Patterico,
Oh That
Liberal Media, Jul. 9
An editorial in today’s Los Angeles
Times asks the silly question: Why
Snub the NAACP?
[President George W. Bush] has declined
to speak at the NAACP’s annual convention, which starts Saturday.
Unless he changes his mind, this will make Bush the first president
since Hoover not to attend a single NAACP convention during his
presidency.
Why on earth not? Bush’s decision
to boycott the NAACP is inexplicable as a matter of presidential
leadership. And it is just as inexplicable as a matter of low,
self-interested politics. We would accuse him of ulterior motives,
but it is hard to think of any.
. . .
Not since Richard Nixon have a president’s
motives been so hard to fathom.
You got that? The L.A. Times editors—supposedly
well-informed folks—have no earthly idea why George W. Bush
might have the slightest problem with the NAACP. Picture Scooby-Doo—shrugging
his shoulders and making that canine noise of helpless befuddlement
in response to a particularly tricky question posed by Shaggy—and
you’ll get an idea of the utter confusion of the Times editors
as they ponder the impenetrable mystery of why G.W. Bush wouldn’t
want to address the NAACP.
Consider this a pop quiz. I’ll
s for a moment and ask Patterico/Oh, That Liberal Media readers
if you can think of any possible reason for George W. Bush to resent
the NAACP. The L.A. Times editors haven’t the foggiest. Can
you think of anything?
Well, let’s look at the benefits
Bush received from speaking to the NAACP as a presidential candidate
in July 2000. Two months later, the “non-partisan” NAACP
ran this
advertisement linking Bush to the racially motivated dragging
death of a black man in Jasper, Texas:
[Background sound: deep, eerie metallic;
later fade in low clanking]
Renee Mullins (voice over): I’m
Renee Mullins, James Byrd’s daughter.
On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father
was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged 3 miles to
his death, all because he was black.
So when Governor George W. Bush refused
to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed
all over again.
Call Governor George W. Bush and
tell him to support hate-crime legislation.
We won’t be dragged away from
our future.
Keep in mind: the editors of the Los
Angeles Times profess not to have the slightest idea why Bush doesn’t
want to address the NAACP in this election year. And indeed, their
editorial does not say one word about this hateful advertising campaign,
obviously intended to oppose his 2000 presidential candidacy.
Does Bush have any reason to believe
that he’ll be treated differently by the NAACP this election
year? Here’s a clue for you, Jack: the chairman of the NAACP
has vowed that his organization will work to defeat Bush in the
2004 election!
Yup, you heard right. In July of 2003,
I published a post
that quoted an Associated Press story as saying:
The leader of the NAACP [Julian Bond]
criticized President Bush and his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, for
challenging race-conscious admissions in colleges and vowed to
work to unseat the president in 2004 . . . [Bond] also said the
group intended “to uproot the bigger ‘Bush’ in
2004.”
(As I pointed out in the same post,
Bond’s comments were also a clear violation of IRS regulations
preventing tax-exempt organizations like the NAACP from engaging
in “political activities”—a term that expressly encompasses
“activities that encourage people to vote for or against a
particular candidate, even on the basis of non-partisan criteria.”)
So: despite the fact that the NAACP
is explicitly dedicated to defeating Bush in this election, the
astoundingly clueless editors at the L.A. Times just can’t
comprehend why Bush doesn’t want to address the organization.
“Why on earth not?” they ask.
Most revealing of all is the way that
the Times editors characterize Bush’s relations with this group—whose
chairman has publicly vowed to work to defeat him in the upcoming
election:
Relations with the NAACP have not
been terribly warm since Bush became president.
Relations “have not been terribly
warm.” You don’t say!
I’ll leave it to the readers to
debate whether the editors responsible for this trash were aware
of the above facts, and thus making a transparently fraudulent argument—or
whether they were just unaware of these same facts, thus showing
themselves to be astoundingly ignorant on the ic on which they
chose to opine.
