A Depressing Evening

A gray seagull on a gray day. Does it get more depressing than that? Image credit: Cujo359

For a while this evening, checking in at various political blogs was a pretty depressing endeavor. Some folks just don't know when to shut up and think, as Eli notes:

What the hell is wrong with these people??? How can anyone honestly believe that the world is just handed to minorities or women? Any preferential treatment at all (i.e., affirmative action) is far outweighed by the prejudices and disadvantages that it’s supposed to (ineffectually) counter. Can you really look me in the eye and tell me that if you were an unborn spirit floating in the void, and you wanted to be President Of The United States, or attain some other prestigious (okay, formerly prestigious) position, that your first choice would be to be born as a black man, or a woman who gets very publicly cheated on?

Black Privilege

You'd think that having a black person and a woman as the two leading candidates of one party would be a cause for optimism, and yet the reactions I'm seeing to it on the Democrats' part is positively depressing. Will a day go by without someone accusing someone of racism or sexism? Not bloody likely, it appears.

I understand Geraldine Ferraro's frustration. I don't understand why she said what she did, because she should have known better. Clearly, Obama has something going for him besides being black. He's shown himself to be good at politics. If he wasn't, he would not be a front runner. He's outlasted some accomplished opponents to get where he is. That's not all due to charm or favoritism from the news.

In fact, given the number of times folks in the news business have remarked on Obama's middle name and his supposed Muslim education, I'd say that he hasn't had it all his own way with the press, either.

I wrote about this back in January, when people were accusing John Edwards of being a racist and a sexist for no good reason. He could be both, of course, because he's a white man. He had an advisor named Mudcat and a supporter named Cooter. What more reason did anyone really need? I wish people would take a breath and think for a second, but with many folks, it's not happening. It's ironic that some of the same folks who were doing the accusing then wonder where all this stuff is coming from now.