Chocolate City

Like George Clinton and Parliament, I always thought Washington, DC was Chocolate City and the Vanilla Suburbs".

Apparently, I was wrong.

Does Ray Nagin know how to alienate people, or what? He starts off his Martin Luther King Day speech with a page straight out of Pat Robertson's book:

"Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin, who is black, said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Day.

"Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses."

See how neatly he combines a religious-right-sounding "God's will" with standard issue left-wing "Bush lied" rhetoric? Sure, he's probably still a bit steamed at the president about the poor initial response after Katrina (even though there's plenty of blame to go around from top to bottom), but the last time I checked, the soldiers helping to free Iraq were from many different countries, not just the U.S., and even the American soldiers over there aren't all from the hurricane-devastated areas.

And from there, he just moves on into what amounts to segregation talk:

"It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans - the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African American city."

Imagine the uproar--and rightly so--if the mayor of another city had come out after such a disaster (Giulani after 9/11 springs to mind, although the damage there was much more localized) and said "Let's rebuild this city in plain vanilla!" Anyone brain-dead enough to say something like that would be absolutely finished politically--the news media would see to that. They wouldn't cover it for a day, cover the apology, then that would be the end of it.

And what a backpedaling apology--see if you believe his rationalization. It's a fitting close to this post.

“How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about," he said.