For us journalist types, some stories just keep giving and giving. These are the stories we say have “legs.” The race baiting of the Congressional Black Caucus is such a story. First we had Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., telling that if she had her druthers, “the Tea Party can go straight to hell.”
Not one to be outdone, Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., put in his two cents worth, trying his best to convince folks that he’s the second coming of Malcolm X.
“Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us [black Americans] as second-class citizens,” Carson said. “Some of them in Congress right now of this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me, I’m sorry, hanging on a tree.”
Florida Rep. Allen West is the only Republican in the CBC. West had the support of members of the Tea Party movement when he ran for Congress last year, so it’s understandable that he took umbrage with Carson’s race-baiting rant and Waters’ uncouth mouth.
“I don’t think we need that type of incendiary talk coming out there,” West said when he appeared on the Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor” recently.
“And I think that it’s a reflection that when you look at the almost 17 percent unemployment rate in the black community, 40 percent unemployment rate among black teens, the high incarceration rates, that we are not seeing them go at failures of the Obama administration but rather they are trying to demonize and attack the Tea Party movement as a scapegoat for these failures.”
West is wrong on one point: He hinted that the CBC hasn’t criticized President Obama’s policies, but it has. CBC members have specifically taken Obama to task for not coming up with a jobs program to alleviate the unemployment West referred to in his comments on O’Reilly’s show.
But West is absolutely right about this: He hinted that the CBC is completely useless, and it is. A modern-day Diogenes would have an easier time of it finding his elusive honest man than he would finding a more useless political body than the CBC.
So what do you do when you’re an elected official who’s black, liberal, Democratic and useless? Why, you resort to race baiting and scapegoating, of course.
What better way to divert attention away from the fact that you’re essentially useless? And, I might add, reeking with the stench of hypocrisy.
Let’s go about back about six to eight weeks. West sent a testy email to Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, of Florida, calling her “vile, unprofessional and despicable.”
While Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., the CBC chairman, hasn’t mustered the gumption to make any comment about Waters wishing that “the Tea Party can go straight to hell,” or about Carson saying that, in essence, members of the Tea Party movement are little more than a lynch mob, he did have an immediate reaction when West attacked Wasserman Schultz.
“It’s unfortunate,” Cleaver said, according to a story on the Web site www.foxnews.com. “I’m going to talk to him.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., a CBC member, said in the Fox story that he was “shocked” by the language West used and then added, “we have really got to make sure that we maintain a high level of civility.”
Cummings and I graduated from Baltimore City College in 1969. During our sophomore year, we had the same homeroom and English teacher. So I know that he knows what civility is.
And he knows that neither Waters nor Carson used it in their remarks about members of the Tea Party movement.
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Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
