writes Paul Krugman darkly in his op-ed:… there’s also … the stain that won’t go away
race.This comes at the end of a column in which the New York Times' economist has castigated the right for "Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate".
Every time I read a column by Paul Krugman in which he laments the racism he constantly finds among conservative groups (A War on the Poor, New York Times, November 1), I wonder if he has ever heard about Tim Scott. Given that for awhile, the legislator from South Carolina was the only member of the United States Senate who is African-American, one would think that his name might be — almost — as renowned as Barack Obama's.
The explanation for Scott's relative obscurity is that he is a Republican — one who is backed by Tea Partiers (endorsed by Tea Party favorite Jim DeMint, Scott's Senate predecessor) and one from a Southern state to boot. And were Scott better known, it would be far more difficult for people like Krugman to bewail the racism of Republicans and Tea Partiers, not to mention Southerners.
You would think that this black pauper's rise from rags to the halls of the U.S. Senate is a living memorial to Martin Luther King's dream. But because leftists (conveniently and self-servingly) define themselves as the valiant fighters against the racism they (conveniently and self-servingly) constantly find throughout the ranks of the Republican Party, it comes as no surprise that South Carolina's conservative Senator did not even receive an invitation to participate in the 50th anniversary commemorations of MLK's Lincoln Memorial speech.
Should Krugman need more evidence of his own prejudices, one could also mention Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal, Republican governors (both of Indian heritage) backed by the Tea Party whose skin is about as dark as, if not darker than, that of Barack Obama. Yes, they too were elected in states from the former Confederacy.
As for blacks who are favorites of the Tea Party, either nationally or locally, they include Herman Cain, Allen West, Darryl Glenn, and Mia Love as well as Thomas Sowell (the Stanford economist who deserves the Nobel Prize in Economics at least as much as Krugman), Walter Williams, and Larry Elder. But all these African-Americans must be ignored, because for the Left, the only good "Negro" is the martyred "Negro" — the one who constantly thinks he and his like are victims and therefore votes for the victimization party (i.e., the Democrats).
Currently, one favorite of the Tea Party crowd for presidential candidate in 2016 is Dr Benjamin Carson, a neurosurgeon who is offering a free-market alternative to Obamacare that would keep prices down and Washington's brand-new army of bureaucrats out of the health care system. His skin, too, is darker than Obama's.
But all these inconvenient facts must be ignored or belittled by media people like Krugman in order to push the narrative that America is an intolerant hell hole of prejudice populated by hordes of despicable racists.
Note: The initial text of this post held that Tim Scott was the only black member of the United States Senate; that was true at the time of the writing of this post, over several weeks, but 12 days before this post was posted, Cory Booker had become New Jersey's junior senator.
Update: one year after this post was written, Tim Scott wins South Carolina's 2014 mid-term Senate election — in a landslide
