Last updated on February 7th, 2013 at 11:46 pm
George Will’s Racist Flop Sweat: Americans Won’t Fire Obama Because He’s Black
Proving that all he can see in Obama is his skin color, George Will had decided that the only reason Americans aren’t firing Obama is because he’s black. This not only proves that George Will doesn’t understand the glass ceiling of racism, but also that he has bought into the fictional President Obama presented within conservative echo chambers and doesn’t get out much.
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Will wrote:
Obama’s administration is in shambles, yet he is prospering politically. This may not, however, entirely be evidence of the irrationality of the electorate. Something more benign may be at work. ..
Perhaps a pleasant paradox defines this political season: That Obama is African-American may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up.
Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African-American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.
Poor George Will just can’t wrap his mind around the idea that maybe, just maybe, race has nothing to do with it.
Maybe the country likes Obama. That’s what the polls show. Does Will also buy into the idea that all the polls are somehow biased? Maybe Americans remember how this economy got here. Polls show they correctly blame Bush for his own mess, and not Obama. Maybe Americans know that Republicans have done nothing to fix the economy or create jobs. Maybe the country trusts Obama. Polls show they do, much more than they trust Romney.
Maybe Mitt Romney is a bad candidate selling a failed ideology and lying about it to boot, and maybe the public isn’t as dumb as Will had hoped.
Poor Will is obsessed with the racial bias he feels the first African American president is enjoying. We all know that’s how isms work. It’s not as if any other President had to show his long form birth certificate, but hey. The President is getting all kinds of breaks because he’s black and Will is resentful.
If only Romney were black, right? It wasn’t too long ago that we were listening to another privileged white man lament his failure to get the perks of being a minority, as Romney told his wealthy supporters that he would be elected if only he were Latino, because you know how easy the Latinos have it.
If only Romney had been born to poor-middle income parents and was of mixed race. Think of the benefits! Sure, Romney wouldn’t have been able to go to the fancy schools he went to, because his grades weren’t hot enough to get a scholarship, and he wouldn’t have had his dad’s stocks to live off of, but still, we all know how easy things are for black people.
Will believes that the first half black President is winning because minorities get the pity vote. This is the same kind of thinking that blames Americans for not wanting to “sacrifice” more so that the rich can pay less. The rich, privileged white men are simmering with resentment that things are changing. It’s not fair, they whine. They only like Obama because he’s black!
Is there even one remotely serious conservative pundit left who isn’t prone to frequent bouts of self-indulgent self pity brought on by a refusal to face reality?
What Will is really saying is You People would fire Obama if you weren’t afraid to because of his skin color. That is the only reason he can come up with to avoid looking at the most obvious reason Obama is winning.
He won’t admit the truth: Obama is the better candidate.
Obama has a better foreign policy. Obama has a better temperament. Obama has a better character. Obama puts the middle class and poor before millionaires. Obama doesn’t hate half of the country. Obama’s job proposals would add 2 million jobs, if only the Republicans would stop obstructing it.
So, it’s tough to judge Obama on the economy when he’s getting hammered on it deliberately by the GOP, which doesn’t mind taking us all down further into the pit of despair in order to prop up their trickle down lies one more time. And why are Republicans destroying the economy? Because they thought they could use it to keep Obama a one-term president. They are shocked that you didn’t buy it.
Obama has been an extraordinary president. But if you tend to think that invading the wrong country on a lie and leaving the folks in Katrina’s wake to die makes a good president, maybe you just can’t get it. If you look at it that way, you realize that Will must think that Bush’s unpaid for wars and unpaid for Medicare Part D were an example of a winning presidency; we didn’t fire Bush, after all, and he’s not black. What gives?
There’s no more pathetic violin than the self-pitying elite whining about how their privilege is being eclipsed by the first minority to be President, who happened to make it on his merit. But even this, they manage to blame on the black guy. You truly have to be ensconced in white privilege to not understand how crazy it is for the folks on top to be blaming minority status for their own failure to make it in the free market of competition – a market that inherently favors the privileged, by the way. They need to stop sucking their thumbs and come to the party with new ideas.
There’s no helping these people, and George Will is a bright man, which makes this even more disturbing. Denial, self-pity and resentment do not a viable party platform make. We need a serious conservative party, and this is not it.
That rank waft of racism is sadly George Will, who can’t see beyond Obama’s skin color to even discuss his policies honestly, let alone admit the result of his own party’s ideological failures as evinced in Mitt Romney. Will refuses to look in the mirror, for that is where the real wreckage hides.
The Republican Party is dying a slow painful death, and with each gasp of air comes another noxious blast of self pity wrapped in resentment.
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