Argghhh. I'm reading Balloon Juice today and finally decided to move them over into my Fake Progressives folder. That'll show them all right, all right.
John Cole has done yet another blog post telling leftists just that well we are asking too much of Obama, or unfair, or that we are racist in our criticisms of his. Then right on cue he links to a New York Times Op Ed Ismael Reed saying essentially the same thing. That blacks and hispanics know when to be quite and, I guess take what they are given, something that apparently white folks never learned. Or forgot I guess.
The comment section is a free for all, something that one wouldn't have seen six months ago at Balloon Juice. Now Cole is complaining about the folks coming in to argue about whether or not Obama has done what he could or should do.
I'm actually not sure what people are arguing concerning criticism by white folks of Obama being as he is African American. Generally, at least out loud, they are not arguing that any criticism of him is racist, but I see them coming close to that. One of the suggestions was that Obama is like the political Jackie Robinson and has to hold is temper at all times else he be called an Angry Black Man (apparently the 60s never happened). Another, is that the African American (called AA in the comments which confused me quite a bit for a while) community will react, as a group, negatively to too much criticism and to primary him. Another person ran a time line of how he tried to save the middle class tax cuts while ending them on income over $250,000.00, of course the time line started this summer.
The interesting thing about these discussions is that they completely ignore all that has happened in the last two and a half years. That is what Obama has actually or chosen not to do or who he has put the muscle to. He has not arraigned himself with a cabinet of dashiki clad black radicals like Putney Swope. He appointed the most conventional of main stream thinkers[?] around, when he wasn't reappointing Bush republicans.
Yet his defenders seem to be completely unaware of this it is as if they have been living in a parallel universe where there is an effective Obama who cares about the poor and middle class. It is if one is talking past these people. One tries to point out just what he has done or failed to do and the argument is well if he had tried it wouldn't have worked so he had to do something else that didn't work either.
1 comment:
I'm actually not sure what people are arguing concerning criticism by white folks of Obama being as he is African American.
I think it's a bit like what happened with O.J. Simpson - ordinary black people assumed he was getting treated the same way they sometimes (or often, depending on how bad their luck is) get treated. So that's it now - we expect more out of him than we would out of a white person.
I sometimes feel like pointing out that he's only half black, so I only expect 1.5 times as much out of him, but I doubt that would sway many people...
Of course, I actually was expecting him to do better than this white guy, but I don't think that's unfair. One might say it's the soft bigotry of low expectations. Which, I should add, he hasn't met.
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