Remember when Scott Brown was chastised for questioning another type of Indian candidate?
He was uniformly raked over the coals by the media.
When the candidate is a Republican however, their ethnicity and race are considered worthy of attack.
Case in point, Annie Gowen of the Washington Post:
From Piyush to Bobby: How does Jindal feel about his family’s past?Jindal’s status as a conservative of color helped propel his meteoric rise in the Republican Party — from an early post in the George W. Bush administration to two terms in Congress and now a second term as Louisiana governor — and donors from Indian American groups fueled his first forays into politics. Yet many see him as a man who has spent a lifetime distancing himself from his Indian roots.As a child, he announced he wanted to go by the name Bobby, after a character in “The Brady Bunch.” He converted from Hinduism to Christianity as a teen and was later baptized a Catholic as a student at Brown University — making his devotion to Christianity a centerpiece of his public life. He and his wife were quick to say in a “60 Minutes” interview in 2009 that they do not observe many Indian traditions — although they had two wedding ceremonies, one Hindu and one Catholic. He said recently that he wants to be known simply as an American, not an Indian American.“There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal,” said Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who is writing a book on the governor.
The Post must be fairly proud of that last part because, as Ed Morrissey of Hot Air notes, they’re using it to promote the story on social media:
John Nolte of Breitbart has Jindal’s response:
For years, liberals have attacked Governor Jindal for not being brown or Indian enough for their liking.Liberals are fixated on race.They have said he is ‘trying to scrub some of the brown off his skin” or ‘there’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal’ or that a portrait of him in the Governor’s Office was not brown enough.Governor Jindal is proud of his heritage. He believes we need to stop fixating on race and hyphenated Americans. We are all Americans.
As a conservative of Asian descent, Michelle Malkin has seen her share of similar attacks from liberals. She addressed the issue in a recent column:
The media’s vile attacks on conservative assimilationistsI have had enough of smug liberal elites wrapped in their “Celebrate Diversity” banners tearing down minority conservatives.Look in the mirror, media and academia bigots. Your own reflexive racism and divisive rhetoric are poisoning public discourse. There’s nothing “progressive” about attacking the children and grandchildren of immigrants who proudly embrace an American identity.We are not “self-hating.” You just hate what we believe.
Indeed. It’s difficult to imagine the Washington Post asking a similar question about a Democrat.
It’s just a sign of what is to come this season, since the Republican field is so much more diverse than the Democrats.
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