Is Everything "Out Of Context" With The Left?

by guest blogger Andrew Roman

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CNN's Warren Ballentine

To misspeak is one thing. It’s fairly common among Homo sapiens who communicate through spoken language. However, to speak without substance or lucidity, devoid of forbearance of thought – and to be admired for it - is quite another.

It is astonishing to me (and it shouldn’t be) how often Democrats – almost always portrayed as the most astute, most intellectual members of the political gamut - have to “clarify” and “amend” the things they say.

Have you noticed this?

Somehow, so much of what they utter needs to be placed in "proper context" after the fact.

Perhaps it just appears that way because they are afforded far more column space and air time to explain away gaffes, blunders and unqualified stupidity than Republicans are. Or maybe they just say more dim-witted things. (We may be getting warmer). Indeed, a liberal may conclude that the brightest among us are also the most complex of notion, easily misunderstood by the common folk and therefore requiring more time to elucidate their ideas for the masses – in other words, too smart for the room - but it simply isn't so.

Arrogant, yes.

Elitist, often.

But nuanced? Complex? Labyrinthine?

Not on a bet.

Is it possible, for instance, that the venomous, anti-American invective that infamously poured from the poison tongue of Barack Obama's former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was taken "out of context" by the great unnuanced masses? Is there a chance that his repulsive, vitriolic bellowings against the United States from the pulpit were simply misunderstood by right-wing knee-jerkers looking to bring down a black man aiming for the White House?

CNN Analyst Warren Ballentine seems to think so.

During a recent "panel" discussion on the Shirley Sherrod issue, Ballentine said:

When this story first broke, on my show, I came out publicly and said I'm not going to do anything because this is the same thing they did to Jeremiah Wright. They played a clip without the whole context.

It's interesting to note that Ballantine - the cautious, reflective, contextual straight-shooter that he is - while unwilling to entertain the possibility that Jeremiah Wright might be a racist or a hater of his country (with a mountain of evidence to support that assertion) went on to condemn the Tea Party movement as an ideology steeped in racism, even though there isn't a single stitch of truth to back it up.

If I may be so bold to ask (realizing that I am allowing my inner white hood and sheet to bubble to the surface): How exactly was the racist Wright taken out of context?

What text from his oratory masterworks have we not been apprised of that would put everything he said - including his infamously renowned "Goddamn America" commentary - into its proper perspective once and for all?

What the hell is wrong with us?

And while Shirley Sherrod's now infamous comments may have been taken out of context initially, a quick listen to the rest of her speech reveals a women who is far from the angelic, color-blind, character-over-color soul she is being portrayed as by a disgustingly over-apologetic lame stream media. She, just like most modern leftists, is a relic - a race-obsessed smear merchant with no other way to explain opposition to Barack Obama other than white racism.

(I'm waiting for someone to tell me that I have taken the rest of her speech "out of context.")

Humanity's most prolific murderer
- and a philosopher to boot

Remember Anita Dunn, former White House Communications Director? She was the one who not only waged open warfare against the privately owned, free-market media outlet, Fox News Channel (“It’s opinion journalism masquerading as news.”) but admittedly got her intellectual tingles from one of her two favorite philosophers – the man responsible for the most murders in all of human history – Mao Zedong. She said so in front a graduating high school class. The man who murdered, by conservative estimates, 70 million human beings, is one of her two political philospohical heroes.

Of course, Dunn, after the fact, had to clarify what she meant – for the shallow of mind and unnuanced – and put everything in its "proper context," blaming a deceased Republican for her misunderstood comments.

She explained:

The use of the phrase 'favorite political philosophers' was intended as irony. The Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater from something I read in the late 1980s, so I hope I don't get my progressive friends mad at me.

Yeah, okay.

HBO's Bill Maher, host of the program Real Time, summed up leftist thinking in a column he penned just a month before President Obama's ascension to the Office of President-Elect suitably titled, “Republicans, Stop Calling Obama Elitist - Because the real reason you don’t like him is that he’s smarter than you.”

In one of the most telling sentences ever written highlighting liberal elitism, Maher wrote:

Barack Obama can’t help it if he’s a magna-cum-laude Harvard grad and you’re a Wal-Mart shopper who resurfaces driveways with your brother-in-law. Americans are so narcissistic that our candidates have to be just like us. That’s why George Bush is president."

Nice.

Remember when Labor Secretary Robert Reich spoke hypothetically, saying that someone running for President of the United States - if he or she did not actually care about being elected and spoke the truth about what health care reform was really all about - would be able to say, "If you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."

Admidst a firestorm of reaction (from conservatives only), Reich later explained that he was "taken out of context," saying, "The whole point of the mock exercise was to show that presidential candidates can't state what everyone knows to be the truth because they'll be taken apart by the Right or the Left."

Recall when Senator John Kerry notoriously asserted that young people in America who don't study or get an education "get stuck in Iraq" – one of my all-time favorite “misunderstandings.” According to the leftocracy, Republicans “got it all wrong” when attempting to interpret that one – including MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who cracked open his Democrat/English dictionary to offer the most salient clarification of all. He explained that Kerry was actually referring to President Bush’s intelligence, and was attacking Bush’s “team” as being dense for not understanding that. Said Olbermann, "Kerry called them stupid, and they were too stupid to know he called them stupid."

Recall then-Senator Barack Obama at the now famous Saddleback Forum saying that he couldn’t appropriately comment on when human life began because it was “above his pay grade.” He eventually had to clarify his statement by explaining, “All I meant to communicate was that I don't presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.”

(It’s interesting to note that he apparently felt he knew enough to be able to decide that the killing of that “unknown” quantity was perfectly reasonable).

When candidate Obama, talking about small-town Americans, said, “It's not surprising … they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them … as a way to explain their frustrations,” he eventually clarified what he really meant by saying, “So I said … when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people … vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community.”

(That is still one of the most condescending things ever uttered by Chicago's most famous metrosexual).

Remember ... Democrats, besides being the brightest among us, also mean well - unlike Republicans, whose motives are almost always sinister. Libs are the upholders of true compassion, and care far more about human beings than Republicans do.

They’ll tell you so – my favorite example of which comes from former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, who famously said on Meet The Press once that “Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.”

That really says it all.

...although I've probably taken it out of context.

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