She did it again yesterday.
Claiming that her listeners, "wanted to talk about it," Randi went on and on and on about how awful it was that a black pastor with considerable bona fides spoke his mind in a manner reminiscient of Malcolm X or Elijah Mohammed.
Angry black men scare the crap out of white people. "We can't have them angry darkies actin' up, why, they might start burning their own neighborhoods again, or somethin'," says the unspoken and unstated consciousness of white America.
Pay attention to your fellows, America, and then read your own damn history. The United States of America was formed by a cabal of angry people, including black men and women (however hard we tried to keep that fact from seeing daylight). It seems a dictator, in many ways a tamer version of our own George W. Bush, insisted on ramming a corporatist agenda down our colonial throats. And we had had enough.
Those were the days. Days when white people didn't have to "outsource" their emotional experiences and seek to hire social mercenaries to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
Pastor Jeremiah Wright said nothing insane and utilized rhetorical devices in practice among most white evangelical preachers. The difference is that Pastor Wright was honest, whereas his white peers tend to focus mostly on pabulum before asking for money.
The United States is responsible and accountable for the events of 9/11? You mean we're not victims?? You mean we are the authors of our own experience? Sacrilege! Abomination!
And in the midst of all this agenda-setting distortion, Randi Rhodes' brain takes a vacation from its usual leadership role and piles on to the "lynch the black man" campaign.
Fine. The media and the rest of America has lost its mind after seven years of a complete vacuum of legitimate power in Washington, D.C. America needs a leader, someone who can shut people up and keep them focused on what is really important. Someone who can see the clamor and rather than practicing the politics of divide and distract, actually molds public opinion and fires it in a more advantageous direction.
If Obama survives this media lynching, Hillary needs to pack up her toy husband and her voodoo doll friends in the corporate media, and accept what she has so far refused to accept: Barak Obama is a real leader and a real President. We haven't had one of those since John F. Kennedy, and that, quite frankly, scares the holy hell out of the conspirators plotting against America.
My continued disappointment with Randi Rhodes' vacuous stoking of racist fires notwithstanding, I believe Obama will turn this whole circus into a net gain for his campaign. The man is a public relations wizard and a natural-born leader.
If I am sad about anything besides Rhodes' inability to lead public opinion, it would be that White America just can not accept that a black citizen possesses traits conspicuously absent from all his white peers.
