Free Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes by David Horowitz

delegation of African-Americans in tow, the President set off to wave the bloody flag, apologizing for slavery (to the wrong African country) in an attempt to wrap the sins of America around his own. Continuing his bid to hide his tarnished self under the mantle of black suffering, he went on to Martha's Vineyard to debase the memory of Martin Luther King's march on Washington, choosing the anniversary of that historic occasion for another unconvincing act of contrition. These are the kinds of gestures that give tokenism a bad name.
    But not this time-at least not among African-Americans. Instead, the most prominent voices of black leadership joined willingly in Clinton's charades and rallied to his tarnished cause. There was civil rights legend John Lewis at the Martin Luther King anniversary, solemnly, tearfully forgiving Clinton and urging the rest of the country to forgive him as well. It was terrible, apparently, to be so judgmental of another human being. This was the same John Lewis who not so long before was denouncing Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans as "nazis" for attempting to reform a welfare system that had become destructive to inner city minorities and poor people.
    This is what the liberal melodramas of conspiracy and witch hunt are really about: not racial persecution, which thankfully has been driven undergound in America, but political loyalty to a bankrupt liberalism, and its system of bureaucratic exploitation of dependency and economic waste. The previously cited New York Times report on black attitudes noted that "many of those interviewed said they not only subscribed to Hillary Rodham Clinton's statement that a 'vast right-wing conspiracy' had targeted her husband, but also that they believed the conspirators were motivated by a desire to reverse the gains made by blacks during the Clinton administration." One paranoia is linked to another. Leftists like Maxine Waters and Toni Morrison and demagogues like Charles Rangel have persuaded the African-American community that Republicans are racists who want to reverse the gains of the civil rights era. This is the really Big Lie that locks African-Americans into Clinton's corner, blocks reform, and protects the one-party political systems of America's largest cities.
    If liberals want instances of political persecution or persecution of blacks, they need look no farther than their own character assassination of Clarence Thomas in an episode of sexual McCarthyism (to use Alan Dershowitz's inflammatory phrase) whose allegations pale in comparison to the charges against Clinton. Where are the liberal apologies for this racial outrage?
    Or consider a more unpalatable thought: the political persecution of Newt Gingrich. Liberal leaders of the House, hoping to reverse the results of the Republican victory in the 1994 election, leveled more than seventy-four phony ethics charges against Gingrich (sixty-five of which were "laughed out of committee") before they were able to make one ludicrous claim stick. Out of a hundred Gingrich-loathing liberals who might read this text, there is not one who could describe the specifics of even that charge. Yet Gingrich was censured, fined, and politically destroyed by a relentless liberal smear campaign that included 120,000 union-financed television commercials falsely portraying him as an enemy of older Americans dependent on Medicare. There is not a single liberal now defending Clinton or bemoaning the unfairness of his prosecution who has offered any second thoughts about this witch-hunt.
    That is because Gingrich's lynching, like that of Clarence Thomas, serves a liberal purpose. Just as Thomas is the dangerous black who has left the plantation, Gingrich is the alleged organizer of the "right wing conspiracy" that is seeking to bring down the left's leader in order to "reverse" the civil rights gains of African-Americans. Cease to believe in this mythology and what happens to the president, or to the leftist