Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton sparked a Martin Luther King Day political firestorm yesterday by describing the GOP-controlled Congress as a "plantation" during a speech before an African-American congregation in Harlem.
"When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about," Clinton (D-N.Y.) told an audience at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ during an event sponsored by the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network.
"It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard," she added to thunderous applause.
You have to have real contempt for your audience to say something as childish as this. Anyone can introduce legislation into the House. It's just that you need a majority to have your ideas passed. 90 miles from America a real plantation exists; a virtual slave state. Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte and Charles Rangel love that plantation owner. They call him Fidel. That's about as far as you have to travel to compare to the old south to the modern world.
To compare our representative democracy and the Republican majority with slavery should receive a chorus of boos or at least silent disbelief. Hillary has no intention of lifting that audience up by speaking well of America, of the opportunity here or of how far Black America has come since the 1960s. She uses the occasion to invoke easy metaphors that conjur emotion all the while talking about how George Bush has divided America.
GWB spoke once about the soft bigotry of low expectations. It's obvious that Hillary and her ilk campaign with that soft bigotry at the top of their minds.
3 comments:
...and you know what I'm talking about.
(silence)
Because you're black.
(silence)
Like the slaves on the plantations.
(silence)
Run by the Republicans.
(silence)
I would have been on your side.
(murmuring)
Because Democrats care about Negroes.
(applause)
When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about.
(a lone black man stands)
Do you mean they treat you like a bunch of dumb niggers who don't know nothing?
(Senator gasps)
Well, no, I, uh, ha ha, wow, (aside to aide) maybe we should go with the lamprey eel metaphor.
(collects herself)
What I mean is that they treat us like a bunch of Niggers who really ARE smart, but see, they don't know that, because, I mean Negroes, because they never, or African-Americans, I should say...Do you know what a lamprey eel is?
But Brokeback Mountain and Commander in Chief are winning all the awards, so see, America is making progress after all.
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