Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Quote Unquote


Democrat Harry Reid makes an insensitive racial remark regarding then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama. He apologizes and Obama accepts the apology. If that were the end of the story, RedStateVT would have no problems. Politicians tend to speak a lot and they are going to say something stupid occasionally. (Note the one exception here. Vice President Joe Biden speaks a lot and says something stupid most of the time. This explains why he has not been spotted in public for months.) However, let’s look just a little further at the issue of verbal gaffes.

When a Republican says something dumb, Democrats have two immediate reactions. The first is to infer that the remark masks a hidden prejudice and that the speaker is a closet bigot. Note that no one has made such an accusation against Reid. This continues the familiar script that Republicans are racist/sexist/fill-in-the-blank-ist while Democrats are open-minded and warmly embracing of diversity.

The second Democrat response is to call for the resignation of the offender. No Dem calls for Reid to resign, of course, even though he does not deny making the remark. We juxtapose this with the fury and outrage several months ago when Rush Limbaugh was reported to be among a group of investors looking to buy a pro football team. A host of the most scandalous racial utterances attributed to Limbaugh were endlessly circulated and he dropped out of the group. Only guess what? He never said any of the things they said that he said!

A couple of other Democrat responses are worthy of mention. Some Dems have attempted to justify Reid’s miscue by saying that Reid was actually only verbalizing what most people really think. And they call us bigots!

And lastly, during this event Dems have also rolled out an old chestnut that goes like this. Yes, he said something bad, but we can’t get rid of him because he is too important to fill-in-the-blank again. In this instance, Reid gets a pass because he is crucial to Obama’s health care agenda. This kind of situational ethics reminds us of the story of the feminist who reportedly forgave Bill Clinton his womanizing (and offered sexual favors to him) so long as he continued to support abortion rights.

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