Racist talk, 2008 version

Jay Cole, rightwing radio ranter and one of the Huck's good ole boy network

Jay Cole is kind of an Arkansas Rush Limbaugh, one of the many talking heads of Republican hate radio. (h/t Arkansas Times blog) Max Blumenthal describes Cole and his links with the Huck in The Real Mike Huckabee The Nation Online 01/11/08:

Of all the right-wing figures who have promoted Mike Huckabee's extraordinary political rise from a backwater church to the national pulpit of a presidential campaign - and there are many - perhaps none know the former Arkansas governor and current Republican presidential front-runner better than Jay Cole. A Baptist minister based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with a right-wing radio talk show of his own, Cole has been instrumental in inspiring Huckabee's rise over more than two decades. Indeed, when Huckabee was the governor of Arkansas, it was Cole who persuaded him to arrange the release from prison of a convicted rapist, Wayne Dumond, who had become a born-again evangelical in prison - the most controversial act of Huckabee's career, which still dogs him on the campaign trail.

At his Web site Save Our Nation, Cole shares the following story under "Current Articles" as of 01/14/08, Conveniently Forgotten Facts. It's bylined only, "This came in an email". I learned a long time ago (though I occasionally forget) that you can burn up an enormous amount of time actually researching the crap that come in rightwing chain letters. It's generally easier and faster to make stuff up than to actually research what happened. So I don't attach any truth-value to anything based on what this little diatribe says.

But it's a good example of the racism on which a large part of today's Republican Party feeds itself. The real point of the story is not any factual account, but the punch line, "Today the Black Panther party is Moslem ... back then they were Communists ... but they have always hated all non-blacks." From which the reader is presumably to understand: "Blacks evil. Want to kill whites. Commies, Muslims, blacks, all evil and scary." Of course, the message that Hillary Clinton supports these commieislamofascistonegroscarypeople is almost as important for the fine Christian white folks for whom it is meant.

Here's the text as presented by Cole (or at least by his Web site; I guess he can use the Ron Paul excuse and say that he has no idea who wrote the stuff on his Web site or who decided to put it there):

Back in 1969, a group of Black Panthers decided that a fellow Black Panther named Alex Rackley needed to die. Rackley was suspected of disloyalty. Rackley was first tied to a chair. Once safely immobilized, his friends tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him. When they got tired of torturing Rackley, Black Panther member, WARREN KIMBRO, took Rackley outside and put a bullet in his head. Rackley's body was later found floating in a river about 25 miles north of New Haven, Conn.

Perhaps at this point you're curious as to what happened to these Black Panthers. In 1977, that's only eight years later, only one of the killers was still in jail. The shooter, WARREN KIMBRO, managed to get a scholarship to Harvard, and became good friends with none other than Al Gore. He later became an assistant dean at an Eastern Connecticut State College.

Isn't that something? As a 1960's radical, you can pump a bullet into someone's head, and a few years later, in the same state, you can become an assistant college dean! Only in America! ERICA HUGGINS was the lady who served the Panthers by boiling the water for Mr. Rackley's torture. Some years later, Ms. Huggins was elected to a California School Board.

How in the world do you think these killers got off so easy? Maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers.

These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial. One of these people was none other than Bill Lan Lee. Mr. Lee, or Mr. Lan Lee, as the case may be, isn't a college dean. He isn't a member of a California School Board. He is now head of the US Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, appointed by none other than Bill Clinton.

OK, so who was the other Panther defender? Is this other notable Panther defender now a school board member? Is this other Panther apologist now an assistant college dean? No, neither! The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at the time. She is now known as The "smartest woman in the world." She is none other than the Democratic senator from the State of New York, our former First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And now, as Paul Harvey would say, you know "the rest of the story".

Today the Black Panther party is Moslem...back then they were Communists...but they have always hated all non-blacks.

Okay, old habits die hard, so I checked at TruthorFiction.com for the rumor. This one goes back to Clinton's 2000 Senate race, though the last paragraph about the commieislamofascistonegroscarypeople seems to be a later accretion. Clinton did actively participate in protests over the trial of Panther leader Bobby Seales in connection with this case. As the TruthorFiction.com entry shows, like much of what passes for fact on the right, pieces of factual material are mixed with horsepoop to create a more sinister effect.

The TruthorFiction.com entry doesn't include that last sentence. But the present-day New Black Panther Party is a small hate group that actually is racist and is not a direct successor organization to the Black Panthers of the 1960s and 1970s. See Snarling at the White Man, in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report Fall 2000, which reports, "Eschewing the health clinics and free breakfast programs of the original Panthers, the new group's leaders have seemed to focus almost exclusively on hate rhetoric about Jews and whites."

Tags: jay cole, mike huckabee, new black panther party, racism