All they are missing is having Kanye West announce that George W. Bush and Ward Connerly hate black people. Add that one little touch, and the disingenuousness of the latest ad by a group called One United Michigan (OUM) would
touch the sky.
A radio spot by OUM, one of the leading opponents of the
Michigan Civil Rights Initiative , which voters will see on their Election Day ballot, invokes both the September 11 terrorist attacks on America and Hurricane Katrina to scare voters into voting against the initiative.
The ad asks:
If you could have prevented 9-11 from ever happening...would you have?
If you could have prevented Katrina from ever happening...what would you have done?
On Nov. 7th there's a national disaster headed for Michigan...the elimination of affirmative action.
And on Nov. 7th there's only one way to stop this disaster ... by voting No on Proposal 2.
By voting No on Proposal 2 you keep the playing field level for people who believe in fair and equal treatment.
By voting No on Proposal 2 you will keep programs for women and people of color to have equal access to jobs, public contracts and most importantly education.
By voting No on 2 people like you, people like me will have equal opportunity.
So on Nov. 7th we urge you to step up, take a stand and stop a national disaster by voting No on 2.
No on 2.
Vote No on Proposal 2.
It's bad for you.
Paid for by One United Michigan with regulated funds.
In reality, MCRI would amend the state’s constitution to prohibit “state entities from discriminating or granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” In other words, it’s the logical extension of Martin Luther King’s dream.
But no matter. Most of those we’re expected to consider civil-rights leaders today are actually nothing but liberal demagogues, some of them even
dangerous charlatans . They oppose the MCRI, and believe that when it comes to racial politics, anything goes.
Just ask Maryland Senate candidate
Michael Steele , who has had Oreos thrown at him (black on the outside, white on the inside — get it?). Just this weekend, in fact, he had the cookie tag thrown at him again. And here’s another great moment in racial politics: With zero evidence and no subsequent remorse, the former head of TransAfrica, Randall Robinson, wrote on HuffingtonPost.com that the Bush administration’s inattention to black people in New Orleans led them to cannibalism. He wrote, “It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.” No such thing was ever reported. But, hell, that’s a great urban myth to spread. And so it went.
But back to MCRI.
This is far from the first time that Hurricane Katrina has been invoked by opponents of MCRI. At Rosa Parks’s funeral last year, Al Sharpton
warned those gathered — who were presumably there to remember and pay tribute to Ms. Parks’s brave refusal to move to the back of an Alabama bus in 1955 — about MCRI, a product of one of Jim Crow’s sons, he said.
“James Crow Jr. Esq.,” Sharpton said, “doesn’t put you in the back of the bus. He just puts referendums on the ballot to end affirmative action when you can’t go to school. He doesn’t call you a racial name, he just marginalizes your existence. He doesn’t tell you that he’s set against you, he sets up institutional racism. Where you have a nation respond looking for weapons in Iraq that are not there but can’t see a hurricane in Louisiana that is there.” Unapologetic, at a University of Michigan rally last fall, Sharpton
said , “It is hypocritical to mourn Rosa Parks and then try to make sure her grandchildren can’t get an education.”
James Crow Jr. Esq., in Sharpton’s mind, is probably best personified by Ward Connerly, chairman of the
American Civil Rights Institute and father of California’s Proposition 209, a precursor to MCRI. Connerly tells
National Review Online: “More than any other issue in American life, ‘race’ seems to be the one that most inspires racialists to believe that they have license to do or say anything they want about their opponents because they believe they uniquely hold the moral high ground. ‘Racist’ has lost all effect, so now we are purveyors of ‘national disasters.’”
The campaign against MCRI is far from the only disingenuous, over-the-top campaign out there. In
Missouri there is a cloning referendum voters face that doesn’t even get called a cloning bill. But Michael J. Fox has endorsed it — you know if you oppose it you’re against sick people.
In Pennsylvania, hysterical folks on the Left would have us believe that Republican senator
Rick Santorum doesn’t respect women — even though some of his top campaign and Senate staffers are women (his Senate and Republican Conference offices in Washington are overflowing with women). We’re also supposed to believe he hates gay people because he believes that the actual institution of marriage is fundamental to society.
But in an America where, come Election Day, many busy Americans probably will not have had time to sort out truth from insulting fiction, a vote-against-Prop-2-or-black-people-will-die-just-like-when-George-Bush-made-’em-die-in-New-Orleans approach could work. In its campaign against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, One Michigan United is joined by a group called By Any Means Necessary — “By Any Means Necessary” says it all. People who claim to be “civil” rights leaders should be ashamed.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.
