The Anti-Obama Gadsden Flag Shows We’re All Hezbollah Now
IN Barack Obama’s Post-racial America, there is no race, there is only racism. Republican congressman from the South, Joe Wilson, heckles Obama during a speech on health reform to a joint session of Congress, belching, “You lie.”
So then former US President and author Jimmy Carter opines:
“There is a feeling among many people in this country that an African-American is not allowed to be president, not allowed to be given the same respect.”
The media world goes into spasm. Obama fields the question on child-rape enthusiast David Letterman’s show Says Barry:
“It’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election.”
But other with vested interests speak up. Spike Lee is invited on Newsnight, the BBC politics show, to opine:
“I never drank that post-racial Kool-Aid. He [President Obama] was not Harry Houdini. He was not going to be ‘abracadabra, presto change-o’ overnight poof, racism disappears. I never thought that.”
Miranda Devine, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, tunes into the din:
The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claimed she could hear the unspoken word ”boy” on Wilson’s lips as he heckled the President – which says more about her inner life than Wilson’s. “…what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: ‘You lie, boy!’ Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”
Anyone else hear boy?
Then there was the Georgetown University sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, who claimed racism was proved by the fact Obama could be applauded for calling the African-Americans rapper Kanye West ”a jackass … But when he calls an anonymous white guy stupid by implication, he has to nearly apologise to the nation. How dare a black man stand in judgment of white intelligence?”
How dare a white man comment on the Cameroon national team, the West Indies or the Dizzee Rascal’s latest hit? How very dare you!
Personally, I tend to agree with President Carter. While certainly not all the anger being publicly vented today can be tied to racism, I believe there is an underlying current of it smoldering [sic] beneath the public discourse and no one dares to mention the pink elephant in the room. Carter was never afraid to speak his mind, which probably cost him a second term as president – Dr Judith Rich, Huff Po.
The headline screams:
COMMENTARY: Carter is right: It smacks of racism
And writing in the Guardian, Daniel Nasaw just knows:
Hundreds of thousands of angry conservatives flocked to Washington on 12 September to oppose Obama’s effort to provide healthcare for all Americans, his pouring of public money into the US economy to save it from collapse, and just about ¬everything else the new president has done or promised to do. The frothing-mad protesters carried signs denouncing the nation’s first African-American president as a Nazi, a socialist, a lump of human waste, the Joker from Batman, and, perhaps most disturbingly, an African witchdoctor.
Maaaaaad. Frothing mouthed. Rabid.
But thousands also carried the flag that is fast becoming a symbol of backlash against the president: a bellicose yellow banner depicting a rattlesnake poised to strike and bearing the slogan, “Don’t tread on me.” Known as the Gadsden flag for its purported creator, Colonel Christopher Gadsden, it was a revolutionary war-era naval standard that was carried into battle during the civil war and flown during both world wars.
Yellow banned with picture on the front held aloft by racist nutters. Where have we seen that before..?
The fury at the protests was palpable – a resentful amalgam of cultural, political and racial animosity levelled at a president…
Among the crowd specific complaints were few, giving the event the feel of a protest against a man and against history rather than any policies. The level of vitriol aimed at the president seemed out of whack with the substance of the grievances. What is it about Obama’s healthcare proposal that makes steam boil out of people’s ears?…
Although the participants in the protest were almost all white, the ¬ reality is more complicated than classic American Jim Crow racism…
In addition, many Americans who would not describe themselves as racists and who claim black acquaintances and listen to black music nevertheless hold deep-seated racial antipathy they are unlikely to express or acknowledge, even to themselves. With its signs and slogans ostensibly aimed at the president’s policies, the anti-Obama movement has given these people what seems like a legitimate way to express their discomfort at seeing a black man from Chicago’s South Side in the White House…
Perhaps the Gadsden flag will similarly re-emerge as a symbol for all Americans, not just reactionary Obama-haters. Next year in South Africa, anyone?
But the last word is with the cartoonist, who delivers this joyous rebuttal…
It’s not that they stick up for freedom and rights – it’s just that they’re on the other side.
Spotter: Barcepundit
Posted: 23rd, September 2009 | In: Key Posts, Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
