You know Chucky The Lip better as Rep. Charles Rangel of New York. Rangel is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and he's also a well-known hatchet man and race baiter for the Democratic Party.Chucky The Lip's latest race-baiting salvo came last week when he spoke at a health-care forum in the Washington Heights section of New York City. Those opposed to President Obama's health care plan are motivated, sayeth The Lip, by "bias" and "prejudice." Translation from Lip-ese into standard English: they have a problem with a black man sitting in the Oval Office. In case that wasn't clear enough, Rangel added this: "Some Americans have not gotten over the fact that Obama is president of the United States. They go to sleep wondering, 'How did this happen?'"
Actually, I go to bed wondering how race-baiting demagogues like Rangel and Michigan Rep. John Conyers get re-elected term after term. I'm still miffed at Rangel for calling former President Bush "our Bull Connor," and it's not because I have any great love for Bush. It's because the allegation was scandalous, darned near slanderous and downright untrue. Comparing the president who named the first two black secretaries of state and who had one of the most diverse Cabinets in history to the man who turned fire hoses and police dogs on black civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 was a new low in demagoguery.
But with that quote about how some Americans go to sleep wondering how Obama became president, Rangel is absolutely right, but not for the reasons he thinks. And we should thank him for dredging up the issue of race. It allows us, once again, to point out how race worked FOR Obama during his run for president, not against him.
What most of those Americans who are wondering how Obama got to be president are wondering about is not how a black man got to be president, but how a guy with only two years experience as a U.S. senator, less than 10 years experience as a state senator and absolutely zero years of military experience got elected president of the United States, leader of the free world and commander in chief of our armed forces.
Really, could a white guy with those same credentials have run for president of the United States and won? Or would a white guy with those same credentials have been laughed out of the presidential race before he was barely in it?
Perhaps some full disclosure is in order at this point. I'm a registered Republican. I didn't vote for Obama, for a laundry list of reasons. Obama's view on abortion and the Roe v. Wade Supreme court decision was at the top of my list.
But on that list, right behind abortion, was the matter of experience. There was no way I could see myself voting for a guy who was, basically, a state senator, and helping to elect him to what is in essence the most powerful office in the world. I dismiss, out of hand, Obama's two years of experience in the U.S. Senate. I consider that no experience at all. (Yes, I know that as of November 2008, Obama had technically been a U.S. senator for three years and 10 months. But he declared his candidacy for the presidency and started running in 2007. I don't consider running for president legitimate experience as a senator.)
In addition to his woeful inexperience, there are the matters of Obama's age -- he was only 47 when he was elected -- and his politics, which are far to liberal for my tastes. (The only two other Democrats who've been elected president since 1968, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, at least had the wisdom to campaign as moderates.) Obama's liberal leanings may explain why he's appointed to the Supreme Court a justice who thinks white male judges don't quite cut the mustard, and a black man who's compared Republicans to a well-known bodily orifice and who's also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist to an administration post.
Rangel has a point: if his race didn't help get this far-left liberal, wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper elected president, then what did?