Free Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media by Ishmael Reed Page A

thought. Typical of a member of the Old Media, which takes its cues from those whom the patriarchy has appointed to lead the movement.
    If Cynthia McKinney is nominated for president by the Green Party, a test for corporate feminists like Gloria Steinem so concerned about the lack of opportunities for their black sisters, black voters will flock to McKinney by the thousands, which might tip the balance if the contest is close between Mrs. Clinton and her Republican opponent. Others will leave the line for president on the ballot blank. This rage against the Clintons will go unnoticed by the segregated old corporate media, which has more information about the landscape of Mars than trends in the black, Asian-American and Hispanic communities. They rely upon their handful of colored mind doubles who tell them what they want to hear. Modern day Indian scouts. When they’re not available, all-white panels instruct each other about who is a racist and who is not, how black people feel, how they are going to vote, continuing what some blacks regard as the white intellectual occupation of the black experience, an attitude that dates all the way back to a letter written by Martin Delaney to Frederick Douglass in 1863, in which he complained about the favorable treatment Douglass gave to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin , while ignoring his Blake or the Huts of America (1859-1862). “She can not speak for us,” he wrote.
    Clinton will still receive some support from some black Democratic loyalists, and celebrities although some of them are beginning to distance themselves from the couple after the Iowa and New Hampshire smears against Obama, but a large number of black people, who helped elect Clinton, twice, will defect.
    Representative James E. Clyburn, a black congressman from South Carolina, told The New York Times (January 11, 2008) that “he may abandon his neutral stance in his state’s primary, based in part on comments by Senator Hillary Rodman Clinton about President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” He and other blacks interpreted Hillary Clinton’s remark about the two as implying that Johnson did more for the cause of civil rights than King, who, like Obama, made great speeches.
    Also one wonders whether Henry Louis Gates, Jr., media-appointed leader of the Talented Tenth (a phrase that W.E.B. DuBois used to appoint the black elite as the true leaders of the Negro masses, an insult to grassroots leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer), will follow suit. While smearing a number of black male writers as misogynists, in the Times and elsewhere, when Bill Clinton was caught with his pants down, Gates, Jr. said we will “go to the wall for this president.”
    Are the Clintons new in a South where husbands like George Wallace extended their power by getting their wives elected? Hardly. Take the Fergusons.
    In Texas there was a couple called the Fergusons, affectionately called “Ma and Pa Ferguson.”
    Miriam Ferguson was a quiet, private person who preferred to stay home in her big house in Temple, Texas, and take care of her husband, raise her two daughters, and tend to her flower garden.
    But in 1923 she was elected governor of Texas, the first woman governor elected in the United States.
    Her husband, Jim Ferguson, served two terms as governor, but during his second term he was impeached, which meant he could not run again for public office. So Miriam agreed to run to clear his name and restore the family’s honor.
    She served two terms as governor: from 1925 to 1927 and from 1933 to 1935. She and her husband became known as “Ma and Pa Ferguson.” Her campaign slogan was, “Two Governors for the Price of One.”
    Remind you of anyone?

The Crazy Rev. Wright 3
    ( The Media and the Clinton campaign sought to break candidate Obama by associating him with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Predictably, Wright’s complex theology was