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• Cleaver

There are many fronts in the dismal daily death-struggle that is American

politics. A particularly boggy one is race. Rightbloggers are keenly

aware that the President whom they like to accuse of socialism and fascism is black, and also that

picking on black people is not considered cool these days. What to do?

Usually, not much. To counter imputations that they're making these

ludicrous accusations to appeal to racists, they have adopted a few

pre-emptive measures -- for example, finding the few black folks who

have appeared at Tea Party protests and publicizing

the hell out of them.

For the most part, though, they've been well advised to leave the

subject alone. To do otherwise can't help, except in some backwoods

jurisdictions. But as the struggle to denigrate Obama persists and heats

up, rightbloggers are finding themselves less able to avoid it -- and

tempted to get into it up to the armpits.

You probably heard about the rambunctious behavior allegedly exhibited by some

Tea Party protesters toward some black Democratic Representatives in

Washington last month, including racial slurs and even spitting on

Emanuel Cleaver.

The latter incident was captured on video, but like the "Second

Spitter" footage shown by Jerry Seinfeld years ago, it

leaves room

for doubt. A reasonable viewer might take Cleaver's reaction to the guy

with his hands cupped around his mouth to indicate that something

like that happened, though the spitting may have been accidental.

There

was no sane reason for rightbloggers to get defensive about this;

the smart play was to call such behavior wrong, if it occurred, and

move on -- as did National Review's Kathryn J. Lopez, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and others.

But

rightbloggers are heavily invested in two things upon which this

incident touches: Tea Parties, and conservative victim status. They are

thoroughly committed both to the promotion of the protests, and to the

notion that -- as Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit likes to put it --

the

left and its cats-paws in the "state-run media" (meaning not only PBS, but every

news outlet which does not report the news as they would prefer) are out

to destroy the Tea Parties, conservatives, and America.

So when

Cleaver told the press that he himself never "reported" the

spitting incident ("People assume I went somewhere, never done press

conference, never done an interview on it and I'm not going to do it"), Weasel Zippers leapt on the fact that Cleaver had

mentioned the spitting in a press conference and even reported that a

perp had been arrested (a suspect had merely been detained).

There's

an obvious conflict between the two accounts, which may be taken

as suggesting that Cleaver was less than forthright about his role in

promoting coverage of the incident. Weasel Zippers, however, took it as

"proving [the incident] NEVER happened."

As more

careful readers at the Kansas City Star noticed, it proves

nothing of the sort, unless some common English words have suddenly

changed their meanings. Nonetheless rightbloggers insisted that Cleaver

had debunked the story, either intentionally or unintentionally, and

proven liberal media malfeasance.

Left Coast Rebel just declared outright that "Rep.

Emanuel Cleaver Admits he Was Never Spit on." RedState was a little more circumspect, claiming

only that "Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D, MO) disavows any role in spitting

smear" ("Can't say that I'm surprised that he doesn't want to lay any

blame at the feet of the DNC's would-be race-hate demagogues,

either..."). Hot Air's Allahpundit said, "Emanuel Cleaver: I haven't done

anything to hype that spitting incident," adding, "so transparent a lie

is this that I don't know how to read it except as a tacit admission

that he wasn't, in fact, deliberately spat on."

Others avoided

such stark, unsupported declarations, but went to some

effort to lead readers to similar conclusions. The Daily Caller, for example, began its report thus:

"Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, Missouri Democrat, was one of a few central

figures key to the narrative that Democrats used in the days after the

health care vote to argue that many of the people who opposed the

massive new law are racist or deranged." Thus motive was established up

front, so readers could properly interpret events.

Cleaver's portrayal of his own response may have fluctuated, but that of

Representative John Lewis has been consistent: He maintains Tea Party

protesters yelled racial slurs at him.

Lewis is a genuine hero of the 60s civil rights movement, which means

that when rightbloggers accused him of lying, some of them had to

pretend to feel bad about it.

While Lewis' stature would by itself be no reason to take him at his

word if he were asserting something absurd, in a situation like this (a

gantlet of white conservatives enraged by the passage of the health care

bill -- or, as such people like to think of it, an assault on America

and Jesus) normal people might either accept his

testimony or simply note that his charge has not been independently

corroborated, and let it go at that.

But rightbloggers went another, harsher way. RedState got out front early, calling both Cleaver

and Lewis "lying bastards" and "political crooks" right after the

reported incidents, and leaning for evidence on what became a

rightblogger talking point: the absence of audio recordings of the

slurs.

"I don't know if these two idiots are just unaware that protesters and

activists tend to carry video cameras everywhere they go now in order to

catch news as it happens," said RedState's Leon H. Wolf, "or if (more

likely) they just figured that their completely fabricated story fit a

pre-existing narrative the media would be happy to credulously pass on."

American Thinker's Jack Cashill created a video of the day's events

that did not include racial slurs, which he offered as proof that no

such slurs were uttered. The video is only four minutes long, and much

of the audio is given over to a voiceover track telling viewers what to

think about it ("the agitprop was working!"), but Cashill portrayed it

as dispositive. "The fact that [reporter William] Douglas is himself

black and that the McClatchy chain has a liberal bent should not

matter," added Cashill, "but in this case they both do." (Presumably, in

Cashill's reading, Douglas and Lewis met ahead of time at the Mau-Mau

Club to collaborate on the falsehood before handing it off to their

collabo-traitors at McClatchy.)

"Liars! Where is the Proof" wrote Conservative American News. "Videos Prove Deception

of Democrat Party," said Frugal Cafe. "By the way, I called bullshit on the

story as soon as it was reported," said Ann Althouse.

Eventually this POV was so well-circulated among rightbloggers that Legal Insurrection could write, "an attack based on

the now discredited claims that health care protesters at the Capitol

shouted racial epithets and spit at black Congressmen," without having

to explain it -- that is, to the extent it was ever explained.

As is typical in such circumstances, the overt haters were not as

obnoxious as those who affected reluctance to declare the honorable

Lewis a fraud.

"I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have

always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior," claimed Mark Steyn at National Review. "And I feel

slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement

and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points -- in the

same way I would be disgusted by a Holocaust survivor painting a

swastika on his own door and blaming it on his next-door neighbor over a

boundary dispute."

Regular readers will have already guessed that Steyn's alleged respect

for Lewis, not to mention his queasiness, did not prevent him from (or

even delay him in) suggesting that Lewis had made it all up and was in

fact out of his mind: "But that's what the Democratic Party has been

reduced to," said Steyn, "faking hate crimes as pathetically as any

lonely, mentally ill college student."

Now the story seems to be waning, and you might expect rightbloggers to

want to put it all behind them, and get back to the usual and less

controversial accusations of treason. But you may be seeing more of this

kind of thing. There are plenty of rightbloggers who are so tired of

having to watch their step when black people are involved that they

can't even acknowledge indisputable racism when presented with

it. Such people may see here an opportunity to clear the decks and

prove once and for all who's the real racist.

"Note to all Republican and Conservative spokesmen," instructed

RedState's Martin Knight. "If you're on TV or Radio and anyone

brings this up, this is the only response; Lewis is lying. Simple,

straight and to the point. If anyone even begins to hint that opposition

to Obamacare is based on the color of Barack Obama's skin, loudly and

clearly denounce them and call them out-and-out liars without hesitation

or apology."

If that doesn't work, there'll be plenty of other race-based

opportunities -- like the one Obama just offered by declaring himself

black on his Census form. "And what do we think of the opinion of the

President who, some of us thought, would move us into a new era of

race?" asked Ann Althouse. "My first thought was that he

disrespected his mother and maternal grandparents, who contributed so

much more to his upbringing than his father ever did." Keep hope alive,

guys!

Roy Edroso's Rightbloggers: Exploring the right Wing Blogosphere

appears courtesy of our sister paper in New York City, Village Voice.