Larry Klayman Blames Obama For Bundy And Sterling’s Racism

Donald Sterling, one of Larry Klayman's poster children for racial resentment (courtesy NBA Entertainment)
Donald Sterling, one of Larry Klayman’s poster children for racial resentment (courtesy NBA Entertainment)

If you visit WorldNetDaily, you come to expect the bizarre. But the latest column from Larry Klayman might have you exhausting your supply of brain bleach. He believes that when Cliven Bundy started “a-wondering” whether blacks were better off when they were slaves and when Donald Sterling snapped that he didn’t want black people coming to see a team that has 10 black players out of 12, they were merely giving voice to resentment whites have felt since Obama took office.

Klayman is not only a birther, but a card-carrying member of the “he’s a Mooslim” club. Need proof? Read here.? Nonethleless, he claims to have harbored hope that the election of a black president would give this country something to be proud of. However, Klayman claims that over the last five-plus years, Obama has given so much favor to people of color that “whites, and particularly rich ones, are now at the back of the bus.” He claims that Obama used his first term as a chance to “settle the score” with rich whites. Calling for higher taxes on the rich, for instance, amounted to an attempt to wring reparations out of whites for the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. In Klayman’s view, Obama has triggered a deep feeling of resentment among whites–and unless he starts acting like he is the president for all Americans, we can expect more Bundys and Sterlings in the future.

Apparently Klayman must have been watching a parallel version of the way our politics have played out since the summer of 2008. If Obama’s policies have generated so much resentment among whites, then how did he become the first Democrat since FDR to win a majority of the popular vote twice in a row? And how did he carry states like Vermont, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon and Wisconsin–all of which are 90 percent white or more? Plus, while Obama only won a minority of the white vote in both 2008 and 2012, you have to put an economy-size asterisk by that total. Even the most cursory analysis would show that John McCain and Mitt Romney’s totals among white voters were inflated by their performances in the South–many parts of which have turned so heavily Republican that they wouldn’t vote for a Democrat if he were black, white, or polka-dotted.

Moreover, one of Klayman’s examples of this supposed resentment is problematic at best. Sterling has been under fire for racist behavior since Obama was a little-known state senator from Illinois. According to a 2009 piece in ESPN The Magazine, one of the property managers at Sterling’s apartment complexes testified in a 2003 suit against Sterling that her former boss frequently blamed his black and Latino tenants for the odor there, and even went as far as to demand that one of them be evicted for demanding compensation after construction work flooded her out of her apartment. She also testified that Sterling’s employees were under orders to make life as onerous as possible for black tenants. If Klayman wants us to believe this racism can be pinned on Obama, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell him. And Klayman is not an entirely neutral observer on Bundy–he is one of the few prominent right-wingers who didn’t bail on Bundy’s cause after the rogue Nevada rancher revealed his racism for all to see, but is also offering legal assistance to Bundy.

Edited/Published by: SB


Darrell Lucus.jpg Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.

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