REID’S “MACACA” MOMENT…MAYBE THE PREZ SHOULD INVITE HIM FOR A BEER
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=517744
‘Macaca’ A La Reid
Posted 01/11/2010 07:23 PM ET
Leadership: The top Senate Democrat has exposed the hypocrisy of modern liberalism through his racially insensitive remarks. Trent Lott lost his post for humoring an old man. How will Robert Byrd’s party honor him?
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has called for the resignation of Harry Reid as Senate majority leader over remarks published in a new book calling then-presidential candidate Barack Obama a “light-skinned” black man “with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” If the Lott standard still applies, Reid should step down.
Reid’s propensity to shoot from the lip is legendary. He recently compared opponents of his health care reform bill, written in secret behind closed doors, to supporters of slavery. But unlike former Senate Majority Leader Lott, Reid’s remarks will be excused and he’ll likely keep his job.
Steele is an expert on racism and racially insensitive remarks. He has been pelted with the symbolic epithet “Oreo,” and during his successful run for Maryland lieutenant governor in 2002, the Democratic president of the Maryland senate, Thomas Miller, called him an “Uncle Tom.” Miller apologized, but he did not lose his job.
“Oh yeah, there’s a big double standard here,” Steele said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” If a Republican made the same remarks, Steele said, Democrats would be “screaming for his head.” Just as they screamed for, and got, the head of Lott.
Lott lost his post for saying, at South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, that the country would have been better served had it followed Mississippi’s lead in voting for Thurmond in his 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign.
Back then, Thurmond was a Democrat in an era that saw Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia serving as a “Grand Kleagle” in the Ku Klux Klan. Byrd led an 62-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sen. Al Gore, father of the former vice president, voted against the act. We look forward to Byrd’s 100th birthday tribute.
You better believe there’s a big double standard here. In remarks made to the New York Observer about his Democratic opponents for the 2008 presidential nomination, Vice President Joe Biden said: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Imagine if Sarah Palin had said that.
Democrats gained control of the Senate in 2006 by knocking off incumbent Sen. George Allen in Virginia, exploiting his alleged use of the “n” word in college and the word “macaca” in reference to a volunteer for his Senate race opponent as examples of the GOP’s insensitivity to minorities, if not outright racism.
On Feb. 11, 2005, the day before he was elected party chief, Howard Dean asked a gathering of black Democrats: “You think the Republican National Committee could get this many black people into a single room?” To roaring laughter, the former governor of Vermont delivered the punch line: “Only if they had the hotel staff in there.” Har, har.
Racial transgressions, real or imagined, are a capital offense when done by Republicans. But for Democrats it’s a shrug and a “Whatever.” For Reid, it’s another explanation of why his approval rating is in the 30s and why he may lose his Senate seat this year.
Maybe President Obama can have Reid over for a beer.
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