CODE WORDS
When Republicans say something a team of scientists could study without finding racism, liberals say the Republicans are using code words.
Not only photos of Paris Hilton and Scott Brown’s pickup truck, but standard Republican positions on small government, low taxes and toughon-crime policies are supposed to be proof of racism. That’s convenient. Since there is nothing objectively racist about these policy stances, liberals explain that they are “dog whistles” “slick racism,” “subtle racism” or “code words” that secretly convey: “I hate black people.”
This is as opposed to liberals who actually make racist statements all the time—but they have good hearts, so it doesn’t count.
We had Biden calling Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Former CBS newsman Dan Rather said the argument against Obama would be that “he’s very articulate… but he couldn’t sell watermelons if you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.” Senator Harry Reid praised Obama for not having a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
But because they are liberals, their use of actually racist phrases becomes code for “I love black people!”
As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel said of the left, while most regimes are judged on their records, only communism is judged only by its promises. Similarly, modern liberals are judged on their motives; conservatives are judged on what liberals claim we really meant.
The Tea Party was held responsible for every single person who showed up at their rallies, including random nuts or liberal infiltrators as if it proved something about the whole movement. Meanwhile, the explosion of sexual assaults, drug overdoses and property damage at Occupy Wall Street events were never thought to impugn the admirable motives of that group. (The first month of Occupy Wall Street protests included more than a dozen sexual assaults; at least half a dozen deaths by overdose, suicide or murder; and millions of dollars in property damage.)
Hordes of young liberal nitwits sport T-shirts featuring Che Guevara, a vile racist who described blacks as “indolent,” spending their “meager wage on frivolity or drink” who lack an “affinity with washing.” This isn’t a big secret: He wrote it in his book The Motorcycle Diaries. No one calls them racist.
When it comes to black conservatives, liberals drop the subtlety and tell us that blacks are stupid, unqualified and oversexed. It’s as if all the fake fawning over black nonentities creates a burning desire in liberals to call some black person an idiot—and all that rage gets dumped on black conservatives.
Democratic Senator Harry Reid called Clarence Thomas “an embarrassment to the Supreme Court,” adding, “I think that his opinions are poorly written.” Name one, Harry.
White liberal Washington Post reporter Mary McGrory dismissed Thomas as “Scalia’s puppet.” The New York Times’s Bill Keller called Justice Thomas an affirmative action appointment.
Bill Clinton slyly demeaned Colin Powell by citing him as a product of “affirmative action,” slipping it in during a televised town hall meeting in his 1997 “national conversation” on race. “Do you favor the United States Army abolishing the affirmative action program that produced Colin Powell?” he asked. “Yes or no?”
When Bush made Condoleezza Rice the first black female secretary of state, there was an explosion of racist cartoons portraying Rice as Aunt
Jemima, Butterfly McQueen from Gone with the Wind, a fat-lipped Bush parrot and other racist clichés. Joseph Cirincione, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Rice “doesn’t bring much experience or knowledge of the world to this position.” (Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose experience for the job consisted of being married to an impeached, disbarred former president.) Democratic consultant Bob Beckel—who ran Walter Mondale’s campaign so competently that Mondale lost forty-nine states—said of Rice, “I don’t think she’s up to the job.”
When Michael Steele ran for governor in Maryland, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up a copy of his credit report—something done to no other Republican candidate. He was depicted in blackface and with huge red lips by liberal blogger Steve Gilliard. Oreo cookies were rolled down the aisle at Steele during a gubernatorial debate.
And of course, both Clarence Thomas and presidential candidate Herman Cain were slandered with racist stereotypes out of a George Wallace campaign flier.
But a Republican drives a red pickup truck and that’s “racist.”
Liberals step on black conservatives early and often because they can’t have black children thinking, “Hmmm, the Republicans have some good ideas, maybe I’m a Republican.”
The basic set-up is:
Step 1: Spend thirty years telling blacks that Republicans are racist and viciously attacking all black Republicans.
Step 2: Laugh maliciously at Republicans for not having more blacks in their party.
Republican positions are not code words for racism. Rather, liberals use “racism” as a code word for Republican positions. The basic difference between the parties is that Republicans support small government, low taxes, and tough-on-crime policies, while Democrats prefer behemoth national government with endless Washington bureaucracies bossing us around, taxes through the roof and releasing criminals.
Republicans also oppose abortion and gay marriage, but those are touchy issues for Democrats since black people don’t like them either. So those aren’t “code words.”
In lieu of arguing with Republicans, Democrats simply brand all words describing their positions as a secret racist code, visible only to liberals. (To be fair, they should know.)
Bill Moyers distributed tapes of Martin Luther King’s adulterous affairs to the press. But this sensitive soul claims Republicans hated LBJ’s Great
Society program because they hated black people. Yes—Republicans were only pretending to care about bankrupting the country. That was a pretext, but deep down they didn’t care one way or another about a gargantuan, useless government spending program, requiring heavily staffed Washington bureaucracies. What reason, other than racism, could Republicans have for objecting to that?
How has the War on Poverty improved black people’s lives again? Try comparing how black people were doing before and after the Great Society before answering that.
Democrats claim “states’ rights” is racist code, but they are the only ones who ever used the phrase as a front for racism. Democrats love enormous, metastasizing national government for everything under the sun — but, strangely, they wanted “states’ rights” for their Jim Crow policies. Republicans want a tiny federal government with the states running everything else. The only times in the last century that Republicans have supported a broad federal remedy was when the Democrats were denying black people their civil rights in the South.
As has been overwhelmingly demonstrated over the past few decades, when Republicans talked about things like “states’ rights,” “law and order” and “welfare reform,” what they meant was: states’ rights, law and order and welfare reform. And as soon as their policies were implemented—most aggressively during the post-OJ verdict paradise—blacks suddenly had better lives and started being murdered a lot less. There are your Republican racists.
Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 250-253.