Bundy's hoof in mouth disease

The internets are buzzing today with the death of Cliven Bundy. No, not the physical death, but the political death. His remarks about the plight of blacks in America have politicians and pundits scrambling to step away from him, to push back from the table and end their support for his fight against the Bureau Of Land Management. And like sharks drawn to blood in the water, liberal progressives are attacking with fury.

I have yet to see the full context of his remarks - I'm sure he didn't just get up and start talking about the plight of blacks, something had to lead into that topic - but it's unfortunate he's not a better speaker. In later remarks he clarified that what he was saying is that blacks are essentially slaves to government now and he wonders if their plight is no better under the government thumb than it was under slavery.

And thus, he stepped on the political landmine that progressives try to plant everywhere. They have so successfully established the rules of this game that like Global Thermonuclear War in Wargames, the only way to win is not to play. The intention of the left is to get people on the right to say anything about race, then brand them as racists in the usual list of publications like Slate, Huffpo, CNN, ThinkProgress, etc, and thus force the rest of the conservative world to hang them out to dry. And of course, the game only works one way. These same publications can put words in people mouths, interpret things however they want and bash whites all they want with no repercussions at all. Then people like Barack Obama will, with a straight face, say that we need to have open and honest conversations about race. Don't fall for it. They'll take what you say and use it out of context to make it sound racist...and if they can't do that, they'll just declare it to be racist based on their own prejudices, repeat that opinion in a hundred syndicated posts, and then your goose is cooked. Don't fight the allegations and the lies go unchecked. Fight them and they just play the comments in a loop for the entire time the issue is in the news.

For example, a recent CNN post on the Bundy comments says "But experts on race and politics say the comments, much like those of rocker Ted Nugent, who created a firestorm when he called President Barack Obama a "subhuman mongrel," also speak to complicated and deeply fraught cultural tensions running beneath the surface in some segments of America." In one fell swoop, the author has taken Bundy's "That's what I'm wonderin'" comments and tied them to Obama via Ted Nugent. See how they made his comments to be much more than they already were?

Calling the president a subhuman mongrel is certainly disrespectful (and redundant - if one is a mongrel they are by definition subhuman) but is it racist? Where have I ever heard someone refer to blacks as mongrels? Oh yeah, I remember. It was Barack Obama. On The View. (USA Today: Obama said...African Americans are "sort of a mongrel people," when asked why he identifies himself as black rather than of mixed race, given that his mother was white. "We're all kinds of mixed up," he added. "That's actually true of white people as well, but we just know more about it.")

My belief as this relates to Clive Bundy is that the pro-oppressive government propagandists are trying to drive a wedge between Bundy and his supporters that have, for the moment, held the BLM at bay. I'm encouraged that I'm on the right track with this theory when DNC spokeman Mo Elleithee says "If you ever want to be taken seriously for your outreach efforts, you might want to start by not defending racists." I'm confused though, if Elliethee is referring to Bundy, who simply 'wonders' if blacks are better off being slaves to individuals or to the government, of if he's referring to Nevada pugilist Harry Reid, who in addition to calling Bundy and his supporters domestic terrorists also thinks Obama was successful in his bid for the presidency because of his "light-skinned" appearance his ability to speak "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

The race game is so rigged in favor of Democrats that even a real, honest-to-goodness racist will never be called a racist - as long as he's a Democrat. Exalted Cyclops and founder of the Sophia, Virginia chapter of the KKK Robert Byrd personally recruited more than 150 people into the anti black organization. In 1946 he wrote a letter to Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo saying "I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side ...Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels [there's that word again, uttered by another Democrat. No wonder they think Nugent meant it in a racist tone - that's exactly how Democrats use it!], a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds." In 1947, the year Jackie Robinson started at 1st base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Byrd wrote to the KKKs Grand Wizard "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation." You would assume that the party that wants to lynch (sorry, couldn't resist) a cattle rancher would of course DESTROY someone who publicly, proudly wore the white hood of racism. Right? Right? Wrong.

Byrd was elected to the state Senate in 1950, a scant 3 years after his racist screeds and written support of the KKK. He was elected to the US House in 1953, the US Senate in 1959, and there he remained until his death in 2010. Far from distancing themselves from his racism, the Democrats named him to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee three separate times, named him Senate Majority leader twice (him and Harry 'light skinned negro' Reid - two peas in the DNC Senate Majority leader racism pod) and FOUR separate times he was named the Senate President Pro Tempore. This last role acts in the vice president's stead when the veep is absent from the senate floor and is 3rd in line of succession to the president. From Excalted Cyclops to 3rd in line to the presidency...no one pulls support away from racists like the Democrats do.

Even the president gets in on the act. Democrat Lyndon Johnson said (though the left denies it) that with his entitlements he would "have those niggers voting Democrat for 200 years." Only 2 people supposedly witnessed this remark so the left says it's bunk (how many witnesses are required to make it valid? Three? Four? Ten?) but his proven, recorded use of the word nigger in other comments makes this not much of a stretch to believe. But he gave us Medicare, y'all, so it's ok.

Then there's Bubba. Bill Clinton was quoted as saying to Ted Kennedy "A few years ago, this guy [Obama] would be getting us coffee."

The racism in this comment is not overt, but it was enough for Reverend Al Sharpton to use it on Hannity to deploy a tried and true Democrat tactic to defend sitting Senate Majority Leader Reid - that of diversion.

"I think what Bill Clinton said is something you ought to be dealing with. I have said, and you know I said it, that that was far more far disturbing and I think it was far more offensive [than what Reid said.]"

Hannity asked, "Was it racist?"

Sharpton responded, "If he meant that he would have been serving because he was black..."

If. Only a Democrat gets the benefit of 'if.' Ted Nugent got no such qualifications on his 'mongrel' comment. If a conservative says something it's automatic that the left will consider it racist.

Which beings me back to Bundy. His understanding and beliefs about the plight of the black community has nothing to do with whether or not the BLM is justified in stealing his cattle and slaughtering them. It's a tactic designed to force people to push back from the table so the BLM can do what it wants without facing an outraged public. It's just a shame that he gave them the ammunition to deploy this maneuver, and it's a bigger shame that it's worked.. Hannity, one of his most vocal supporters in the media, has stopped supporting him. If I were Hannity I would say "This is America. We don't have to agree with people, we don't even have to like them personally, to support their rights to private property. We don't take people's property just because we find their comments distasteful. Rights are not determined by an individual's popularity."

In this country, we'll never have any productive conversations about race because the left doesn't want to solve any racial problems, they want to use race as a weapon in an ongoing political battle. People like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson make a living from racial division. Too many people benefit from the racial division industry for any of them to change now. As conservatives, we need to push past this noise and stick to the issues. Progressives can't win an argument based on the facts or issues. They can only win based on emotion and we need to stop letting them get away with it.