Jack Cashill: Anatomy of a Racial Smear

American Thinker ^ | March 24, 2010 | Jack Cashill

[neverdem]

For the last year, the media have been desperately trying to hang the "racist" tag around the Tea Party movement as a way to discredit it. This past weekend, they would seem to have finally succeeded.

The McClatchy newspaper chain, whose slogan is "truth to power," launched an opening salvo on Saturday, March 20 with the inflammatory headline -- its exact words -- "Tea party protesters scream 'nigger' at black congressman." That is "protesters" in the plural who "scream" a racial epithet, "nigger," at a particular "congressman."

This one headline contains one perilously uncorroborated accusation and three conscious fabrications, beginning with the identity of the "congressman" in question. So much for "truth to power."

To give the story poignancy, reporter William Douglas makes iconic civil rights veteran John Lewis the subject of the abuse. He is the "congressman" alluded to in the headline. The only problem is that Lewis never heard anything. This is the first of the fabrications.

According to the article, Lewis was walking from the Cannon Office Building to the Capitol when protesters started shouting. According to Lewis, however, what they shouted was not a racial slur, but "Kill the bill, kill the bill." If he heard anything more derogatory, he does not seem to have told Douglas about it.

Lewis, it should be noted, is no slouch when it comes to race-baiting. During the 2008 campaign, he compared the McCain-Palin campaign to that of "presidential candidate George Wallace," whose comparable "atmosphere of hate" led to the fatal church bombing in Birmingham. So egregious were Lewis's comments that McCain called on Obama to "condemn" them.

As Douglas reports, it was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), a Lewis colleague walking a few steps behind him, who actually claimed to have heard the slur. Note the way that Douglas runs these sentences together.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said he was a few yards behind Lewis and distinctly heard "nigger."

"It was a chorus," Cleaver said. "In a way, I feel sorry for those people who are doing this nasty stuff -- they're being whipped up. I decided I wouldn't be angry with any of them."

Douglas deliberately leaves the impression that Cleaver heard a "chorus" of people shouting racial slurs.  The use of the plural in the headline is the second of the fabrications. The chorus was, in fact, shouting, "Kill the Bill."

It is unlikely that Cleaver misled Douglas. In the era of the ubiquitous camera, he would have known that such an accusation could be immediately refuted, as it certainly has been. The ample videotape evidence shows that there was no such chorus.

Cleaver does turn briefly to face the camera in one video, but regardless of what he might have heard or thought he heard, no one on the video is heard to "scream" anything racial. This is the third fabrication. 

What is uncorroborated is whether Cleaver even heard a single person utter the slur in question. William Owens, a black Tea Party activist from Nevada who had joined in the protests, confirmed to FOXNews.com, "Never did I hear any type of racial slur."

House majority whip James CIyburn, who walked with the contingent from the Black Caucus, heard no racist remarks either. "I experienced some of [the anger]," Clyburn told Keith Olbermann on March 22. "I didn`t hear the slurs." Still, this was more than enough for the factually indifferent Olbermann to conclude, "If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart."

Cleaver also claimed that the police arrested one of the Tea Party crowd for spitting on him, but he chose not to press charges. U.S. Capitol Police, however, said that no protester was arrested. One was, however, detained and quickly released.

"There were no elements of a crime, and the individual wasn't able to be positively identified," a spokeswoman for the Capitol Police told FoxNews.com. "[Cleaver] was unable to positively identify."

Despite the slightness of the evidence, the seemingly omniscient Yael T. Abouhalkah, the Editorial Page columnist in Cleaver's hometown Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, was able to conclude that "some Tea Party supporter spat on Cleaver Saturday on Capitol Hill because the U.S. congressman is black." 

If there were a spitting incident, it is clear that the spitter had to be someone other than the shouter of racial slurs. That Abouhalkah can impute racism to someone he does not know, not even by name, who may or may not have spit, is testament to the shabby, subversive state of contemporary journalism.

When the message moves out into the leftist blogosphere, the message gets progressively more unhinged. One fairly typical YouTube site I visited hoping to see evidence of the spitting, as implied in the video's listing, instead reviled the "teabaggers" as "homophobe, racists, bigots." There was no video verification of any of the charges.

For the last half-century, the Democrats have been able to count on the allegiance of black America to their program. They and their media allies know that the party -- in both senses -- ends when African Americans catch on to the ruin which that program has rained upon black America: unprecedented rates of homicide, homelessness, social disease, abortion, drug addiction, unemployment, poverty, and imprisonment. 

With so many promises broken, all that Democrats have left to peddle are an elusive hope and a manufactured fear. Pretty soon, it will be just the fear. Expect more of this.

[Tarpon]

They have to discredit the tea partys, it’s their only hope. Even if they lie, which Obama does near every-time he raises his nose and opens his mouth.

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

The whole calculus, the mathematics of liberal vs conservative, especially as it plays in the media..reminds me of the mathematics of the struggle against terrorism.

Eg; “...they only have to be right once, we have to be right 100% of the time”.

The MSM and liberals can throw any kind of insult or accusation, and it gets full-spectrum coverage, automatically. There never needs to be any evidence. There is never a shortage of ‘....he said, she said, therefore it’s obvious that...’ Keith Olbermann logic. If it’s wrong, or specious, or downright deliberately a false-plant, there never needs to be even the consideration of an apology.

[SUSSA]

There is no credible charge of racism. There is ample evidence that the alleged offenses never happened.

[Jet Jaguar]

BTTT

[SUSSA]

Next the MSM and Democrats will investigate what white-boys are putting in malt liquor to make blacks violent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnM2X9yGP4

That charge is as credible as these charges.

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

An apology spoils the effect.

[lentulusgracchus]

[Art.] Still, this was more than enough for the factually indifferent Olbermann to conclude, "If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart."

The epistemically untroubled Olbermann was no doubt deeply gratified to receive these assurances that he was, after all, right, after he delivered a long, Shakespearean soliloquy a few weeks ago in which he convicted Tea Party participants, in his own mind, of essential racism and bigotry.

His own tendentiousness on the point would not qualify, of course, as bigotry, but only as commendable "courage of his principles".

Yeah, right, Keith.

In the age of Lippmann, this guy would never have risen above copy-boy.

[lentulusgracchus]

That charge is as credible as these charges.

Well, you know that "they" -- and we all know who they are, and what they are </stock bigotry> -- started the rock-cocaine epidemic.

Oh, wait -- that story was discredited.

But it's still true, though.

</sarc>

[penelopesire]

BUMP TO THE TRUTH!!

[Inwoodian]

When we recognized “de facto” racism, when we failed to prosecute and execute the animals who rioted and killed in Watts, Newark, Detroit and other places, when we cowered at the threats of “a long, hot summer”, when we did nothing when West L.A. scum murdered and committed mayhem after the Rodney King verdict, when we permitted reverse bias as a remedy for past offenses committed by long-dead individuals and when we (or they) created and maintained the Welfare Plantation- those are the incidents of moral cowardice that lead us to be bedeviled by a racist president and a racist,Communist cabal today.