Rice’s anti-Americanism

Diana West criticizes Condoleezza Rice’s constant slogan that we shouldn’t worry about the ultimate success of democracy in Iraq, since America itself had such terrible problems and supposedly took two hundred years to achieve real democracy. To my knowledge, West is the first mainstream commentator to draw attention to this highly objectionable, indeed, anti-American, line of argument coming from both Rice and President Bush.

“We should note that unlike in our Constitutional Convention, the Iraqis have not made a compromise as bad as the one that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man,” [Rice] said. Is it politically incorrect to find this statement offensive?

It is beyond offensive that the U.S. Secretary of State, instead of presenting America’s good side, gallivants around the world repeatedly reminding foreigners that blacks were slaves when the United States began, as though that were the most salient fact about America. Not only that, but she bypasses the Civil War with its 600,000 dead and acts as if America wasn’t a democracy until the Civil Rights movement. Like the post-Sixties liberal she is, Rice devalues all of America preceding the Sixties. In order to make the utopian experiment in Iraq look better, she deliberately make America look worse. Even the loathsome Albright was not as bad as this.

And think—“conservative” blogs tout Rice for president!

Bill Carpenter adds:

The “3/5 of a man” line has been around so long it is starting to stink. The issue was not “how much of a man” a slave was, but “how big a bonus” free white voters were to receive in their Congressional representation for living in states that permitted black slavery. The people that make this cheap shot apparently wish the slave states had had much bigger delegations. In that case, perhaps the Civil War would have been avoided by the sheer national preponderance of the slaveholding power, and we would still have slavery today.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 28, 2005 11:53 AM | Send