Black and white conservatives play the media bias card

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

Conservatives such as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Herman Cain, Laura Ingraham, Gregory Kane, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Rush Limbaugh and Ann “Our Blacks are better than their Blacks” Coulter have successfully intimidated many who oppose them by accusing their opponents of “political correctness” and/or “playing the race card.”

Because of my fear of being so labeled I won’t say that a charge of sexual harassment by two blonde white women against Herman Cain has a racial component. After all, Cain and his fellow Black conservatives insist that race is no longer a meaningful economic, political or cultural factor in this country. This raises a question. If race is no longer a factor why are Cain and his supporters whining about his being the victim of a high-tech lynching? Why would a conservative columnist write a column entitled “The Liberal Lynching of Herman Cain”? Why would a Black conservative acquaintance insist that I should support Cain “as a Black man.”

My response to the latter was that “I am too brainwashed to support Cain. Plus there’s my concern about being considered a promoter of victimhood.

Anyway, Coulter and her friends should be in a position to look out for one of those about whom she was speaking when she said “Our Blacks are better than their Blacks.” With her support and that of other open-minded conservatives such as Hannity and Limbaugh, who are known nationwide for their courageous resistance to the horrors of what they call “the mainstream media,” nobody will be able to successfully mess with Cain. They got his back. He’s their “brother from another mother,” as Cain said of the Koch brothers, two of his wealthy white supporters.

By the way, those whom the conservatives accuse of indulging in victimhood by playing the race card are naïve amateurs when it comes to serious whining. Hannity and company spend much of their air time weeping and wailing about the absolutely awful way they are treated by those mean-spirited, horrible, insensitive, far left “pinheads” at the New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN. This is especially true of the country’s grandest spin master, O’Reilly who regularly cites example after example to back up his persistent whining about the failure of “the mainstream media” to acknowledge what a great man he is. Maybe if he and others spent less time wallowing in self-pity, they would have more time to herald what they insist is the glorious American Exceptionalism.

One last thing, those who compare personal political attacks on Cain with the lynching of black folks, who were hanged on trees limbs, burned to death, their bodies often mutilated by rabid white supremacist mobs, are despicable. That they do so reveals much more about their racial attitudes than it does about the individuals they are attacking.
Journalist/Lecturer A. Peter Bailey, a former associate editor of Ebony, is currently editor of Vital Issues: The Journal of African American Speeches. He can be reached at (202) 716-4560.

This article was originally published in the November 21, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper