“Reid, assessing Barack Obama’s chances in 2008, cited the fact that the candidate was a ‘light-skinned‘ African-American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.‘ Those ill-advised comments, to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann for their new book, ‘Game Change,’ produced an immediate apology by Reid to the president. That was followed immediately by presidential forgiveness: ‘As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.’” — [ READ MORE ]

As Barack Obama quickly realized the book is not closed, Senator’s Reid’s inartful words have sparked hundreds of editorials, and now it’s my turn to vent.

First let’s consider the messenger, Reid isn’t a conservative with a racist streak, he’s a liberal Democrat who was an early supporter of Obama.

Let’s not forget that Reid has an apparently incurable case of “foot-in-mouth disease“, he’s made many bizarre statements. Remember Reid’s quip about the smelly tourists coming into the Capitol”?

Finally at 70-years-old the senator from Nevada isn’t as mentally agile as he was in his younger days.

In other words Reid is no Pat Buchanan, let’s cut the man some slack.

Now let’s consider the message: Obama is a light-skinned African-American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one. As a writer and as a fan of the absurd, I think Reid’s statement is a masterpiece.

Reid may be the first person in recorded history to refer to a black man as an “African American” and as a “Negro” in the same sentence. Reid the consummate politician refers to Obama as an African American, but a second later Reid the doddering old fool uses the archaic word “Negro.”

Reid’s comments were honest and truthful, Obama is a light-skinned African American. The implication that a light-skinned black would have a better chance than a dark-skinned black of winning the presidency is also true. If Obama were as black-skinned as a typical African, he would still be community organizer in Chicago.

The claim that the Harvard Law School-educated Obama doesn’t sound like a homeboy from da hood is spot on. I love Reid’s qualifier that Obama doesn’t have a Negro dialect “unless he wanted to have one.” When Obama is interviewed on TV he sounds like a law school professor, but during the campaign when he was speaking to a predominantly black audience, Obama affected the cadences of a black Baptist preacher. It should be noted that Hillary Clinton the candidate did the same thing when addressing a black audience.

Bottom line: Reid has apologized for his truthful but clumsy statement, and the president has forgiven him. He doesn’t need to give up his leadership post or resign from the Senate. To borrow the words of Bill Clinton, it’s time to “move one.” There are many racists who daily utter vile and false statements about African Americans, they are the ones that we should be criticizing, and not Reid whose days in the Senate appeared to be numbered anyway.

Follow Robert Paul Reyes on Twitter: http://twitter.com/robertpaulreyes

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GOP Tool, Fox News goes on a witch hunt for Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano — Since the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, Fox News has waged war on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, going so far as to ask whether she should be fired.

In doing so, various Fox News figures and outlets have seized on Napolitano’s comments that “the system worked” after the attempted terrorist attack while ignoring both Napolitano’s later clarification that she was discussing the emergency response notification system that took place following the attempted attack, and that Bush administration officials Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge previously claimed success for passengers’ ability to thwart “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid’s December 2001 attempted bombing of a domestic airline. [ READ MORE ]

MediaMatters: Beck’s Mis-informer of the Year defense rests on falsehoods — Glenn Beck devoted the full hour of his Fox News show to responding to “some liberal blogs” that had named him Misinformer of the Year, asserting that the blogs “didn’t back it up with any facts.” Beck’s 60-minute rebuttal ignored numerous facts set forth by Media Matters for America undermining a litany of Beck’s claims throughout 2009; moreover, his defense itself rested on misrepresentations and false claims. [ READ MORE ]

More GOP Lies, Innuendo …..below

WHITE NATIONALIST Pat Buchanan negatively compares Obama to Nixon, adds: “That was the best-run White House I have ever been in“

Beck’s economic forecast: “The Great Depression times 100” or hyperinflation like the Weimar Republic

“COLONIALIST” Monica Crowley suggests Obama wants Americans to be killed in order to fulfill Alinsky agenda

BONY-ASS Ann Coulter: Women object to TSA adopting full-body scans because Bill Clinton might become an airport screener

GESTAPO Sean Hannity repeats false claim that 2009 was “coldest year on record“

KINKY Dick Morris claimed “9-11 happened” because Clinton treated ‘93 WTC bombing as a crime

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“….The irrefutable answer is that what Cheney is saying, primarily on foreign policy, defense and anti-terrorism, makes sense to more and more American citizens growing increasingly worried by the Obama Administration’s insouciance when U.S. national interests are threatened, both at home and abroad. Since the only real, long-term way to deal with persuasive positions on substantive policy matters is to refute them with sounder policy arguments, it is not hard to understand why the Obama White House is near panic. Where are they going to go to find a better policy inside his administration?” — Mustachioed Neo-Con John R. Bolton, writing for right-wing HumanEvents.com [ READ MORE ]

Human Events Awards Cheney Conservative of The Year Award

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MediaMatters: On MSNBC and in his Creators Syndicate column, Pat Buchanan claimed that climate change is “a fraud, and a scam, and a hoax,” and as evidence, suggested that greenhouse gases are not warming the planet because the Antarctic ice sheet has expanded in the past three decades. However, the source Buchanan cited in his column — a press release from the British Antarctic Survey — undercuts his claim, saying that the ice increase is “a result of the ozone hole delaying the impact of greenhouse gas increases on the climate of the continent,” but that “this will not last.” [ READ MORE ]

Buchanan claims climate change is a “hoax” because Antarctic ice is “expanding,” but science says otherwise

…..More Republican Psycho-Talk

Limbaugh continues attacks on Obama: He’s an “out of control little child who thinks he is the Messiah“

Limbaugh says Founders “rose up against a tyranny that is nothing compared to” health bill, liberalism is “un-American“

GOP Gets Desperate To Defeat Healthcare Reform

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GOP Stays With NO

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Perino’s “convoluted” attack on health care bill is all fuzzy math [ READ MORE ]

Wallace allows McCain to falsely claim no benefits of Senate health care bill “kick in” until “after four years“ [ READ MORE ]

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   Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens on Palin:

“…. Everything she does is for effect, she’s, and is always deniable. She could switch back in a minute. At the moment she thinks her tea party crowd wants to hear this kind of thing so she’ll say that. She’s been out to say, ‘well, I don’t know but I think the President ought to produce his birth certificate. I’m not saying it isn’t a good question.

Then later, cause she’s got to go to the Gridiron dinner in Washington, and learn how to use a knife and fork and be taught by Fred Malek. She takes it back. She’s a disgraceful opportunist and a real moral coward.”

“…. At least Richard Nixon had the ill fortune to look like what he was: a haunted scoundrel and repressed psychopath. Whereas the usefulness of Sarah Palin to the right-wing party managers is that she combines a certain knowingness with a feigned innocence and a still-palpable blush of sex.

But she should take care to read her Alexander Pope: That bloom will soon enough fade, and it will fade really quickly if she uses it to prostitute herself to the Nixonites on one day and then to cock-tease the rabble on the next.”

[ READ: SARAH PALIN'S BRAND OF POPULISM IS DANGEROUS AND DECEPTIVE ]

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McCain a Dark Memory For Sarah Palin

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Wanda Sykes Unveils Sarah Palin’s “Pop-Up” Christmas Book

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By Leonard Pitts Jr.

We are gathered here today in sympathy with our brother, Rush Limbaugh.

As you are no doubt aware, these have been difficult days for Brother Limbaugh. There he was, happily revealing that he was part of an investment group that had submitted a bid to purchase the St. Louis Rams of the National Football League. Next thing you know, Al Sharpton is on him like ugly on King Kong, urging the NFL to reject him. And NFL players, not previously known for commenting on, or even visibly caring, who owns a team so long as the paychecks clear, are saying they would not play for him. And owners, who must vote to approve him, are telling reporters they will not.

It all came to a head last week as the talk show host was dumped by his fellow investors. Whose heart is so stony that it does not weep for Brother Limbaugh to find himself humiliated so? Put yourself in his shoes.

You’re a college dropout and OxyContin junkie who somehow managed to climb to the top of the media pile. You’ve made yourself one of the most popular and influential voices in the national dialogue and that, in turn, has made you rich beyond dreams of avarice. How satisfying must that be.

And you’re an avid sports fan, too, so naturally you jump at a chance to fulfill every sports fan’s dream — to buy yourself a team. You picture yourself watching games from the luxury box with a babe or two on your arm, evaluating talent and signing off on trades, partying in the locker room, champagne stinging your eyes, at the end of a championship game.

How cruel to have it all snatched away from you. And why? Because a bunch of black African-American Negroes start making noise? What reason do they have to be upset with you?

•   Just because you once called Philadelphia Eagles star Donovan McNabb overrated, the victim of media too eager to see a black quarterback do well?

•   Just because you referred to Barack Obama and Halle Berry as “Halfrican Americans?”

•   Just because you told your listeners Obama’s economic program is “reparations?”

•   Just because you called Obama “the little black man-child?”

•   Just because you said the NFL “all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips?”

•   Just because you once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back?”

For those “trifles” the sensitive pansies of the NFL don’t want to have anything to do with you? Just because 65 percent of their players are black African-American Negroes? Oh, the shame! Oh, the humanity!

So yes, the rest of us should rally around Brother Limbaugh. If they can deny one rich, racially inflammatory media lout his constitutional right to own a football team, what’s to stop them from denying another? This is a clear and present danger. Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck … none of us is safe while this injustice stands.

And besides, what lesson does this teach our children?

That there are things (like respectability) even money can’t buy? That there are doors (like the one to the owner’s box) even fame can’t open? That you only have one reputation and it’s not stain-resistant, so you’d better not soil it? That karma is a female dog?

Do you really want your children to learn that sort of socialist claptrap? I don’t. How dare the high and mighty NFL act like the things we say carry consequences?

So let’s stand up for Brother Limbaugh. Indeed, here and now, I am starting a legal fund to help him carry on the fight. I will make the first contribution — a shiny new Franklin Roosevelt dime. What about you? Wouldn’t you like to see poor Rush get what he deserves?

Please give generously.

[Enlarge] About The Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally-syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He was originally hired by the Miami Herald to critique music, but within a few years he received his own column in which he dealt extensively with race, politics, and culture. He lives in Bowie, Maryland. He has won awards for his writing from the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and was first nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, eventually claiming the honor in 2004. He is also the author of the bestselling book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. Pitts gained national recognition for his widely-circulated column of September 12, 2001, “We’ll Go Forward From This Moment,” in which he described the toughness of the American spirit even in the face of such a horrible attack. In June 2007, Pitts was the subject of a campaign of death threats and harassment by neo-Nazis angry at a column he wrote about two whites raped and murdered in Knoxville, Tennessee. In his column addressing the murders, Pitts stated “for the crackpots, incendiaries and flat-out racists who have chosen this tragedy upon which to take an obscene and ludicrous stand. I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized. Cry me a river.” More death threats were made in April 2008 before his appearance at the University of Puget Sound. ——————————————————————- | Read More About Leonard Pitts Jr. | Visit his website at www.leonardpittsjr.com.

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