This is the latest in the Saturday Night Card Game series on the use of the race card for political gain:
Charles Ogletree is a Professor at Harvard Law School. Ogletree who is black, has decided that to call Barack Obama “professor” has racist connotations:
Speaking to Tea Party activists in Nashville last week, Sarah Palin did her part to keep the “professor” dig in circulation.
“They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern,” the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee told a frenzied crowd….
Ogletree, founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says he sees the “professor” label as a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race. Calling Obama “the professor” walks dangerously close to labeling him “uppity,” a term with racial overtones that has surfaced in the political arena before, Ogletree said….
“The idea is that he’s not one of us,” Ogletree says of the professor label. “He has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists — those were buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as an African American who was out of place.”
What rubbish. Obama is out of touch, is elitist, and is professorial in his lecturing style of dealing with critics and governing. The facts are the facts.
Last April I pointed out that Obama was too professorial in his willingness to test dangerously naive theories of governance, Welcome To The Real World, Professor Obama.
I also have leveled that criticism even more broadly against the large number of (mostly white) law professors who have joined the Obama administration, Should Law Professors Really Be Running The Government?:
The beauty of teaching, particularly in a law school, is that you get to suppose and propose all types of innovative theories as to how to make the world better, without the burden of having your theories tested in the real world. That doesn’t mean your theories are ignored or wrong, it’s just that there is a real world person (lawyer, judge, client, juror, etc.) who acts as a filter to translate your theories into practice.
The Obama administration increasingly is being run by law professors. The law-professor-in-chief is Obama, who used to teach part time at the University of Chicago Law School…. The problem is, in the Obama administration there does not appear to be a filter since the theorists are the ones making the decisions….
Innovative legal theory in a law school setting is a thing to be praised; innovative legal theory in an administration is dangerous to the welfare of the nation. While the various Obama law professor appointees all may be good people, are they really the good people we want making decisions on national security?
My criticisms of Obama for being too professorial had nothing to do with race. And neither did Ogletree’s use of the race card, which was all about politics.
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