Innocence Is No Defense

Update: See GOP Returns To "White Voter Strategy" for a look at why profiling and racism plays.

Oh yeah, Henry Louis Gates Jr is an innocent man. An insignificant detail not mentioned by those who cheerlead all the progress we have made in race relations and defend the cop who persecuted an innocent man.

Bob Herbert reminds us this morning of this minor detail of Prof Gates' innocence and the propensity of cops to target people of color.

No one is immune. Colin Powell told Larry King that he had been profiled many times. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke last week about how humiliated he felt as a college student when a cop made him stop his car and open the trunk so it could be searched for weapons.

Young, old, innocent as the day is long — it doesn’t matter. Your skin color can leave you perpetually vulnerable to a sudden and devastating criminal injustice.

Well, Gates like Colin Powell and Attorney General Eric Holder is black; so I guess he had it coming. We just need to ignore such distasteful facts like the man's innocence and understand the perpetrator because he wears a uniform and a badge.

Just 39 Percent See Hillary as honest and trustworthy

Just 39 percent see Hillary Clinton as "honest and trustworthy" in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

I hope this is right, certainly fits in with the reaction among progressives to her despicable campaign.

Write Anne E. Kornblut and Jon Cohen:

PHILADELPHIA, April 15 -- Lost in the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign's aggressive attacks on Barack Obama in recent days is a deep and enduring problem that threatens to undercut any inroads Clinton has made in her struggle to overtake him in the Democratic presidential race: She has lost trust among voters, a majority of whom now view her as dishonest. ...

Clinton is viewed as "honest and trustworthy" by just 39 percent of Americans, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, compared with 52 percent in May 2006. Nearly six in 10 said in the new poll that she is not honest and trustworthy. And now, compared with Obama, Clinton has a deep trust deficit among Democrats, trailing him by 23 points as the more honest, an area on which she once led both Obama and John Edwards.

More Racist Crap from Hillary

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog asks: Are Hillary's latest attacks subtly racist, and intentionally so?

That's an easy one. Intentional and subtle.

Writes an appalled and angry Aravosis:

As a Southerner, the attacks on Obama being elitist by the elites of this country, it made me uncomfortable. Not just because the attacks are generally unfair and a distortion of what he actually said, but because it smacks of the sort of dirty, snide, racial attacks of the old South - the 'uppity' black man attack. ... This is a disgusting, racial attack against Obama being portrayed as an attack on Pennsylvania voters, and I will have none of it.

This project of subtle racist impressions of Obama projected onto the electoral audience has been going on since Wisconsin, Feb. 19, when Hillary was killed across all demographics, including white males.

See Hillary's Appeal to Racism Is a Project, Not an Accident for a further discussion of Hillary' southern strategy-light.