Guilty (28 page)

What were liberals saying Palin should have done to shield her daughter's pregnancy from the press short of turning down McCain's offer to be his running mate. Oh, wait—now I see! Liberals think Palin should have refused the vice presidential nomination for the good of her family, which would have had the incidental effect of eliminating a great campaign asset for McCain. Once again, the Obama plan for victory was to force the other side to scratch.

Pretending they are doing something other than furthering the left-wing agenda, the media make up new rules for each case as they go along. If Palin was to blame for “outing her pregnant daughter in front of millions of people,” then was Bill Clinton to blame for outing his sex toy, Monica Lewinsky, in front of millions of people? No. Again, establishment journalists would be stumped at the comparison. The rules keep changing to accommodate new circumstances. The one constant is that only conservatives will have their personal affairs paraded before the public by an indignant media claiming to expose conservative “hypocrisy.”

Palin was a “hypocrite” because she was a Christian.

Love, The Mainstream Media.

Conservatives are adjudged guilty for sending inappropriate e-mails or foot-tapping in bathroom stalls. Those acts of base sexual perversion are enough to be driven from civilized society by the media if you're a conservative. Contrarily, Democrats are as pure as the driven snow—unless they sign a written confession. As long as Clinton said he did not have sex with “that woman,” there were only tawdry allegations from tacky people. Until John Edwards appeared on TV to announce that he had been cheating on his wife, his assignations with a former campaign staffer were off limits. Even when the evidence is overwhelming, headlines about a Democrat's scandal will announce, “Records Prove Accusations False, Aides Say.”

Winning the Quote of the Year Award from the Media Research Center, the
Chicago Tribune
ran the following correction on September 5, 1996—long after Gennifer Flowers, the Arkansas state troopers, and
Paula Jones had given detailed accounts of Bill Clinton's legion infidelities (and the more honorable Dick Morris had already resigned over his infidelity): “In her Wednesday Commentary page column, Linda Bowles stated that President Clinton and the former campaign adviser Dick Morris both were ‘guilty of callous unfaithfulness to their wives and children.' Neither man has admitted to being or been proven to have been unfaithful. The
Tribune
regrets the error.”
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THE 2006 SENATE RACE BETWEEN REPUBLICAN SENATOR GEORGE Allen and his Democratic opponent, James Webb, produced a potpourri of both alleged and actual ethnic slights, but you've only heard about the one from the Republican.

At one of his campaign speeches, Allen jokingly introduced a “tracker” from the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, to the audience. Trackers are little Nazi block-watchers, who follow a candidate around, recording everything he says—and everything his audience says—so the selectively edited videos can be posted online for ridicule. Democrats think they are living in Nazi Germany if the government monitors phone calls from this country to al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan, but they have no problem with liberals constantly intruding on peoples' enjoyment of public events with intimidating video surveillance.

Needless to say, it can be kind of a buzz-kill at a campaign event to have some sulking kid in the crowd filming everything. Allen also probably wanted to alert audience members that they were being filmed by a hostile cameraman and that if they asked a stupid question, they might end up as YouTube jokes. So Allen cheerfully introduced the Nazi block-watcher to the audience, getting in some swipes at Webb for being at a Hollywood fundraiser at the same time.

Allen said:

On the basis of that, the Nazi block-watcher, S. R. Sidarth, claimed to be a victim of a hate crime. As he told the
Washington Post,
“I think [Senator Allen] was doing it because he could, and I was the only person of color there, and it was useful for him in inciting his audience,”
⁵⁴
adding that he was “disgusted” that Allen “would use my race in a political context.”
⁵⁵
(Using race is only appropriate in a college-application/affirmative action context.)

How self-absorbed do you have to be to think that you were singled out for being a “person of color” when you also happened to be the only person in the audience doing opposition research for the rival candidate? The son of a wealthy banker, Sidarth had grown up in an affluent Fairfax suburb, where he attended good schools and at the time was a student at the prestigious University of Virginia. The Allen event was in Breaks, Virginia, a town on the Kentucky border with a median household income of $23,431.
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Sidarth was probably the wealthiest person in the audience—the audience that he was there to humiliate. At least when the Cossacks rode in to rape and pillage, they didn't simultaneously cry that they were the ones being victimized. Today's privileged elites go to distant rural towns to ridicule ordinary Americans and then run back to the
Washington Post
to whimper that they have been mortally offended.

In the first of more than one hundred articles in the
Post
about the
victimhood of Sidarth, Senator Allen told the
Post,
“I would never want to demean him as an individual. I do apologize if he's offended by that. That was no way the point.”
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In a world in which the media were not doing PR for the Democratic Party, that would have been the end of it. But Allen was a Republican and Sidarth was of Indian descent—not black, but good enough—so the
Post
kept flogging the story right up until election day. The media triumphantly reported that a macaca is a type of monkey in Gibraltar! And Allen's mother had grown up in Tunisia! The evidence was in: Allen had called the liberal pill a “monkey” in a foreign language, which no one in his audience would have understood—whether or not Allen did. It was as if Bull Connor had returned from the grave and set rabid dogs on Sidarth.

Notwithstanding reporters' obsessive interest in Allen's “macaca” line, I note that the NAACP could not have cared less about the matter. When Allen spoke to the NAACP a few weeks before the election, he didn't get a single question about the “macaca” remark burning up the pages of the
Post.
Allen was, however, invited to become a lifetime member of the NAACP, which he did.
⁵⁸

Allen made his “macaca” remark on August 11, 2006—or two months after Democratic senator Joe Biden told a questioner of Indian descent at a town hall in New Hampshire, “You cannot go into a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking.” Biden's line was treated, as it should have been, as a buffoonish comment from a harmless fool. Indeed, Biden's repeated gaffes didn't even prevent him from being chosen as Barack Obama's running mate in 2008. Remarks that would be political death for a Republican are said to demonstrate “authenticity” in a Democrat, as an article in the
New York Times
put it. Biden's idiocies proved he “doesn't take himself too seriously.”
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So one can well imagine George Allen's surprise when his “macaca” line was not cited as evidence that he “doesn't take himself too seriously” but rather as proof that we were dealing with an incipient Adolf Hitler. In a somber, deadly serious editorial, the
Times
described “macaca” as a “discouraging word,” and accused Allen of playing “the race card.” Compared with the
Washington Post,
the
Times
was the soul
of reason: The
Post
mentioned “macaca” 109 times in the two months before the 2006 election.

In a career of talking, anyone will make mistakes and this was Allen's. Not the “macaca” line, which was amusing enough. His mistake was to grovel to phony race-baiters pretending to be offended. When did rich college kids harassing rural voters become a new protected category that must be shielded from words that are insults
in other languages?
How did Sidarth become a specially anointed victim? What did we ever do to India?

In short order, Allen was issuing “repeated apologies,” explaining over and over again that if he had “had any idea that in some parts of the world or some cultures that this would be an insult, I would never have used that word because that's not who I am.” He went on, “It's not how I was raised. It's not what I believe in.”
⁶⁰
If Allen had treated the media's self-righteous-athon with the derision it deserved, we'D have one more Republican in the Senate and one fewer illegal gun. (In March 2007, Senator Webb's executive assistant was arrested for trying to walk into a Senate office building carrying a loaded gun and ammunition, which he said belonged to Webb, a staunch advocate of gun control.
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Charges were later dropped when it was proved that the aide had never used the word “macaca.”)

The people who were the real victims of the “macaca” incident were the legions of young white males who aspire to be Democratic Nazi block-watchers themselves someday. What would the media have done without Sidarth's beige skin, certifying his victim status? No reliving the Jim Crow era if Sidarth had been a privileged white male instead of a privileged Indian American male. I guess it's lucky for the Democrats: They'D have a hard time finding a white man in their party these days, anyway—going from winning a majority of white men with John F. Kennedy, to only about a third of white men in the past twenty years.
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As long as their political snitches remain upper-middle-class “people of color,” the Democrats have ready-made fake victims as they actually victimize ordinary Americans.

James Webb was Allen's Democratic opponent in that race. One didn't have to search for words in foreign languages to get the point of
Webb's ethnically insensitive remarks about his primary opponent, Harris Miller. One flyer produced by Webb's campaign called Harris, who is Jewish, the “anti-Christ of outsourcing” and “killer”—the latter cleverly disguised in one use as “
job
-killer.” Resembling something out of Al Jazeera comics, the cartoon on the flyer depicted Miller in grotesque caricature as a hook-nosed Jew with money bulging out of his pockets.

In the cartoon's first panel, a bespectacled, hook-nosed Miller is saying, “Let them eat cake.” In the second panel, the again hooknosed Miller is standing in front of a framed dollar sign, saying, “Costs are down and profits are up! U.S. workers will just have to get used to lower wages.” In the third panel, with only the money in his pocket showing, Miller says, “Now, get those jobs overseas
now!
Blame it on technology while I count my money!” The fourth panel shows a muscular, Aryan-looking Jim Webb, saying, “Shut your mouth, Killer! I'm gonna fight to keep those jobs here and to bring the others home! The last thing we need in DC is another lobbyist!”
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The flyer promised, “There is a solution.”

Not only was the Webb campaign flyer more obviously offensive than Allen's one-time use of the nonsense word “macaca,” it wasn't an extemporaneous remark made about one specific jerk at a campaign rally. This was a printed flyer, approved by Webb and distributed by the official “Webb for Senate” campaign. The
Washington Post
'
s
entire coverage of this blindingly anti-Semitic flyer consisted of three very brief mentions of the flyer near the bottom of articles on other topics. The fullest, most graphic discussion of the anti-Semitic flyer appeared in a
Post
article modestly titled “Webb, Miller Spar on Spending”:

Each of the three brief mentions of the flier in the
Post
included a conclusory announcement from the Webb campaign that the flyer was not anti-Semitic. And that was the end of it. The
Post
published more than a hundred articles citing Allen's offhand use of a word no native English speaker would recognize as a slur, but barely mentioned an unmistakably anti-Semitic flyer distributed by a man who is now a United States senator. Amazingly, there was so little press about Webb's anti-Semitic flyer that in June 2008 he felt free to complain to the
New York Times
about the “Karl Rove” techniques that had been used against
him
during the 2006 Senate campaign. Claiming his Senate campaign was “one of the most brutal things I've ever been through,” Webb said, “It's more than the name-calling. It's the whole attempt to destroy your personal credibility. That's the Karl Rove approach. Until you've been through that, you don't really know what it's like.”
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