The Racism Card: Is Joe Klein a Racist?
DID JOE KLEIN JUST OUT HIMSELF?
Every time Joe Klein (TIME) hears an objection to our president’s hoped for government takeover of the health care industry, he sees the white sheets of the Klan. [Yes, It's Racism...but it's Complicated]
And even though the teabaggers’ pinched , paranoid sensibilities are now being stoked by Boss Rush and the leaders of the Republican party, I take comfort in this: the racists and nativists have always been with us, and they have always lost. They will lose this time, too.
Klein says that Obama has “lowballed” the race issue because “it is divisive, in a reprehensible way”. Which makes us wonder: why does all of the race talk seem to come from Klein’s direction?
Klein tells us how to recognize this complicated racism:
Finally, I should say that the things that scare the teabaggers—the renewed sense of public purpose and government activism, the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism—are among the things I find most precious and exhilarating about this country.
A reader emailed Jonah Goldberg at NRO with the info that Joe Klein lives in Pelham NY.
Pelham, NY. Demographics: 87.33 percent white. 4.57 percent black.
Pelham borders the Bronx, New Rochelle, and Mt. Vernon, all with muchgreater “diversity” that Joe loves. Why did he not choose to live in those places? Someone like Joe Klein might argue that this is a form a racism.
Which puts Klein clearly in the middle of the “racists” he is decrying, by his own definition. Doesn’t seem like Pelham fits the model of “racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism” that Klein finds so “precious and exhilarating”.
NOW, we at DBKP don’t think Klein is really a racist.
But, thankfully, we’re more tolerant–and we’re not using Klein’s own parameters to judge people we don’t know.
We agree that that would not only be “divisive”, but also “reprehensible”.
by Mondo Frazier
image: DBKP file
