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Dem Comments Called 'Racist'

By Michael P. Tremoglie, The Bulletin
Published:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
After President Barack Obama gave his inauguration speech, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a civil rights icon, followed him. Rev. Lowery said the nation needed to “make choices on the side of love, not hate, on the side of inclusion not exclusion, tolerance not intolerance.”

But some are questioning how inclusive and loving Rev. Lowery is. During that same speech he asked God’s help “to bring about the day, when white will embrace what is right.”

Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, the Philadelphia-born daughter of immigrant Filipinos, reacted to Rev. Lowery’s remarks by asking, “Who wrote that line? Jeremiah Wright? And what would Obama’s grandparents and mother have to say?”

Comments that appeared on the Chicago Sun-Times blog by Lynn Sweet and other Web sites and blogs protested what they called racist comments on Rev. Lowery’s part.

A couple of weeks earlier, one of Mr. Obama’s economic advisers, former Clinton administration labor secretary, Robert Reich, said during a hearing about the economic stimulus proposal that the jobs created by this stimulus “not simply go to ... white construction workers.”

This brought an outraged reaction by CNN’s Lou Dobbs. He played the clip on his Jan. 23 show. He then said, “What in the world is he thinking. Reich is a former labor secretary in the Clinton administration. A well-documented liberal who obviously is not resisting the temptation to inject group and identity economics into group and identity politics that affects all Americans irrespective of race or ethnicity.”

Even Robert Zimmerman, a Democratic strategist, who was a superdelegate to the Democratic Party’s 2008 convention, condemned the comment.

He said, “Secretary Reich’s comments are a very good example of why he’s not in the Obama administration. They’re silly comments, they’re irrelevant and they should be kept in that perspective.”

Michael P. Tremoglie can be reached at mtremoglie@thebulletin.us



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