Ed Driscoll
PJ Media
8/14/2013
Oprah Winfrey’s recent “incident” in a Swiss handbag shop, a story which is quickly falling apart — and sounds suspiciously like an earlier racist incident she reported during a European shopping spree nearly a decade ago…
…After this year’s incident and her previous retail challenges in 2005, we must ponder why someone so wealthy and successful keeps having such trouble from high-end European merchants? And why has Oprah’s staff been so consistently incompetent over the years that they can’t coordinate store hours during the precious time their boss has free during her overseas excursions, and pre-screen the best clerks to work with her, etc?
While we in America must come to grips with the notion that the exclusive stores of France and Switzerland have unconscious biases, perhaps regarding her latest incident, there might be another reason. As John Hinderaker of Power Line asks in a post titled “The Long, Hot Summer of 2013?”, rounding up several non-race race incidents, such as the George Zimmerman murder trial, and incidents involving current and former NFL players Riley Cooper and Hugh Douglas, a banana-throwing disgruntled baseball fan, the not-exactly infamous blue-on-blue Missouri rodeo clown, and now Oprah, Hinderaker responds:
What should we make of the fact that stories like these–some absurd, some not really about race at all–are being given so much attention in the press? I think the conventional wisdom, that self-apppointed civil rights leaders will seize on any purported manifestation of racism in order to stay relevant, no matter how minor or even non-existent such purported manifestations may be, is correct.
But I would go beyond that: I suspect that there is another reason why the press is so fixated on race these days. The left’s agenda is in tatters. Obamacare has crashed on takeoff, after five years of Democratic policies the economy is in the doldrums and we are nearly $17 trillion in debt, and the Obama administration’s foreign policy is is disarray. The Democratic Party, as represented by the press, desperately needs sideshows to 1) rally the party’s faithful, and 2) distract the rest of us from the failures of the liberal agenda. Thus, I don’t think it is a coincidence that liberals are doing their best to portray the summer of 2013 as more or less a replay of 1967. The silliness of the attempt is a measure of how out of ammo liberals are these days…
Read the whole thing at PJ Media.
Oprah on shopping racism: Clerk did me a favor
Oprah Winfrey insisted that she experienced what ‘people of black or brown color experience daily’, in an interview with a Swiss paper published today.
Update: Does Oprah Have a History of Making Disputed Racism Claims?
