Obama is racist?

Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King thinks our president and attorney general are racists. It really does not get more plain than this. Mr. King feels that President Obama has a "default mechanism" that makes him take the side of blacks over whites. I will grant Mr. King one small point in favor of his argument. A reasonable person could assume, based on one or two incidents, that the president might be inclined to side with black people. The incident involving the black professor and white police officer is the instance he refers to, and I do appreciate that the congressman's "default mechanism" probably made him understand the conflict in this way.

But Mr. King goes a bit too far when he decides to argue his point in reference to Eric Holder. He states:

But it looks like Eric Holder said that we were, that white people in America are cowards when it comes to race and I don’t know what the basis of that is, but I’m not a coward when it comes to that and I’m happy to talk about these things and I think we should.

Eric Holder did make a comment about cowardice and race in America, but he did not refer to whites at all in his remarks. His was a sweeping criticism of the dialog around race in our country. And Mr. Holder has a valid point. On the whole, we are mostly cowardly when it comes to serious dialog about the lingering racism that persists in America. Sadly, it is folks like Congressman King who are scratching the underbelly of race dialog, and in reality pandering to the extremest of the right in the process.

If you doubt this, note that even a Tea Party-favorite candidate in Colorado, Rep. Cory Gardner, went so far as to cancel an appearance by King at a Colorado fundraiser. Perhaps the folks in the Tea Party movement (at least those in the public eye and in positions of leadership) are catching on the the fact that bald-faced racism is not appealing to a majority of Americans. We may not want to talk seriously about race, but still, most people do not want to be perceived as racist, and that, at least, is a measure of progress.

It is rare that I find any common ground with Tea-Partiers, and while I'm not sure I agree with everything they have offered up on this particular issue, I must grudgingly credit them with taking a stance in response to King's comments.

And I suppose it should really come as no surprise that King made his remarks on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show.
Conservative radio, it seems, is becoming the new bastion of racism in America.