June 17, 2005
N[AD]ER WITH ATTITUDE:
Nader's very unpleasant N-gagement (Lloyd Grove, June 17, 2005, NY Daily News)
If Ralph Nader doesn't stop dropping the N-bomb, Al Sharpton is going to wash out his mouth with soap."Nader is not a racist by any stretch of the imagination," Sharpton told me yesterday. "He has a good track record. But he ought to be sensitive that he does not sanitize that word."
Speaking Wednesday night at a Washington fund-raiser to retire the debt from his 2004 presidential campaign, Nader complained that Democratic Party powerbrokers had kept him off the ballot in such Southern states as Georgia and Virginia - which reminded him of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that denied African-Americans equal rights.
"I felt like a [n-word]," remarked the 70-year-old white multimillionaire graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.
Washington gadfly Evan Gahr reported Nader's comments on his chimpstein.com Web site.
"If Ed Koch had said what Ralph Nader said, we'd be marching," Sharpton noted. "This [scolding] doesn't rise to the level of a march. It rises to the level of a wrist slap."
Yesterday, Nader told me he was using the word in the same spirit as the Black Panthers of the 1960s - "as a word of defiance."
But Sharpton retorted: "He's not a Black Panther."
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 17, 2005 11:05 AM
The Indecent Left will collapse upon itself. One part of it says that "Nothing is taboo" and another part says that "Anything that offends non-white non-Christians is taboo."
Posted by: Governor Breck at June 17, 2005 11:32 AMWhen Senator Byrd (K - West Virginia) used the "n" word in a TV interview a few years ago, no problem. When Mike Wallace called his bank loan officer the "n" word for refusing him a loan in the 1980's, no problem. When Nader (another form of the "n" word) uses the "n" word, no problem.
When Senator Lott praises Strom Thurmond in jest at a birthday party without using the "n" word, BIG PROBLEM.
What a niggardly response to conservatives by the Left.
Posted by: obc at June 17, 2005 1:29 PMIf you do something to shock frumpy rural white-folks, it's okay. But when you do it to shock right-thinking Progressives, or their protected minority groups, now that's just unacceptable. Think of the uproar if Ralphie had done something that didn't show the proper, subservient respect for a Koran, too. (Like urging people to make a papier mache pig out of one.)
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at June 17, 2005 1:48 PMRaoul. Ralph woudn't do that. He is an Arab.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at June 17, 2005 2:31 PMIs he, Robert? I thought he was a Lebanese Christian - but I could be mistaken.
Posted by: obc at June 17, 2005 6:46 PMI thought most if not all the Arabs who'd until recently come to this country were Christians driven away from their homelands by those tolerant, peace-loving Muslims. (Years ago I worked in a department whose head was an Egyptian Copt, for instance.) But for Ralphie to embrace something like Koran idolatry would certainly be in character, wouldn't it?
(Clarification: what I mean is that these ridiculous ways in which Muslims demand that Korans are to be treated is idolatry, not the making of it into a pig. But still, where's the Serrano, or Mapplethorp or Finley who's got the guts to try? I thought the purpose of Art was to shock.)
Theo van Gogh ended up dead and OJ cheered it.
Posted by: bart at June 18, 2005 11:01 AMHe desrved it.
Posted by: oj at June 18, 2005 11:48 AM