Dan Rather: ‘Obama Couldn’t Sell Watermelons’

We can only wonder what would have happened if Fox News anchor emeritus Brit Hume had said the following:

“Part of the undertow in the coming election is going to be President Obama’s leadership. And the Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument. “Listen he just hasn’t been, look at the health care bill. It was his number one priority. It took him forever to get it through and he had to compromise it to death.” And a version of, “Listen he’s a nice person, he’s very articulate” this is what’s been used against him, “but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”

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If Brit Hume had said that, the left would have ripped their robes in self-righteous outrage and shouted, “BLASPHEMY!”

But it wasn’t Brit Hume who said that our first black president couldn’t sell watermelons.  It was liberal legend Dan Rather who said it.

And so instead of pulling out every stop to label the statement as a rant of typical racist conservative hate, the same media talking heads who would have been all over this story are either omitting it completely or else giving it the “he didn’t really mean it” spin job.

Chris Matthews jumped in with a frenzy to prevent liberal icon Dan Rather from saying something even more stupid or more racist.

Chris Matthews – who once managed to forget Barack Obama was black for a whole entire hour – apparently had his memory jogged when Dan Rather started spouting off about Obama and watermelons.

If Rather had been given a chance to fully explain himself, maybe he would have said something like, “Obama couldn’t sell watermelons.  What he needs to do is sell something he CAN sell.  Maybe he can’t sell watermelons, so he should sell fried chicken instead.”

And it’s such a shame that Obama couldn’t even manage to sell watermelons if the (presumably white) state troopers were out helping him.  I mean, after all – as Harry Reid can vouch – Obama is a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ and you’d think he could have a fine career in roadside watermelon sales.

And Bill Clinton would hastily point out that if Obama didn’t have the knack for selling watermelons (or fried chickens), he could fulfill his true calling of serving his betters their coffee.

All of that is just the very recent stuff.

And these are the very sort of slime who have repeatedly characterized conservatives and Republicans as being “racists” when they’ve got more racism in their pinky fingers.

George Allen was a Senator and a leading hopeful for president when he said one word which so outraged Democrats that they ended his career.  He didn’t talk about black people selling watermelons; he didn’t try to lecture on the advantages of ‘light skinned’ African Americans vis-a-vie the “darkies” who were more likely to suffer from “Negro dialect”; he didn’t suggest that a man who is now president of the United States would have or should have been serving coffee instead.  He used a single word – macaca – that required a study in etymology to suggest that it might just possibly be racist.

There was no suggestion that Allen wasn’t a racist, or that he probably meant something else, or that there should be forgiveness, or even that we need to get past the ‘gotcha’ moments.  They simply screamed that he was a racist and destroyed him.

And there’s your selective tolerance of liberals.

Which is why we always seem to have a cult of pardon for liberals, to counterbalance the cult of demonization that the very same people who pardon the liberals apply to conservatives.

I’m not inclined to assume that Dan Rather is a racist.  That seems to be the prerogative of liberals.

But I am more than inclined to point out that these people are a bunch of  self-righteous hypocritical slimeballs.

Tags: African-American, Bill Clinton, Brit Hume, Chris Matthews, coffee, Dan Rather, forgot Obama was black, George Allen, Harry Reid, hypocrisy, light-skinned, macaca, Negro dialect, racism, sell watermelons, state troopers, watermelons