Race card; really?

By Jim Killebrew

[January 22, 2014]  How many times will the president play the "race" card? When he sat for an interview with the New Yorker magazine, the president looked at his falling poll numbers tanking his job approval and decided the only thing that people disliked him for was his race. He said, "There's no doubt that there's some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea of a black president."

Really? Did he not remember he has been elected president twice? He has reminded the American people of that fact many times. How did that happen if people don't like him because they didn't "like the idea of a black president"?

The president likes to use the excuse he was not informed, or didn't know about something members of his administration had done, or that nobody told him about something that morphed into another scandal. Is this another of those incidents where his close advisers just failed to tell him that using the race card for his failed policies might fall on deaf ears?

When millions have lost their insurance, placing their health care in jeopardy, or have lost the physician they have trusted over the years, was their first reaction to blame the president because he is black? Perhaps a few, but they are the ones who failed their math classes in school. When you look at the claims of the signature insurance law the president enacted exclusively through the Democrat Party, where 30 million more people would be added to the insurance program, thousands of doctors would eventually be out of the health care practice, the math just doesn't add up. When those who passed the law hadn't even read the bill and were urging passage so they could read it and "find out what was in it," it is the troublesome law, not that the president is black.

His approval poll numbers are down because he has failed to take responsibility for the American citizens who were killed in a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. They are down because no one has been brought to justice; no one has been fired, and even the secretary of state retorted, "What difference now does it make?"

His close advisers and Cabinet members have failed him by keeping things from him or lying to him. Why would his closest advisers allow him to stand repeatedly in front of millions of American citizens and repeat a story of a video demonstration as the cause of the murder of the ambassador and three other American citizens? Why would his advisers allow him to go out in front of millions of Americans and tell repeated lies about their being able to keep their policies, keep their doctors and pay less for their policies?

The very fact of his trying to convince Americans at this stage in his second term, after all the scandals and mishaps, that his fall from grace has been caused because he is black, simply authenticates the illegitimacy of the further use of the race card on which to blame all his troubles. Shame on the close advisers for letting him blunder into such a morass of political quicksand. It is not befitting the dignity of the president of the United States. It is insulting to the intelligence of "we the people" of the United States.

[By JIM KILLEBREW]