Same speculation fallacy all over again.
Is there an echo
echoecho in this cavernc
averncavern?
The question remains unmolested:
where's the racism?
The coverage of presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden’s racist remarks about Senator Barack Obama demonstrates a blatant media double standard. If a Republican had condescendingly referred to a black person as “clean,” “bright” and “articulate,” he or she would have been branded as a racist and banished from public life. But Biden’s political career had to be saved at any cost. Why?
A quick look at the news from the past week provides an answer. Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been organizing opposition to the Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq. That means he has to be given a pass, even though this is the second time in less than a year that he has made disparaging remarks about a member of a minority group. He previously claimed that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” This comment was caught on C-SPAN and can be
seen on YouTube.
For our media, destroying the Bush policy in Iraq takes precedence over making an issue of Biden’s racism.
Biden has been described by Robert Guttman, the Director of the Center on Politics & Foreign Relations at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., as “the most knowledgeable, articulate and concerned” spokesman for the Democratic Party on foreign policy.
On the Huffington Post website, Guttman
declared that “no one doubts he has the expertise in foreign affairs to hit the floor running if he became our next president.”
For these reasons, which are shared by many in the liberal media, Biden’s racism must be excused. That is why this supremely articulate individual must now be transformed into someone who makes “verbal slips” on race. Even on the “conservative” Fox News, Brit Hume said Biden’s problem was that he talked too much, not that he was a racist.
However, when then-Republican Senator and candidate George Allen called an Indian-American a “macaca” during a campaign rally, he was hounded by the media to the point where the controversy contributed to his eventual defeat. Republican Senator Trent Lott’s joking comments that one-time segregationist Strom Thurmond would have been a good president were covered so extensively by the media that Lott was forced to step down from his post as Senate majority leader.
Lott’s “offensive” comments included the remark that “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.” It was obviously intended to make an old man feel good, in contrast to Biden’s denigration of a whole race of people by singling out one as civilized.
Clearly, there is a lower media standard for Democrats, who include Senator Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, and Howard Dean, the Democratic chairman who once remarked that “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”
But Biden’s big mouth does stand out. His rhetoric suggests that he pays close attention to how members of minority groups look, smell or sound. He exhibits the classic behavior of a racist.
At least it can be said in this case that Biden was speaking his own mind. He was forced out of the presidential race in 1988 when he was caught plagiarizing a speech from a British politician. That scandal is rarely, if ever, mentioned by the media when discussing Biden’s record and career as an “articulate” foreign policy spokesman.