TW: It is becoming clear that Obama's gaffe relative to the Cambridge Gates matter has served as a permission slip for some on the right to jump back to their portrayal of Obama as a closet white-phobe. This attitude disgusts me. Do white folks really think they get the short end of the deal in this country?
I peek at Fox Nation to get a feel for what is percolating with the right-wing. Today's top headline was entitled: "Reparations By Way Of Health Care Reform" (other headlines included: "Is Obama a Snob", "Tea Party Protesters Erupt at Town Hall", etc.).
It references a piece from Investors Business Daily, a mainstream investing publication. I have never really read IBD but have seen them take a conservative slant on their opinion pieces. But in this one they try to somehow tie Obama's health care reform effort to providing reparations to slavery descendants. This stuff is obscene. Where is the sane opposition in this country? The IBD is not some cable TV channel trying to stir up sixty seconds of conflict to adhere channel flippers. This is an INVESTING paper making racial shit up for no apparent reason.
Here is the piece, I read it about three times trying to understand the convoluted logic but cannot even accounting for the fact that they take quotes out of context to build their perverted story.
From IBD:
"Still believe in post-racial politics? Read the health care bill. It's affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.
President Obama is on the record as being officially opposed to reparations for slavery. But as with other issues, you have to sift through his eloquent rhetoric and go beyond the teleprompter to get at what he really means.
His opposition to reparations is based on the fact they don't go far enough. In a 2004 questionnaire, he told the NAACP, "I fear that reparations would be an excuse for some to say, 'We've paid our debt,' and to avoid the much harder work."
Never mind there are those who thought we apologized at Gettysburg and that an African-American president is a recognition of the hard work that has been done.
At a press conference with minority journalists last fall, candidate Obama was pressed for more detail on his reparations position. He said he was more interested in taking action to help people who were just getting by. Because many of them are minorities, he said, that would help the same people who would benefit from reparations.
"If we have a program, for example, of universal health care, that will disproportionally affect people of color, because they are disproportionally uninsured," Obama said.
This may be a goal of Obama's health care plan: the redress of health care disparities on the basis of race and the punishment of those believed to be responsible, such as greedy doctors who perform unnecessary tests and procedures and greedy insurance and drug companies lusting for profits.
In his health care plan published during the campaign, it was written that Obama and Biden will "challenge the medical system to eliminate inequities in health care by requiring hospitals and health plans to collect, analyze and report health care quality for disparity populations and holding them accountable for any differences found."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeated this when she addressed the NAACP this month, saying: "It is a moral issue for our country to reduce health disparities, whether in diabetes, asthma, heart disease, cancer and HIV/AIDS."
The racial grievance industry under health care reform could be calling the shots in the emergency room, the operating room, the medical room, even medical school. As Terence Jeffrey, editor at large of Human Events puts it, not only our wealth, but also our health will be redistributed."
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