Obama's Pointman on Race

Obama's Pointman on Race



I know that even six years into his presidency there are people who still see Obama in the exact same way he was presented to us in 2008 – as the great uniter of blacks and whites. But, then, there are those who also approve of his foreign policy in the Middle East. Sometimes you merely have to accept innate stupidity as a part of the human condition and move on.

Among the legion of disasters one can lay at Obama’s feet, the racial antagonisms he has fostered might well stand out as his greatest failing. That’s because it’s the one he could have most easily avoided.

On other issues, one could, to a greater or lesser degree, blame his partisan politics. But because he was black, when it came to the racial divide, he was in the unique position of being able to bridge it in ways that no other president could. But instead of using the bridge, he blew it to smithereens by appointing one unrepentant racist, Eric Holder, to head up the Justice Department and he made another, Al Sharpton, his consigliore on racial matters.

Sharpton gained his initial fame back in the 1980s using the lies of a black teenage girl, Tawana Brawley, to denounce the NYPD. For those too young to remember, Ms. Brawley was afraid that her mother would ground her if she found out that Tawana had spent the weekend making whoopee with her boyfriend. So, instead, she concocted a sordid tale about being tossed in a trash dumpster after being raped by six New York City cops.

The lies worked to his advantage then and Sharpton has seen no reason to change his ways. He has merely revised the narrative. Back then, his stooge was a sexually precocious teenager; today, he uses a couple of black thugs as the innocent victims of police brutality in his tale of woe. But the motive now, as it was then, is simply to promote Al Sharpton as the conscience and spokesperson for black America.

For reasons I can’t fathom, race hustlers like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are catnip for the media. Although they both speak as if their mouths, along with their brains, were full of mush, they have been the go-to guys on matters of race for the past several decades. In spite of his deficiencies as a public speaker, Sharpton even gets to host his own show on MSNBC. The fact that nobody watches MSNBC is no excuse, and his bosses at NBC shouldn’t be allowed to use that as an alibi for providing the putz with a megaphone.

When in December, Sharpton hosted an anti-police demonstration in Washington, D.C., he actually flew arsonist Joshua Williams, whom most of us had last seen on TV burning down the Quik Trip market in Berkeley, Missouri, so that he could address his fellow thugs.

Although Sharpton owes his current prominence to the likes of Obama and NY Mayor Bill De Blasio, he owes far more to Jesse Jackson. It was Jackson, after all, who taught him all he knows about corporate extortion.

At present, Sharpton is being paid by Colgate-Palmolive, Anheuser-Busch, Macy’s, Pfizer, Pepsi, GM, Walmart, Chase, Verizon, McDonald’s and MGM, among a great many other companies, for what the mob used to call “protection.” When Al Capone got paid off, it was to prevent a bomb being tossed through a tavern window. When Jackson receives a corporate donation to his Rainbow Coalition or Sharpton gets a donation to his National Action Network, it’s to prevent having a bunch of black stiffs parading for the TV cameras in front of their headquarters, claiming the companies engage in racist policies.

And because Sharpton gets to sit next to Barack Obama more often than Michelle does might also explain why he is still walking around a free man even though he’s in arrears to the IRS to the tune of $4.5 million.

For me, the biggest surprise is that Sharpton, who was a roly-poly guy back in the 1980s and is now so tiny he looks as if his neck is too skinny to hold up his head, never thought to market the Sharpton Diet. The change has been so dramatic, the weight loss so astounding, I thought at times he might actually disappear altogether. But, alas, that was only wishful thinking.

But that’s not my only wish when it comes to one of America’s three most odious race hustlers. My other wish, far-fetched as it might be, would be for all those companies who are currently being bled by Sharpton to receive thousands of angry letters and phone calls from customers threatening to take their business elsewhere if they continue to pay a shakedown artist who knows everything there is to know about extortion, except, that is, how to spell the word or pronounce it.

By Burt Prelutsky