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Saturday, February 13, 2010

Saturday Night Card Game (Prof. Charles Ogletree)

This is the latest in the Saturday Night Card Game series on the use of the race card for political gain:

Charles Ogletree is a Professor at Harvard Law School. Ogletree who is black, has decided that to call Barack Obama "professor" has racist connotations:

Speaking to Tea Party activists in Nashville last week, Sarah Palin did her part to keep the “professor” dig in circulation.

"They know we're at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern,” the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee told a frenzied crowd....

Ogletree, founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says he sees the “professor” label as a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race. Calling Obama “the professor” walks dangerously close to labeling him “uppity,” a term with racial overtones that has surfaced in the political arena before, Ogletree said....

“The idea is that he’s not one of us,” Ogletree says of the professor label. “He has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists -- those were buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as an African American who was out of place.”

What rubbish. Obama is out of touch, is elitist, and is professorial in his lecturing style of dealing with critics and governing. The facts are the facts.

Last April I pointed out that Obama was too professorial in his willingness to test dangerously naive theories of governance, Welcome To The Real World, Professor Obama.

I also have leveled that criticism even more broadly against the large number of (mostly white) law professors who have joined the Obama administration, Should Law Professors Really Be Running The Government?:

The beauty of teaching, particularly in a law school, is that you get to suppose and propose all types of innovative theories as to how to make the world better, without the burden of having your theories tested in the real world. That doesn't mean your theories are ignored or wrong, it's just that there is a real world person (lawyer, judge, client, juror, etc.) who acts as a filter to translate your theories into practice.

The Obama administration increasingly is being run by law professors. The law-professor-in-chief is Obama, who used to teach part time at the University of Chicago Law School.... The problem is, in the Obama administration there does not appear to be a filter since the theorists are the ones making the decisions....

Innovative legal theory in a law school setting is a thing to be praised; innovative legal theory in an administration is dangerous to the welfare of the nation. While the various Obama law professor appointees all may be good people, are they really the good people we want making decisions on national security?

My criticisms of Obama for being too professorial had nothing to do with race. And neither did Ogletree's use of the race card, which was all about politics.

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Saturday Night Card Game

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11 comments:

  1. Question: Did President Obama teach law students (JD) or undergrads? Someone told me it was undergrads, but they wouldn't be at the law school, would they?

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  2. I'm boggled by how hard some work to find insult and offense.

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  3. I remember back when Obama spoke at Georgetown U. (remember? he had the Jesus' name background covered up, causing a stir), and the MSM glowingly lauded his speech as "professorial". From the Washington Times (Julia Duin) back in April:

    "Students 'were dying to get into the hall,' [Rev. Reese] added.'The audience wanted to cheer and cheer this very professorial address. He played Professor Obama. He's a damn good professor but not even he could make economics a barnraiser.'"

    Being a "professor": wasn't racist then - isn't racist now.

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  4. Serious question if anyone knows the answer: When and where did the notion come into being that to portray an adversary as "not one of us" (however defined) represents some kind of intolerable rhetorical offense?

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  5. To Conrad - it sounds like it is right out of Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." It is along the lines of "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Rule 13, I believe.

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  6. Ogletree sees racists under his bed and in his closet, which is amusing given how successful he has been in the USA. But, of course, much of that success has been due to his shrieking like a little girl at every imagined moment of racism.

    It really has reached the point where you cannot even caricature these people better than they do it themselves.

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  7. Here is the deal. The race card is all they have left. It's their fallback. Nothing else seems to be working, so out it comes....

    "Professorial" is a compliment. Unless, of course, that's not what is required at the moment. It is Obama who does not comprehend the difference.

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  8. But Progressives like to experiment with policy to see which things work best to their liking.

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  9. That article refers to Mr. Ogletree as a "professor". Clearly, Inside Higher Ed is a racist publication that should be ignored out of hand, and maybe even investigated and shut down for hate speech.

    I also noticed that Harvard Law's page on Charles Ogletree describes Mr. Ogletree as "Jesse Climenko Professor of Law"... right there directly under his name. How racist can you get? Just what does Harvard Law teach, the proper way to burn crosses on people's lawns?

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  10. Sounds crazy I know, but it appears that a lot of really bad "ideas" are coming from yale and harvard. Maybe a 12' high wall could be constructed around both schools(joke) to keep the weirdos from escaping the asylum.

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  11. Ogletree, a long-time friend of Obama is a racist. Ogletree, a subsequent Obama advisor, was the faculty advisor to the Black Law Students Association when Obama attended Harvard Law School. Ogletree is a strong supporter of slavery reparations and is the co-chair of the Reparations Movement Coordinating Committee.

    Thomas L. Haskell, history professor at Rice University, stated, “For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual. But what does that mean to John Q. Public? I don’t know. John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially because this particular intellectual is a black."

    Read The Obama Timeline to learn the full story behind the thug-in-chief and the shady company he has kept since 1961.

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