As we all know, FOX News was the first channel to begin floating various slurs against the Senator from Illinois.
The FOX & Friends crew made their by now infamous attempt to portray Obama as a closet terrorist because he attended a Muslim school in Indonesia as a child.
When the "madrassah" controversy didn't work, they tried the "his-middle-name-is-Hussein" and "he-doesn't-wear-a-flag-pin" approaches. After that fizzled, FOX News and the right wing noise machine dipped into the lexicon of racist code words and began painting Obama as all talk and no action, which is "code" for the stereotype of the jive-talking black man, a shallow con artist who is charming but shiftless.
That didn't seem to work either, so the smear merchants went into pure swiftboat mode, and tried to convince American voters that Sen. Obama is guilty by association. The malevolent maestro of slime, Sean Hannity, fulminated against Obama's minister, snarled like a mad dog about Mrs. Obama and drooled over the fact that Sen. Obama - gasp! - served on a charitable foundation with former Weather Underground member William Ayers.
None of these attacks seemed to stick either, so now FOX is trying a new tack.
On April 18th during a preview showing of Hannity's America, Karl Rove floated his latest talking point. He spoke with host Sean Hannity (who's been buddy-buddy with the likes of racist Hall Turner) and repeatedly used the word "arrogant" to conjure up yet another noxious stereotype that lingers just below the surface in the minds of some older Americans who are uncomfortable with African-American success.
By using the word "arrogant" to describe Obama, Rove deliberately pandered to those who remember when the n-word was used in children's play songs and who, to this day, carry the memories of the ofttimes turbulent struggle by African-Americans to carve out a place at the American economic table.
Most Americans supported the civil rights movement, but a small percentage of our citizenry retreated into anger and fear. As middle class jobs left the small towns and competition for the few remaining jobs increased, some people lashed out at African-Americans, seeing them as competitors who were getting special privileges. That simmering anger often expressed itself in racially offensive words meant to belittle and invalidate any black person who dared to push for a better life or stand up and challenge the status quo.
The state of Pennsylvania has the second largest concentration of older Americans in the United States. Karl Rove is well aware of this fact, so he knows precisely what he is doing by using the word "arrogant" to describe an educated, self-assured African-American man like Barack Obama, a man who seems to take everything in stride with humor and good grace.
Let's cut to the chase.
Rove knows that Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee and he is desperate to redefine Obama's assured self-confidence as "arrogance" in a benighted hope that older voters will translate the word into a less politically correct phrase.
In the video below, in a slimy bit of "framing" Karl Rove is basically saying that Sen. Barack Obama is nothing more than an "uppity n****r" who doesn't know his proper place in the white man's world.
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