ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Well, that was pathetic. And it wasn’t an accident. The fix was in from the beginning.
Last week’s lackluster “Beer Summit” featuring Sgt. James Crowley, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was orchestrated to end a national discussion on race, not begin one. That’s why there were no microphones, even though each participant showed himself to be perfectly qualified, astoundingly articulate and camera-ready for an illuminating and much-needed public debate.
The problem for the White House was the more the esteemed professor talked, the more trouble he created for his friend, the president. The clever photo-op sans audio was crafted to yank the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research off the stage, lest anyone begin to question what is being taught at Harvard these days.
Conversely, the more Sgt. Crowley weighed in, and his brave black co-workers spoke out, the more obvious it became that a national discussion featuring this cast of characters may not end with the results the professor and the president wanted.
The status quo was at risk, and Mr. Obama used his extraordinary powers to protect it.
Any serious discussion would have put multiculturalism on trial, but the pretrial public hearings showed America opposes this false and corrosive idea, an opposition that our chattering classes can only understand as bigotry and prejudice. In the public eye, being a victim of past injustices does not win the right to propagate current and future ones, and that’s intolerable to those in charge of the race industry today, whose power relies on maintaining forever a latent rage that can be turned on and off at the will of the nation’s elites.
America is Tiger Woods country for a reason, and she elected Barack Obama to punctuate this new reality. The nation’s laws, education system and media attitudes now need to catch up, but such catching up is exactly what Mr. Obama doesn’t stand for.
My long-held fear is that Mr. Obama is hiding something about his education. During the endless 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama would not release his college grades. Given that President George W. Bush and Sens. Al Gore and John Kerry all had proved mediocre grades were no impediment to a presidential bid, Mr. Obama likely had other concerns.
While I have no desire to see Mr. Obama’s birth certificate, I do want to see his college transcripts. My suspicion, one could even call it a conspiracy theory, is that Mr. Obama committed himself to a radical curriculum, aligned himself with the far-left professoriate, and sought to keep this biographical information from his political enemies, especially then-rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, for fear that they would paint the former community organizer and follower of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as something other than an advocate of racial reconciliation.
Through his acts over the last few weeks, Mr. Obama has reinforced my fears and my admittedly speculative thesis. He has shown he has neither the desire to provide a fresh angle on race, nor wants to draw attention to the bad ideas that dominate higher education and stifle the mainstream media.
Not only were there no fresh ideas about race and living in multiethnic America, but there were hardly even any stale ones. Perhaps this was because Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Gates’ initial - and thus probably most authentic - reactions in playing the race card had proved so unpopular, and so they just wanted to have their frosted malt beverages and get outta Dodge.
But for whatever reason - this ballyhooed beer summit proved merely to be a semi-private photo-op that just happened to be held at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. There were rote, banal and opaque statements, with no public discussion, no interaction with reporters, or even with voices as identifiably conservative as Mr. Gates is identifiably liberal. For what Mr. Obama had called a “teachable moment,” the teachers were pretty much absent and there wasn’t even much of a lesson plan.
Isn’t the mainstream media that built up the narrative of the black professor versus the white cop the least bit curious why in a tailor-made scene the wondrous orator and America’s first multiracial president failed miserably to fulfill his great promise to usher in an era of better race relations?
The Democratic Party - which is now Mr. Obama’s party - now depends on the ability to keep blacks in fear: of cops, of Republicans, of conservatives, of “Uncle Toms,” and even of Tiger Woods, who proves that America, while still imperfect, is clearly heading in the right direction.
The beer at the White House tavern was served flat last Thursday because the president is less the living embodiment of America’s melting pot than he is an adherent of the toxic ideas that - “thanks” to Mr. Gates among many, many other tenured radicals - dominate the modern university, permeate media thinking, saturate public policy and seek to define us in perpetuity by the color of our skin.
It took black and white blue-collar civil servants to expose that the race game is rigged at the highest levels. The majority in the United States wants to enter a better, more egalitarian and diverse, and even racially mixed future.
We still need to have this big national discussion. We’ll just have to have it without the president of the United States.
• Andrew Breitbart is publisher of the news portals Breitbart .com and Breitbart.tv. His latest endeavor, Big Hollywood (https://bighollywood.breitbart .com), is a group blog on Hollywood and politics from the center-right perspective.
• Donald Lambro can be reached at dlambro@washingtontimes.com.old.
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