The Plantation
Topic: Newsmax
A Jan. 17 NewsMax article quotes Republican Rep. Peter King denouncing as "cheap racial politics" and "beyond the pale" Sen. Hillary Clinton's statement that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives was run like a "plantation." WorldNetDaily's Les Kinsolving asked for White House reaction to the statement during a press briefing and if she was "up to" something, to which White House press secretary responded that Clinton's statement was "way out of line."

Like conservatives' feigned shock 2004 that any left-leaning person would dare to compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler despite a long history of conservatives comparing Democrats to Hitler, conservatives have also made regular use of the plantation metaphor to attack liberals. From the WND and NewsMax archives, from the past year alone:

-- And that's the problem, you see – both among America's "victims" and the leftist "victim plantation owners" – who have carefully cultivated each generation of poor people in order to reap their own power. Four generations of persistent failure hasn't taught either group anything at all. -- WND columnist Craige McMillian, Jan. 12

-- It is not hard to see why the poverty pimps and race-baiters still embrace the party that has historically oppressed blacks and kept them on one plantation or another. -- Nina May, WND commentary, Nov. 4

-- So you have a bunch of white liberals in a newsroom, in an editorial board, typical people that run the white plantation telling blacks how they have to think, telling blacks how they have to act. -- Rush Limbaugh, WND article, Nov. 3

-- Senator Reid has revealed the intolerance found on the political left for minorities who do not reside on their ideological plantation. -- Wendell Talley of the black conservative group Project 21, WND article, Nov. 1

Asking the Democratic Party plantation owners in the U.S. Senate to confirm a black woman who understands, supports and upholds the Constitution of the United States is asking too much. -- WND editor Joseph Farah, June 23

-- [Affirmative action is] a self-empowerment plan to keep minority votes on the new Democratic Party plantation by offering them special race privileges. -- Joseph Farah, April 28

-- Whereas Bush is selling his reform under the theme of an "ownership society," I would call the Democratic alternative the "plantation society." The "plantation society" is characterized by a wealthy class of owners who want to limit the choices, opportunities and freedom of working-class Americans. -- Star Parker, WND commentary, March 22. Parker is author of the 2003 book "Uncle Sam's Plantation," published by WND Books.

-- You have to keep them dependent on the Democrat Party. The more you take from the haves – who you think became haves by dishonest means (you know, by working for it) – the more you'll have to expand your bureaucracy and ladle out more goodies to the have-nots living on your liberal plantation. -- Michael Reagan, NewsMax commentary, Nov. 3

-- Panelist Mychal Massie, director of Project 21, a media outlet that supplies speakers around the country, challenged everyone to "believe we are all Americans - not a hyphenation." Massie said he hoped Blacks could break free of "imprisonment on an ideological plantation." -- NewsMax writer Dave Eberhart, Feb. 25

There's plenty more where these came from if we go back even farther into the archives. Like this choice bit of prose from July 2001 by NewsMax columnist John L. Perry:

Being black is difficult enough. Now there's the additional indignity of having to tote Bill Clinton, not exactly the lightest bale on the barge.
Even for a white Southerner, the spectacle of the scalawag disgracer-in-chief's installing himself in the big house of his latest political plantation, smack in the midst of black Harlem, is nauseatingly reminiscent of bad times not forgotten in the land of cotton.

From Clinton's spectacular top-floor veranda overlooking Central Park, where he may conveniently overlook blacks and others being routinely rousted, the Arkansas mas'r may gaze down on his less-affluent and -exalted subjects trying to get a life in the environs of West 125th Street.

[...]

The magisterial ensconcing of an impeached president in his expensive new digs in Harlem was not at all unlike the triumphal ceremony when the slave master would move into his edifice of oversight.

All the blacks on the plantation were expected to throng around, grateful faces smiling, to celebrate him on his grand day. They could not run away to register their disgust, no more than could the poor people of Harlem move on up to a better neighborhood now that theirs had been trashed.

So spare us your sanctimony, guys. You weren't offended until now.

UPDATE: Fixes date on John Perry commentary, more clearly marks WND and NewsMax cites.