The unconscious racism of a San Francisco liberal newspaper reporter

Last week, I did a post about the news stories that followed in the wake of the conservative Groupa-Palooza gathering the heart of liberal Marin County.  I focused especially on one San Francisco Chronicle reporter who was shocked by a shirt one of the attendees was wearing:

Regarding that last, let me add a few words about the SF Chronicle’s coverage. First,the Chron said the Tea Partiers are “ultra-conservative.”  I find that an interesting characterization because it’s meaningless.  To Progressives and liberals and Democrats and whatever else they’re calling themselves nowadays, there is no such thing as a “conservative.”  Or rather, a conservative is someone who says “I’m a Republican, but I agree entirely with the Democrats.”  All true conservatives, meaning people who believe in small government and American exceptionalism are tarred by the “ultra-conservative” brush.

Second of all, regarding the MSM’s inevitable efforts to tar the Tea Partiers as racist, get a load of this peculiar paragraph:

Bay Area Patriots describes itself as nonpartisan. But most of the visible campaign activity on Sunday was on behalf of Republicans. There were also a few Libertarian and American Independent candidates – one of whom, Jerry Leidecker, an American Independent running for Congress, wore a shirt showing President Obama with what appeared to be watermelon juice on his lips.

Asked about the apparent racial reference, Leidecker turned around to show a caricature of former President George W. Bush on the back of the shirt, labeled, “Fascist.”

I’ll give the reporter a smidgen of credit for allowing Leidecker to show both sides of his t-shirt, but I have one question for you: What does watermelon juice look like? Unless the reporter added that watermelon seeds were dribbling down along with the painted juice on Obama’s painted lips (which he didn’t say), how do you distinguish painted watermelon juice from any other type of liquid?  To a hammer, everything is a nail; and to a liberal, any attack on Obama is racist.

I’m now in a position to give you more information about that suspect shirt with the watermelon-bedecked Obama, cause there are some great photographs, here.  He even took photos of Jerry Leidecker’s shirt.  You might recognize the image of Barack Obama on that shirt:

Yup — it’s the infamous Barack Obama as the Joker image, the one that every even marginally cognizant American knew about.   Yet here is a newspaper reporter who looks at that picture, a picture that riffs on a Hollywood pop culture image of a guy smeared with lipstick, and he pronounces that it’s a picture of Obama “with what appeared to be watermelon juice on his lips.”

I’m try to come up with a suitably scathing statement about a reporter who is so miserably informed about the world around him, and so biased, but I can’t.  I’m just beyond words.  Maybe that ignorance itself shouldn’t surprise me so much, though.  It turns out that vast numbers of reporters are miserably uninformed about American iconography.  And yet we trust these people to filter our complex world and given honest, comprehensible information about what they know.