Taranto’s “Best of t…

Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” is always a must-read, but today it’s..um…”mustier”?

Liberal Racism: A Little Perspective

Both before and after her elevation to secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice has been the target of a series of racist caricatures by liberal cartoonists. Rush Limbaugh points out three: a Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau that refers to her as “Brown Sugar,” a Jeff Danziger cartoon that portrays her as Prissy from “Gone With the Wind” (also the topic of a Wall Street Journal editorial last month) and, most recently, a Tuesday political cartoon from Pat Oliphant that depicts the secretary-designate as a parrot with enormous lips. (This seems to be a running feature; yesterday’s Oliphant cartoon does it also, this time with President Bush as a pirate.) Blogger Winfield Myers catalogues other examples.

Limbaugh is incensed by these displays of bigotry and hypocrisy (emphasis his):

It is grotesque. It is insulting. It is vile. It is angry. It is childish, and it is typical I think of what the left has become. They claim to be holy [sic] than thou. They claim to be above all of us when it comes to understanding the downtrodden and minorities. They claim to be the only ones that have the ability to have the compassion and understanding, and yet they get away with racism. They get away with bigotry. They get away with sexism, and they get away with homophobia–and in the case of Condoleezza Rice, they get away with an attempted character destruction of a truly brilliant and accomplished woman who came from nothing to become the first black female secretary of state.

Myers echoes the point: “This is part and parcel of the left’s embrace of moral and intellectual nihilism, which in turn has led to a belief that the ends for which they labor justify the means.”

We don’t really disagree with any of this, but it strikes us that the outrage, while understandable, is perhaps a bit overwrought. It’s not as if the works of Trudeau, Danziger and Oliphant are going to provoke an outbreak of lynching or cross-burning. These expressions of racial prejudice don’t actually diminish Rice’s accomplishments, and they are not going to prevent her from becoming one of the most powerful people in the world. These cartoonists have merely proved to the world that they are prejudiced against blacks who don’t share their views–and that’s good to know.

The absence of outrage from the liberal sensitivity police, who would be up in arms if a conservative cartoonist committed a similar offense (cf the reaction to National Review’s 1997 cover depicting the Clintons as Asians, second item), shows that liberals are hypocrites when it comes to race–and that, too, is useful to know.

It is truly amazing how must this kind of behavior is tolerated by the left. Yeah, they call themselves the party of the “tolerant”, but is this what they have in mind?

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