Did Tea-Party Smear Incite KC Riot?

If there was any one individual at the center of the smear of the tea-party protest on March 20 outside the Capitol, it was Kansas City Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

In the original McClatchy report posted 90 minutes after the incident, “Tea Party Protesters Scream ‘Nigger’ at Congressman,” it was Cleaver who uniquely heard the slur and Cleaver who was uniquely spat upon. And so “Spittlegate” was born.

McClatchy’s Kansas City Star ran with the McClatchy story and spread the poison. The following day its normally sober editorial page columnist ratcheted up the already inflammatory reporting by insisting that “some tea-party supporter spat on Cleaver Saturday on Capitol Hill because the U.S. congressman is black.”

Not surprisingly, the message metastasized throughout Kansas City’s black media, unchecked and unchallenged. {snip}

{snip}On successive weekends since the Capitol Hill protest, mobs of black youths have been descending on Kansas City’s famed Country Club Plaza, among the most attractive urban shopping and dining venues in the country.

This past Saturday, even the Kansas City Star had to take notice when, according to a Plaza spokesman, some 900 youths roamed the Plaza streets, “destroying property, pushing people as they walked down the sidewalk and spitting on people.”

Spitting on people? The Star does not mention whether the people were spit on because they were white or beaten because they were white or robbed because they were white. In fact, in a 2,000-word summary article, the Star does not mention race in any which way at all.

The only way that a visitor from another planet might infer a racial angle from the article was the one-word reference to the “NAACP,” which was among the organizations consulted as to how “to find the best solution.”

In other words, race is not an issue when nearly a thousand young African-Americans pillage a largely white civic showcase, but race is the dominant theme when at best one out of a thousand non-violent citizens utters a racial slur in a protest that had absolutely nothing to do with race.

Is this what Obama’s post-racial America was supposed to look like? {snip}

(snip) The police, of course, are hamstrung. Here, as everywhere in urban America, the Democrats and the local media have been quick to turn every aggrieved perp into a Scottsboro Boy.

Individual police officers have caught on. Last Saturday, even the most dedicated of them knew what they were looking at was 900 potential lawsuits–if not potential suspensions, terminations, or even imprisonments for making an ambiguous move in front of 900 cell-phone cameras in a racially charged environment.

And while Kansas City burns, Cleaver fiddles. Ironically, on April 10, the day of the Plaza riot, the Star ran a curious op-ed by Cleaver in which he called for more “civility” and “decorum” in political debate.

{snip}