Spike Lee on Hillary’s black supporters: “Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us”

Progress.

What do you think of Obama?
I’m riding my man Obama. I think he’s a visionary. Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, “Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to Soul Man. Michelle would have been like, ‘What’s wrong with this brother?’ ”

Does this mean you’re down on the Clintons?
The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles. Snipers? That’s not misspeaking; that’s some pure bulls***. I voted for Clinton twice, but that’s over with. These old black politicians say, “Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!” Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins—they have to understand this is a new day. People ain’t feelin’ that stuff. It’s like a tide, and the people who get in the way are just gonna get swept out into the ocean.

Why care what a moron with his own Truther-ish version of what happened during Katrina thinks? Two reasons. One, it’s the celebrity equivalent of those blackface photoshops the nutroots likes to toss at minority conservatives from time to time insofar as it’s merely an unusually grotesque example of a standard form of leftist identity-politics demagoguery. Obama lackey Jesse Jackson Jr. has been shoveling garbage like this at Hillary’s black superdelegates for months, a point not lost on Sean Wilentz at TNR but ignored by most of the media. A notable exception came last month from the AP:

One black supporter of Clinton, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, said he remains committed to her. “There’s nothing going on right now that would cause me to” change, he said…

He said Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois had recently asked him “if it comes down to the last day and you’re the only superdelegate? … Do you want to go down in history as the one to prevent a black from winning the White House?

Two, it’s a perfect illustration of Steyn’s point at the Corner yesterday about how easily the left’s provocateurs adopt the rhetoric of their oppressors to shame their opponents even on the left. The feminist calls Hillary a whore, the racial liberationist suggests Charlie Rangel’s some sort of house slave. Exit quotation: “There’s something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who’ve been on the receiving end of the left’s vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you’re all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs. The left’s Discoursometer is like one of those shower units where the slightest nudge turns it to scalding.” How slight? This slight.

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