THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

IF YOU'RE SHREWD, YOU SAY LIBERALS ARE SMART | 2002-10-26

The Shrewd conservatives, no matter how wrong they have always been, continue to say what they always said. They insist that everything liberals did until recently was right. If liberals will just point out an Evil Racist to a respectable conservative, he will loyally kill the Evil One.

Black people get profiled because so many black people commit crimes. But no black will ever blame the black criminal.

By the same token, no respectable conservative will tell a black man that profiling is the fault of black criminals. Vice President Cheney almost cried talking to a black man about the evil, evil, EVIL police who treat a man with black skin as if he were more likely to commit crime than people with white skins.

That performance would have made me sick to my stomach, but by now I've seen it a thousand times. Whining about the Noble Red Man, the Noble Black Man, the Noble Anybody Not White is the standard age-old response of Shrewd conservatives to any challenge by the left on the race issue.

The heroes of the Shrewd right are conservatives who helped get us in the situation we face today. Charlton Heston brags that he was a loyal follower of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and finally Ronald Reagan. Teddy Kennedy's worshipper Orrin Hatch was out there fighting to make the world what it is today in the civil rights movement of the 'Sixties.