[PLEASUREMAN]

One of the problems today is that, if asked to take sides in a dispute between Slate's Timothy Noah and Fox News' Glenn Beck, it is not easy to make a choice. One says something stupid and the other makes a big stupid deal out of it. Here is Noah, a career partisan of the Left, rambling with a whisper of "he's a crazy white separatist" about Beck:

Timothy Noah:

Driving near the mall today as Beck's 9/12 protesters milled about, I began to grasp this message when I saw one handwritten sign that said, "Obama: More Dangerous Than Al-Qaida." I finally understood when I saw another handwritten sign that said, "Diversity Is A Disease." Riddle solved. The 9/12-ers are white separatists.

Riddle solved, motherfucker! Increasingly, defense of Obama has taken the tack of discovering the secret racism in everything, but that's really only because it's the first weapon to hand--rest assured if a Negro Republican were in the Oval Office, it would be a career right-winger making asinine suggestions of racism about the pattern he saw in his toasted bread that morning.

Of course the beauty of driving by a protest as "research" for your opinion blog is that it doesn't matter how big the protest was, who was involved in organizing it, if anyone else shared the sign-holder's views, if the sign was a prank, or even if that particular sign really existed. (Sometimes you have to give the truth a little help in order to meet deadline.)

Timothy Noah:

In July Beck complained that our African American president "has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture [italics mine]." What the hell is the "white culture"? "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people," Beck continued (perhaps remembering that Obama's own mother was white). "I'm saying he has a problem. He has a—this guy is, I believe, a racist."

It takes a man as white as Tim Noah to ask with a straight face, "What the hell is white culture?" Well, Tim, it starts with a perverse disbelief in the existence of cultures other than your own, or even ideas other than your own. To put it another way, white culture is Slate as fuck...Slate x 1000...Slate on a steroids and Viagra regimen that has truly fucked with its mind. In fact the most readily identifiable characteristic of white culture is its own obliviousness to its being a culture. Why this is just the way everyone behaves, Noah says, knotting his ascot.

Even his aside about Obama's mother seems unnecessarily dense--forced stupidity for the reader's benefit. Surely even a hack like Timothy Noah has heard of at least one half-white African American who is obsessed with whites--if only because the man who first comes to mind was the source of a major furor in the last election. But Jeremiah Wright's parentage notwithstanding, Obama himself has written a book agonizing over his racial ancestry. The truth is, many mixed-race blacks sport a blacker-than-thou complex, just contrast Barack Obama's memoirs with the viewpoint and temperament of Tiger Woods. The comparison is instructive.

"Diversity is a disease" is no more disturbing a statement than "diversity is our strength"--neither is actually true and both assertions seem to spring from a primitive mode of thinking. Even from within Slate's distant reaches of closed-minded liberalism, Noah has to have heard of Robert Putnam's research on the effect of diversity in communities (tl; dr: it lowers both inter- and intra-ethnic trust).

Alas, this discussion may be taking on a worrisome character, by Noah's standards:

Timothy Noah:

Beck's boss, Rupert Murdoch, is a caucasian male married to a woman born and raised in China. This suggests Murdoch, whatever his other faults, does not believe diversity to be a disease. Why, then, does he continue to employ someone who advocates so recklessly on behalf of "the white culture"? How might Murdoch explain this to his own two mixed-race children?

Indeed, Mr. Beck, I believe you've just been...checkmated.

[antistoic]

Quote

Riddle solved, motherfucker! Increasingly, defense of Obama has taken the tack of discovering the secret racism in everything, but that's really only because it's the first weapon to hand--rest assured if a Negro Republican were in the Oval Office, it would be a career right-winger making asinine suggestions of racism about the pattern he saw in his toasted bread that morning.

so true, republicans are hardly averse to using accusations of racism and sexism against their own opponents...i remember hearing about some GOP tv ad that featured a woman talking about how the DEMOCRATS were the ones who supported slavery in the civil war and how the republicans were the real anti-racists

racism is the greatest sin in american politics, does noah really think the republicans haven't picked up on this?? look how gingerly mccain treated obama during his campaign, he was quite obviously horrified that he would face being tarnished by the media as an anti-black racist..and it hasn't been that long since the sotomayor incident which featured accusations of racism from both sides, he must have a short (or selective) memory

[PLEASUREMAN]

For the companion piece, see http://www.myposting...-of-a-liberal/.

[The Jewish Conspiracy]

Timothy Noah:

Hangly Man, Clancy Dalebout, is a caucasian male married to a woman born and raised in China. This suggests Dalebout, whatever his other faults, does not believe diversity to be a disease. Why, then, does he continue to post so recklessly on behalf of "the white culture"? How might Dalebout explain this to his own two mixed-race children?