Now the Washington Post , being a consummately professional source of objective news, tries to avoid taking a side in telling the story of how a government official got fired because of bogus claims of racism , put out by a professional right-wing propagandist in a falsely labeled video. The incident, Karen Tumulty and Krisseh Thompson write,
opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.
Who is to blame for Andrew Breitbart repackaging Shirley Sherrod’s speech to a mixed-race NAACP luncheon about why racism is bad and presenting it as a down-with-whitey address to an “all-black audience”? We all are.
[F]or some on the right, Sherrod’s comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first African American to occupy the White House practices its own brand of racism.
“Narrative” is an awfully nice way of saying “self-pitying bullshit.”
Suspicions on the right that Obama has a hidden agenda—theories stoked in part by conservative media and sometimes involving race—have been a subplot of his rise, beginning almost as soon as he announced his campaign. They lie beneath many of the questions that conservatives on the political fringes have raised about his motives, his legitimacy and even his citizenship.
On the other hand, some of the president’s allies on the left have at times reflexively seen racism as the real force behind the vehemence of the opposition against Obama’s policies and decisions.
Every issue has two sides. Some people believe that an Ivy-educated establishment striver who put Wall Street loyalists like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of the economy is really a Muslim Communist demagogue and a sleeper agent who used time-travel powers to forge his own birth announcement. Other people believe that those people’s passion might be grounded in something other than the president’s performance and policy agenda.
People sure do disagree about politics!
