Jonathan Alter Plays the Race Card Again

John on November 30, 2009 at 10:38 am

Alter has a new piece for Newsweek in which he takes on Palin, Dobbs and Beck. There’s not much argument in it, mostly it’s just the same old race card argument Alter has used before.

He gives away the game early with this oddly phrased statement:

We haven’t elected a populist president since Andrew Jackson 180 years ago. But we haven’t had a black guy with no experience and a Muslim name as president either.

Is it really so difficult to divorce the experience argument from race? Even the NY Times is questioning the President’s ability to look beyond the next move in the foreign policy sphere. Subtext: He’s a noob! Are they racists for saying so? There’s more:

Populists of the past like Bryan in the 1890s, Huey Long and Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and even Pat Buchanan in the 1990s were… anti–Wall Street, strongly protectionist, and committed to economic justice, even when some of them descended into racism and anti-Semitism.

Fortunately, no movement on the left has a history of racism. Anyway, if some of them did, like Margaret Sanger for instance, you won’t here about it in Newsweek. You certainly won’t see it connected to Planned Parenthood defenders on the scene today, say Barack Obama. That’s a non-starter. But we’re not done:

Today’s faux populists also feast on emotions…They’re reacting against the pace of change and feeding right-wing nostalgia for a bygone era when a liberal black man wouldn’t dare run for president.

Yes, that’s it! It’s because he’s black. Jonathan Alter has cracked the Klan code and exposed the real secret behind all resistance to Obama. That or he’s just another liberal race-baiter using the issue to shield his side of the aisle from criticism. Hmmm…which is it?

So that’s three explicit mentions of race in a piece of just 736 words. There are a couple more feints in the same direction which I’ve left out.

And in case you’ve forgotten, this is old news for Alter. It was only a year ago that he was suggesting, on the eve of the election, that if Obama lost it would be because of racism:

…in the last week, LIV’s swung back to the default choice:  John McCain.  Some had good reasons other than the color of Obama’s skin to desert him; many more did not.

Of course Obama won, but Alter hasn’t changed his tune. If you have ever refused to vote for or otherwise support Barack Obama it’s probably because you’re a racist or a troglodyte. This is the sort of ham-fisted liberal demagoguery that gives the left a bad name and makes Newsweek (which actually published this tripe in the print version) a failure and a laughingstock.

Category: MSM & Bias, Politics |