Reason's science editor Ronald Bailey bought his mother a pair of tickets to a Joan Baez concert as a birthday gift. Baez performed last night and, as one might expect, had quite a bit to say about the outcome. What Bailey didn't expect was the bizarre minstrel show that recalls Ted Danson's Friars Club debacle:

However, the most remarkable and disturbing episode occurred halfway through the concert when Joan stopped singing and announced that she had "multiple personalities." One of her multiple personalities is that of a fifteen year old poor black girl named Alice from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. Baez decided to share with us Alice's views on the election. Amazed and horrified I watched a rich, famous, extremely white folksinger perform what can only be described as bit of minstrelsy—only the painted on blackface was missing. Alice, the black teenager from Arkansas Baez was pretending to be, spoke in a dialect so broad and thick that it would put Uncle Remus and Amos and Andy to shame. Baez' monologue was filled with phrases like, "I'se g'win ta" to do this that or the other and dropping all final "g's." Baez as Alice made statements like, "de prezident, he be a racist," and "de prezident, he got a bug fer killin'." Finally, since Bush won the election with 58.7 million votes to Kerry's 55.1 million, Alice observed, "Seems lak haf' de country be plumb crazy." Since Baez was reading Alice's notes, it is evident that she thinks that Arkansas' public schools don't teach black children to write standard English.

Once Joan finished her minstrelsy riff, the audience, in which I did not see a single black person, went wild with applause and hoots and hollers. I have never felt so embarrassed for a bunch of "liberals" in my life.

So the champion of the working folks likes to channel Amos & Andy as part of her act, eh? Perhaps Baez would like to add "Mammy" as an encore. I wish I could be scandalized by this, but it's all part of the utter hypocrisy one finds on the left.

It should be mortifying for Baez, and not just for its blatantly racist tenor. Since when does an entertainer get up on stage and pretend to be mentally ill in order to convince people of her political and intellectual acumen? And look what she picks as an alter ego to bolster her argument -- not a scholar or a statesman, but an apparently uneducated teenager who can't speak properly.

Baez surely will rate an entire chapter if Laura Ingraham ever decides to update Shut Up And Sing. (via Memeorandum)

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It's the 25th Anniversary of the war on Islamic Fascism. As I noted here, the Carter approach doesn't work. Joan Baez is herself a metaphor for the Democratic Party and Instapundit chronicles events similar to what I witnessed in New [Read More]

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