POLITICAL, RELIGIOUS, AND RACIAL PARANOIA

Victor Davis Hanson on the Democrats and race:

I recently listened to, and read from, various disgusting excerpts of Rev. (“God damn America!”) Wright, the Obama pastor and his Ward Churchill-like “chickens coming home to roost” rhetoric.

The problem is that he is not simply a well-meaning black pastor, sounding themes of African-American self-improvement. His loopy references about the past, and the many sins of a white racist America, coupled with his promiscuous use of slurs about other races and religions, (and his own country), put him clearly in the camp of extremists. In other words, he is a nut, and the more Obama’s tries to pooh-pooh that, the worse it gets. Most who could sit through those diatribes and venom each week might find it difficult to have a balanced view of so-called “white” people or the country at large.

That Rev. Wright is a racist of the worst kind is indisputable--all you have to do is watch him to understand the hatred he preaches. This is the kind of hatred that Barack Obama has listened to and admired for more than 20 years-- and given his money to support; it represents the audacity of hate and a high dose of racial paranoia, rather than the audacity of hope or change.

So it is interesting to wonder how so many people have come to imagine that Barack Hussein Obama could possibly heal America's racist past? That he represents some sort of redemption?

Don't you think it's interesting that for all of Barack's saintly attempts to "keep race out of the race" that the Democratic primary has been the scene of the most disgusting race-baiting and racist/sexist name-calling in memory? I don't believe this is only Hillary and Bill's fault....just listen to Obama's mentor for a moment or two and think about it.

The Democrats (who were largely responsible for America's racist past) are in pure denial and wishful thinking mode (are they ever in any other?) if they believe that either Obama or Hillary represent any sort of healing, since both campaigns are based on the identity politics the Democrats have championed over the last two decades.

In a recent post, I said:

I am repeatedly astonished at how the left in this country jumps to their pre-ordained conclusions about things. Everything that happens is instantly transformed into a "fact" that supports their fantasy. We see this in people with paranoid delusions. They take reality and then creatively rearrange it to fit the pattern they have already set up inside their heads. That's why most people with paranoia and with a modicum of intelligence develop complicated conspiracy theories over time.

Basically, their delusional system becomes the only thing they can see, and hence they are completely unable to visualize the "Big Picture". The "Big Picture" is just a shorthand way of describing reality over time.

The Rev. Wright appears to believe in a vast number of conspiracy theories, including the idea that AIDS was developed to use against the Black community; that the government is feeding Blacks drugs; that they are behind 9/11 etc. etc.

And you thought that such nonsense was so paranoid and psychotic that it could only exist on the margins. Well, the Democratic Party is about to take it mainstream.

Remember, Obama has been listening to and supporting this crap for more than 20 years. His "repudiations" of Rev. Wright are lukewarm and affectionate. You've got to ask yourself how any reasonable person could stay in such an environment for two decades without absorbing some of the insanity being preached there.

But this is the same sort of insanity that infused the left wing of the Democratic party. It is the same sort of insanity that is promulgated in many of our academic institutions--and you have to spend time on university campuses to appreciate the baseline level of intense political and racial paranoia that exists in this particular bastion of "diversity". The university campus is where you can promote diversity as much as you want--as long as you aren't inclusive of white, heterosexual, male, Republicans.

Like Type O blood,--the universal donor among bloodtypes--the WHMR is the universal oppressor in the postmodern rhetoric of the left. There is nothing that can't be twisted, distorted or spun in such a way in order to ensure that this particular group gets the blame for everything bad that happens in the world.

This kind of paranoi and conspiracy are of the "politically correct" sort--and therefore academically and religiously sanctioned. No matter the color of the skin of the person who does it, it remains racial stereotyping and scapegoating. But it is affirmative scapegoating, I guess.

Along these lines, remember this surreal exchange from a recent House Committee hearing:

Two congressmen yesterday said the Department of Homeland Security needs more diversity to do its job effectively, and scolded Secretary Michael Chertoff for not bringing any black or female staffers to his appearance before the House Judiciary Committee — even though two staffers were immigrants and a third was Hispanic.

In what appeared to be a sort of diversity sting operation, Rep. Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, led off his questions to Mr. Chertoff by demanding that the secretary's staff stand up to be scrutinized. Minutes later, during his own questions, Rep. Melvin Watt, North Carolina Democrat, said the point was to prove that none of the 10 staffers who stood met his definition of diverse.

"You brought 10 staff people with you, all white males. I know this hearing is not about diversity of the staff, but I hope you've got more diversity in your staff than you've reflected here in the people you've brought with you," Mr. Watt told the secretary.

The hearing was called to examine the administration's record on border security and immigration, but Mr. Watt said diversity mattered for law enforcement. Both Mr. Watt and Mr. Scott are black.

Mr. Chertoff responded that Mr. Watt shouldn't judge his staff based purely on appearance.

Well, yes. That's exactly what the identity politics of the Democrats says you should do.

And an article from the Washington Post:

President Bush's crop of political appointees includes fewer women and minorities than did President Bill Clinton's at comparable points in their presidencies, according to a new report by House Democrats.

Women made up about 37 percent of the 2,786 political appointees in the Bush administration in 2005, compared with about 47 percent in the Clinton administration in 1997, according to the report and supplemental data released last week by the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee. Similarly, about 13 percent of Bush administration appointees last year were racial minorities, compared with 24 percent in the fifth year of Clinton's presidency, the report found.

This kind of casual racism that is so much a part of the whole identity politics/equality of outcome schtick is absolutely disgusting. Once, people marched for equal rights and opportunity. Now they demand equal results and the sanctity of victimhood.

How have we come to live in a society that once idealistically sought to permanently END the pervasive and evil racism that had made Blacks second-class citizens since the beginning of our republic; and which now has come to CELEBRATE a new and even more sinister racism as some sort of political good?

Can you think of a single person from a "non-White" background in the Bush Administration that has not been acused of being a "traitor" to their respective racial or ethnic groups--simply because they are Republicans? Instead of being role-models for others to emulate; any "person of color" who happens to be conservative is regularly excoriated by the mullahs of multiculturalism and the degenerates of diversity as "white". So, it isn't even enough for them that you be a person of color--you also must toe the ideological line, or you don't count.

This cycle of neverending racial stereotyping and politically-sanctioned racism is a fundamental political strategy of today's left, which uses the racism of identity politics to forward on their collectivist agenda. It reaches a pinnacle of absurdity in the rantings of Rev. Wright.

Paranoia and conspiracy theories help keep the clueless minions under control and constantly feeling victimized and oppressed--even as those minions now feel free to victimize and oppress others. No theory is ever too outrageous if it badmouths that "universal oppressor."

Racism itself is a form of psychological projection. It results when a person does not take responsibility for their own unacceptable or angry feelings and projects them onto an identified group; so that one can feel virtuous or morally superior to members of that group. And psychological projection is as the heart of paranoia.

The Democrats have been using racial stereotypes for years as a bludgeon against the Repulicans. Most people have forgotten that they are the party that historically was associated with black oppression and their vocal "championship" of blacks and other minorities--even as they support programs and policies that clearly have the consequence of keeping those minorities in a dependent and underdog state-- has always had an "Eliot Spitzer" type of overcompensation and moral hypocrisy associated with it.

Welcome to the age of political, religious, and racial paranoia--brought to you by the Democrats.

UPDATE: Mona Charen this morning at The Corner:

Obama's True Beliefs

Derb: I am coming to believe that Barack Obama is one of the greatest con artists we've seen. His entire campaign has been about "coming together," a post-racial consensus, etc. Any mention of his middle name was immediately condemned as ignorant fear-mongering. He has played the role of racial unifier with great skill and finesse.

But there is a great deal of evidence out there that he is anything but. The Reverend Wright is exhibit A. Mrs. Obama is Exhibit B. But there's lots more. Here is a piece by John Batchelor about some of Obama's other connections. For example:

William Ayers is the second Chicago figure to consider in the political profile of Mr. Obama. William C. Ayers, known as Bill Ayers, is notorious as a terrorist bomber from the 1970s who, on September 11, 2001, in the New York Times was quoted as finding "a certain eloquence in bombs." Now, at 62, Mr. Ayers, a former aide to the current Mayor Richard M. Daley, is an established professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Importantly, Mr. Ayers and his wife, the equally notorious Weatherman terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a crucial meet-the-candidate event in their Hyde Park neighborhood home in 1995 when Mr. Obama, also a Hyde Park resident, was sounded out by vital citizens, among them the retiring state senator Alice Palmer for the 13th District.

Obama's book is strewn with hints of his far left sympathies, as when he tells an African cousin who complains about the hardships of life in Kenya that things are no better in America. Or when he suggests that the lives of poor black young men in the inner city are blighted by white racism. He never says it explicitly, but it's there.

He has been very friendly with Rashid Khaladi, the fierce anti-Israel professor who took Edward Said's post at Columbia.

My own theory, FWIW, is that Obama acquired his far left views at least in part to make himself as authentically black as he could to compensate for having a white mother. His mother, of course, was very left herself. But looking the way he does, and having been raised among only white people (mother and maternal grandparents) he felt the need to better identify with his black heritage. That struggle is what the book is all about.

One can have sympathy for his psychological predicament . But that sympathy certainly does not extend to electing him president of a country that I sincerely believe he does not love.