Jonah Goldberg‘s latest column documents some of the liberal punditry’s most bizarre references to alleged racism on the right.
Toward the end of the presidential campaign, various liberal pundits — a great many of them born after the signing of the Civil Rights Act — thought it a brilliant and damning indictment to note that Mitt Romney ran strong in states that once constituted the Confederacy. When Barack Obama won, Jon Stewart conceded that at least Romney won “most of the Confederacy.”
These states committed the obvious sin of voting Republican while the president was black.
Just this week, in an essay for the New York Times, Adolph Reed attacked South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — the first female Indian-American governor in America — for appointing Representative Tim Scott to retiring senator Jim DeMint’s seat. Scott is a black man and a conservative Tea Party favorite.
So obviously, this is a very clever ploy to restore Jim Crow.
“Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment,” Reed writes, “so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests.”
That’s it exactly. Indeed, that’s what the Tea Party was always about: undermining black interests.
When Herman Cain — another inconveniently black man — was the overwhelming preference among Tea Party activists for the Republican presidential nomination, a historian writing in the New York Times suggested that Cain could be seen as proof the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan lives on.
