http://alternet.org/story/74753/?page=entireThe Hypocrisy of BET's Bob Johnson's Obama Smears
By Davey D, Davey D's Hip-Hop Corner. Posted January 24, 2008.
Bob Johnson should leave politics to someone else.
Former BET president and founder Bob Johnson is an asshole and hypocrite. Lemme not pull punches, be politically correct, beat around the bush or try to impress high-brow readers who feel I should be less crass and gentler with my words so I can appeal to their sensibilities. It's 2008 and unfortunately being nice and proper doesn't quite get the message across, especially when it comes to Bob Johnson and his recent disparaging remarks about presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I'm referring to Johnson getting onstage to introduce Sen. Hillary Clinton at a rally and expressing outrage about Obama's past. He said, "Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood. I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book."
It was a cheap shot -- referencing Obama's drug use when he was a young man. This was an activity that Obama freely admitted to in his memoirs Dreams From My Father, and on some level I can see it being fair game, but coming from a guy like Johnson, that's like former President Bill Clinton giving marital advice to Halle Berry's former husband and admitted sex addict Eric Bonet. I heard Johnson make these remarks, and I was like, "Negro, go back into your cave; please sit down and leave the politics to someone else."
I keep asking myself: Where does Johnson get off slamming Obama about the wrongs of drug use when he piloted one of the largest media institutions (BET) that provided a worldwide platform that for the most part glorified and legitimized the lifestyles of those who not only used drugs but also sold them? In all the years we've known of billionaire Bob Johnson, we have not seen him get on any stage and diss former drug dealers like Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Rick Ross or any number of artists whose videos he would routinely play coupled with sit-down interviews conducted by fawning hosts who never, ever challenged these artists for resurrecting a "criminal" lifestyle they supposedly left behind in both their songs and videos.
The Bob Johnson we know has never gone out of his way to publicly smash on artists who like Mary J Blige or Fergie, who admitted to using drugs in the past and have since gotten their lives together and moved onward and upward. If anything, the former head of BET could be seen publicly praising them while courting them to appear at his award shows or Spring Bling concerts.
Johnson certainly never came out swinging on admitted drug abusing artists like Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, Flava Flav or DMX, who all had reality shows either on BET or one of the other stations within the Viacom network where he had influence as a VP.
snip//
It's ironic that Obama, who at 40-something would've been part of that Public Enemy/ Afrocentric generation that initially rallied for causes like getting BET on cable systems, now finds himself being criticized by a guy like Bob Johnson. How quickly they turn. But I guess we shouldn't be surprised -- sheisty people rarely change their stripes. My boy and fellow writer, Jelani Cobb, raised an important question in his recent article on this topic for the Washington Post, which was, what were the Clintons thinking when they got Johnson to stomp for them? She might as well gotten Rupert Murdoch or Bill O'Reilly to stomp for her. That's like me running for office and getting a Gestapo-like guy like Rudy Giuliani to stomp on my behalf; it's not a good look and brings into question Sen. Clinton's clear lapse in judgment. All she had to do was look at the number of protests launched against BET in the past few years for their degrading images of women. That should've been a clear enough message. In other words, if Hillary thinks so little of black people that she went and dug up a cat likes Bob Johnson, then I'm gonna have to close the book on her and bounce the other way and roll with Obama.
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