Bush the racist...or not

On Nov. 3, 1998 voters in Texas handed a smashing victory to George W. Bush in his bid for re-election as governor of that state, giving him an amazing 68% percent of the vote. Being Texas, you don't reach those kind of numbers without garnering a fair number of Hispanic, and to a lesser extent, Black votes. Indeed, Bush captured 21% of the Black vote, an amazing number for a Republican from this most reliable of Democratic constituencies.

It was this ability to garner substantial number of non-White votes in a country that was becoming more racially diverse by the day that partly explained why many Republicans saw him as presidential material. It also, however, made him public enemy number one for many Democrats and liberal Black leaders. Just how low they would sink became apparent in the 2000 campaign when a commercial was aired by the NAACP that attempted to link Bush to the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. This is how the commercial is described by the Media Research Center:

Over black and white video of a pickup truck dragging a chain, the daughter of Texas dragging death victim James Byrd declares, "So when Gov. George W. Bush refused to sign hate crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again."

This was only the beginning. In subsequent weeks during the campaign Al Gore stated that Bush wanted to take Blacks back to a time when they only counted as 3/5 of a human being (I wish I had lexis-nexis so I could dig up the exact quote). After the Florida vote Jesse Jackson marched around accusing Bush's brother, the state's governor at the time, of engaging in a deliberate effort to suppress the black vote. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina the bungled federal response was explained by many as linked to the sizable Black population in New Orleans. Kanye West famously stated that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people."

Now comes this:

More From the Now They Tell Us Dept. [Mark Hemingway]

Another gem from Talking Points Memo:

Would America have elected Barack Obama if white Americans had not gotten accustomed to seeing (in succession) two African-American Secretaries of State? I don't think so. Before Bush, African-Americans were appointed to some good posts but not to our #1 foreign policy job. Two African Americans (one with a pretty odd first name) served as America's face to the world. That eased Obama's way. It is not Tiger Woods in whose footsteps Obama is walking — it's Rice and Powell.

Fact is, "W" never gave any evidence of holding racist attitudes.

Got that? Essentially, now that Bush is set to pass from the scene there is no need to continue the smears. These people should be deeply ashamed of themselves.