Clyburn: GOP using “racial code words” to criticize @AmbassadorRice

In which the SC Democrat Congressman triples down on the nonsense:

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Tuesday that a letter from nearly 100 House Republicans urging President Obama not to appoint Susan Rice as secretary of State employed racially charged “code words” to make its case.

The letter, signed by 97 House Republicans, says Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, “is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi matter” — language Clyburn saw as racially loaded.

You know, these are code words,” Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, told CNN. “We heard them during the campaign — during this recent campaign we heard Sen. Sununu calling our president lazy, incompetent, these kinds of terms that those of us, especially those of us who were grown and raised in the South, we would hear these little words and phrases all of our lives and we’d get insulted by them.

“Susan Rice is as competent as anybody you will find, and just to paste that word on her causes problems with people like [incoming Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman] Marcia Fudge and certainly causes a big problem with me,” he added.

In a press conference earlier this week, Rep. Fudge (D-Ohio) said she believed criticism of Rice contained “a clear … sexism and racism.”

“It is a shame that anytime something goes wrong, they pick on women and minorities,” Fudge added.

Clyburn described himself as frustrated by the criticism of Rice. While he said it is fair to criticize her for having initially claimed the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was the result of a protest against an anti-Islam video, he objected to the language used by Republican leaders.

“I don’t like those words,” Clyburn said. “Say she was wrong for doing it, but don’t call her incompetent. That is something totally different. A lot of very competent people sometimes make errors, and to say that she erroneously did it, I don’t have a problem with it.”

What a crock. It doesn’t matter if the non-existent “racial code words” had been removed, Clyburn, Fudge, and other race-baiting Democrats would still characterize it as “racism” because the GOP has the sheer nerve to dare criticize a black Democrat – and one who, I should add, would be slammed just the same if she were a he, and/or if she were white and had said what Rice repeatedly did.

It’s really about as un-American as it gets for politicos and other public figures to frame every criticism of a liberal woman and/or black person who is part of this administration or otherwise works on behalf of it as “sexist” and / or “racist.” Dissent is supposed to be patriotic (as the left pretended to “remind” us in the Bush years but forgot the moment Barack Obama was elected President). Not only that, but why fight for equality for your fellow man as Clyburn did in the 50s and 60s if all you’re going to do is to turn around and essentially exclaim that they should be immune from criticism on the basis of their skin color?

Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted us to be judged on the content of our character, not the color of our skin. Too bad Clyburn and other “civil rights leaders” have long forgotten that.

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