McClatchey=Race Baiting

For those of you not familiar with Jack Cashill, you should get acquainted. Mr Cashill is an investigative journalist who knows how to dig and analyze facts. He produced a video some years ago called Mega-Fix. It was an analysis of the 1996 campaign to re-elect Clinton and how Flight 800 played a part in that campaign.

Mr Cashill has reviewed alll the available video from the anti-healthcare rally in March and using a watch, common sense and empirical data, lays out what actually happened and why.

While you are reading this and being taken back in time to a period of our history no one should be proud of, remember that the people who were standing against the Civil Rights movement were mostly DEMOCRATS.

A Closer Look at the Capitol Steps Conspiracy
(N-Word March a Set up from the Beginning!!)

William Douglas, an African-American reporter for the liberal McClatchy Newspapers, seems to have broken the story at 4:51 PM on Saturday, March 20, just hours after the alleged incident took place. Douglas did so with the seriously inflammatory headline, "Tea party protesters scream 'nigger' at black congressman."

At 7:21 PM that same evening, Douglas upped the ante with a headline that moved from inflammatory to incendiary: "Tea party protesters call Georgia's John Lewis 'nigger.'"

As Douglas reminds his audience in the lead of the second posting, "civil rights icon" Lewis, now a Georgia congressman, "was nearly beaten to death during an Alabama march in the 1960s." The focus on Lewis encouraged the Washington Post's Colby King to opine a few days later that "[t]he angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956."

King's take perfectly mirrored the Democratic talking points. If the immediate strategy was to discredit the Tea party movement as racist and split the movement's base from the Republican Party, then it was working splendidly.

By Sunday morning, March 21, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was publicly denouncing the actions on the Capitol steps as "reprehensible." What Boehner did not know at the time is that he had been himself victimized in one of the most appallingly successful media scams in recent years.

If it were not for those damn ubiquitous video cameras, House Democrats and their media allies would have gotten away with it entirely. Instead, they must content themselves with a victory only among those who rely for the news on an increasingly myopic major media.

To discover what did happen, I have reviewed video from at least four different sources, talked to several eyewitnesses, and analyzed the early media reports from the scene.

Bottom line: the Douglas story would seem to meet the standards for libel. It is provably false, preposterously reckless, quite possibly malicious, and has caused real damage to publicly identified Tea Party leaders.

Here is what happened. Rather than use the tunnel from the Cannon Office Building to the Capitol, a contingent from the Black Caucus chose to walk through a crowd of protesters. In none of the videos shot that day, including those by the members of the Caucus themselves, has anyone identified a single audible racial slur.

What the videos show are protesters booing the black congressmen as lustily as they did their white counterparts. The one thing they do scream is the racially neutral "Kill the bill." The caucus members pass without incident until they reach the Capitol steps. There, an inattentive Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), flanked by a police officer, walks right in front of a man who has been screaming "kill the bill" through cupped hands for at least the last ten seconds.

Cleaver appears to get caught in the vocal spray. Once the videos emerged, Cleaver would tell the Washington Post that the man "allowed saliva to hit my face." In the immediate aftermath of the incident, however, a visibly angry Cleaver -- he poked his finger in the man's face after being sprayed -- spread a much darker story.

As Douglas reported in his 4:21 posting, Cleaver's office claimed in a statement "that [Cleaver] had also been spat upon and that Capitol Police had arrested his assailant." The Cleaver statement continued, "The man who spat on the congressman was arrested, but the congressman has chosen not to press charges."

Yael T. Abouhalkah, the editorial page columnist in Cleaver's hometown Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, captured the party line nicely with the claim that "some Tea Party supporter spat on Cleaver Saturday on Capitol Hill because the U.S. congressman is black." The video evidence belies all this nonsense.

About a minute after the incident, Cleaver returns to the scene of the crime with a Capitol Police officer. The "assailant" is still standing there shouting, unaware that he has committed anything like a crime. Heck, until a year or so ago, he had been led to believe that dissent was patriotic, not racist. More embarrassingly, Cleaver fails to recognize the man even though he is standing right in front of him, and the man is making no effort to hide. There is no arrest, no detention as Cleaver's office would later claim, no noble decision to not press charges.

Read the rest at American Thinker.