Guess who Obama’s Times blames for “injecting race”

Excerpts in italics from an Aug. 1 article (“McCain Camp Says Obama Is Playing ‘Race Card’” ) in Sen. Obama’s New York Times, with my comments in plain.

Senator John McCain’s campaign accused Senator Barack Obama on Thursday of playing “the race card,” citing his remarks that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

The exchange injected racial politics front and center into the general election campaign for the first time, after it became a subtext in the primary between Mr. Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. (all emphasis added)

The claim that this is “the first time” “racial politics” have been “injected” “into the general election campaign” is, as the Times knows, absolutely false.

Who doesn't recall Rev. Wright’s racist remarks at the National Press Club? Has anyone forgotten Sen. Obama injected race into his recent speech in Jacksonville? And who can forget Rev. Jackson, while waiting to appear on Fox News, using the N-word when criticizing Sen. Obama?

It came as the McCain campaign was intensifying its attacks, trying to throw its Democratic opponent off course before the conventions. …

The purpose of the sentence above is to begin casting the McCain campaign as the people who began the exchange.

In fact, the McCain campaign was responding to Obama's raising the race issue with his now famous claim that he's being attacked because “ he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.”

Obama hasn’t said who, besides himself, has been making the dollar bill references. Maybe he heard them during his recent grand European tour.

Later in the story Obama’s Times leaves its faithful readers in no doubt as to who it wants them to believe "started things" and who “the bad guys are.”

With his rejoinder about playing “the race card,” [McCain campaign manager] Davis effectively assured that race would once again become an unavoidable issue as voters face an election in which, for the first time, one of the major parties’ nominees is African-American.

And with its criticism, the McCain campaign was ensuring that Mr. Obama’s race — he is the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas — would again be a factor in coverage of the presidential race. On Thursday, it took the spotlight from Mr. Obama when he had sought to attack Mr. McCain on energy issues.

And so goes another day of “news reporting" at Obama’s Times.

The entire article’s here.