Ray and Hillary Catch Republicans' Word Flu
Just as the GOP is imploding under the weight of its own corruption and hate-mongering, two Democratic geniuses open their mouths wide and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
 

January 18 2006
Counterbias.com
STEVE HOROWITZ
  

"It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans -- the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way."

Just when you were hoping Democrats would lead the way in taking God out of politics, along comes New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin trying to bring people together -- as long as they're, um, chocolate. His remarks Monday were so stupid as to be beyond explanation. Never mind the fact that God wouldn't reveal His will to someone who uses double negatives. (See Paul's Letter to the Grammarians, 4:12.)

But let's not forget Sen. Hillary Clinton, representin' in Harlem yesterday about the House of Representatives, and about a subject she knows well: life on the plantation. The House, she asserted, "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about. It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."

As any thinking person would guess, chocolate people -- sorry, African-Americans -- had more to worry about on the plantation than their free speech rights. So presumptuous was this remark, and so ridiculous an analogy, one wonders how Hillary ever got to be known as one of the brainiest people in politics.

The problem with all this is not how stupid Nagin's and Clinton's comments were. It's how stupid they were to make them. At a time when the GOP is nearly DOA, they chose the Martin Luther King Holiday to prove once again that neither party is worthy of respect.

All they had to do is maintain some semblance of rational discourse, and not distract people from the real issue of Bush's lies and the Republicans' culture of corruption. But no. Instead they seize headlines and TV news time with discussions of how to make chocolate milk, and whether slave plantations were sufficiently democratic.

The real shame is what got lost in the media's scramble for easy, no-analyis-required controversy -- Hillary's additional remark Monday that the Bush administration will go down in history as one of the worst ever. That's an easy case to make. But instead of making it, she reached back a century and a half for a half-baked, misapplied comparison to slavery.

That's not what God would have wanted.