The video of the kid getting beaten on that St. Louis school bus is just horrible. If my child had been attacked that way, the administrative staff at his school would wish they had never been born.
Where was the bus driver? Why didn’t he try to put a stop to it? You can’t watch it and not become enraged.
But was the attack racially motivated?
The police chief initially said he thought so. Then he backed off; now police and others on the bus are saying this wasn’t about race, it was about bullying.
But to our friends on the right, it’s about race.
Because some black kids assaulted a white student on this St. Louis bus all white people in America are under assault by blacks and it’s all because we have a black man in the White House.
Rush:
“In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” Limbaugh said. He continued:
I wonder if Obama’s going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard.
Now some principled conservatives are distancing themselves from this. Rod Dreher:
How low will these people go? Look, I think it’s important to talk about black male violence, or at least as important as it is to talk about any other important social trend. I don’t think we should be squeamish about discussing it in a responsible and fair-minded way, despite what the politically correct say. But good grief, Limbaugh is up to something wicked. He’s plainly trying to rally white conservatives into thinking that now that we have a black president, blacks are rising up to attack white kids! Christ have mercy, what is wrong with these people?
I won’t have anything to do with it, not even tangentially, which is why I took down the post. I can’t see this as anything other than Limbaugh deliberately trying to whip up racial fear and loathing of the president. This goes far, far beyond tough criticism of Obama. Does that man Limbaugh have any idea what rough beast he’s calling forth?
He knows exactly what he’s doing; the rough beast lurks in his soul.
Dreher then goes on to talk about a man he knew who, on his deathbed, admitted to being part of a lynch mob in the 1930s:
I pray that his repentance in the face of eternity helped him find mercy. It unnerved me, though, to think that that kindly old man had once fallen under the sway of race hatred to that degree, a race hatred that was part of the society into which he was born and raised. It still does, because that world seems like a thousand years ago. But it only seems so far away because many people worked too hard — and some even gave their lives — to drive those demons out. And now here is Limbaugh, of Palm Beach, and his ilk, calling them back insouciantly, for political advantage. This is evil.
It’s not just for political advantage, Rod. These people really believe the white man is being grieviously wronged by the black man - as did the folks who made up your friend’s lynch mob.
