Governor, we are not "the enemy'.

  One of Donald trump's biggest supporters is a guy named Paul Le Page. Mr. LePage happens to be the governor of the lovely state of Maine, and he has some very interesting views about people of color.

"Speaking about Maine's effort to combat drug crime, Paul LePage said that "the enemy right now... are people of color or people of Hispanic origin".

When you go to war... and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red," he said.

Leading Democrats have urged him to resign.

Mr LePage made the comments while seeking to clarify remarks he made earlier in the week which were criticized as racist.

The press conference capped a controversial 72 hours for the Republican governor."

This is the same guy who went all Travis Bickle on a fellow lawmaker because he thought that the guy called him a racist.

Anyway, Le Page is catching some heat for his behavior, but I am pretty sure that he won't be forced to resign. In fact, you could argue, that given the demographic makeup of the state of Maine, he will win reelection if he decides to run for governor.

This is not the same for his buddy, Donald trump. In order to win the election to become the 45th president of the United States, trump will have to win significantly more minority votes than -according to the polls- he is currently going to receive.  With this in mind, Donald has put a full- court press on trying to court the black vote. Unfortunately for the orange haired one, though, that has not been going so well.

Once again, he gave a speech to an almost all white audience about "the African Americans" and about how  he plans to make America better by forcing them to clean up their act. You could see him reading the lines from the teleprompter as his handlers no doubt kept their fingers crossed. 

They wrote all the right things for him about how African Americans had contributed to America's greatness and how not all African Americans (as he implied before) were living in poverty and looking over their shoulders for fear of being shot, and he was delivering the message---- meant for college educated whites and white suburban mothers to a barn full of screaming right wingers.  The optics was sickening, and the speech was predictable.

The worse part of trump's day started before the speech. This is when he took it upon himself to use the tragic death of Dwyane Wade's (Donald, note the spelling) cousin to score cheap political points. 

"Donald Trump tastelessly used the tragic shooting death of basketball star Dwyane Wade’s cousin to appeal to black voters — but he couldn’t even spell the Chicago Bulls player’s name correctly.

“Dwayne Wade's cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!” Trump tweeted Saturday, a day after 32-year-old Nykea Aldridge was shot dead in the city's South Side. The mom of four did not appear to be the target of the shooting.

Critics swiftly condemned the Republican presidential hopeful's callous message — which at first offered no condolences to Aldridge’s grieving family — and mocked the real estate mogul for misspelling Wade’s first name.

Three hours later, Trump deleted the typo tweet and sent out a new message, which was identical to his first post but with the correct spelling of Dwyane."

 I bet Donald wishes that he was running to be governor of Maine instead of president of the United States, then he wouldn't have to deal with "the blacks".           

*Pic courtesy of huffingtonpost.com  

"They use it so why can't we?"

           It never ceases to amaze me how indignant folks in the majority population can get over the fact that they aren't allowed to use the n-word. If I hear this familiar refrain again:  "They use it to each other so why can't we"? one more time, I swear I will find religion.

My views on the subject of the n word is well documented, I personally don't use the word, but I am not as offended as others when the younger generation of African Americans use it. And I certainly can appreciate it  when it is used in the context of art. "Sucka Nigga" is still one of the greatest hip hop songs of all times (RIP Phife Dawg), and I can appreciate its use in film and other forms of artistic expression as well. 

Having said all of that, given how the word was used by whites historically (and how they still, in some quarters, continue to use it today) it is never ever cool for whites to use the word in general conversation. 

This notion that they can use the word because we do is preposterous. I have Italian friends who refer to other Italians as the d word, that does not give me the right to use that word to an Italian American, and I would certainly never make an issue of the fact that I am not supposed to use the word because it is repugnant to them when it is said by someone who doesn't happen to be Italian American. 

It's really that simple, folks.  

This all leads me to Larry Wilmore's use of the word (or something like it) to close the White House Correspondence Dinner last night.

I played tennis with an older African American gentleman today who was furious that Wilmore even went there to his Oness. To him, it was disrespectful, given the historical nature of O's presidency and the fact that this was his official send off from the Washington elites. And judging from what was said on twitter and in other quarters, he was not alone. Heck even Rev Al weighed in, and he, like others, gave it a thumbs down.  

I personally was not so much offended by the word as I was the fact that the line was not particularly funny. Wilmore is a fine comedy writer, but let's face it, he is not a very good stand up comedian, so that joke, like a few others, fell flat.

Leonard Greene, writing for the New York Daily News, had a good take on it.

"That’s not to say Wilmore bombed the whole set. He managed to get off quite a few good lines, like the one about Obama’s graying hair.

“Mr. President, your hair is so white, it tried to punch me at a Trump rally,” Wilmore said. “The President’s hair is so white it keeps saying ‘All lives matter.’”

Wilmore should have quit while he was ahead.

Besides unfairly putting Obama on the spot about the most loaded word in the English language, Wilmore just gave white people, many of whom have for nearly eight years been beside themselves over a black man in the White House, license to use the N-word against the leader of the free world."

Yep. "They use it, so why can't we?"









  

Studying black people.

  Jonathan Chait is a very white man, and he recently wrote  an article about African Americans and our voting traditions especially as it relates to the democratic party.

It was an interesting take on why the majority of  African Americans vote the way we do, and why, when it comes to the two leading political parties, we tend to choose the donkey over the elephant.

I actually found a lot of what t he wrote to be true, but, like others, I found it a little unsettling that this very white writer thought that he could go into the minds of African Americans and like some member of the Jedi Order play mind tricks on every African American voter in America.  

I think the gist of what he wrote is that black voters are pragmatic almost to a fault, and that the reason Hillary has been able to beat Bernie four to one among black voters is because black voters are afraid of change. (Or something like that. ) I am still not sure where this leaves the 25% of black folks who are voting for Sanders.

"And pragmatism inflects the African-American view of how politicians perform in office. Purists see compromise as a sign of moral failure or weakness, an inability to smash a corrupted system. Pragmatists expect political opposition as normal and enduring. A politician who has their best interests in mind and pushes policy in the proper direction is better than the all-too-common alternative. Sanders’s campaign draws much of its strength from the left-wing critique of Barack Obama’s presidency, which it dismisses as largely feeble half-measures. Sanders has attracted Democrats most discontented with Obama’s progress, while Clinton wins those most satisfied, among whom African-Americans are disproportionately represented. Obviously, Obama’s status as the first black president creates a unique bond with black supporters, but much more than racial affinity is at work here.

As Brett Gadsden, a historian and professor of African-American studies at Emory, told me a few months ago over email, “Black voters have always [been] faced with the difficult choice between candidates who have only offered incremental support for their concerns and have been perfectly willing to turn their backs, albeit to slightly different degrees, on black communities when it was politically expedient.” The decision about how to exert leverage (which is necessarily limited within a racially polarized electorate) is difficult, even agonizing. Any political constituency must navigate the twin imperatives of supporting the better (or less bad) party without letting that party take its support completely for granted."

"Racial affinity". The first African American president in the history of this country --- one who in retrospect has done a pretty decent job--- and the writer makes an issue of "racial affinity" between black voters and the candidate.   

This is what drives black folks like yours truly crazy. This tendency some whites -particularly liberals- have of viewing us as some exotic other to be studied and understood like experimental lab rats.

This was the case of a very liberal recently hired Temple University professor, who had the following to say:

"Goldrick-Rab, who spent five years in Philadelphia when she attended the University of Pennsylvania, said she welcomes the chance to return to an urban setting, where she will be "closer to the students whose lives I study."

"I fell in love with that city when I was a grad student," she said, "and I've been trying to get back ever since."

She plans to spend time in neighborhoods, visit the Housing Authority, and hang out at Community College of Philadelphia, where she previously served as an evaluator of a program that provides legal, counseling, and other services for students in one place.

"They have the population that I've been working on and studying for a long time," she said."

Did you read that? She has been studying us for "a long time." That sound you hear is my head exploding.

No doubt Mr. Chait has been studying us a long time as well, and his intense studying has inspired him to write this puzzling essay about African American pragmatism when it comes to voting.

Memo to Mr. Chait: We are not the only group that votes for what we think is in our best interest. The American electorate is now more polarized than ever because more groups are doing just that.
That has been the American way long before we even had the right to vote.  

Maybe the next time Mr. Chait will focus his effort on writing about another one of the polarized groups in America, and as  the old timers like to say: "Stay out of black folks business."

*Pic from npr.org






 

Another take on Rachel, and another attack on young black girls.

  My hometown  newspaper has a  very interesting article that I want to share with you.

The Field Negro education series continues.

"As the controversy over her racial identity became a distraction for the organization, Rachel Dolezal has resigned from her job as president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP. She teaches college courses in Africana studies, she fights for civil rights, and she identifies as black. So what's the story here, and how did we learn about her?

This case is as much about the psychology of families of origin as it is about race, racism, and passing. Dolezal is also the biological daughter of white parents who adopted black children after Rachel and her biological brother were born. She couldn't have asked her parents any louder for their attention.

And instead of working with a family therapist, her parents - who may themselves have felt hurt by her identity choices - attempted to embarrass her publicly, insisting that her decision to live as a black woman is both ridiculous and fraudulent. Embarrassment has turned to humiliation as continuing revelations cast suspicion on the originality of Dolezal's artwork, and she has forfeited her job. What appears to remain genuine, however, is her desire to belong.

The revelation by the senior Dolezals is particularly well-timed to maximize anger and resentment from African Americans, who this year more than others have been reminded with excruciating cruelty of how vulnerable we still are to the capriciousness of state-sponsored violence. With the stunning revelations that kindergartners in sandboxes, teenagers at pool parties, shoppers at Walmart, kids with arms raised in submission or walking home "armed" with candy, and fathers selling single cigarettes on the street are all considered fair game if they have dark brown skin, this attenuated moment of despair has led to a collective insistence that black lives matter. It is also a moment to demand that our differences should never be grounds for mistreatment, much less murder.

Those differences are not nearly as dangerous as the ideology that justifies such violent and cruel responses to our existence. True, a sizable segment of African Americans has been admitted into the middle and upper classes as a direct result of the sacrifices and struggles of the civil rights movement. But others have been left to struggle over fewer jobs that pay a living wage while navigating the backlash against the gains of the 1960s, in a retrenchment of white supremacist ideology that is as dramatic as it is difficult to undermine.

But make no mistake, while the increasingly bureaucratic and underfunded government institutions that could be a way out of poverty, illness, and ignorance affect Americans of every color, the lives of African Americans and Latinos have been disproportionately narrowed. The work of the civil rights movement is far from over.

While biology reveals that race is a fiction, sociology reveals how powerful the implications are of that fiction on people's lives. Let's be clear: There's no science in race, even as it plays itself out on bodies marked by color and ancestry. This is neither to deny inherited traits and genetic predispositions of people with the same sets of recent ancestors, nor the science of measurement clarifying that groups of people are both treated differently and respond differently to their environments. But race is a concept invented to justify treating some people as things and others as owners of things. As an immoral invention, its continuing effects are toxic.

In contrast, ethnicity is about the beliefs and traditions, and the habits and customs, that spring up around us. If ever there were a time for African Americans, as an ethnic group, to reveal one of the hardest-won insights of oppression - that it is right and good to offer hospitality to those who are exiled - this is one of those times. We know what it's like to hide, and to be hidden, to ignore our own needs and to be ignored. We know what it's like to be excluded, degraded, less valued, how welcome it is to be taken in and how good it feels to extend that hand.

The ideology of white supremacy continues to play itself out in everyday degradations, whether it's a white news anchor casually using the n-word among coworkers or what have become nearly weekly fatalities of family and friends. But our mourning must not make us stingy. In the best traditions of our cultural practice, it should make us angry and creative, strategic and compassionate, insistent on justice and generous.

We're a family under stress, a family with a troubled history and a vulnerable present, but any family that includes everyone has a bright future.

Pull up a chair, Rachel. We know you've got some skeletons in the closet. Who doesn't? But at our table, everyone is welcome." [Source]

That was a very interesting take on this Dolezal situation. Black folks embracing her because we feel that she is being persecuted by folks in the majority population.

 And speaking of black folks catching it from folks in the majority population. Here is another story involving black folks and  a swimming pool that might interest you.

"The police say they were just doing their jobs—and besides, the 12-year-old attacked them. But a 911 call by a pool employee reveals concerns over race.

 

Krystal Dixon dropped off her kids and nieces and nephews at the Fairfield, Ohio, pool just as she’d done many times before. Not a half-hour later, the family was being rushed to the hospital after a violent altercation with local police.

The incident started so small. When one child didn’t have swimming trunks, staff demanded the family leave.

Even though Dixon, pregnant and 33, said she had a swimsuit for the child, workers at the Fairfield Aquatic Center—about 25 miles north of Cincinnati—said it was too late.

What was a minor breach of pool rules then descended into chaos: A white officer using pepper spray on black teenage girls, and one 12-year-old—Dixon’s niece—being slammed against a cop car. Her family says she has a fractured jaw and broken ribs.

Two adults were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. A 12-year-old girl was charged with assault and resisting arrest, while a 15-year-old was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

The two sides paint a different picture of what happened. The family is accusing the cops of using excessive force in the incident. The police say they were just doing their jobs—and besides, the 12-year-old attacked them. But a 911 call by a pool employee reveals concerns over race." [More]

Wow, some folks really hate to see Negroes in the pool.

Relax people, that black will not come off while they are in the water.    

 

When being "delusional" can hurt your child.

A friend of mine, who also happens to be a successful attorney, sent me the following article:

"I knew the day would come, but I didn’t know how it would happen, where I would be, or how I would respond. It is the moment that every black parent fears: the day their child is called a nigger.

My wife and I, both African Americans, constitute one of those Type A couples with Ivy League undergraduate and graduate degrees who, for many years, believed that if we worked hard and maintained great jobs, we could insulate our children from the blatant manifestations of bigotry that we experienced as children in the 1960s and ’70s.


We divided our lives between a house in a liberal New York suburb and an apartment on Park Avenue, sent our three kids to a diverse New York City private school, and outfitted them with the accoutrements of success: preppy clothes, perfect diction and that air of quiet graciousness. We convinced ourselves that the economic privilege we bestowed on them could buffer these adolescents against what so many black and Latino children face while living in mostly white settings: being profiled by neighbors, followed in stores and stopped by police simply because their race makes them suspect.


But it happened nevertheless in July, when I was 100 miles away.


It was a Tuesday afternoon when my 15-year-old son called from his academic summer program at a leafy New England boarding school and told me that as he was walking across campus, a gray Acura with a broken rear taillight pulled up beside him. Two men leaned out of the car and glared at him.
“Are you the only nigger at Mellon Academy*?” one shouted.


Certain that he had not heard them correctly, my son moved closer to the curb, and asked politely, “I’m sorry; I didn’t hear you.”

But he had heard correctly. And this time the man spoke more clearly. “Only … nigger,” he said with added emphasis.


My son froze. He dropped his backpack in alarm and stepped back from the idling car. The men honked the horn loudly and drove off, their laughter echoing behind them.


By the time he recounted his experience a few minutes later, my son was back in his dorm room, ensconced on the third floor of a red-brick fortress. He tried to grasp the meaning of the story as he told it: why the men chose to stop him, why they did it in broad daylight, why they were so calm and deliberate. “Why would they do that — to me?” he whispered breathlessly into the phone. “Dad, they don’t know me. And they weren’t acting drunk. It’s just 3:30 in the afternoon. They could see me, and I could see them!”


My son rambled on, describing the car and the men, asking questions that I couldn’t completely answer. One very clear and cogent query was why, in Connecticut in 2014, grown men would target a student who wasn’t bothering them to harass in broad daylight. The men intended to be menacing.


“They got so close — like they were trying to ask directions. … They were definitely trying to scare me,” he said.


“Are you okay?” I interrupted. “Are you —”


“Yeah,” he continued anxiously. “I’m okay. I guess. … Do you think they saw which dorm I went back to? Maybe I shouldn’t have told my roommate. Should I stay in my dorm and not go to the library tonight?”


Despite his reluctance, I insisted that he report the incident to the school. His chief concern was not wanting the white students and administrators to think of him as being special, different, or “racial.” That was his word. “If the other kids around here find out that I was called a nigger, and that I complained about it,” my son pleaded, “then they will call me ‘racial,’ and will be thinking about race every time they see me. I can’t have that.” For the next four weeks of the summer program, my son remained leery of cars that slowed in his proximity (he’s still leery today). He avoided sidewalks, choosing instead to walk on campus lawns. And he worried continually about being perceived as racially odd or different.


Herein lay the difference between my son’s black childhood and my own. Not only was I assaulted by the n-word so much earlier in life — at age 7, while visiting relatives in Memphis — but I also had many other experiences that differentiated my life from the lives of my white childhood friends. There was no way that they would “forget” that I was different. The times, in fact, dictated that they should not forget; our situation would be unavoidably “racial.”


When my family moved into our home in an all-white neighborhood in suburban New York in December 1967, at the height of the black-power movement and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil-rights marches, integration did not — at all — mean assimilation. So my small Afro, the three African dashiki-style shirts that I wore to school every other week, and the Southern-style deep-fried chicken and watermelon slices that my Southern-born mother placed lovingly in my school lunchbox all elicited surprise and questions from the white kids who regarded me suspiciously as they walked to school or sat with me in the cafeteria. After all, in the 1960s, it was an “event” — and generally not a trouble-free one — when a black family integrated a white neighborhood. Our welcome was nothing like the comically naive portrayal carried off by Sidney Poitier and his white fiancee’s liberal family members in the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” which had opened the very month that we moved in.


It wasn’t about awkward pauses, lingering stares and subtle attempts of “throwing shade” our way. It was often blatant and sometimes ugly. Brokers openly refused to show houses to my parents in any of the neighborhoods that we requested, and once we found a house in the New York Times Sunday classifieds, the seller demanded a price almost 25 percent higher than listed in the paper. (My parents paid it.) A day after Mom and Dad signed the contract, a small band of neighbors circulated a petition that outlined their desire to preemptively buy the house from the seller to circumvent its sale to us. My parents were so uncertain of this new racial adventure that they held onto our prior house for another four years — renting it on a year-to-year lease — “just in case,” as my mother always warned, with trepidation on her tongue." [More]


My friend, like the author, did all the right things to achieve the "American dream". She and her husband are also raising their children in a very lily white environment.


Unlike the author, though, she has no illusions about the alleged "post racial" world that we live in.


None of her children, she assured me, would be as traumatized at being called the n-word by some random white dude in a car. 


"My son rambled on, describing the car and the men, asking questions that I couldn’t completely answer. One very clear and cogent query was why, in Connecticut in 2014, grown men would target a student who wasn’t bothering them to harass in broad daylight. The men intended to be menacing.


“They got so close — like they were trying to ask directions. … They were definitely trying to scare me,” he said.


“Are you okay?” I interrupted. “Are you —”


“Yeah,” he continued anxiously. “I’m okay. I guess. …"


Sorry kid, your daddy should have prepared you.




The picture above is of the author and his family courtesy of the Washington Post.  


h/t TL Esq.

"Can't we all just get along?"

The following story was sent to me by Dan Walter of the Center For Independent Media, and it's interesting for a few reasons:

First, there is the sensitive issue of race and journalism: Do journalist have an obligation to report the news no matter what? Or, should they show some sensitivity to certain racial groups given the history of race in this country? Second, do journalist report the news based on their own bias and fears? And finally, given the fact that we just found out that Hispanics are becoming citizens faster than any other racial group, should we pay attention whenever there seems to be a rift between African Americans and Latinos? Judging from this article maybe we should.

"By Gwyneth Doland 4/10/09 1:24 AM.
ALBUQUERQUE — Some African-American community leaders are unhappy with the way a story in Thursday’s Albuquerque Journal may unfairly affect the city’s small black community. The front-page story, which carried the banner headline “Cops Bust Memphis Mob,” featured large mug-shot images of six young black men accused of breaking “every law in the book.”
The Albuquerque Police Department worked with a consortium of law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service, to arrest or charge nearly 50 members of the cocaine-dealing gang, nine of whom face federal charges, according to the story. (You can read it online here, but unfortunately the photos are available only in the print edition with the eJournal service.)

According to 2000 Census figures, Albuquerque is slightly over 3 percent black; New Mexico as a whole is less than 2 percent black. There is no mention in the story of the names of the alleged gang members pictured in the mug shots, or the racial makeup of the gang.
While few would disagree that breaking up the gang is a positive development for the city, the image of six young black men’s mug shots on the front page troubled some.
'It’s just another example of — I don’t want to use the regular words like ‘racist’ — but convoluted thinking. It’s just an absence of thought. It’s amazing how people on a major newspaper, who are supposed to be intelligent would do that, unless they’re just trying to sell papers,' Ron Hinson of the African-American Chamber of Commerce told NMI.

Hinson said the story might have bothered him less had it been published on an inside page. He also thought it ironic that the story appeared alongside another item about a bill passed by the Legislature that would create a Department of Hispanic Affairs.'
Not only are we angry, but … today I find that there’s also an article about the governor having some serious thoughts about passing a bill that’s going to make things better for a Hispanic cultural group — which is 42 percent of the population. Now what problems are they having? They just got through stomping a black guy nearly to death, who was supposed to be in protective custody,' Hinson said.

Hinson was referring to a recent incident in which an African-American inmate at the Metropolitan Detention Center was beaten so severely by another inmate that he was partially paralyzed. The accused attacker and a correctional officer who is facing charges of intimidating a witness in the case are both Hispanic. Just this week the victim’s family and community groups spoke out about the attack.

'We may have a black president, but we have not changed the hearts and minds of other cultural groups who have been misguided in their zeal to always have someone to step on,' Hinson said."

More here.

Some of you have commented on this before; ---especially you folks who live out West and in the Southwest---the tension among brown people in this country. Well here is my two cents: We really need to get a grip and start recognizing just where we (Af. Americans and Latinos) stand in this country. Because here is the deal: No matter how different we think we are from each other; there are still quite a few Lou Dobbs types in this country who still believe that we are all the same, and they will do everything in their power to keep the status quo.

"Race Matters."

I want to talk about the elephant in the room again; no, not the GOP logo, race.

Reading the very fine columnist, Dick Polman, in my hometown paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, made me think about it. Honestly, I try not to think about this tricky little subject when it comes to his O-ness; and being around you Obamaholics (I am married to one) makes it easier for me not to. You are all so positive, so optimistic, so full of hope, and so confident that your fellow A-merry-cans will do what is right for all of us. But that damn elephant won't go away. And watching the repukes at their Klan rally.....I mean their convention, jarred me back to reality. [This years code word is "Community Organizer"]

So what is reality? Well the reality is that 12% of dumbocratic voters were willing to tell pollsters straight up, that race was "important to Obama's detriment". Maybe you didn't read that. I wasn't talking about what the rethuglicans said, I was talking about the dumbocrats. And they are supposed to be the enlightened ones? According to Polman; "last June, the Washington Post-ABC News poll devised a 'racial sensitivity index,' based on a series of nuanced questions that were designed to measure questions that were designed to measure the varying levels of racial prejudice in the white electorate. The pollsters came up with three categories ranging from most to least enlightened category--- The key finding: Whites in the least enlightened category--- roughly 30 percent of the white electorate--- favored John McCain over Obama by a ratio of 2-1" Now I don't know about you folks, but where I am from, that spells trouble for his O -ness. I know my Philly politics, and right here in this 75% democratic city, where 55% of the population is African American, his O-ness will be lucky to get 65% of the overall vote come November. Why? Because many of the poor white ethnic blue collar voters will be voting for McCain, that's why, and it ain't because they think Obama is inexperienced.

Don't believe me? Well how do you explain, according to Polman's article, that union organizers in places like Michigan are complaining to the press that "we're all struggling to some extent with the problem of white workers who will not vote for Obama because of his color." In the article, one mine electrician from Kentucky said: " I won't vote for a colored man. He'll put too many coloreds in jobs." Well, that's a pretty good reason for not voting for him I guess, we can't have too many of those "coloreds" working now can we. Might upset the balance of things. Change those traditional values that we cling to here in A-merry-ca. Ahhh A-merry-ca, some things will never change.

Polman's quote from David Thoreau is spot on: "public opinion is a weak tyrant, compared with our own private opinion."

Well my private opinion is that race still matters, at least to at least 30% of our fellow citizens. And I am sorry Obamaholics, in spite of the well meaning folks of the majority population, and you true believers in the minority, 30% is just too big of a number to make up.

Field are you going

to post about something else besides race, the "O" man, and Hillary just once?

Ahhh, I want to. But sorry, tonight I have a twofer. Why? Because it involves the Ice Queen, the "O" man, and race.

You all know the story. Apparently the Ice Queen darkened up the "O" man for a T.V. commercial, and her campaigned got called on the carpet by some left leaning blogs.

I have posted the pic. Is it much to do about nothing? I bet the Ice Queen thinks it is.

After all, she is just trying to show A-merry-ca what the Kenyan side of the "O" man looks like.

But hey, I am tired of all the racial stuff. I mean is it possible that maybe the picture just happened to be darker, and there was no nefarious intent on the part of the Clinton campaign?

I choose to see the glass as half full. I think the Ice Queen and her peeps were just trying to appeal to African American voters. After all, she is not doing so hot with that group.

Don't worry Ice Queen, if you become President, I am sure you will be the President of all the people. Even the darker ones.