Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News is a reliable liberal on most issues and his go-arounds with Brit Hume on Sunday mornings make Hume's retirement all the more a loss. But Williams is hardly the reflexive liberal we've come to expect from the likes of NPR particularly on matters of race.
If his appearance in Janks Morton's illuminating DVD
What Black Men Think along with Shelby Steele and Alvin Poussiant was not enough to get the attention of the racial establishment his book,
Enough:
The Phony Leaders, Dead-end Movements, and Culture of Failure that are Undermining Black America--and what we can do about it., surely enraged the monolithic race-baiting professional black grievance criers. Mr. Williams is apparently unafraid to speak truth to black power.
Speaking out has it's price. It comes as somewhat of a shock to me that the senior political correspondent for NPR cannot get an interview with Senator Obama for instance. Hmmm. What's up with that?
Now comes Mr. Williams direct confrontation with Mr. Obama on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In polite society, of which Mr. Williams is a card-carrying member, this is how you call out essentially one of your own. The words may not seem strident or inflammatory but that makes them no less deadly serious.
Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Race and Other Issues - WSJ.com
On Glen Beck's radio show today Williams said that education, specifically the issue of education vouchers and charter schools, is the premiere civil-rights issue of our time. And he wasn't complacent about alluding to Senator Obama's subservience to the teacher's unions by overlooking the travesty that is inner city education affecting largely black children. On the anniversary of the Rev ML King's "I have a Dream" speech it is a lonely Juan Williams who cries out at the soft racism that condemns black children to a future holding little more than ignorance and poverty. The potentially first president of color stands silent. How can the candidacy that purports to bridge some of the final racial divides, that claims the mantle of the civil-rights movement as it's progenitor, that features a man most professionally noted for being a community organizer within that self-same community be willing to sweep this issue under the rug for the gain of support from the vast teachers union? Apparently another principle conveniently brushed aside in the pursuit of political ambition. Is it unreasonable to question the candidate on what other principles he might find convenient to forget in a Faustian bargain for power? Because the voters will have to--Obama HQ is not answering the phone calls from a certain NPR reporter.