The Moral Decline of Oprah
Multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey, after her surreal $38,000 handbag “racism” encounter in Switzerland, has just weighed in again on race and the presidency, as yet the nth way of hyping her new film: “There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”
Nobody ever says? Has she read a newspaper columnist or turned on MSNBC lately?
Aside from her historical ignorance, Oprah Winfrey has increasingly turned to the race card to explain the president’s plummeting polls.
In her race-obsessed world, Syria, Benghazi, the NSA, IRS, AP, and ACA messes do not explain why a reelected president crashes from a recent 60 percent approval rating to less than 40 percent in less than a year.
Instead, in Oprah’s no-win, racialist world, to the degree that Obama is popular, Americans are considered for the time being as not racist; to the degree that he is not, the country suddenly is collectively under suspicion (e.g., “everybody’s thinking it”).
That Obama might be utterly inexperienced in the manner of Jimmy Carter, less than veracious in the manner of the impeached Bill Clinton, or suffering the same second-term blues of Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra or popularity crash of George W. Bush after Katrina simply cannot for Oprah be true of an African-American president, who for some reason must not suffer the same fate and treatment as almost all who have held the highest office. Instead, in this raciallyobsessed world of Oprah, that Obama is faring no different from his predecessors is now the country’s fault. And as remedy, he must be given deference if the country wishes to avoid the latest therapeutic rant from Oprah.
In fact, Oprah has no record of worrying about the level of disrespect shown the office. If she did, she might have said something a few years ago when her president was routinely being compared to a Nazi, and often by her own fellow celebrities, writers, politicians, civil-rights activists, and filmmakers. That she said nothing then, but now says a lot, explains not America’s problem with race, but her own race obsessions, which have blinded her to her own prejudices and hypocrisies.
I don’t recall Oprah objecting when Bush was routinely shouted down. Did she deplore Al Gore calling the Bush team “digital brownshirts”? Or maybe John Glenn invoking the Nazis (“It’s the old Hitler business”) to talk about her president? Nor do I remember her weighing in on Linda Ronstadt’s claim that the Bush administration was “a new bunch of Hitlers.” Harry Belafonte and Julian Bond both routinely labeled their conservative opponents as little more than Nazis or KKK racists. Nor did Oprah note that “there’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs” when Barbra Streisand compared Bush to Hermann Goering. Was she worried when Alfred A. Knopf published a novel about musing how to kill Bush? Or by a prize-winning docudrama film imagining the killing of Bush? What was her reaction a New York play, “I’m Gonna Kill the President,” was produced? Did Oprah once give a similar BBC interview about the office of the president and disrespect shown it in 2004 when a guest columnist in the Guardian, Charles Brooker, wrote: “On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”
What might explain her outrage now about criticism shown Obama, but silence just recently when abject hatred and dreams of violence were voiced against her president? That answer may explain a lot about what Oprah has become.
Tony Katz owns Contessa Brewer, ‘race-ers’ on MSNBC
Posted By Bryan Preston On April 30, 2011 @ 2:25 pm In Culture,Politics | No Comments
PJTV host, radio host and Tatler blogger Tony Katz got a turn at bat on MSNBC, and hit a home run.
CONTESSA BREWER, MSNBC HOST: That’s what a lot of people are saying it’s not a laughing matter. They say that there are questions about him, not because there really are questions about where he is born, but because he is black. […]
KATZ: But this whole idea of race, you know what, if there are birthers and they’re all crazy and silly for actually wanting to see a birth certificate, well let’s talk about the racers, the people who believe that everything is a conspiracy about race. It’s Obama’s race that people want to see the birth certificate. It’s Obama’s race that people don’t like the out of control spending. It’s not his race. It’s that he’s awful. The policies are terrible. ObamaCare is a lie and a failure. QE1 and QE2 didn’t work. It’s crazy.As you’ll see in the clip, Brewer tried to make the case that the quest for the birth certificate was all about race because, hey, Bush’s critics didn’t ask him for one! No, they just called him “Hitler” and fabricated a smear on his military service.
The obvious answer to Brewer’s accusation: Bush’s father wasn’t a Kenyan communist, and Bush didn’t end up living in Indonesia for years. The Bush history, which was already very well known before he ever ran for president (he’d been governor of Texas and owned a baseball team, for goodness sake) doesn’t beg any sort of questions about citizenship, while Obama’s does. Pretty simple, not about race, but that’s not good enough for Brewer. Katz sends it into the bleachers.
KATZ: They didn’t say it was race. Everything that comes out of the racers, and they exist – the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Huffington Post”, some people at your very network, and you know I enjoy having these conversations with you. They are so focused. Everything is about race. It’s not about race. When we talk about Obama and the policies, it’s about the awful policies. It’s about the inability to bring down debt. It’s about the inability to tackle the deficit. And when everybody says, “Oh, they’re just after this because of race,” it is nonsense. It’s a way to stop people from having conversation. Political correctness at its worst. If we want to talk about the issues, let’s talk about the issues.Well done, Tony.
Article printed from The PJ Tatler: http://pjmedia.com/tatler
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/04/30/tony-katz-owns-contessa-brewer-race-ers-on-msnbc/
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