As anyone paying attention to the Democratic primary race knows, last week Hillary Clinton sat down with Richard Mellon Scaife and the editorial board of his Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and launched her strongest attacks to date on Jeremiah Wright ("hate speech") and Barack Obama's connection to him ("He would not have been my pastor"). Ever since, I've wondered why, if Hillary wanted to test fly such attacks, she didn't do so in a meeting with the editorial board of the larger, more respected, not-owned-by-a-right-wing-conspiracy-theorist Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which I'm sure would have been thrilled to have her.
Now, via Yglesias, we have one possible answer--namely, that no minimally respectable newspaper would ever print a piece as vile and stupid as "Obama's Indoctrination," a column that ran in the Tribune-Review yesterday:
The Department of Justice reports that approximately 8,000 blacks were murdered in the United States in 2005. In one year, that's exactly double the total number of American military deaths during the entire five years of the war in Iraq; in one year, that's 10 times the average number of American military deaths per year since the start of the war.
A recent study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice shows that blacks committed murders in 2005 at a rate seven times higher than whites....
I wonder if it's ever occurred to Obama and Wright that it probably doesn't help young people in the black community when they're told that their country hates them, that the U.S. government gave them drugs and AIDS, and that jail and genocide are the officially-sanctioned plan for them....
I wonder if Obama ever considered the negative impact on young blacks from listening to these hateful and anti-white tirades. It's not as if Obama is blind to the influence of hate speech. When Don Imus made one careless remark about black female athletes, Obama was among the first to call for his firing. Fines and a temporary suspension weren't enough. Obama said he wanted Imus silenced so that his young daughters never had to hear such language.
Does Obama think it's good for his daughters and the black community when black leaders increase the black community's level of anger, defeatism, paranoia, cynicism, negativity and pessimism? Does he think it's good to jack up the level of the resentment and racism in a community that's already overdosed on rage and victimhood?...
Does Obama think it improves matters when black leaders tell blacks that they're poor, sick, jailed or hooked on drugs because of a government plot? Does it help to fix things if the choir is singing "The devil made me do it," the white devil?...
For 20 years, Barack Obama drank the aforementioned Kool-Aid, never seeing the problem. That makes him a problem.
This is the newspaper with which Hillary Clinton sat down for a friendly chat last week. This is the newspaper whose support Clinton has sought (as Scaife put it in his own column, "I have a very different impression of Hillary Clinton today than before last Tuesday's meeting -- and it's a very favorable one indeed") and subsequently advertised (HillaryClinton.com linked to Scaife's column with the headline, "If You Read One Thing Today"). These are the bedfellows she has chosen.
--Christopher Orr