Congressman King vs. Race Baiting Coates (or the anvil that crushed the ant).

Congressman Steve King

Iowa's Fifth District Congressman Steve King opined earlier this morning (on G. Gordon Liddy's radio program) that

"When you look at this administration, I'm offended by Eric Holder and the President also, their posture. It looks like Eric Holder said that white people in America are cowards when it comes to race. And I don't know what the basis of that is but I'm not a coward when it comes to that and I'm happy to talk about these things and I think we should. But the President has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race — on the side that favors the black person."

One could not simply dismiss Congressman King's statements after hearing the multiple specific factual examples of what appear to be race based favoritism of black people or groups by the Obama Administration.  (Don't start the African-American nonsense with me unless you're a recent immigrant from Africa; we're all Americans and we here at TRS do not recognize ethnic distinctions in that political status based on our reading of the 14th Amendment.)  The simple facts are as they are and Congressman King's statement cites those facts.

As expected, however, the liberal left has become more inflamed than their last outburst at Congressman King's suggestion that Islamofacist regimes would cheer an Obama victory (in that case the Congressman merely repeated the statements of Islamofacist leaders themselves).  Perhaps the most logically deficient attack came promptly from an Atlantic Monthly editor named Ta-nahesi Coates.

Needless to say, Coates apparently concedes the facts of the several examples of racial bias Congressman King cited. Rather than engage in argument,Coates' went immediately to the post modern PC thought cop's big bomb-the outright accusation of racism. Coates puts an interesting twist on the old attack; although King's comment contains no racial invective the mere opinion that a black President's Administration shows bias toward black citizens and groups is itself inherently racist.

Coates relies on a rather strange historical analog for his conclusion.  Coates cites an 1864 statement that he attributes to General William T. Sherman through which Sherman voiced objections to recruiting black soldiers because "when fools and idiots try and make niggers better than ourselves, I [Sherman] have an opinion".   The only logical relationship between Congressman King's statements and those of a general, who was significantly responsible for changing Coates' status from property to person, now dead for some 119 years appears to their common partisan registration.  Nothing in Congressman King's statements require  racial animus for their accuracy, unless the mere act of criticizing the racial bias of black person is ipso facto racist, for his the Congressman's opinion about the Big O's administration to be correct.

What Coates and Holder mean by a discussion of race is, in reality, a lecture on white racism.  Had their motive been different Coates would have engaged Congressman King on the facts and not rushed to the invective and ad hominem.  There's a reason these guys don't debate conservatives, there really is.

As for Congressman King, he does not need me to tell him to keep calling the shots as he sees them.