In Detroit right now, a corrupt mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, has been trying to whip up support in the black community by playing the race card.
Is there an echo in here?
Kilpatrick is in a heap of trouble for charging $210,000 in personal expenses—spa massages, champagne, "entertainment," and the like—to the city's credit card. He's also accused of having sexual relations with a staff member (he's married with three kids, a fact that he throws in people's faces as if it absolves him of horniness) and lying under oath. If convicted of a felony perjury charge alone, he could get a 15-year prison term.
And so Kilpatrick, who claims to love Detroit, is bringing the city down with him. Last week he touched bottom, turning the annual State of the City speech into a race-baiting. He claimed people were making threats to him and that the media's "lynch mob" mentality was to blame, tossing the 'n' word into the invitation-only audience like raw meat. Never mind that he has abused the power of his office from the day he took it in 2001. For the good of Detroit, he should resign, but he prefers to race-bait and avoid personal responsibility for his actions. Thankfully, many members of Detroit's black community aren't buying this product this year, and calls for his impeachment are rising.
Talk about echoes: when I lived in Washington D.C. in the 1980s, we had to watch Mayor Marion Barry drag the city into the gutter with him rather than step aside. The race card flew fast and furious back then, fueling a particularly poisonous time in the city's history—a crack cocaine plague turning D.C. into the murder capital of the world, with more than 500 deaths a year attributed to it. While the bodies piled higher, Barry blamed racists and the "white media" for his troubles, which only halted when he was caught smoking crack in a downtown hotel room with a hooker.
Is there an echo in here?
Geraldine Ferraro recently played the race card as Hillary Clinton's surrogate by implying that the sole reason the mixed-race Barack Obama is the leading contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination is his skin color. When called on this putrid pandering, Ferraro said, "I really think they're attacking me because I'm white."
Lest we forget, Obama has his own "race problem." If the senator tries to smooth over the racial divide in America he opens himself to charges of being an Uncle Tom, but if he pushes it to the forefront, he will alienate moderates who'd see him as "militant." Bringing this quandary to the fore were recent comments made by his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Wright served some of the same dish as Geraldine Ferraro, only from the other side of the racial platter. Obama's problems are compounded by the fact that Louis Farrakhan has taken a liking to his campaign. The Nation of Islam leader is the living embodiment of the Racial Third Rail in America.
There is not much Obama can do about this except what he's done: distance himself from Farrakhan's more extreme views.
In all the hubbub, people have ignored Sen. John McCain, the presumed representative of the Party of Racism in America. He too has a whacked-out religious surrogate talking turkey in his stead. McCain's "Wright" is Reverend John Hagee, whose endorsement McCain actively solicited. Hagee is an anti-Semite who blames Jews for bringing all their troubles on themselves, and he has called Catholicism "the Great Whore" and blamed gays for Hurricane Katrina.
Good God, where do they find these people?
