Nagin says God wants a Chocolate New Orleans

I had a chocolate New Orleans once. It was kind of gritty and hollow. Not like the solid chocolate Florida.

At least it was in a nice gold wrapping, though.

he didn't rule out white chocolate, although i personally like the darker kind.

Nothing Nagin does should surprise anyone after all the scaremongering racist allegations he made...10,000 dead in New Orleans! ...wrong. Less than 1,000 in Louisiana.

Nor was race a factor, since statistics now show that whites died at a higher rate than blacks.

Of course, you won't see him mentioning that little factoid.

Now he's blaming it all on God. LOL.

I do notice alot less outrage towards Nagin's comments than Pat Robertson's comments about Sharon or Katrina.

Typical media double standard when it comes to critisizing a minority.

With nuts.





<One can only imagine the reaction if a big city mayor had said "vanilla">

I heard a clip of that bizarre <to me> speech last night.
I actually thought I was asleep and dreaming it.
The dream was so weird it woke me up.

What an idiot.

Pretty strong language, nimh.

Last night CNN invited Jesse Jackson on to get his reaction to Nagin's statements. First, they ticked off each and every mistake made by Nagin both pre and post Katrina, showing clips relevant to each disastrous decision, but frequently turning the camera back to Jackson. He was livid by the time he finally got to speak, but held it together and explained that what Nagin said isn't what he really meant. Just as he was launching into a more detailed explanation, I turned him off and went to bed.

Nagin was just misunderstood, you see.

If Nagin had been white,then all hell would have broken loose.
But,since he is black,its ok to be racist.

At least,thats how it seems.

You reap what you sow...

yep..He is ridiculous...

<yawn>

LOL!!!

But, glad people see the double standard. I heard that he cancelled Anderson Cooper, citing an emergency, and Cooper found him at a restaurant and broadcast from the street outside.

Did anyone see that?

You're doin' a heck of a job there Lashie...

Hee hee

Thats a very subtle way to point out that the 'side' that here complains about a "double standard" apply one in their very own posts ...

I mean, that "Republican Leadership" in the pictures above, would that have been, for example, that of "I know all about breeding horses" FEMA chief Mike Brown?

He was finishing his chocolate pudding with Bill Bennett.

From a friend of a friend's blog, the Illhindu. Siddhartha Mitter, the author, writes for the Boston Globe.

Illhindu
Can you dig it, C.C.?
"Anderson Cooper don't know the funk."

Those were the first words I heard when I switched on the radio today. It was the Tom Joyner Morning Show, which only just arrived in Boston, but that's a whole other story.

Under discussion, I figured out, was a segment of cable wonderchild Cooper's show last night, in which he and his guests analyzed two recent instances of politicians "playing the race card" - the Hillary Clinton plantation reference, and New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who had this to say in his MLK day speech:

And as we think about rebuilding New Orleans, surely God is mad at America, he's sending hurricane after hurricane after hurricane and it's destroying and putting stress on this country. Surely he's not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely he's upset at black America, also. We're not taking care of ourselves. We're not taking care of our women. And we're not taking care of our children when you have a community where 70 percent of its children are being born to one parent.

We ask black people: it's time. It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day.


These remarks have set off one hell of a firestorm, including ponderous editorials along the lines of: "What if Mayor Giuliani had said New York was to be a vanilla city? Could he have gotten away with that? Huh?" ("Bigotry in the Big Easy," inveighs the Boston Herald.)

Now, Mayor Nagin is a loose cannon, and in no way universally loved within the New Orleans Black or progressive communities.

Perhaps that's because, just like Hillary Clinton and her plantation remark, he's the kind of tin-eared politician who can take a good metaphor and turn it into a disaster.

Anyone who's spent more than a minute in New Orleans knows that it is a Chocolate City... just like others. Just like Washington, DC, the original Chocolate City, celebrated by the immortal George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. A vibrant, multi-cultural city that happens to be majority Black.

Any problem with that?

But you have to get the reference. Apparently, no one did, except my friend Lolis, writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

But, "Anderson Cooper don't know the funk."

Neither do these other pundits and editorialists -- a sure sign of the sad state of American civic life.

But here's the rub: Mayor Nagin don't know the funk either. Let's go to the transcript. Compare Nagin:

"It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. And I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day."

with Clinton:

There's a lot of chocolate cities, around
We've got Newark, we've got Gary
Somebody told me we got L.A.
And we're working on Atlanta
But you're the capital, CC (...)

Hey, CC!
They say your jivin' game, it can't be changed
But on the positive side,
You're my piece of the rock
And I love you, CC.
Can you dig it?

Hey, uh, we didn't get our forty acres and a mule
But we did get you, CC, heh, yeah
Gainin' on ya
Movin' in and around ya
God bless CC and its vanilla suburbs ...


See? There's plenty of love to go around. But lyrically, there's no comparison: Mayor Nagin deserves to be criticized, if only because his lyrics are wack.

And more importantly, because he's managed to take a crucially important subject -- the African-American identity of New Orleans -- and turn it into something he has to apologize for.

Thanks, Mayor. Next time, just wink at your audience and say, "Can you dig it, C.C.?"