon, how fascinating.
There are too many more examples to give a complete accounting here including actions and statements by both Presidents’ Bush, but this fact is inescapable; anti-Semitism or anti-black words, bias or statements, actual or symbolic, never but never, seem to harm a candidate of the right with their own base. I know this politically, and regretfully personally. That said it can be a pretty base base, but I so wish they’d at least tell us why and even more, I wish they’d ask themselves this: has any American candidate on the political right ever suffered at the polls for anti Black or Anti-Semitic remarks, ever, ever? And then, please ask yourselves why.