The Scourge Persists

By BOB HERBERT
Published: September 18, 2009

Did we really need Jimmy Carter to tell us that racism is one of the driving forces behind the relentless and often scurrilous attacks on President Obama? We didn’t know that? As John McEnroe might say, “You can’t be serious.”

“There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president,” said Mr. Carter. I guess he was aiming his remarks at those who contended when Mr. Obama was elected that we had achieved some Pollyannaish postracial society. But it’s hard to imagine, after all the madness and vitriol of the past few months, that anyone still believes that.

For many white Americans, Barack Obama is nothing more than that black guy in the White House, and they want him out of there. (Mr. Carter knows a little something about kowtowing to that crowd. During his presidential campaign in 1976, he blithely let it be known that he had no problem with residents “trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods,” and he tossed around ugly terms like “black intrusion” and “alien groups.” He later apologized.)

More than three decades later we have Sherri Goforth, an aide to a Republican state senator in Tennessee sending out a mass e-mail of a cartoon showing dignified portraits of the first 43 presidents, and then representing the 44th — President Obama — as a spook, a cartoonish pair of white eyes against a black background.

When a gorilla escaped from a zoo in Columbia, S.C., a longtime Republican activist, Rusty DePass, described it on his Facebook page as one of Michelle Obama’s ancestors.

Among the posters at last weekend’s gathering of conservative protesters in Washington was one that said, “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African.”

These are bits and pieces of an increasingly unrestrained manifestation of racism directed toward Mr. Obama that is being fed by hate-mongers on talk radio and is widely tolerated, if not encouraged, by Republican Party leaders. It’s disgusting, and it’s dangerous. But it’s the same old filthy racism that has been there all along and that has been exploited by the G.O.P. since the 1960s.

I have no patience with those who want to pretend that racism is not an out-and-out big deal in the United States, as it always has been. We may have made progress, and we may have a black president, but the scourge is still with us. And if you needed Jimmy Carter to remind you of that, then you’ve been wandering around with your eyes closed.

Glenn Beck, one of the moronic maestros of right-wing radio and TV, assures us that President Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Some years ago, as the watchdog group Media Matters for America points out on its Web site, Beck said he’d like to beat Representative Charles Rangel “to death with a shovel.”

There is nothing new about this racist rhetoric. Back in the 1970s Rush Limbaugh told a black caller: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”

But the fact that a black man is now in the White House has so unsettled much of white America that the lid is coming off the racism that had been simmering at dangerously high temperatures all along. Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with Media Matters, said, “If someone had told me in February that there would be mainstream allegations that Obama was a racist and a fascist and a communist and a Nazi, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Republicans have been openly feeding off of race hatred since the days of Dick Nixon. Today’s conservative activists are carrying that banner proudly. What does anybody think is going on when, as Anderson Cooper pointed out on CNN, one of the leaders of the so-called tea party movement, Mark Williams, refers to the president of the United States as an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug, and a racist in chief.

After all these years of race-baiting and stirring the pot of hatred for political gain, it’s too much to ask the leaders of the Republican Party to step forward and denounce this spreading stain of reprehensible conduct. Republicans are trying to ride that dependable steed of bigotry back to power.

But it’s time for other Americans, of whatever persuasion, to take a stand, to say we’re better than this. They should do it because it’s right. But also because we’ve seen so many times what can happen when this garbage gets out of control.

Think about the Oklahoma City bombing, and the assassinations of King and the Kennedys. On Nov. 22, 1963, as they were preparing to fly to Dallas, a hotbed of political insanity, President Kennedy said to Mrs. Kennedy: “We’re heading into nut country today.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/opinion/19herbert.html?_r=1&ref=global

Gaddafi Not Invited to Obama UN Reception

Posted:
09/15/09

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama host their first international reception for world leaders later this month, in connection with the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly. Politics Daily has learned that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has not been invited because of the hero's welcome Gaddafi gave the convicted Pan Am Lockerbie bomber when he returned home to Libya after being released from a Scottish
prison.The Obama reception will be Sept. 23 in New York, as the president makes
his first visit to the United Nations General Assembly and spends several days at the UN.

By coincidence, the United States in September takes its turn holding the rotating presidency of the 15-member UN Security Council. A Libyan is the president of the UN General Assembly, and Libya is also taking a turn as one of 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council.

Besides speaking before the General Assembly, Obama will chair a Security Council summit meeting on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament, host a lunch for leaders of sub-Saharan African nations, and chair a meeting with countries contributing police and troops to UN peacekeeping operations.

In addition, Obama and the first lady will host the traditional U.S. welcome party for the heads of state converging in Manhattan for the opening of a new session.

Gaddafi is among a small group of world leaders -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is another -- not invited to the Obama party. "We can decide who we want to entertain and who we don't," a source close to the situation told me.

The Gaddafi snub, I was told, is directly related to Libya giving a hero's welcome last month to Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the Dec. 21, 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that killed 270 people, 189 of them U.S. citizens.

Al-Megrahi left a Scottish prison after Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill ordered him released from his 27-years-to-life sentence on "compassionate grounds," which is allowed under Scottish law. Al-Megrahi has prostate cancer, and on Aug. 10 was given three months to live.

While relations with the Lybyan leader had been improving, a new strain emerged in the wake of the high-profile welcome al-Megrahi received on Aug. 20. The U.S. and Britain had asked Gaddafi that al-Megrahi's homecoming be without fanfare.

Gaddafi may have been hoping to open a new chapter in U.S-Libya relations, as he just marked the 40th anniversary of the September, 1969 military coup that installed him in power. Last July, Obama and Gaddafi were in Italy for a G8 summit -- Gaddafi there in his role as the president of the African Union -- and Obama shook his hand, a small but symbolic action.

A gesture likely not to be repeated.

Obama and Gaddafi on Sept. 23, both address the UN General Assembly, with Gaddafi following Obama. U.S. United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, at a breakfast with reporters last Friday sponsored by the Christan Science Monitor, said Obama will not be taking part in any kind of hand-off.

Rice also said that Gaddafi has given up on what had been a plan to pitch a tent on the grounds of a Libyan residence in New Jersey and instead will stay in Manhattan.