“Talk about a double standard. What Trump said about illegal immigrants from Mexico was tame compared to the things Al Sharpton has said about race, but the media have gone after Trump with a vengeance bordering on hysteria.”

Source: Lowell Sun
By Peter Lucas
UPDATED:   07/14/2015 08:25:36 AM EDT

Flashback to 2004.

That was when the nine Democrats, including Al Sharpton, ran for president.

Recall how fellow candidates like John Kerry, John Edwards, Richard Gephardt, Howard Dean — as well as the mainstream media — treated the controversial race hustler Sharpton with the deference reserved for a real candidate.

They never laid a glove on him. And neither did the media.

Despite all the race-based controversies that Sharpton was involved in before the 2004 campaign, including the Tawana Brawley rape hoax — let alone his utterance of a string of anti-white racial comments — his fellow candidates and the fawning media treated Sharpton as though he had just emerged from the Harvard Divinity School.

None of the other candidates dared criticize Sharpton even as it became obvious early on that Sharpton knew little about the issues, and that his candidacy was nothing more than a weird but entertaining sideshow.

But he participated in all the television debates and was treated with obsequious fawning by Kerry and the rest of them, all fearing to upset Sharpton and alienate the black vote.

Sharpton did not win, of course, but typical of his political lifestyle, he ended up stiffing vendors $925,000 and was fined $285,000 by the Federal Elections Commission for campaign violations. He has yet to pay the money back or other unpaid taxes.

In the campaign his fellow candidates and the media gave Sharpton a free pass, mainly because they were deathly afraid of being smeared as racists.

Being black to Sharpton is more than a skin color; it is a bulletproof vest.

White politicians have no qualms about saying vile things against fellow white politicians, but are scared stiff when it comes to going after black politicians.

Contrast the behavior of the press and the politicians when it came to Donald Trump and his artless comments about illegal immigrants from Mexico, which got him in such hot water with the press.

Talk about a double standard. What Trump said about illegal immigrants from Mexico was tame compared to the things Al Sharpton has said about race, but the media have gone after Trump with a vengeance bordering on hysteria.

Trump said: “They’re sending people who have a lot of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Since then he had doubled down on his remarks.

But no sooner were the words out of his mouth the roof fell in on him. He was labeled a clown and a racist, something the politicians and the pundits never dared called Sharpton when he ran for president, even though he was both. Being white, Trump has no bulletproof vest when it comes to matters of race.

Not only was Trump attacked by fellow Republican presidential candidates, but his lucrative business contracts with NBC, Macy’s and Univision were canceled.

Then, almost to prove his point, the next day an illegal Mexican immigrant, who had been deported five times, allegedly shot and killed an innocent woman in San Francisco, a city that provides “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants.

Yes, there is Mexican outrage among some over what Trump said.

“But with that outrage should come introspection,” syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette wrote in The Daily Beast. “It’s easy for Mexicans to make Trump a target. But he simply said out loud what many Mexicans who stay behind have long believed about those who fled to the north — that they’re the undesirables who were out of options, didn’t make it and couldn’t hack it. Which raises the question: Are Mexican elites upset at Trump for insulting their countrymen, or for stealing their lines?”

Meanwhile Trump is soaring in the polls and is doing so because he is saying things that many Americans believe, not only about illegal immigration but about restoring the greatness of the country that President Barack Obama, through sheer incompetence and his college-lounge ideology, has frittered away.

Right now Trump is the driving force in the crowded race for the Republican nomination for president, and his fellow candidates and the pundit class resent it.

They resent it because Trump is not one of them. He is a political outsider, a very successful businessman and developer who does more than just talk. He builds things.

Not only that, he looks upon them — the professional politicians in both parties, as well as their fellow travelers in the media — with contempt.

And unlike all the other politicians running for president, he is paying his own way.

All he is asking is that he be treated with respect, like Al Sharpton.

Fat chance.

Peter Lucas’ political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at luke1825@aol.com