Academic

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Charlie Rangel Is Toast. ?There will be resistance to Rangel?s departure, pri?

By Glenn Reynolds

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Charlie Rangel Is Toast. “There will be resistance to Rangel?s departure, primarily from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, for whom Rangel is, for all his flaws, a revered elder statesman. But Rangel is now indefensible, and not merely because Pelosi wants to show him the door: His is a style, a method, a politics from an age when it was simply not done to ask uncomfortable questions of a black politician, lest that politician (and his supporters) retort that the questioning was racist. That protective smokescreen of ‘racism’ was good to men like Rangel, allowing them to go about their merry ways blithely, and untroubled. It is harder to strike pouting, Manichaean postures now, when a black man holds the highest office in the land. There can be no cheap and easy shaming of critics, no slick refuge in a narrative of racial oppression.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on July 24, 2010 (boomark / email).