New York, New York (Jan.14, 2007) News Commentary.
Perhaps it was inevitable; an omnipresent built-in hazard that was bound to pose a navigational challenge. It may seem a little disingenuous as the talking heads express their collective dismay, shock, incredulousness or quickly dismiss it all as a “non-issue.” For those who are puzzled that it has even come up, such noble naivety is as blissful as boulder-like ignorance. Please. It was there all along; we all saw it and, maybe thought, that somehow it would not really be an issue. Wow…how foolhardy was that!
Possibly some of the dismay among us is in the specifics rather than the issue itself. Not the “what” but the “who”. Many folks thought it would arise, loom over this campaign landscape like a malignant, centuries old volcano causing tremors before a major eruption. Now that the tremors have hit, the faults are being exposed, the stresses within the tectonic plates finally nearing critical mass.
As those forces seek release, the bedrock, no match for the pressure accumulated over all those decades, they have found escape in a multitude of increasingly wide fissures. Now that this elemental process has begun, there is no stopping it.
Beyond the shameful fact that this issue has now come to the light of day, the deliberate words that triggered this are more troubling still because of from where they originated. They are more vile because they came from within, from those thought to be friends. It was not too long ago that Hillary Clinton proclaimed to a reporter that she was in a “biracial marriage”. This was an obvious play employing the once semi-popular notion in certain segments of the African American community that Bill Clinton was the “first black president”. My how times and sentiments have changed. Priorities have shifted, no?
Certainly it would have been less of a surprise attack had it come from the right, the extreme right wing of the republican party. No, that could have been anticipated and surely deflected by the Obama team. That would have been typical right wing ignorance and dirty tactics; race bating, as a political tool, was invented by them. But, when the stink bomb is tossed in to your own living room by a house guest, that says something profoundly important about your guest. They are not and never were your friends; they pandered and played along under the auspices of mutual benefit as a means to an end.
There is no end to the clichés and analogies applicable to this scenario. As it is said “those closest to you can hurt you the most”. After all these years of the Clinton’s championing their close ties to the African American community, the fact that this first salvo of racial missiles was launched by Bill and Hillary’s own hands is beyond disappointing, way beyond an insult.
And so the true colors of Hillary are revealed; the color of ambition and political expediency, the color of political strategy and take no prisoners tactics.
The very fact that Hillary allegedly cannot understand how in the world her comments about Senator Obama, about Dr. Martin Luther King, and all her campaign’s plants of pieces of rumor and innuendo could be misunderstood, clearly demonstrates just how little she actually knows and cares about her “black constituency”.
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