The Left Uses Any Excuse to Cry “Racist”

Prominent Republican and former governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour is feeling the heat from the country’s oversensitive liberals after using the term “tar babies” to refer to Obama’s policies. Barbour has since apologized for use of the term, insisting that he meant nothing racist0. Naturally, this mea culpa has not been enough to satisfy the PC police.

For these liberals, being offended is a way of life. For Barbour to merely point out the dictionary definition of the term (a difficult situation to get out of) only invigorates their anger. Because once a word has been used in any offensive context, it can never again be used in its original scope. This is apparently why we’ve seen words like “retarded,” “moron,” and “psycho” fall out of favor, even though all three are so useful when talking about liberals.

Barbour isn’t the first politician to fall afoul of the “tar baby” term. Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Doug Lamborn have all been mercilessly scorned for their respective uses of the phrase. None of the three meant it as a slur against black people, of course, but that’s of no consequence. When the left decides something is racist, no amount of logic, context, or rationality can reverse their declaration.

It has gotten to the point where you can safely dismiss any accusation of “racism” as utter nonsense and only be wrong about 10 percent of the time. Since politicians no longer swagger into office after a long history of leading the KKK, the left has been forced to get creative in their accusations. They’ve denoted a list of phrases deemed “racist code words” that Republicans supposedly use to wink at their bigoted constituency without getting in hot water. As such, seemingly-innocent phrases like “inner city,” “state’s rights,” and “illegal alien” have become secret messages meant to incite white supremacists.

Sometimes just apologizing for the use of one of these supposedly-racist phrases isn’t enough. Liberals often demand nothing less than resignation, as in the case of David Howard, a Washington D.C. mayoral staffer who used to word “niggardly” to describe a proposed budget in 1999. One of the mayor’s black colleagues, certain that he had been disrespected in some way, demanded that he be fired. Howard resigned temporarily.

Then there was the sad tale of Penn State student Eden Jacobowitz, who garnered national attention when he called a loud group of black sorority sisters “water buffalo.” He was to be charged with violating the college’s racial harassment policy until Penn State realized that even the country’s PC lunatics couldn’t stretch their protective wings that far.

Liberals, who have appointed themselves the nation’s guardians against all of the evil -isms, apparently don’t realize the harm they do to their own movement with such silly accusations. Real racism still exists, and there’s nothing wrong with calling it out. But when the race-baiters of the country use each and every excuse they can find to demonize speech, they trivialize their own cause. It’s a real sticky situation they’ve found themselves in.

You might even say…