Is Turnabout Not Fair Play?

Today's big news is the alleged racist (reverse racist) bus beating in Illinois of the white kid by several blacks. Before that it was Kanye J. West humiliating a young white girl at a national awards show, and over the weekend we saw Michael Jordan and Serena Williams showing their rears (well not literally) in public forums. Only the school bus story was spun as racist, and the offending cops are now backtracking.

Yet here's Newsweek's Susan Jacoby laying it down hard on those teabaggin' crackers for sowing the seeds of discontent and racism:

I am also sick of hearing the talking heads point out that liberals can be just as "uncivil" as these right-wing haters bringing loaded guns to crowded rallies and praying for the president's death. The "liberals are just as bad" mantra is nonsense. Historically, anti-rational movements have existed on both the left and the right, but it's all coming from the right today. I hated President George W. Bush's policies, but I didn't hate him personally. Were any liberal congressmen yelling "you lie" at Bush during his State of the Union speeches? Were liberal Unitarian pastors and Jewish rabbis delivering sermons in which they prayed for Bush's death? No, we liberals were doing what we generally do--expressing our dissent in writing. Real wimps, we are.

Is this supposed to be about healing? Aside from the obvious fact she's spent the past eight years cloistered on the Isle of Pitcairn, foraging for coconuts ala Tom Hanks while building giant strawmen, that's a rather odd way of sowing the seeds of content. Loaded guns? How many loaded guns were carried by black men amongst the 800,000 70,000 tea partiers (or does she prefer the more civil "tea baggers") at the DC event? Were they part of that zero arrest figure?

Not to mention that Ms. Jacoby's bully pulpit contains no laptop with an internet feed so she could Google "Cheney Afghanistan death wish Huffington Post" and similar things about contractors dangling from bridges in Falluja or political pie throwing. No, chastising political enemies using feigned moral outrage and myopic thinking coupled with a lack of historical reference is so much more fun, in a Christian kind of way of course.

We now live in a world where Obama can grandstand about Professor Gates and a racist cop, or call Kanye West a jackass, or call his own grandmother a typical white person while trying to deflect from sitting in reverend Wright's church for years, and there is no outrage whatsoever from the moral authority police. Bizarrely, some of these events are even blamed on white GOP America (funny, it wasn't always white GOP America before the election).

Only in this bizarroworld can a mild-mannered white Congressman from South Carolina call out the president for dissembling on health care, which has nothing to do with race whatsoever, and be labeled a racist, get a censure, and end up the crux of columns about the death of civility in American culture. As if Van Jones and the above-named people don't exist. And they don't in the court of racial opinion and political correctness otherwise known as the Elite media.

Evidently Ms. Jacoby and others haven't stopped to consider that this double standard they so tirelessly defend, now in nuclear warhead mode in the age of Obama, could be part of the reason why people have taken to the streets. That doesn't mean all those people are correct, it only means they are frustrated and tired of being whipped by arrogant bullies- whether on a bus or while reading the morning paper.

MORE 9/15/09

This is how a real writer does it (VDH).