Those who draw the ‘race’ card are the least deserving to use it
When Englishman Samuel Johnson suggested “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels,” he was referring to sunshine patriots, those who would wrap themselves in the flag for personal advancement as opposed to those who actually fought beneath it for love of country.
We’re now witnessing a modern version of that distinction, only now it’s a cry of “Racism!” that offers unmerited refuge to scoundrels, knaves and self-promoters willing to cash in on the historic suffering of others.
Donald Trump’s adversaries, led by the shamelessly ambitious Liz Warren, hollered “racism” when he referred to her as “Pocahontas” in an Oval Office meeting with three World War II Navajo Code Talkers, whom he effusively praised as “incredible” and “very special people.”
He was referring, of course, to Warren’s unfounded claim of Native American heritage, as if her ancestors had trudged the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
The heart-wrenching history of Native Americans belongs only to the likes of the late Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who was one of six Marines to hoist Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi, only to return to his Arizona reservation and die from alcoholism in an icy puddle at 32.
There was nothing racist about Trump reaffirming to Native Americans that their painful story is theirs and theirs alone.
Touching these hot buttons is to play a vile game.
Remember Joe Biden telling a Virginia crowd of blacks that GOP policies “are gonna put y’all back in chains?”
Or Ted Kennedy suggesting “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters?”
How about former City Councilor Chuck Turner, ejected for accepting a bribe, telling his delusional followers, “African-Americans were brought to this country as slaves and we were whipped and lashed and hung,” as if he had been one of them, instead of just being a crooked Boston pol.
Remember Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., arrested for mouthing off to a cop who had rushed to his Cambridge home ostensibly to protect him and his property? Gates later said he thought of donating those handcuffs to the Smithsonian Institute’s museum of black history, as if he had confronted Bull Connor’s dogs.
Remember Jesse Jackson calling New York “Hymietown?”
Every race, nationality and ethnicity knows something about blind hatred.
There was a time when indigent arrivals, desperate to feed their families, were confronted with “No Irish Need Apply” posters all across this city.
You can look it up. Hatred is an evil that remains alive and well, fueled by a cowardice that, unfortunately, remains alive and well, too.