Well, we found it. And it is damaging, because Barack Obama was as close or closer to Derrick Bell than he ever was to Jeremiah Wright. Obama didn’t merely sit in the pews – or not — for Derrick Bell. He didn’t just hang out with Derrick Bell for prayers. He said:
“Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”
If we did, here’s what we’d be opening our hearts and minds to. This is a close associate of Jeremiah Wright, a man who was quoted by Jeremiah Wright regularly. This is a man who posited that the civil rights movement was too moderate because it accepted the status quo, and believed that the entire legal and constitutional system had to be transformed in radical fashion. This is a man so extreme that, as we’ve reported, he wrote a story in 1993 in which he posited that white Americans would sell black Americans into slavery to aliens to relieve the national debt, and that Jews would go along with it.
There’s far more coming on Derrick Bell. This is just the beginning. And this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate.
In 1991 Barack Obama was a thirty year-old law student and President of the Harvard Law Review. Derrick Bell was a professor who was protesting the lack of diversity in the Harvard Law School faculty. Bell vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school appointed a female of color to its tenured faculty. At that time Harvard Law School had sixty tenured professors, three of whom were black and five of whom were women. The school had never had a black woman on the tenured staff.
If I had been attending Harvard Law back then I would have most likely joined in the protest too.
As for the story Shapiro refers to, it’s hard to blame Obama (or anyone else) for something written two years after this video. This isn’t a smoking gun, it’s a steaming pile of nothingness.
BTW – Bell’s leave of absence ended with him being formally removed from Harvard faculty in 1992. He ended up at NYU Law where he wrote and gave speeches on race and civil rights until his death last year at the age of eighty.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Racism Tagged: | Barack Obama
While I tend to agree this is not a winning storyline for the right, the story is more than you outline here. It wasn’t just any woman, it was Regina Austin, who, by the way, didn’t want the tenure and has never forgiven Derrick Bell for being so paternalistic with her career, which she saw as a real set back professionally. So really, it does kinda fit with Obama’s habit of stepping on the toes of women on his way up. The man never saw a woman he couldn’t exploit. That’s not the story Shapiro is selling, though.
Videos are like jokes – if you have to explain them they don’t work.
As far as scandals go this seems on a par with Palin’s emails. A big ball of so what?
The difference with Palin’s emails (or Rick Perry’s rock) is that the media sent dozens (hundreds?) of reporters to Alaska and Texas to dig up something, anything, on them.
The digging up of stuff on Obama is way long overdue, and the media still ain’t doing it.
No, videos are a starting point. You have to expand on what the video represents. I have been viewing videos on C-span re Derrick Bell all morning. He was not just for diversity but that diversity had to come with a certain ideology. He didn’t only care about the color of your skin but also about the “color of your ideology”. He was rather abusive, at the time, with another black Harvard professor, Randall Kennedy, who did not agree with him.
It’s very interesting reading about a man I had never heard of until yesterday. Education is a wonderful thing.
Wish I had known this information way before now.
Yawn.
Much ado about nothing. This is precisely where the right falls flat on its face. Many on that side actually believe Obama is some socialist radical. I think Breitbart and partners and other groups going down this path were drinking the red kool-aid and were only looking for the communist boogyman.
Here’s a clue for any on the right reading this, Obama’s vulnerabilities are not with past connections to radicals, it’s with connections to wall-street, to banks, to Dem party machine insiders that cheated, with Repub party machine insiders that heaped him win over McCain. Corruption with money and with party machines is where you want to look. What happened where he got more money than anyone else when he was unknown? How did he get the better political consultants when he was a nobody? It’s all about crony capitalism and the cover up.
But of course if you’re looking in those places, you’ll find just as many important and well placed Republicans looking back at you as anyone else. You have to be willing to dig into the whole mess. And there’s a lot of money and power that will do anything to make sure you fail.
If anything it will convince the backsliding Democrats that Obama really is a lefty.
Obama is whatever is convenient for that particular day and that specific location. He gives soaring, eloquent speeches about equality then goes and sits in the corner when a banker hands him a check.
Honk! Spot on, DT.
Man, I hate when a movie flops. Otoh, still more factual than Game Change. LOL
This reminds me of how we still haven’t seen anything he published back then.
Edit: after my morning coffee, iirc the article from Breitbart’s site I posted the other day was saying they were aiming at the media, for not vetting Obama, rather than at Obama himself. Dunno if that’s gonna happen either.
“Otoh, still more factual than Game Change.”
Speaking of which, I watched Jon Stewart’s “interview” with (a cringeworthy giggling, ‘girly’) Julianne Moore, and felt quite uncomfortable about the way she (they!) spoke about Sarah Palin. As if she was a … a thing. Something immaterial that was open for public dissection, and not a human being.
Troubling, no matter one’s own opinion of her political standpoints.
I’ve seen several interviews on the topic by Julianne Moore, including the Stewart interview, and I couldn’t disagree more. If anything, she’s bent over backwards to point out that Palin was thrust on the national stage with no preparation and could not be expected to have a smooth transition into a national figure who’s every breath was going to be dissected by the media and the public.
What’s more, there was nothing inappropriate about Moore’s demeanor on The Daily Show. She is an actor selling a product and smiling and joking with an interviewer is perfectly legitimate behavior. She was not doing her mothers eulogy.
Uh huh.
Yes, Ben Smith is a steaming pile…..
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/07/Ben-Smith-Harvard-Obama
Let the real vetting of Obama begin……..
This is not a smoking gun. The kind of people who will be outraged by this tape already hate Obama.
It occurs to me that maybe the intent is not so much to take down Obama, but to take down the the brand of the “left” and the media by association.
Most of the voters (including independents) already thinks Obama stinks; maybe Breitbart’s idea was to show that everyone he is associated with (then and now) stink too.
A lot on the disenchanted left like to say Obama is really GOP if you look at his policies; maybe this is the argument that says no, Obama is from the left and the left is really deceptive and trying to con & control you.
Kind of like will the real greater evil please step forward.
On economic policy, Obama is not progressive left or tea party right. He is center right imo, pretty much where establishment Republicans (like Romney) want to be. Same with foreign policy. On social issues, one could make the case he’s further left than establishment Republicans, though Nader Progressives might disagree.
OT
Not unless he thinks it will get him some votes.
Obama! Obama! Obama! This is the trailer for a 17 minute doc coming out soon. Well it worked in 2008…..
Now THAT’s a steaming pile! It should come with a barf warning!
I saw Malkin had a comment on it (and the Obama-Bell rally tape)
When will the liberal media stop hiding crucial information on youtube?
That video besides being aired on Frontline in 2008 has been available on their website and on youtube since then. Let the Malkin counter top inspections begin.
Yeah, I can’t watch that. And Tom Hanks is doing the voice-over, so screw him. Is it just me or is Hollywood becoming even more of a political messaging factory these days. Citizens United might be helping. Good for business.
Race card is back.
White CNN talking head accuses Breitbart editor Joel Pollak of being “afraid of black people.”
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/08/video-cnn-beclowns-itself-painting-breitbart-editor-in-chief-as-racist/
Joel Pollak, incidentally, was the Tea Party challenger to Jan Schakowsky (one of the women who refused to denounce Maher) in 2010.
Edit: I really think it’s projection — it’s the Dems who are “afraid of black people” if they in any way challenge Obama. Panderer’s conundrum.
Joel Pollak is married to a woman from South Africa and they have a bi-racial daughter. His mother-in-law was also appointed by Nelson Mandela in a advisory position.
Mandela-shmandela. That stuff don’t matter. As long as he dares question Obama he is racist. /s
True story
I found another ‘steaming pile’ …. love the Cupp and Malkin responses …..
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/keith-olbermann-apologizes-to-se-cupp-and-michelle-malkin-suspends-worst-persons-again/
Olbermann will always be a steaming pile. Glad Malkin & Cupp shot him down.
This made me laugh
Hillary is 44 has a great post on this btw
http://www.hillaryis44.org/2012/03/07/andrew-breitbart-strikes-from-the-grave-barack-obama-the-race-baiter-protected-by-corrupt-big-media/
Good, H44 gets it.
Documentary trailer for Hating Breitbart.
OT, but myiq, was this you???????
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=324145334299195&set=a.166353416745055.31801.151339441579786&type=1&theater
That was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. They called him Slippery Sam. He was the first one in my family to get lynched.
It’s an inside joke in our family to say he was well-hung.
Derrick Bell was no more a racist than Henry Louis Gates Jr. But I’m guessing the right will win this battle, though the proggish Obots online are doing a pretty good job making fun of the kerfuffle so far. We’re more than two decades on from the one dimensional critical race theory debates of the 80s and 90s. Obama himself wouldn’t want to be elected to a second term as an affirmative action president.
The right look like complete fools in this battle. Since I don’t believe that most people in the US are idiots, I don’t see how this is a winner for them.