Perhaps in an attempt to prove she isn’t a left-winger after all, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien has found an Obama talking point that she feels quite comfortable slamming. O’Brien finds the spin that Vice President Biden didn’t mean anything by his “put ya’all back in chains” comment is a bit hard to swallow.
On the August 16 broadcast of her Starting Point morning show, O’Brien took the opportunity of an interview with Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D, MO) to press the Democrats on their off handed dismissal of Biden’s remarks. It didn’t seem as if Cleaver was prepared for such nay saying of his blather.
After being caught using a left-wing blog to program her talking points on her CNN show, Soledad O’Brien recently told The Hollywood Reporter that she is neither left nor right, but is just right down the middle. Perhaps she feels she has something to prove, but, regardless, she is right to be suspicious of the Democrat’s untenable support of our gaffe-prone Vice President.
For his part, Rep. Cleaver claimed that Biden’s allusions to black chattel slavery and his lapsing into black dialect in the doing was no big deal. Cleaver thought that focusing on Biden’s “chains” comment was just engaging in an attempt to “create an atmosphere of more and more discord.” In fact, he said he would never have paid any attention to it at all but for the media pushing the story.
Cleaver went on to say that it was insulting to assume that throwing out the word “chains” might “attract dumb African-Americans who if they hear the word ‘chains’ are going to automatically vote for him and President Obama.”
Cleaver also said that Biden’s comments had “no impact” on him as a black man.
O’Brien, however, was having none of it.
She first told Cleaver that he was ridiculously “extrapolating” with his “dumb African-Americans” characterization. This was an astute observation because no one has made such an accusation at all. This is just spin from Cleaver. But that wasn’t all she had to say.
“You cannot tell me,” O’Brien pointedly said, “that if in fact we were talking about Mitt Romney saying a line like that… that people would not be going crazy and crying about race-baiting and talking about tone and tenor and coded language. I think we would, wouldn’t we?”
Cleaver’s absurd reply was that he wasn’t sure because it would “depend on the context.”
What context would make it OK to use racially charged language, Mr. Cleaver?
Cleaver went on with the approved spin on Biden’s comments. You see, as Cleaver and others have had it, the audience only had a “sprinkling” of African Americans in attendance, so using racially charged rhetoric is OK if there wasn’t a majority of African Americans there. That is how they are framing the Vice President’s latest lapse in judgment.
O’Brien, though, corrected Cleaver’s untruthful characterization of the demographics of the audience. She said that witnesses reported that the audience was more like the racial breakdown of the city from which the audience came. It was a 50/50 audience, O’Brien insisted.
Now, catch this foolishness from Cleaver.
Yes, I mean but why would the vice president go into a setting like that where presumably half the people wouldn’t have any understanding or feelings about what was going on?
So, in Cleaver’s opinion, no white people could have any sympathy with the fear African Americans might have of being “put back in chains”? Whites can “have no feelings” that slavery is a bad thing?
Talk about insulting!
Cleaver went on to complain that our “discourse” has become “unsophisticated” and “unpolished,” yet, as commentator Will Cain noted on the show, Cleaver is still not upset over Biden’s engaging in just such unsophisticated discourse. Seems a bit hypocritical, doesn’t it? Or maybe just illogical?
There is no logic in the Democrat’s attempt to explain away Biden’s idiocy. But they are certainly spinning furiously. Kudos to Soledad O’Brien for not lying down and allowing the left to spin this story away.
As to gauging whether something is “racist” by measuring the audience, perhaps Trent Lott didn’t have to resign back in 2002? After all, his audience had but few African Americans in it. By Cleaver’s absurd reckoning, Lott was not being racist at all!
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