Have you heard about the latest overwrought tempest in a P.C. teapot on this post-Super Bowl Monday morning?

It’s over Michigan Republican Pete Hoekstra’s “insensitive” Senate campaign ad using an Asian-American actress portraying a Chinese worker gloating over incumbent Dem. Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s big spending habits.

Watch:

Black ministers and Asian activists have decried the commercial.

Both left and right are up in arms:

The portrayal of a young Asian woman speaking broken English in a Super Bowl ad being run by U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra against Michigan incumbent Debbie Stabenow is bringing charges of racial insensitivity.

GOP consultant Nick De Leeuw flat-out scolded the Holland Republican for the ad.

“Stabenow has got to go. But shame on Pete Hoekstra for that appalling new advertisement,” De Leeuw wrote on his Facebook page Sunday morning. “Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done.”

A media consultant who has advised Democrats also thought it could prove problematic.

“Some Asian-Americans may be offended by the stereotype that is portrayed in the spot,” said Robert Kolt, who teaches advertising part-time at Michigan State University and had previewed a number of

Sunday’s Super Bowl ads. “Pete seems like a nice guy in the ad, but I think he is wasting a lot of money now. … It’s just not Super Bowl-worthy. It’s not cute, it’s not funny and it’s not memorable.”

Is the ad less than tasteful? Yes.

Is it “xenophobic” to point out that China is benefiting ginormously from our fiscal recklessness, indebtedness, and outsourcing of jobs? Certainly not.

Oddly enough (in other words: predictably enough), there was little uproar when Vice President Joe Biden — a serial P.C. offender — mocked an Indian accent in decrying outsourcing of call center jobs just last month:

Back in 2006, Biden joked about Indian accents and Dunkin’ Donuts and gas stations — with a hardly a peep from the Sensitivity Police:

Liberal Democrat Bob Beckel mocked GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal’s State of the Union response address and likened it to a “call center ad in Mumbai:”

The P.C. police, as always, are P.C. only when it’s P.E. — politically expedient.

As for all the lefties decrying the ugly nativism of the “Buy American” message that resonates with Rust Belt voters, I remind you that it’s not just Republicans who have channeled Pat Buchanan for electoral gain:

Jim Moran, racist pig
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white enough. Moran’s an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out.

Responding on cable news to GOP Rep. Allen West’s blunt criticisms of President Obama this week, Moran derided the retired U.S. Army colonel, who is black, as “not representative of the African-American community.” Moran then launched into the kind of tired race-traitor tirade I’ve heard from progressives of pallor for more than 20 years.

How dare we “people of color” stray from the left’s ideological plantation? If we choose personal responsibility over entitlement, capitalism over statism or self-determination over identity politics, presumptuous white liberals appoint themselves spokespeople for our forefathers and deciders of our true destinies.

To wit: Lt. Col. West “just seems clueless now that he has climbed aboard ship,” Moran fumed. “He’s climbed this ladder of opportunity that was constructed by so many of his ancestors’ sweat, sacrifice, blood, you know, they did everything they could for his generation to be successful. But now that he’s climbed on board ship, instead of reaching down and steadying the ladder, he wants to push it off.”

West, his father, his mother and his brother all dedicated their lives to military service; four consecutive generations of his family served in the U.S. armed forces. As a freshman congressman, West’s message has been a compelling agenda of self-empowerment. For this, he is savaged by a House colleague as a racial saboteur?

But Moran was just warming up. Next, he contrasted conservative West with big-government savior Barack Obama, who he said acted in proper accordance with his ancestors “by reducing college tuition and training our workers, trying to get a decent job for everybody” and leaving a “constructive legacy.”

Er, how’s the savior’s near double-digit unemployment, record food stamp enrollment, re-inflation of the housing and higher-education bubbles, and massive redistribution of wealth from the working class to the Wall Street bundler class working out for you?

Moran hailed Obama as “our Lion King” and compared his Republican detractors to the “hyenas in the background trying to cause trouble” for the White House. This bumbling chief of political correctness apparently is unaware that those hyenas in the Disney movie have been criticized for perpetuating negative stereotypes about blacks and Hispanics. Dog-whistle politics, anyone?

Do Moran’s constituents in Virginia’s 8th district support his incessant race-baiting? Last year, he accused Tea Party activists of racism for sweeping out entrenched Democrats in the November 2010 midterm elections. It “happened for the same reason the Civil War happened in the United States. It happened because the Southern states, the slaveholding states, didn’t want to see a president who was opposed to slavery,” he ranted to Arabic-language television network Alhurra. “(A) lot of people in the United States don’t want to be governed by an African-American, particularly one who is liberal, who wants to spend money and who wants to reach out to include everyone in our society.”

Yet, only two short years before, this hopelessly racist nation put Obama in the Oval Office with a landslide victory. Logic never was the demagogue’s strong suit.

The aptly named Moran, an 11-term incumbent, continues to be rewarded by voters for his extravagant spending habits, self-dealing and diarrhea of the mouth. As I’ve reported previously:

– While on the Alexandria (Va.) City Council, he was charged with casting a vote that helped a developer friend win a bid for a lucrative plot of public land. A special prosecutor concluded that Moran had violated the state’s conflict-of-interest law. He sobbed as he pleaded no contest to a felony charge of vote-peddling. He received a year’s probation for a reduced conflict-of-interest misdemeanor charge and was forced to resign.

– In 1995, he had to be subdued by Capitol Hill police when he threw a punch at California Republican Rep. Randy Cunningham on the House floor. After the incident, Moran blamed “talk radio” for creating a hostile environment in Washington. That same year, he screamed “I’ll break your nose” at Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton during a hearing.

– In 2002, Moran revealed in financial disclosure statements that he accepted a $50,000 loan in January 2001 from an “old friend,” billionaire America Online co-founder James Kimsey. The congressman claims to have paid the business mogul back at 15 percent interest over three months, and his spokesman emphasized the loan came with no accompanying quid pro quo.

– Kimsey’s gift came on the heels of Moran’s disclosure that he had received another Big Business-tied loan: $25,000 from “old friend” Terry Lierman, a drug industry lobbyist representing Schering-Plough. After getting that unsecured loan at a lower-than-market interest rate, Moran co-sponsored a bill that would extend the patent on Schering-Plough’s allergy medicine Claritin — and prevent generic drug manufacturers from offering inexpensive alternatives.

Liberal busybodies are an annoyance. Liberal race-card abusers who lambaste patriotic minority conservatives to cover their own dirty deeds make my brown skin crawl.

(h/t Dan Collins)

Huffington Post explains (h/t collegepolitico Stephen Gutowski):

CNN anchor Kyra Phillips had to apologize Wednesday after the network accidentally played a Coolio song featuring the N-word.

For a clip on a 103-year-old Pennsylvania woman who still drives, CNN played Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage” to go into break.

The clip of the song they used?

“Ain’t no bloodin’, Ain’t no crippin’ / Ain’t no punk-a** n***a’s set trippin’ / everybody’s got a stack and it ain’t no crack / and it really don’t matter…”

“We aired some music just a few minutes ago, and, obviously for those of you that heard it, it was the wrong music that aired,” Phillips said shortly thereafter. “We apologize for that. It was a terrible mistake. And we’re working very hard to make up for it.”

Like Dan says: “What if this had happened on Fox?”

Over to you, NAACP, Al Sharpton, the Congressional Black Caucus, and FCC.

You just have to laugh.

Heartily.

When I noted that the Occupy Wall Street movement was filled with a sea of progressives of pallor and challenged the Tea Party-bashing media double standards on calling attention to the demographics two weeks ago, the occupiers filled my Twitter stream with profanities and racial epithets. Soros Monkeys tried to “debunk” my basic point by picking out a few brown faces in the Kamp Alinsky Kids’ crowd.

And also: By screaming “RAAAAAAAAACIST” at me.

Now, the progs are admitting out loud what I needled them for when this whole thing started: They don’t practice what they preach. They never have.

The Associated Press reports:

Jason Woody immediately recognized a shared struggle with many of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators: The 2007 college graduate has been out of work for two years, and it’s been longer since he’s seen a doctor. He also noticed something else — the lack of brown faces on the front lines of the Occupy movement.

“When I started out here … I realized there was not a lot of diversity out here,” said Woody, who is black and graduated from Morehouse College and has camped in a downtown Atlanta park with other protesters for more than a week. “It’s changed in the course of the past week. I’d like to see that grow.”

…The Occupy Wall Street protest in New York has been more diverse than other cities. Although the majority of protesters are white, many blacks and a smattering of Asians and Latinos have participated.

Among them is Omar Henriquez, a Long Island resident who emigrated from El Salvador. He passed out Spanish-language copies of the Occupied Wall Street Journal on Friday. He has been taking the newspaper to Latino and immigrant rights groups. He also is unemployed.

“That’s why I’m here,” said Henriquez, 55. “It’s incumbent on us, Latinos here, to bring more Latinos here. We don’t have to be invited to come, we just come.”

Actually, they don’t “just come.”

Remember: Many non-English-speaking day laborers are being PAID to come.

Manufacture/Subsidize Diversity!

***

By way of Drudge, here’s ten minutes of moonbat moshpittery to be filed under “when life imitates South Park.”

From what I can gather from the video, Rep. John Lewis (D-issed) showed up to address “Occupy Atlanta,” and it was decided that the crowd should take a vote on it because Lewis wasn’t on the original schedule. Hilarity ensued in a cloud of “repeat after me.” Lewis’ attempt to address the gathering was apparently voted down (which would be today’s NYT headline if this were a Tea Party) in a show of “jazz hands” from the crowd, and Lewis was on his way:

For some reason I have the urge to watch the “Way to Eden” episode of Star Trek.

By the way, the “repeat after me” style isn’t new to the OWS bunch, as evidenced in this video featuring Frances Fox Piven (h/t Free Republic).

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Two things really surprised me about this. 1) Sharpton’s show is still on the air. And 2) The “Lean Forward” network hasn’t leaned forward far enough to offer Al access to even a makeshift fact-check team. Or maybe this is the MSNBC fact-checked version.

Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters sets the scene:

As Al Sharpton ridiculed Herman Cain on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” Friday for saying blacks have been brainwashed into voting for Democrats, the reverend ended up proving the Republican presidential candidate’s point.

Seconds after claiming, “What [Cain] does not have the right is to rewrite history by saying that blacks were brainwashed by becoming Democrats,” Sharpton showed his ignorance of the subject by stating, “We went with a Party that stood up for the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and Voting Rights Act of ’65.”

If Sharpton had gone with a party that stood the tallest for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he might be a Republican like Herman Cain:

The House version of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by only 61 percent of that Chamber’s Democrats versus 80 percent of the Republicans.

More importantly, it was Republicans that ended a Democrat filibuster preventing a vote on this bill in the Senate. 82 percent of Republicans voted for cloture versus 66 percent of Democrats.

In the final Senate vote on the Act, 82 percent of Republicans voted “Aye” versus 69 percent of Democrats.

Quite contrary to what Sharpton and most liberals think, a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported this Civil Rights Act.

Ditto for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Take it away, Al:

It’s enough to make you want to jump on the Sharpton bandwagon:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

I’m sure you all saw what the Washington Post did this weekend.

The newspaper tried to macaca Rick Perry.

The frenzy is over a now-overturned stone on a secluded property — “associated” with Perry through his father, partners or his signature on a lease — that once had the word “Niggerhead” painted on it.

The Post interviewed dozens of people. The New York Times followed up with another crack investigation of hazy memories of bygone days.

They’ve given “stoning” a whole new meaning.

Has Perry actually used the racial epithet himself — you know, like the late, former KKK leader Robert Byrd did as recently as 2001?

Did Perry condescendingly refer to a black politician as “articulate and bright and clean” like Biden did when he described Barack Obama in 2007?

Did Perry racially stereotype Hispanics for political gain or refer offensively to President Obama’s “light skin” and “lack of a Negro dialect” like Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid did just last year?

No.

The same lib media outlet that took down George Allen over a dunder-headed moment on the campaign trail in order to perpetuate the GOP=racist meme is trying to kick up dirt over a stone — a stupid stone — that has been painted over and turned over for years.

What does it say about Rick Perry? Nothing. Nada. Zip.

While the Post tries to impose an old narrative on Perry and squeeze blood from a stone, the reality is that Perry has gone out of his way to pander to left-wing impulses on race.

This is the guy that has disparaged his own base as racist in two separate GOP debates.

Remember?

During the presidential debate in Tampa last night, in the midst of a discussion about illegal immigration, Texas governor Rick Perry defended granting lower in-state tuition rates to illegals as follows:

In the state of Texas, if you’ve been in the state of Texas for three years, if you’re working towards your college degree, and if you are working and pursuing citizenship in the state of Texas, you pay in-state tuition there.

And the bottom line is it doesn’t make any difference what the sound of your last name is. That is the American way. No matter how you got into that state, from the standpoint of your parents brought you there or what have you. And that’s what we’ve done in the state of Texas.

And I’m proud that we are having those individuals be contributing members of our society rather than telling them, you go be on the government dole.

This was Perry’s low point, and it’s exactly the kind of insulting garbage we don’t need out of Republican candidates, because we’re going to get plenty of it from the Democrats. So the opponents of providing taxpayer-funded lollipops to illegal immigrants are reacting badly to the sound of their last names? What a vile insinuation.

Remember?

“If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state for no other reason than that they’ve been brought their through no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.”

It sucks to be falsely accused of racism.

Maybe Rick Perry, now under siege by the ruthless race card-playing media, will remember that the next time he’s tempted to accuse conservatives who disagree with him of heartless bigotry.

Forget about the implied “we’re not going to march on the White House because of the color of the president” part and try to focus on what is tantamount to an admission that the policies embraced by this administration have been disastrous.

From The Hill by way of the Miami Herald:

Unhappy members of the Congressional Black Caucus “probably would be marching on the White House” if Obama were not president, according to CBC Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).

“If [former President] Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House,” Cleaver told “The Miami Herald” in comments published Sunday. “There is a less-volatile reaction in the CBC because nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.”

During the 2007-2008 primary season, Emanuel Cleaver endorsed Hillary, so possibly it’s not all about race. But now that I think about it, Hillary is the wife of the first black president, so maybe that takes us back to square one.

It’s a continual source of bemusement when Democrats in Congress whose votes have allowed Obama to follow this very path complain about where that path has taken the country — and then somehow blame the Tea Party.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

When I do, I’m called a RAAAAACIST and accused of “trying to pit the Latinos against the African-American people.”

Law-abiding victims of such violence know the truth, though. Ask the family of Jamiel Shaw. Or Cheryl Green or Shatavia Anderson.

Today’s self-defense story of the day — which will be ignored by anti-gun Democrats open-borders activists, and multi-culti propagandists — comes from Norwalk, Calif., which is known as an illegal alien sanctuary city (h/t Cameron Gray):

A woman used a gun to fight off two men who forced their way into her house after spray painting racial epithets outside early Thursday, officials said.

Two men, described only as male Latino suspects, scrawled anti-black graffiti on the outside walls of a home in the 12900 block of Lindale Street about 1:30 a.m., Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Bill Evans said.

They then forced their way inside of the home, occupied by a black woman in her 40s, he said.

But the frightened resident was ready with a gun, the lieutenant said.

“The resident, in fear for her safety, fired a firearm at the suspects,” Evans said. “It doesn’t appear anyone was struck.”

The intruders then fled from the home and were not found.

Democrats Reps. Maxine Waters and Andre Carson were too busy demonizing Tea Party members as lynching RAAACISTS to comment.

We, the Unhyphenated Americans: Meet My People
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011

My fellow Americans, who are “your people”? I ask because U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black, used the phrase “my people” in congressional testimony this week. It was an unmistakably color-coded and exclusionary reference intended to deflect criticism of the Obama Justice Department’s selective enforcement policies. It backfired.

In pandering to skin-deep identity politics and exacerbating race-consciousness, Holder has given the rest of us a golden opportunity to stand up, identify “our people” and show the liberal poseurs what post-racialism really looks like.

Herman Cain is my people. He’s my brother-in-arms. I’ve never met him. But we are family. We are kin because we are unhyphenated Americans who are comfortable in the black, brown and yellow skin we are in. We are growing in numbers — on college campuses, in elected office, on the Internet, on radio airwaves, everywhere. And that drives liberals mouth-frothing crazy.

Cain is the successful Georgia businessman who has wowed audiences across the country with his passion for free markets, free minds and the American Dream. The former president of Godfather’s Pizza and forceful tea party speaker happens to be black. So he must pay the price that all minority conservatives in public life must pay. As I noted last week, a cowardly liberal writer recently derided Cain as a “monkey in the window,” a “garbage pail kid” and a “minstrel” who performs for his “masters.”

Race traitors. Whores. Sellouts. House Niggas. Self-haters. I’ve heard it for nearly 20 years in public life. Every outspoken minority conservative has. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but these spiteful epithets can’t enslave us.

Val Prieto is my people. A fierce, freedom-loving American blogger of Cuban descent, he rejects race-card games and refuses to be lumped in with Hispanic ethnic grievance-mongers. In response to pro-illegal immigration marchers who infamously desecrated the American flag, Prieto wrote:

“I have never and will never, despite having many issues with the government of the United States throughout the years, burn a flag of the United States of America. I am Cuban by birth, American by the grace of God. And a darned proud, dignified, thankful and respectful American. … I refuse to be lumped together as a class or a race simply because we speak a similar language. … I ain’t Mexican, I ain’t Latino and I ain’t Hispanic. I am an American of Cuban descent. And damned proud of it.”

Katrina Pierson is my people. She’s a feisty young Texas mom and Dallas tea party activist who supports limited government principles and rejects left-wing identity politics. She confronted the NAACP last year with a rousing manifesto of political independence and rebutted the left-wing group’s attacks on the tea party as racist:

“The reality is that we colored people no longer require the assistance from other Negros for advancement,” Pierson said. “These groups run to the rescue of distressed brown people only when the media deems it newsworthy. Meanwhile, there are inner city black children who continue to grow up fatherless while sharing a neighborhood with stray bullets, drugs and a plethora of liquor stores on every corner. … I don’t believe that the true meaning of this nation’s creed was to move black people from one form of slavery to another.”

The NAACP, she observed, is made up of “Democrats who bow to a Democrat master today as they once did over 200 years ago. Once this is realized by the forgotten society, race in this country will be as irrelevant as those who thrive off of it.” Amen, sister.

Allen West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and freshman congressman from Florida who happens to be black, is my people. Unafraid to skewer progressive sacred cows, he speaks boldly against global jihad and its Fifth Column enablers screaming “Islam-o-phobe!” West has also nailed the Congressional Black Caucus as “a monolithic voice that promotes these liberal social welfare policies and programs that are failing in the black community, that are preaching victimization and dependency; that’s not the way that we should go.”

According to U.S. News and World Report’s Kenneth Walsh, President Obama told guests at a private White House dinner that he believed the tea party movement had a “subterranean agenda” of racism against him. But Lt. Col. West summed up the movement’s transcendent, post-racial agenda forthrightly:

“The tea party is a constitutional, conservative grassroots movement — and that’s it. The tea party stands for three things: They want to see effective, efficient constitutional government, they stand for national security, and they stand for free market, free enterprise solutions. That’s it.“

It’s government of, by and for the people — all the people. Not just the ones still shackled by reflexive Democratic Party loyalty. We are beholden not to our skin pigment or ethnic tribes, but to American ideals, tradition, history and faith in the individual.

Three, two, one … RAAAAAAAAAACISTS!

President Obama was supposed to be the first post-racial president.

But as you know, the post-racial era was over before it began.

It’s been left to a generation of multiracial students to pick up the torch. And they’re putting the president to shame.

Via the NYTimes:

Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

They are also using the strength in their growing numbers to affirm roots that were once portrayed as tragic or pitiable.

“I think it’s really important to acknowledge who you are and everything that makes you that,” said Ms. [Laura] Wood, the 19-year-old vice president of the group. “If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘yes — and white.’ People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don’t do it because society tells you that you can’t.”

…Over dinner with Ms. López-Mullins one night, she wondered: “What if Obama had checked white? There would have been an uproar because he’s the first ‘black president,’ even though he’s mixed. I would like to have a conversation with him about why he did that.”

Absent that opportunity, Ms. Wood took her concerns about what Mr. Obama checked to a meeting of the campus chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. last year. Vicky Key, a past president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, who is Greek and black, joined her. The question for discussion was whether Mr. Obama is the first black president or the first multiracial president.

Ms. Key, a senior, remembered someone answering the question without much discussion: “One-drop rule, he’s black.”

“But we were like, ‘Wait!’ ” she said. “That’s offensive to us. We sat there and tried to advocate, but they said, ‘No, he’s black and that’s it.’ Then someone said, ‘Stop taking away our black president.’ I didn’t understand where they were coming from, and they didn’t understand me.”

Whether Mr. Obama is considered black or multiracial, there is a wider debate among mixed-race people about what the long-term goals of their advocacy should be, both on campus and off.

“I don’t want a color-blind society at all,” Ms. Wood said. “I just want both my races to be acknowledged.”

Ms. López-Mullins countered, “I want mine not to matter.”

Screw the hyphens.

And the boxes.

And the color-coded congressional caucuses.

This is the real “No Labels” movement. For the sake of my Filipino-Spanish-Russian-Hungarian all-American children, may it flourish.

***

Flashback: The real leading agent of post-racial hope and change….Ward Connerly.

That didn’t last long.

After exhorting the nation to steer away from discourse that “has become so sharply polarized,” President Obama and his administration will mark Martin Luther King Day by framing Obamacare as a “civil rights victory” (which means if you oppose it, you’re akin to slavery proponents, as Harry Reid posited earlier this year) and by consorting with one of the worst race-hustling demagogues in America, Al Sharpton:

Though it’s officially a holiday, most Obama administration officials will spend the day participating in volunteer activities as part of the National Day of Service.

Here’s a rundown of the schedule of events, as provided by the White House:

– President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are scheduled to participate in a community service project in the Washington area. Vice President Biden and Jill Biden will participate in a community service project in their hometown of Wilmington, Del.

– Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is scheduled to attend the Defense Department’s official observance program in the Pentagon’s auditorium.

– Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is scheduled to speak at the opening convocation of the Howard School of Divinity. Keeping in line with her ongoing defense of the health-care reform law, Sebelius is expected to discuss how the Affordable Care Act is a victory for civil rights, according to the White House.

– Education Secretary Arne Duncan is scheduled to speak at a breakfast hosted by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and will later participate in a service project at Kramer Middle School in Southeast Washington. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is also scheduled to attend the breakfast.

Yes, that Al Sharpton.

How about, in the interest of “healing,” giving the race card a rest?

Through the Bush years, race-card demagoguery escalated to insane levels.

Under Obama, Democrat leaders at the highest levels, government bureaucrats, and “mainstream” journalist enablers pushed it farther:

Harry Reid openly sneered at Hispanic Republicans;

Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson & Company likened Obamacare critics to white supremacists and slave owners;

Journolist members conspired to paint Jeremiah Wright’s critics as racists;

MSNBC attacked conservatives who bought Sarah Palin’s book as paranoid white Tea Partiers;

Charlie Rangel attacked NYPD officers as racists who would arrest President Obama if he weren’t surrounded by Secret Service agents;

Former House Democratic whip James Clyburn played the race card over earmarks;

The FCC played the race card to expand its regulatory powers over the Internet;

The Congressional Black Caucus invoked the race-card shield to deflect widespread corruption charges against its members;

Liberal minority mobsters played ethnicity police against GOP Florida Sen. Marco Rubio;

Democrat Rep. Loretta Sanchez pulled out a divisive mega-race card to whip up Hispanics’ anti-Vietnamese fervor;

DREAM Act radicals bitterly accused opponents of xenophobia and race traitorism;

Progressives led the race-card attacks on the Tea Party from day one;

An NPR commentator cheered the fact that Tucson massacre suspect Jared Loughner was a “gringo;”

And the NAACP has morphed into the National Association for the Advancement of Coddled People.

For starters.

On this day of reflection about the need to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, I can’t put it any better than this black C-SPAN caller who spoke truth to race-hustling power in September…

And from Jerome Hudson, who wrote “A Black Man Goes to Glenn Beck’s Rally,” for Human Events:

Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.

I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.

At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.

“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”

One of the older black women in the group asked me if I felt like I was “selling out” for being one of the “tokens” in the Beck rally crowd?

I laughed and said “Ma’am, Al Sharpton is a pretender. He is going to tell you to pretend that the color of your skin matters. He is going to ask you to ignore the now overwhelming proof that 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, blacks are now destroying each other faster than the KKK could have dreamed.”

As I walked away, the group stood frozen, not knowing how to reply.

Later, as Sharpton preached a divisive message void of actual solutions on how to “close the education and economic gap” in the “black community,” Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, invoked the spirit of her slain uncle proclaiming, “I too have a dream, that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God.”

Her comments on restoring the “foundation of the family” in America were met, not with boos, but with a thunderous applause.

(What bigots those white folks! Having the audacity to cheer Dr. King’s niece like that. Racists the whole lot of them!)

I was probably the only 24-year old black college student in the crowd. It’s hard to know, because we had over 300,000 people there. But that didn’t matter to me. As we all stood hand-in-hand, American shoulder to American shoulder, our myriad faces streaked with tears as we sang “Amazing Grace.” It was a moment I will be proud to tell my grandkids about one day.

What that moment taught me is this: Something profound is happening in America that runs far deeper than politics. The ground is shifting, and it’s in freedom’s direction.

Let’s hope.

If it’s Tuesday (or Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, etc., etc.), it’s Political Correctness Run Amok Day in America’s education establishment.

The latest salvo? A publishing house will release p.c.-policed versions of both The Adventures of Huck Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the words “nigger” and “Injun” deleted.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.”

Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”

…Including the table of contents, the slur appears 219 times in Finn.

The tiresome war on Mark Twain’s novels is older than Al Sharpton’s hair grease. I’m reprinting a piece I wrote about the whitewashers’ attempt to expunge the word “nigger” from Huck Finn in 2001. America’s schoolchildren have been robbed by ignorant censors who are too busy counting Twain’s words to understand them and feckless educators too lazy to teach them.

But, hey, at least they’ll have their laptops!
***

The book burners against Mark Twain
August 24, 2001
Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate

Mark Twain once observed that “We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.” That’s precisely why the muddle-headed movement to ban Twain and his greatest work, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” persists like gangrene.

The Left’s assault on Twain took a literal turn recently in New Jersey. Last month, the mayor of Atlantic City tore down a fiberglass statue of the 19th-century author that had been erected at the intersection of the Atlantic City Boardwalk and Missouri Avenue. The statue was part of new tourist attraction campaign using replicas of state landmarks and celebrities to decorate each block of the famed Boardwalk. In May, vandals smashed and pummeled Twain’s face beyond recognition.

“There were some concerns raised about the appropriateness of Mark Twain,” Atlantic City Mayor James Whelan explained after deep-sixing the battered statue. “Rather than offend anybody, we decided to put him back in storage.” Feelings, nothing more than feelings, did Twain in.

Twain’s knee-jerk Jersey critics said the Missouri-born icon dishonored the heritage of Chicken Bone Beach, a section of the Jersey shore where blacks were segregated until the 1950s. “It’s truly disgraceful that a writer who used the n-word to describe African Americans has taken center stage at Chicken Bone Beach,” William Marsh, president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told the Atlantic City Press.

Ah, yes. The “n-word.” Twain used it in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” 215 times, we are ceaselessly reminded by censors who are too busy counting Twain’s words to understand them. Ignore the book-burning mob chanting “racism.” This novel remains one of the most brilliant and moving anti-slavery tracts ever written.

For the increasing number of Americans who have not read the book, here’s a brief summary: The novel follows the geographic and moral journey of young Huck Finn, who navigates the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, Jim. As their friendship deepens through a series of shared misadventures, Huck’s eyes are opened to the evils of slavery and racism. The novel climaxes when the boy defies his culture’s rampant bigotry and resolves to rescue Jim from his captors.

Two gifted black writers, Booker T. Washington and Ralph Ellison, understood Twain’s medium and message. Washington wrote that Twain “succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for Jim.” In creating Jim’s character, the moral center of the book, Washington asserted that Twain had “exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the negro people.” Ellison noted similarly that “Huckleberry Finn knew, as did Mark Twain, that Jim was not only a slave but a human being (and) a symbol of humanity … and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town.”

Twain opposed racial inequality in many of his works of fiction and non-fiction, and came to reject slavery after moving East, marrying into an abolitionist family, and meeting Frederick Douglass. Twain used the vernacular of the antebellum South in “Huck Finn” not to denigrate black people, but to keep it real. Whitewashing the word “nigger” out of the book’s dialogue would have played into the hands of those who prefer to sanitize history than confront it.

“You can’t just say he was writing how people talk, and overlook what he wrote,” the NAACP’s William Marsh said last week as he cheered the removal of Twain’s statue overlooking Chicken Bone Beach. Yet, that’s exactly what the anti-Twain marauders have done. Could Twain ever have imagined such a farcical fate — banned on bookshelves and now the Boardwalk by literary Neanderthals?

Marsh and his ilk could do the world much more good by heeding Twain’s timeless advice: “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

***

Author Harry Stein recounts how his high school-age son stood up to the racial grievance-mongers:

As a high school sophomore, he had an English teacher, a white liberal, who began the unit on Huckleberry Finn by announcing that, though he was obliged to teach it, he wasn’t happy about it. It was a “racist” book, he said, the word “n*gger” appearing with appalling frequency. There has, of course, been a lot of this lately. Twain’s masterpiece, a work not only famously cited by Ernest Hemingway as the progenitor of “all modern American literature” but widely esteemed as the most moving attack on racism ever written, routinely appears on lists put out by groups like the ACLU and People For the American Way of works under most sustained assault by book banners—a target, as columnist Michele Malkin succinctly observes, of those “too busy counting Twain’s words to understand them.”

Indeed, Twain himself wrote that he intended Huck’s growing recognition of Jim’s humanity to reflect the nation’s ongoing struggle with slavery’s legacy of deeply embedded racism. For any even semi-sentient reader, it is all there in the pivotal scene where Huck agonizes over whether to send the letter he’s written to Jim’s owners betraying the runaway slave, knowing that, as the beliefs of the time had it, failing to do so will mean forfeiting his soul: “I was a-trembling because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell,’ and I tore it up.”

“Are you calling me a racist?” my son demanded, deeply aggrieved.

My son, already very familiar with the Twain classic, raised his hand and told the teacher that, in fact, it was an anti-racist book—indeed, one of the most powerful ever written. Thus began an increasingly heated back-and-forth that went on for a good 15 minutes, culminating with the teacher saying, “It’s clear you have to work on your racial sensitivity.” “Are you calling me a racist?” my son demanded, deeply aggrieved. When the teacher turned away, refusing to answer, he stalked out of class. He returned home from school that day remarking: “Well, I’m starting out with a C in that class, and working down from there”—a prophecy that proved, alas, all too accurate. But, as I told the Dallas crowd, I was never prouder of him in my life.

Ever since I heard that the NAACP was doing a study on Tea Party racism, I’ve been on pins and needles not knowing which way it would fall. As a Tea Party type, I’ve been anticipating finding out if my pre-assigned racial prejudice is overt, subconscious, genetic or merely intermittent and completely by choice.

Shockingly, and against all expectations, the NAACP has cleared the Tea Party of all charges of not being racist.

From the New York Times:

The nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization declares the Tea Party “permeated with concerns about race” in a new report that is likely to reignite a feud between the two groups.

The report by the NAACP, released Wednesday morning, argues that Tea Party groups “have given platform to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots,” and have attracted white nationalists looking for recruits.

“The Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement who are in their numerical majority, angry middle class white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them,” argues the report, called Tea Party Nationalism.

Written by Leonard Ziskind, an author who has written extensively on white nationalism, the report looks at what it calls six nationwide Tea Party networks at the core of the movement. It says that leaders of all but one — FreedomWorks, a libertarian group in Washington headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey – have raised questions about President Obama’s birth certificate or have ties to white supremacist groups.

Wow. Imagine how racist the Tea Party would be if they had Al Sharpton on board. And how come Helen Thomas hasn’t joined yet?

But oddly enough, even though most Tea Partiers are angry, racist white people, the majority of them are pretty good folks:

And a foreword from the group’s president, Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes that the vast majority of Tea Party supporters “are sincere, principled people of good will.”

Hey, he left out clean and articulate with no caucasian dialect.

Even though Mr. Jealous was just one step away from saying “some of my best friends are white,” do “sincere, principled people of good will” participate in political movements headed up by racists and bigots? All I’m saying is that if Tea Partiers were that susceptible to misleading suggestion, they’d probably be Democrats.

Rhetorical question of the day: Do you think the New York Times would ever dare publish a story entitled “Tea Party releases report on NAACP” — especially without offering somebody from the NAACP a rebuttal quote?

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

I’ve shared many stories about being a minority conservative with you.

We’re reviled by the Left for our “betrayal” of our supposed tribes — accused of being Uncle Toms, Aunt Tomasinas, House Niggas, puppets of the White Man, Oreos, Sambos, coconuts, bananas, sellouts, and whores.

This is how the ethnic tribalist left rolls.

But fiercely individualist and equipped with mighty thick skin, most fellow minority conservatives I know rise above the plantation mentality and brush off liberal crabs in the bucket viciously trying to hold onto dissenters “of color.”

In Florida, GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio has been subjected to the Uncle Tom and coconut smears.

That’s par for the course. What’s remarkable now is that pathetic “independent” loser Charlie Crist is actually bragging about an endorsement from an organization that defines people solely by their ethnicity. (Hat tip: Terry Ann Online)

From Crist’s website:

La Gaceta Endorses Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate
Friday, October 8th, 2010

Prominent Trilingual Newspaper Endorses Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate, urges Florida voters to unite against Marco Rubio

LA GACETA

This is a most unusual race that is drawing national attention. Former Florida Speaker of the House Marc Rub (we have stripped Marco Rubio of his Hispanicness and the vowels from his name) is the Republican nominee and faces Congressman Kendrick Meek, who is the Democratic nominee, and both are being challenged by Governor Charlie Crist, who is no party’s nominee. Let’s also not forget the other 10 candidates.

Their names are irrelevant.

This race draws national attention because of its national importance. A Rub win here could change the balance of the Senate. It would give the Tea Partiers a big win with their most mainstream candidate. It also could set the direction of Florida for years to come. If Rub wins, he’ll get 12 years in the Senate which he’ll parlay into eight years as governor and then a run for the White House. His unbridled ambition and no-moral-constraints policy positions make Marc Rub one dangerous hombre.

What bothers us the most about Rub is that he’s turned his back on his Hispanic family, and that’s unacceptable.

The endorsement goes on to tediously refer to “Rub” and attacks him for taking policy positions contrary to the “Hispanic family” mob.

Let’s hope Florida resoundingly rejects such identity politics demagoguery and lets Crist sink to the bottom of the crab bucket. It won’t come soon enough.

***

Commenter Lockstein13:

This “La Gaceta” endorsement – when translated into Standard English – sounds a lot like “They want to take away our seat.”

Gee, I dunno why, but that sounds sooooooooooo familiar.

Yes.

***

Latest poll: Rubio up…

In the Florida U.S. Senate race, Republican Marco Rubio is running away with a commanding 44 – 30 percent likely voter lead over Gov. Charlie Crist, running as an independent, with Democrat U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek third with 22 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.