Race Issues

Conservatives are more racist than the population at large, and John McCain plans to "viciously" stir up racism to beat Barack Obama.  That is John Heilemann's belief, as propounded in his New York magazine article, The Color-Coded Campaign, and spelled out in a CNN appearance today.  The author even broke out the trite "Wonder Bread America" epithet to describe that portion of the country not…

Just one paragraph tucked toward the end of a column.  But Judith Warner's words offer a revealing insight into how liberals view economics and the world at large. In the lefty mindset, making it isn't a matter of doing or making something of value.  It comes down instead to contriving to get a piece of the action, a share of the wealth that some undefined other has created in some undescribed…

Do you know who the Associated Press thinks is secretly hoping for a Barack Obama win? Why, it's "racist groups," dontcha know? See, as the AP reports it, a black man as president couldn't be a more perfect example of how the dark race is takin' over and ruining the white man's world, right? At least, that is according to the AP's favorite go-to racist guy, David Duke, anyway. And what better way…

E-mailer and frequent NB commenter Gary Hall sent me a link to a July 30 LA Times article about how worldwide AIDS deaths are down 10%. In discussing the improvement, it's hysterical in one sense, but very sad in another, to watch how reporter Thomas H. Maugh II studiously avoided using the word "abstinence" (the A-word), which does not appear even once in his entire piece. Just to be sure no…

Somebody call the Epidemiology Branch at the NIH.  It's looking as if we're on the verge of a full-fledged epidemic of Obamania.  As we noted here, NYT columnist Bob Herbert suffered an acute bout of the malady on live national TV yesterday, seeing visions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Washington Monument where none existed in the McCain  Obama/Spears/Hilton ad. By yesterday evening, Keith…

When Bob Herbert, a columnist for the New York Times since 1993, recently charged in his column that the Republican Party deliberately targets black Democrats using ads featuring attractive white women to exploit racial resentment, and claimed as proof that the GOP does not run such ads against opponents who are white, the liberal columnist could have disproved this thesis by consulting a 1994…

Warning: excessive adulation of Barack Obama is harmful to the vision and can in extreme cases cause hallucinations. We're all familiar with how an Obamania overdose produced strange tingling sensations in Chris Matthews.  A new, virulent strain of the affliction has now emerged, claiming its first victim in the person of Bob Herbert, who on live national TV saw visions of the Leaning Tower of…

On Thursday's Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and Newsweek Washington correspondent/MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman went after John McCain for his recent ads attacking Barack Obama, and the Arizona Republican's charge that Obama was "playing the race card" because the Illinois Democrat has repeatedly joked that his opponents will try to discourage people from voting for him…

And I thought David Shuster was in the tank . . . Thank you, Andrea Mitchell.  No, really, I mean it.  Thank you for providing some of the clearest evidence yet of just how much the press corps following Barack Obama has blinders on for its man.  Mitchell has let it be known that "the people covering the campaign" don't think Obama played the race card with his currency crack. Andrea appeared on…

David Shuster surely knows better. Wherever you come down on the issue of who's playing the race card, one thing is glaringly, blindingly, incandescently obvious: when Barack Obama says McCain will point out Obama doesn't look like the other guys on the currency, the Dem candidate is doing much more than making the innocuous point that he is the first black major-party presidential nominee. Yet…

You might say nothing could be more unsurprising than a panel of political pundits admitting the obvious: that Barack Obama is playing the race card when he accuses John McCain of saying the Dem candidate "doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency."But what makes the punditry panel's unanimity notable is that no one would accuse them of being McCain backers, and what's more, that…

After Barack Obama’s more-than-enthusiastic greeting by many attendees at the UNITY convention for minority journalists in Chicago on Sunday, some in the media have expressed outrage that some have now questioned their objectivity, despite the appalled reactions from some of their own peers to the display and the live video shown on CNN (at right).April Yee wrote on Andrew Romano’s blog on…