NewsMax.com: Top House Dem Says Dean Should Apologize

At issue: Howard Dean, the new Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was speaking to a Democratic black activist audience. There he said,

Do you really think that Republicans could get this many blacks together in the same room? [Laughter] Only if they had the hotel staff in here!

The first inference that most people drew from that remark is that Howard Dean seems to think that hotel staffs are predominantly black. That is not strictly true, as any frequent traveler can check out. But more to the point, people thought the offensive thing that Dean was saying was that blacks are good for little else other than being hotel bellhops and chambermaids and so on, unless they join the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, that's not what Dean said or meant to say. What he was actually saying is that Republicans don't have any blacks of any consequence in their ranks. That also is false. And to those who ask why blacks don't seem to be run as Republicans very often, that might be because few blacks, until now, have been willing to espouse conservative ideas. That is now changing, which is something that the Democrats don't want to admit.

I also must chide NewsMax.com for taking the remarks of Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) out of context. Yes, he said that if Howard Dean has offended anyone, he should apologize, and that this would not be the first time that Howard Dean has expressed himself in a less-than-artful way. But this was actually Rangel's tortured way to finesse a relentless line of questioning from Sean Hannity, delivered in that inimitable Hannity style. I listened to that interview yesterday, and I heard no willingness by Charles Rangel to condemn Gov. Dean in a forthright manner.

Indeed, Charles Rangel has problems of his own with expression. When Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) snubbed him by refusing to intervene in the deportation of Amadou DiMallo's mother, Rangel said of Hillary that she married a "redneck" in order to advance politically, and when the chips were down, was not willing to help out in a way that Rangel thought she should. That word &quor;redneck," by the way, is not a racist statement, and nor did I take it as such. Rather, I took it for the typical throw-away insult against the residents of "flyover country" who delivered all their States' electoral votes to Bush. (And as for Hillary's action or inaction: I have never found her to be a sincere person, but I sighed with relief when I heard that she did not exert her Senatorial prestige in order to halt those deportation proceedings. Amadou DiMallo's mother is better gone from the country. But that's another topic.)

More to the point--in the same interview in which Charles Rangel made that tortured non-condemnation condemnation just to get Sean Hannity off his back, he made matters worse: he said that when he crashed the gate, as it were, at the Republican National Convention in New York, he was the only black present, and people would come up to him mistaking him for Al Sharpton, Don King (as if anyone could possibly mistake either man for the other!), and so on. That would be funny were it not so sad--as Sean Hannity took pains to point out. In fact, the Republican Party has had the best results in years in black recruitment--as blacks, at least individually, now begin to realize that their Democratic "patrons" have been taking them to the cleaners for decades, and binding them in an even worse condition of servitude than slavery ever was.

Howard Dean's atrocious comment is in fact a case in point: "Don't listen to those nasty Republicans! They never talk to a black man unless he's the bell captain at the hotel! Keep voting for us, and we'll take care of you [cackle, cackle]." The insult, then, is to the intelligence of blacks everywhere.

Which brings me to my own messages to blacks of every stripe: You're smarter than this. The Democratic Party offers you soup-line tickets; we offer you a good shot at being able to stock your own kitchen. The Democratic Party builds a prison, calls it a "housing project," and--adding insult to injury--expects you to pay rent on your cell. The Republicans offer you a shot at owning your own house.

What kind of society do we want to be? A society of rent-payers? Or a society of owners? That will continue to be your choice in elections to come.