Dr. Laura's n-word rant a window onto her twisted mind

By DeWayne Wickham

I’m going to talk about the flap over Laura Schlessinger’s use of the n-word without once calling her the r-word.

The nationally-syndicated radio talk show host said the n-word 11 times during a recent program in response to a black woman who called in to complain about the racially-tinged things some of her white husband’s friends say around her.

The caller was looking for relationship advice. What she got from Schlessinger was a cacophony of the word many blacks consider a hate-filled pejorative, especially when used by whites. Schlessinger rattled off the n-word easily in suggesting blacks are schizophrenic when it comes to its use.



“Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger,” she said. “I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it’s affectionate. It’s very confusing.”

But to an advice expert that shouldn’t be any more confusing than women who recoil when a man calls them the b-word; but laugh it off when a girlfriend does the same thing. Or, more confusing than the outrage gays show when a heterosexual calls them the f-word; but treats it as a term of endearment when it comes from another homosexual.

Anyone smarter than a nitwit understands that words can take on different a meaning, depending on who uses them. But Schlessinger’s failure to acknowledge what most first-year psychology majors understand isn’t what makes me think she’s got some bigotry coursing through her veins. It is what followed her n-word rant.

“If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race,” Schlessinger said. That sounds to me like the good doctor is saying the caller should just grin and bear it when her white husband’s friends start talking like they’re at a Ku Klux Klan coffee klatch.

It is Schlessinger’s insinuation that blacks who spend time in the company of whites should expect to be exposed to the racial stereotyping the caller complained about that rubs me raw. And it is Schlessinger’s stereotyping of blacks that makes her vulnerable to a charge of racial prejudice.

Racism is a contorted value system that increasingly takes the form of something far less menacing, like advice from a radio talk show host. It can lurk just beneath the surface when someone says, as Schlessinger did: “a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply ‘cause he was half-black. Didn’t matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That’s not a surprise.”

It is to me.

In every presidential election since 1964, “a lot of blacks” – in fact, the overwhelming majority –voted for the Democratic Party’s candidate. And in 11 of those 12 contests that person was white. So to say blacks voted in great numbers for Obama simply because he is black is not only factually wrong, it’s a crass, racial stereotype.

Even crasser is Schlessinger’s attempt to make herself the victim of her n-word rant. She’ll give up her show in December so she will be free to say what’s on her mind and in her heart, Schlessinger told CNN’s Larry King.

I think that’s exactly what she did when she offered that black caller a piece of her twisted mind.

Obama press secretary attacks president's liberal base

By DeWayne Wickham

A day after Robert Gibbs opened a second front in the Obama administration’s political warring, Democratic Party Chairman Tim Kaine was triaging the wounds inflicted by the White House press secretary.

Asked how the Democratic National Committee can rally Democrats to the polls in November — after Gibbs blasted party liberals for griping about what the president hasn’t done and for not giving Obama enough credit for what he has accomplished — Kaine offered a surgical response.

“On balance, I liked more than I didn’t,” he said, trying to put a good spin on the front page story in The Hill, a Washington-based newspaper that covers the federal government. In the article, Gibbs called discontented liberals the “professional left” and said some of them “ought to be drug tested” for comparing Obama with George W. Bush.



Kaine, who runs the political arm of the Obama administration, faced a tough job before Gibbs’ rant. With polls divided over whether voters are leaning toward Republicans or Democrats in November’s midterm elections, the press secretary’s fragging of some members of his party’s left wing has made it worse. Self-described liberals voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

“The rallying of the troops (Democratic voters) is ultimately a function of the troops understanding what’s at stake,” Kaine said, deflecting attention away from his party’s infighting and focusing it instead on the war Democrats are waging with Republicans. “Our job is to explain to people” why the midterm elections are important. That message, he said, will make the choices “plain and stark” for voters.

An early supporter of Obama’s presidential bid, Kaine cut his teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of Virginia politics, where sniping among Democrats has been something of a blood sport in recent years. Somehow he was largely unscathed. He served two terms as mayor of Richmond, and a single term as lieutenant governor and governor before being tapped by Obama to take on the largely thankless job of national party chairman. His selection might prove fortuitous for Democrats, who desperately need a calming influence at their political helm this election season.

“The nub of what he was trying to express is, we Democrats tend to be impatient people.  There isn’t a single constituency within the Democratic Party who says everything has been done” on the issues important to them, Kaine said. “I think Gibbs just expressed that natural frustration that while we’re impatient, let’s at least acknowledge the progress that’s been made.”

That’s the kind of soothing — though hardly exculpatory — explanation of Gibbs’ harsh words that gives Democrats reason to believe they can keep their coalition together long enough to fend off GOP efforts to win back control of both houses of Congress in November.

Kaine said the DNC will spend about $50 million to get out the party’s message that the nation was in a ditch when Obama took office and that the president’s policies are slowly lifting it out. Kaine points to the passage of the health care bill and financial reform legislation — talking points straight out of his party’s election campaign playbook — as proof of that movement.

That might be a good message in a one-front political war. But to make sure that message is heard, Kaine will have to drown out the sounds of the second front Gibbs opened less than three months before voters go to the polls.

Black movie star's daughter hopes porn film will make her famous

By DeWayne Wickham

While most aspiring actresses try mightily to avoid the casting couch, Montana Fishburne is jumping onto it, proving once again that fame is a drug far too many people seek at any price.



In this case, the 19-year-old daughter of Oscar-nominated actor Laurence Fishburne hopes to become a Hollywood A-lister by launching her film career among the industry's bottom feeders. Her decision to "star" in a pornographic movie being released this month will test whether the path she's taking could be the new low standard for celebrity stature.

Until now, that "honor" belonged to those whose home video of sex with a lover became available for public viewing, often just in time to hype a reality show or rejuvenate a flagging career. "I've watched how successful Kim Kardashian became, and I think a lot of it was due to the release of her sex tape. I'm hoping the same magic will work for me," Fishburne told TMZ.com.

Kardashian catapulted to fame after the 2007 release of a sex tape she made with rapper Ray J, a onetime boyfriend. Though she tried to block the tape's release, Kardashian quickly benefited from the widespread distribution of the salacious video. She has appeared in Harper's Bazaar and on the cover of Playboy.She now has an online shoe company, her own perfume line and the top talent website.

But there's a big difference between the sex tape Kardashian made and Fishburne's purposeful venture into the underworld of porn.

Kardashian made a private sex tape with her boyfriend. Fishburne made a pornographic movie, with a male actor, that is specifically intended for mass distribution. Kardashian stumbled into the murky realm of sex tapes; Fishburne jumped headlong into adult moviemaking. Kardashian is a victim who turned her exploitation to her advantage. Fishburne is a troubled young woman who hopes people will see her as something more than a professional sex peddler.

"I'm impatient about getting well-known and have more opportunities, and this seemed like a great way to get started on it," Fishburne said.

Today, it seems - from YouTube to Twitter to the many faces of reality TV - too many young people will sacrifice their dignity and more for a fleeting shot at fame. This young woman is taking that well-worn path.

Understandably, Fishburne's father is devastated. Though he hasn't spoken publicly about her descent into the adult movie industry, he has apparently signaled his displeasure. "My dad is very upset" and "very hurt," she told TMZ.com.

I understand Laurence Fishburne's pain. His daughter's movie puts her in league with porn stars Linda Lovelace and Jenna Jameson, not A-list actresses such as Angela Bassett, Glenn Close and Sandra Bullock. Montana Fishburne almost certainly will be best remembered for her public acts of debauchery, not the Hollywood career she hopes will follow.

Though the sex tape boosted the celebrity status of Kardashian, she didn't let it define her. But while Fishburne longs for that same celebrity magic, she is taking an even lower road.

"I am not in porn to get into acting," she told People magazine. "I am in porn because I wanted to be in porn."

Fishburne might, for a time, become the darling of the adult film industry. But precious few women who enter that swamp emerge from it unscathed. Sadly, I suspect, Montana Fishburne will be no exception.

Obama goes on The View, bypasses "serious journalism"

By DeWayne Wickham

The simmering debate over whether Barack Obama did the right thing by going on “The View” centers on whether his foray into the murky ground of daytime television besmirches the dignity of the presidency.

But this concern is a shallow one that turns our attention away from an issue that is deeper and far more troubling.

Nearly 7 million people watched Obama wedge himself onto a couch between Barbara Walters, the show’s creator, and the program’s four co-hosts. The five women, an irascible, eclectic mix of estrogen, didn’t make him squirm during an hour of questioning on the popular program, which resembles more of a coffee klatch than a news show.



Of course, that’s why Obama decided to go on “The View.” With his approval rating sagging badly and his Democratic party hoping to stave off a drubbing in the mid-term congressional elections, the president needs to rally female voters, a critical part of his political base. And “The View” is a good place to go hunting for their support. Women are nearly 80% of the show’s audience.

Obama won 56% of the female vote in the 2008 presidential election. But recent polls show his approval rating among women has dropped below 50%. So as a matter of political strategy, it makes sense for the president to try to reverse this slide on “The View,” rather than on a TV news show.

I know coming from me such an acknowledgement sounds like treasonous talk to those who think presidents should regularly subject themselves to the questions – and judgment – of serious journalists. Even Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a former Democratic Party chairman, objected to the president going on the show.

“I think the president should be accessible, should answer questions that aren’t pre-screened, but I think there should be a little dignity to the presidency,” he said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Rendell compared “The View” to “The Jerry Springer Show,” and then added: “I think the president of the United States has to go on serious shows.”

But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find truly serious journalists to populate television news shows. The lines between “serious” journalism and news-entertainment has been blurring for years.In 1994, while promoting his latest book, then-CBS news anchor Dan Rather went on the ”Late Show with David Letterman” and exhibited his tobacco spitting skills.

Before being picked to anchor the “CBS Evening News” in 2006, Katie Couric was a guest host of the ‘Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” After taking the job she went on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central faux news show and joked about giving a free colonoscopy to viewers of her CBS show to beef up its audience.

In 2007, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams hosted “Saturday Night Live,” the network’s long-running comedy show. And earlier this year, Christiane Amanpour played a TV journalist in the movie “Iron Man 2.” This month she takes over as host of “This Week,” ABC’s real-life Sunday morning news show.

Given this cross-dressing, it’s not surprising that Stewart, the comedian, was ranked right alongside “serious” network anchors in 2008 when Americans were asked which journalist they admire the most.

You can expect the confusion over who’s a real journalist – and what’s a serious news program – to grow as more and more news organizations try to do journalism on the cheap. Using untrained people to provide video to broadcast news outlets and newspapers’ reliance on “citizen journalists” to help fill the void created by the downsizing of their news staffs blurs the line even more.

The short-term financial gain news organizations get from this watering down of the practice of journalism will, in the long run, make it harder for Americans to distinguish the difference between programs like “The View” and a network newscast.

And it will make it increasingly easy for savvy politicians like Obama to avoid answering tough questions from this nation’s dwindling number of truly serious journalists.

Race issue is kyptonite to Obama White House

By DeWayne Wickham

This never would have happened on Louis Martin's watch.

The political "prestige and the stature of the president of the United States among blacks" was his business, Martin told a senator who in the early 1960s resisted his attempt to get John F. Kennedy to appoint a black to the federal bench.

Helping presidents navigate racially sensitive issues was what the one-time black newspaperman did for Democratic Oval Office occupants from Kennedy to Jimmy Carter. He was their "go-to" guy. Martin had deep roots and was well-connected to civil rights activists as well as black politicians.

It was Martin's job to keep the presidents he served from stumbling into a race-baiting ambush like the one Andrew Breitbart sprung on the Obama administration and the NAACP. The right-wing blogger set off racial shockwaves when he released a 2-minute, 38-second video clip from a nearly hour-long speech that Shirley Sherrod, a regional USDA official, gave to a Georgia NAACP branch back in March.

This craftily selected excerpt, which Breitbart says he got from an unnamed source, left the impression Sherrod bragged about withholding assistance from a white family facing foreclosure on their farm. That was enough to cause the Obama administration to demand Sherrod's resignation - without giving her a chance to defend herself. The full version of the speech showed Sherrod actually went out of her way to help save the white family's property.

But this revelation came too late to save Obama - who apologized to Sherrod days later during a 7-minute telephone conversation - from an embarrassing racial episode that left his administration scrambling to explain why it had been so quick to throw her under the bus. The most likely reason is that when it comes to issues of race, the Obama administration is a basket case.

Its racial paranoia, though not without provocation, is exacerbated by the absence of someone in the president's circle of advisers who has the job - and connections - to protect Obama's flank on matters of race. This is a troubling omission that leaves the president vulnerable to the racial portion of the guerrilla warfare right-wingers are waging against him. Many black politicians and civil rights activists whose concerns get short shrift are frustrated by a White House that handles racial matters like they're political kryptonite.

Obama can't expect his civil rights allies to buffer him from such attacks. The NAACP blamed Fox News for snookering it into calling Sherrod's words in the truncated version of the speech "shameful." That knee-jerk response came before the civil rights group bothered to view the entire video of Sherrod's address to one of its own chapters.

For years Martin helped Democratic presidents avoid such missteps. But in an administration that believes simply repeating that Obama "is not the president of black America" keeps him from hitting the racial tripwire, there is no one in the West Wing with Martin's portfolio.

That's too bad - and might be politically fatal.

In the multi-front war Obama's political enemies are forcing this nation's first black president to fight, he has left his most vulnerable flank lightly guarded. From the moment he emerged from the pack to become a viable candidate his party's presidential nomination, the race issue has been his Achilles' heel.

And if Obama doesn't get someone on his staff soon who knows how to protect it, it'll be his undoing.

NAACP should pressure Obama to help jobless blacks

By DeWayne Wickham

GREENSBORO, N.C. — A day after the NAACP passed a resolution calling on the "Tea Party" movement to condemn unnamed racists in its ranks, I stood inside this city's old F.W. Woolworth, the scene of a truly important civil rights battle.

The lunch counter inside the old department store — now the focal point of Greensboro's International Civil Rights Center and Museum — was the scene of a sit-in demonstration 50 years ago that sparked the greatest chapter of this nation's civil rights movement. The protest led to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The effort to end the store's refusal to serve blacks at its lunch counter was launched by four black college students.

They didn't issue a formal statement condemning the act of bigotry enraging them. They didn't try to fight their battle in the press, though their cause was certainly aided by the news coverage it got. Instead, they did something of substance: They walked up to that segregated lunch counter, sat down and requested service. Within days hundreds of people, black and white, joined their effort — a campaign that pushed Congress to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations.

Of course, if there are racists in the Tea Party movement, the NAACP should track them down and call them out by name — not inference. Ferreting out the racists among us is still important work. But the most important civil rights work the NAACP needs to do is in the economic arena.

Two years ago while campaigning for the presidency, Barack Obama told the NAACP's convention that the federal government has a responsibility to provide employment opportunities for struggling families.He reminded his audience that Martin Luther King Jr. once said the inseparable twin of racial justice is economic justice.

Back then, black unemployment was 9.9%. Today it's a whopping 15.4%. Joblessness among black teenagers in July 2008 was 27%. Now, 39.9% of black youth can't find work. For most of the past decade, black unemployment has been double that of whites.

But 10 months into his presidency, Obama told USA TODAY and the Detroit Free Press he wouldn't do anything special to address the unemployment problems of blacks. "I will tell you that I think the most important thing I can do for the African-American community is the same thing I can do for the American community, period, and that is to get the economy going again and get people hiring again," Obama said.

When black unemployment rose while the Reagan administration gave federal aid to troubled American businesses, the NAACP said the Republican president's economic policies were a "virus" that would set back blacks for generations.

So far, the NAACP hasn't challenged Obama's refusal to make a targeted effort to close this nation's black-white jobless gap while he has used federal funds to rescue failing corporations. Instead, the civil rights group announced that it will march on Washington in October to pressure Congress — not the president — to create jobs.

Joblessness is certainly a greater threat to blacks than the bigots who show up at Tea Party movement events. But the NAACP is apparently unwilling to push Obama, whom blacks played a big role in electing, to do what they asked of Reagan — so the organization will pressure Congress instead.

That makes no sense to me. The four students who challenged Woolworth's whites-only lunch counter focused their efforts on the root of their problem — and the NAACP should do the same.

It's time for Michael Steele to return to his roots

By DeWayne Wickham

It’s time for a change, Michael Steele — time for you to find a new political home.

Born into a family of Maryland Democrats, you became a Republican when the most revered members of the state’s GOP were Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin and Charles “Mac” Mathias.

McKeldin was the moderate Republican who gave the nominating speech for Dwight Eisenhower at the party’s 1952 convention, and who later broke with the GOP to back Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Gold-water in the 1964 presidential campaign. A two-term governor, McKeldin was twice elected mayor of Baltimore. And unlike many other Republicans — then and now — he won widespread support from black voters.

Mathias, a liberal Republican who helped draft the 1964 Civil Rights Act, served in the Senate for 18 years before retiring in 1987. For his willingness to put principle above party, he was called the “conscience of the Senate” by Democratic leader Mike Mansfield.

Your political roots are in the GOP of McKeldin and Mathias, not the Republican Party that is now commanded by right-wingers such as Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell and Ohio Rep. John Boehner.

There is no room for you in today’s GOP. For all the talk of a “big tent,” the Republican Party is a neoconservative pup tent where those with differing views are forced to kowtow to these ultra-right-wingers. Their political absolutism chased Florida Gov. Charlie Crist from the GOP and has reduced Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to backbenchers. And more than once, it has forced you to retract something you said — when it seemed you spoke from the heart, not the party’s playbook.

It’s time to “man up,” Michael Steele, time to put your principles ahead of your job as GOP chairman, time to move into another political space — one that will let you be you. It’s time for you to become a Democrat.

As it is now, you’re widely thought to be a gaffe-prone embarrassment to the GOP. You called Rush Limbaugh an incendiary “entertainer,” then you apologized after he turned his media-megaphone against you. You told GQ that abortion is “an individual choice,” and then backpedaled when the anti-abortionists squealed in protest. And as quickly as you said at a Connecticut GOP fundraiser that the Afghanistan war is a conflict of President Obama’s choosing and is unwinnable, you retreated when GOP hawks demanded your resignation.

While many of your views would not prevail in the Democratic Party, you wouldn’t have to eat your words. You could become a member of the party’s conservative “Blue Dog” faction and influence the Obama administration’s policies and congressional legislation.

Sure, the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress is decidedly liberal. But the party has space within its ranks for moderates such as California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, and conservatives such as Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler. They aren’t forced to genuflect to an ideological litmus test. In the GOP, you’re treated like a malfunctioning dupe of the party’s claim of diversity. In the Democratic Party, you’d be yet another example of the inclusiveness it admittedly struggles with but hasn’t abandoned.

Breaking away from the Republican Party would be a tough move, but clinging to the belief that you can remain in the GOP and be your own man, ultimately, will cause you greater trauma.