It’s kind of hard to take these sorts of comments seriously, but since we are committed to taking on racial lunacy wherever it appears, here goes: conservative commentator, actor and economist Ben Stein went on Fox News on Sunday and called President Obama “the most racist president there ever has been in America.”
Yes, Stein said that. A man who lives in a country where experts estimate that at least 12 U.S. presidents owned slaves—eight of them while they were in the office.
A man who was alive during the tenure of President Richard Nixon, who was captured on his infamous White House tapes calling Black people “little Negro bastards” who “live like a bunch of dogs.”
From where does Stein, who has been a longtime nasty critic of Obama, get his intel on Obama’s racism? He says it’s because the president “is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans.”
Stein told Fox that he thinks the White House is using race to get African American votes by attempting to cast Republicans as anti-black.
“I watch with fascination — with incredible fascination — all the stories about how the Democratic politicians,” he continued, “especially Hillary [Clinton], are trying to whip up the African-American vote and say, ‘Oh, the Republicans have policies against black people in terms of the economy.’ But there are no such policies.”
That’s his evidence—that Obama and the Democrats have somehow forcefed to African-Americans the idea that Republican policies are anti-Black. Apparently he thinks this is information the African-American community wouldn’t be able to determine for itself.
There are so many glaring instances of racism among U.S. presidents, Stein’s comments are laughable. Even figures who loomed large in bringing about racial progress in the U.S. like President Lyndon Johnson were renowned racists. Yes, Johnson helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 while still in Congress, but guess what he called it when talking with his Southern colleagues? “The nigger bill.”
And here’s the whole quote from President Nixon, recorded 43 years ago:
“We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family—let people like [New York Sen.] Pat Moynihan … believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work—throw ’em off the rolls. That’s the key … I have the greatest affection for [blacks], but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”
Um, enough said.
