Many years ago, when I started my career in L.A. as a television and film writer, I was under contract to a small production company headed by Michael Jaffee.

Michael was young, tasteful, talented and possessed a strong social conscience. He was the producer of the beautiful TV movie, A Woman Called Moses, starring Cicely Tyson, about the valiant abolitionist, Harriet Tubman, and is currently one of the producers of The Informant, starring Matt Damon.

My partner and I did a number of projects with him, mostly comedy. One day we went to him with an idea that promos these days would describe as being “ripped out of the headlines.”

During the last half of the ’60’s, cultural, social and political events caused battle lines to be drawn between the left and right, blacks and whites, feminists and “chauvenists,” Vietnam hawks and doves. Suspicion and resistance to all authority were the rule of the day.

Racial riots swept across the country, notably in Detroit and Newark, New Jersey, where an entrenched, white, political power base was being threatened by the growing black population. Out of that tumult came the name of Anthony Imperiale, a Newark resident who polarized even further the already disintegrating tensions between black and white.

In 1976 he was running for a state senate seat and my partner, Norman and I, suggested a movie of the week (remember those?) about the dangers of vigilantism that Imperiale’s candidacy was reviving.

Michael listened and said no. “Too inflamatory,” he added. “We don’t want to add to tension and racial division, even if we’re on the right side of the issue.”

That moment stayed with me and popped into my head as I read the never ending accusations of racism the toadys of the left heaped upon anyone who dared disagree with Barack Obama and the policies of Democrat Party.

From tea-partiers to Rush Limbaugh, the disgraceful left picked upon the one criticism, the one response that was guaranteed to inflame — race. If one looks objectively at the nature of contemporary, radical, Marxist spokesshills leading Obama by his ear, this was not unexpected and I and others wrote as much during the campaign.

This is a response found under a rock, in the belly of snakes and is as untrue as it is despicable. This is a response made cruelly ironic given a president, and his cult-loving, mindless, boot licking, running dog followers who were euphoric about the post racial presidency Obama’s election would give the country.

And the left has betrayed it. Stuck a stick in its eye. If my old boss Michael Jaffee were running the party, it would be better and I’d be walking that side of the aisle with him, instead of running away from the hateful, toxic liberals spawned by Saul Alinsky.

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