“What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshiped “false gods.” He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtoreth, and the like; probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah; he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods.”
--George Orwell,
1984
Whether you like, despise or are impartial to Rush Limbaugh, the latest effort, headed by the two leading blacksploitation flimflammers, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, to excoriate and crucify Limbaugh as a racist based on things he
did not say is troubling. Like the Party member in the above quote from George Orwell’s
1984, Sharpton, Jackson and their ilk need no longer be bothered with facts or consideration of other points of view. Their personal orthodoxy trumps fact. And perhaps more importantly, their ravings get ratings.
If the Sharptons and Jacksons were marginalized by rational and civil society, like the KKK is for example, their fallacious rabble-rousing could be, if not silenced, dismissed as the ranting of malcontents. But, bafflingly, they are not marginalized. They run for the office of the President of the United States. They are sought after as honest pundits and their contaminated opinions are given credence by the media. They host Saturday Night Live. They yuck it up on the talk show circuit. They counsel the President of the United States.
The New York Times on Al Sharpton:
Mr. Sharpton is best-known for the Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he insisted that a 15-year-old black girl had been abducted and raped by a band of white men practicing Irish Republican Army rituals. In fact she had made up the story to protect herself from her violent stepfather. 
But at Freddy's, Mr. Sharpton was even more malevolent. He turned a landlord-tenant dispute between the Jewish owner of Freddy's and a black subtenant into a theater of hatred. Picketers from Mr. Sharpton's National Action Network, sometimes joined by "the Rev." himself, marched daily outside the store, screaming about "bloodsucking Jews" and "Jew bastards" and threatening to burn the building down.
After weeks of increasingly violent rhetoric, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, took Mr. Sharpton's words about ousting the "white interloper" to heart. He ran into the store shouting, "It's on!" He shot and wounded three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew. Then he set the fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one African-American--a security guard whom protesters had taunted as a "cracker lover." Smith then fatally shot himself.
Eight people died, and so evidently did the conscience of liberal Democrats. It was Al Sharpton who had the honor of asking the first question at last week's debate, held within hailing distance of the Freddy's massacre.
And he has the audacity to speak of a “moral victory for America?” This sweat-suited standing joke makes it to the podium of a Presidential debate with the privilege of asking the first question with hardly any reproach from the media? In this case of attacking Rush Limbaugh based on fabricated comments, his continued influence on public discourse and opinion is outrageous and says something very bad about where this country, supposedly in the post-racial era of Obama, is on the matter of race.
Writing about the Tawana Brawley controversy, a Daily Kos writer recalled “one professor earnestly telling me that even if Tawana’s story was false, it was still a crime because it represented the “mythic” truth of what had been done to African American women in America.” How does one begin to debate such a ridiculous position? And I hear arguments approaching this sort of senselessness made all the time on news programs, talk shows, and in print. Worse, such views are usually validated by virtue of a squirming accommodation or complacency.
Organizer of the Rainbow Coalition, Jesse Jackson referred to the current POTUS as a “n____” and said he wanted to cut his “nuts off.” He has said that “Zionism is a kind of poisonous weed that is choking Judaism” and that he is “sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust.” In an interview with a Washington Post reporter, the mumbling, identity politics self-promoter Jackson called Jews “Hymies” and referred to New York City as “Hymietown.”
Why is this bigot and adulterer given the platform and air time to lecture the rest of us on race and morality?
So. Free speech is a right for black activists, scholars, and any and all minorities but not white radio show hosts (Don Imus, Limbaugh) or the rest of us? And this is not an isolated incident. Like ambulance chasers looking for a rainmaker, Jackson and Sharpton have a history of rushing to prove racism even where there isn’t any, like the Duke Rape Case. It’s good for business and a week’s worth of TV appearances, which only further legitimize the two provocateurs in the public realm.
Political correctness, identity politics, multiculturalism, and relativism—with a dash of white guilt or the fear of being labeled a racist—have bullied otherwise rational people into timid reticence. They know that even bringing up the hypocrisy in modern race relations is likely to end with a browbeating of accusations by the likes of Sharpton and Jackson, or maybe a college hipster just out of a women’s or black studies course. Because no matter your intention or context (or whether you even said anything at all as in the case of Limbaugh,) you can find yourself a “white interloper” in a second then made to defend yourself against a mere accusation. It’s a pretty sweet deal Jackson and Sharpton have worked out for themselves: exploit or attack whatever, whoever, whenever and if questioned in any way, which is rare, cry “racist!” Unfortunately, this witch hunting tactic is now main stream. This tactic has seeped into our schools, board rooms, sports, beauty pageants, play grounds, and so on and so forth.
I believe everyone is prejudiced to some degree, however slight. I don’t believe this implies racism. Most people like and get along with most people, regardless of race, most of the time but Jackson and Sharpton don’t promote but undermine the decent civility that exists in most Americans’ day to day interactions. Their hypocrisy is not “honest dialogue.” It’s petrifying—it hardens natural civility into cold suspicion and needlessly foments defensiveness.
Their newsworthiness is perhaps more disturbing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/jackson.htm
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087557
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004192
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/24/14519/262/634/641103
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