It is hardly ever a good idea to allude to Nazism to make a political point. But there are rare occasions when such allusions are entirely appropriate.
Apropos of this, it is only by alluding to the Nazi propaganda strategy of the “Big Lie” that one can fully appreciate the perfidy inherent in Tea Party spinmeisters accusing black politicians of racism. The Big Lie of course was coined by none other than Adolf Hitler in his infamous Nazi manifesto, Mein Kampf. It is defined in that text as:
… a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.
No lie qualifies in this dubious respect quite like the Tea Party’s propagandist in chief, talk show host Glen Beck, accusing President Barack Obama of being a racist:
I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.
(Huffington Post, July 28, 2009)
Far more troubling, however, is the extent to which Tea Party activists have managed to spook the Obama administration by propagating similar lies. For example:
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The administration threw Van Jones, its special adviser for green jobs, under the bus after Beck caricatured his political affiliations to make him seem like an unrepentant, militant communist;
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It presided over the disbanding of voter registration group ACORN after Tea Party activists distorted a few isolated cases of voter fraud to make this group seem like a latter-day, black version of the KKK; and
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It is now in the midst of a political firestorm for firing Shirley Sherrod, a low-level black employee at the Department of Agriculture, on Tuesday after a Tea Party blogger, Andrew Breitbart, made it seem (by slicing and dicing a 2 minute, 38-second viral video out of her 43-minute speech) like she was boasting about discriminating against white farmers as payback for all the years white employees in this department discriminated against black farmers.
This latest example is particularly illustrative of the Tea Party’s Big Lie strategy because Mrs. Sherrod was doing the exact opposite of what was being propagated. Specifically, she was sharing her personal story of racial enlightenment, forgiveness, and redemption (in an address at the NAACP 20th Annual Freedom Fund Banquet) by citing the many reasons she felt inclined to discriminate against a white farmer almost 24 years ago; not least of which was the fact that a white farmer had murdered her father and was never even charged.
But here are two of the critical (clarifying and qualifying) passages Breitbart left out of his doctored video:
Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have…
I’ve come to realize that we have to work together and — you know, it’s sad that we don’t have a room full of white and blacks here tonight, ’cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where, as Tony Morrison said, “Race exists but it doesn’t matter.”
(Shirley Sherrod, NAACP 20th Annual Freedom Fund Banquet, March 27, 2010)
In fact, Breitbart’s distortion of Mrs. Sherrod’s record in this case was so offensive that the white farmer in question felt compelled to come forward yesterday to state that Mrs. Sherrod’s treatment of him was so professional and fair that he’s convinced she saved his farm.
Yet nothing demonstrates how effective Breitbart was in propagating the Big Lie that the NAACP is just as racist as the Tea Party quite like the fact that he not only “snookered” the NAACP into condemning Mrs. Sherrod but also misled the Obama administration (in the person of the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack) into firing her.
Never mind the irony that if people spoke at Tea Party rallies the way she spoke at this NAACP banquet – about eschewing racist tendencies and seeking common cause with people of all races, Breitbart and others would not have to resort to such pot-calling-the-kettle-black spin to defend this rogue party.
A disservice was done. An apology is owed.
(White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs, C-SPAN, July 21, 2010)
Indeed, within 24 hours – after finally reviewing the blogger’s video in the full context of her speech – the NAACP withdrew its condemnation and Vilsack fell on his sword, apologizing with an extraordinary mea culpa and offering to rehire Mrs. Sherrod (for a more high-profile job). There are even reports that Obama intends to offer a personal apology. Unfortunately, the political damage has been done; the Tea Party has won yet another one.
But as I indicated above, the real story here is not Mrs. Sherrod or even the Tea Party. Rather it is the extent to which the Obama administration has become the puppet on a string of so many Big Lies that Tea Party ditto heads can be forgiven for thinking that the first black president of the United States is the most racist president in U.S. history.
The Tea Party and its Grand Poobah Rush Limbaugh have vowed to make Obama a one-term president. And, evidently, they have decided that there’s no better way to do that than to propagate the Big Lie that all of his transformative accomplishments (e.g. on health care) are merely pursuant to a radical manifesto to turn America into a socialist dictatorship that will do unto whites what whites did unto blacks during the halcyon days of Jim Crow. Their aim is clearly to marginalize him as the first black president only of black American. And the more they can instigate such divisive political debates about race, the more likely it is that they will succeed.
So only God knows why the Obama administration, with all of its vaunted political and media savvy, is not just allowing Tea Party activists to poison so many minds with their Big Lies; it’s also reacting to these propagandists as if they were the arbiters of truth, justice, and the American way these days.
Meanwhile, President Obama signed the most sweeping financial reform legislation since the Depression yesterday – complete with the most comprehensive consumer protections in history. Yet, instead of heralding this historic achievement, which, like all of his policies, will benefit far more whites than blacks, all major news broadcasts focused last night on this spectacle, featuring the administration’s bungling efforts to extricate itself from the reverse-racism trap some Tea Party blogger laid for it using Mrs. Sherrod.
Only in America folks….
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Thursday, at 5:18 am.
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