Wife of Pander Bear1

Though the liberal media buried the lede, last week's Watergate was Hillary's race-baiting at a black Baptist church in Harlem:

The House "has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about," said Clinton, D-N.Y. "It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."

Imagine if a Republican Senator had said that! Better yet, ask Trent Lott.

If Trent's not available, try Shelby Steele in today's WSJ:

A great achievement of modern liberalism--and a primary reason for its surviving decades past the credibility of its ideas--is that it captured black resentment as an exclusive source of power. It even gave this resentment a Democratic Party affiliation. (Antiwar sentiment is the other great source of liberal power, but it is not the steady provider that black and minority resentment has been.) Republicans have often envied this power, but have never competed well for it because it can be accessed only by pandering to the socialistic longings of minority leaders--vast government spending, social programs, higher taxes and so on. Republicans and conservatives have simply never had an easy or glib mechanism for addressing profound social grievances.

But this Republican "weakness" has now begun to emerge as a great--if still largely potential--Republican advantage. Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power. The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance. Republicans are generally freer of the political bigotry by which the left either panders to or persecutes black Americans

This truly is bizarro world. Any time Bush gets within shot-put range of an evangelical, the left runs in circles and screams and shouts: theocracy! Meanwhile, Ms. Clinton takes a Sunday stroll to an inner-city Church--scoring two, two, two panders in one.
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¹ See Capitol Steps, Pander Bear, on Fool on the Hill (1992).

(via Fausta's Blog)