The Patriot Post® · Progressives' Tubman Conundrum

By David L. Hunter ·
https://patriotpost.us/commentary/42137-progressives-tubman-conundrum-2016-04-25

It’s great political sport to watch progressives’ befuddled heads spin when faced with the puzzle of publicly supporting a black Republican. For a psychological analogy, imagine the climatic Jack Nicholson-Faye Dunaway scene in “Chinatown” (1974) as discordant elements of their addled minds:

Evelyn Mulwray: She’s my daughter.
[Gittes slaps Evelyn]
Jake Gittes: I said I want the truth!
Evelyn Mulwray: She’s my sister…
[slap]
Evelyn Mulwray: She’s my daughter…
[slap]
Evelyn Mulwray: My sister, my daughter.
[More slaps]
Jake Gittes: I said I want the truth!
Evelyn Mulwray: She’s my sister AND my daughter!

As female, black and gun-toting (obviously pro-Second Amendment), it’s a wonder Mr. Obama’s Treasury department (or Democrats’ humpbacked, propagandist creature, the biased MSM) would honor such a deserved person; an American icon, this diminutive lady, known then through the grapevine as “Moses.” (Even a broken clock is accidentally right twice a day. In any case, this most unusual and laudatory action is worth a calendar mark.) For context, recall that our first black president skipped the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s seminal Gettysburg Address. Indeed, as a bastion of the hard left, Mr. Obama almost never gets anything right.

Yet, in a glorious exception to his longstanding pattern of seeing the world through the divisive prism of party, race, class, or gender, the little “R” next to Lincoln’s name was apparently not an impediment to the historically unyielding Harriet Tubman. However, this president who slow-rolls every issue is still keeping her in the “back of the bus” until 2030 when the new $20 bill will make its long overdue debut. (Why on earth does it take our federal government 14 years to change the appearance of one paper denomination?)

Make no mistake that Democrats see Harriet Tubman as the heroic individual she is. They don’t appreciate her brave character or her unique contributions to society (her eight years as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad facilitated liberty, saved scores of innocents, and put herself at great personal risk to bounty hunters). However, their focus is literally skin-deep. To them, she’s nothing more than a symbol of affirmative action. They automatically applaud supplanting a U.S. president, Andrew Jackson (rightly or wrongly) — because they see him as a symbol of patriarchy and white privilege — for a minority is catnip these jaded people can’t resist. Society, for them, is nothing more than a giant, bureaucratic quota system — for everything. Even when they promote the right thing, it’s done for the wrong reasons.

In this same vein is today’s blind advocacy of front-runner Hillary Clinton. The fact that she’s a crooked presidential candidate with nonexistent accomplishments doesn’t matter. The support she receives is solely on the superficial basis of another checked box on a diversity questionnaire.


David L. Hunter is on Twitter and blogs at davidlhunter.blogspot.com. He is published in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Patriot Post, FrontPage Mag, and extensively in Canada Free Press and American Thinker.