My most recent diary was unfortunately posted about ten minutes before Obama announced his pick of Joe Biden; as a consequence it probably lasted on the roll about five minutes and garnered zero comments.
In it I discussed how much I enjoyed Yahoo's Comics Page for a round-up of national sentiment on hot topics. I noted that
Henry Payne of the Detroit News is the only one of the twenty cartoonists sampled who is consistently anti-Democrat
Follow over the flip for some thoughts on the Payne panel currently on display.
Just as the hyperbolic naming of some bad guy "the new Hitler" has led to Godwin's Law, should there be a law about using the term "lynching" to refer to the ill-treatment of a black public figure, whether that term is used by a white commentator, as Bill O'Reilly recently did when discussing Michelle Obama, or by an African-American, like jurist Clarence Thomas, who said of his 1991 confirmation process:
This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.
In a political cartoon dated September 3, Payne revisits Justice Thomas's self-described "high-tech lynching" at the hands of a combative Senate Judiciary Committee led by Sen. Joe Biden.
Ted Kennedy and Biden are depicted as southern redneck good-ole-boy lawyer types with straw hats and oversized teeth. Biden says "Me and Ted here are committed to advancin' black folk... to the White House" while holding a rope that obviously is connected to a black body whose feet dangle from a tree labeled "Today: Clarence Thomas".
I think the point that Payne is trying to make is that it's ironic that Kennedy and Biden are so gung-ho about the African-American Obama's Presidential campaign when two decades earlier they fought the African-American Thomas's Supreme Court nomination [although many would say they didn't fight hard enough, as Thomas squeaked through in a 52-48 vote].
My response ties in directly to the current Sarah Palin hoopla. If one is going to set up an exemplar of a particular ethnic, gender, or religious group, it should behoove one to ably demonstrate the qualifications of the candidate so as to dismiss any potential charges of "tokenism". Barack Obama is not a token candidate--he is not the nominee because of his race, but because he has proven his mettle through a very hard-fought and well-managed campaign against the Clinton machine. Right now Sarah Palin seems like a token candidate, picked because of her gender.
Back in 1991 the Senate Judiciary Committee was right to pursue the potential of sexual harrassment in Clarence Thomas's past without being called "racist"; today the American public is right to scrutinize Sarah Palin's bona fides for the VP slot, without being called "sexist". Obviously there are boundaries to what should be in play, and in a perfect world we would only look at relevant professional training and experience. Unfortunately, we live in a 24/7 media/politics blender where perception and reality often don't meet--with nebulous terms like "character" and "judgment" being thrown around, how a candidate lives his/her life as well as how the candidate says that life is lived are both on the table.
There is no question that for centuries blacks in this country have been on the receiving end of abuse and discrimination, some of which continues to this day, but Thomas's inflammatory 1991 statement and Payne's rehashing of that statement do not serve the cause of blacks [and whites] today.