May 14, 2013
Source: Shutterstock
(Interestingly, similar critiques emerged at the invaluable black conservative site BookerRising, where answers to the online debate question “Is Charles Ramsey A Buffoon?” ranged from “yes” to “maybe.”)
Instead, my BS detector went off when Ramsey contradicted himself in a different interview, apparently unable to decide whether or not he”d always thought something fishy was going on at the Castro house.
That’s when, like the infallible Adam Carolla, I thought, “I want to investigate THIS guy now,” if only to find out why he wasn”t at work on a Monday afternoon.
But Carolla and I were on our own until the SmokingGun did just that. On Wednesday, the investigative site reported that Charles Ramsey had a “domestic violence” rap sheet stretching back to 1997.
Bizarrely, the same local news station that launched Ramsey into the celebrity stratosphere felt obligated to apologize after airing details from that SmokingGun report. The reason? Viewer complaints.
Cleveland’s WEWS-TV noted that:
While the story was factually sound, the timing of it and publication of such information was not in good taste, and we regret it….Ramsey is a hero for his actions, and we recognize that.
It’s like a version of the line repeated robotically by the brainwashed soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate about the story’s trumped-up hero:
“Charles Ramsey is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
I”ll grant that this story was a novel change from the mainstream media’s usual morbid wall-to-wall coverage of missing white girls. For the first time ever, those girls were kicked out of the spotlight by the black dude down the block.
Yet the worn-out expression “the soft bigotry of low expectations” isn”t adequate to the task of explaining what we witnessed last week: a nation so nakedly neurotic about race and righteousness, so unmanned and unmoored, that it hastily embraced a shady-looking African-American guy on TV because, for once, at least he wasn”t being tackled on COPS or questioned on The First 48.
America is Blanche DuBois running into a black man’s arms and muttering something about “the kindness of strangers” on her way to the asylum.
