Las Vegas Mayor Calls Black President a “Real . . . Slow . . . Learner”

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman

1,250 words

President Barack Obama said at a New Hampshire high school recently, “When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices.”

This simple statement became the pretext for national and international headlines decrying the President’s language about Sin City. Moralists had a field day. “Enough is enough!” Jewish Congresswoman Shelley Berkley (D.-Nev.) said in a statement. “President Obama needs to stop picking on Las Vegas.”

“Picking on.” Again.

Las Vegas, it seems, is near and dear to the hearts of the ruling class. Small wonder. Not only is traffic in sin highly remunerative, but places like Vegas furnish rich opportunities for crime and blackmail by insiders. Those with privileged access can selectively manipulate and destroy careers with the type of inside dirt such places are custom made to uncover or create.

Among those squawking the loudest over Obama’s unobjectionable comments was Las Vegas’ longtime Jewish mayor, Oscar Goodman. “An apology won’t be acceptable this time,” he told TV reporters. “I don’t know where his vendetta comes from . . . He didn’t learn his lesson the first time . . . When he comes [to Las Vegas], I’ll do everything I can to give him the boot back to Washington and to visit his failures back there. And I gotta tell you this . . . this president is a real . . . slow . . . learner.” [Brief video clip.]

If any white politician had made that remark there would have been immediate, serious repercussions rather than respectful silence. After all, wouldn’t the predictable uproar underscore the sensitivity surrounding remarks dredging up hurtful stereotypes involving the subject of race? We can be sure that any white speaker would have been hysterically condemned by the media throughout the United States and overseas, and would instantly have been compelled to do the White Groveling Act.

Goodman’s statement is strange, and the media non-response to it is also strange. The mayor over many years as an attorney dealt with mobsters who were psychopaths, so he had to watch his tongue often. One of them was implicated in the murder of a federal judge. A mere criminal defense attorney like Goodman is much lower on the totem pole than that. Moreover, Goodman is a successful lawyer-politician. Not only did he enunciate the key words of his statement (”real slow learner”) very distinctly, but he preceded them with the statement, “And I gotta tell you this, and everybody says I shouldn’t say it [emphasis added], but I gotta tell you the way it is . . .” In other words, Goodman ran the incendiary comment past advisors before making it on camera.

Goodman’s background is instructive. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, he graduated from The Haverford School, an exclusive Main Line boys’ academy founded in 1884 to educate the sons of Haverford College professors. (Haverford College was originally a Quaker school.) Prominent graduates of The Haverford School include Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (”the Fighting Quaker”), illustrator Maxfield Parrish, one of Thomas Alva Edison’s sons, and astronaut Pete Conrad. Jewish billionaire Ronald Perelman (Revlon, Marvel Comics) graduated from The Haverford School three years after Goodman. Goodman subsequently attended Haverford College before obtaining his law degree from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania in 1964.

Upon graduation Goodman moved to Las Vegas, where he established a law practice and for 35 years represented many of America’s most vicious gangsters: Meyer Lansky, Fat Herbie Blitzstein, Lefty Rosenthal, Tony the Ant Spilotro, and Philadelphia crime bosses Nicodemo Scarfo and Phil Leonetti. Goodman also represented Arab-American drug trafficker Jamiel Chagra, implicated in the assassination of federal judge John H. Wood and the attempted murder of a US prosecutor. Thanks to Goodman, Chagra walked, although everyone around him went to prison, including his wife and brother (an attorney).

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith authored a biography, Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life from Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas (2003) and the mayor starred as himself in Italian-American director Martin Scorsese’s 1995 gangster flick Casino.

Las Vegas voters, predictable democrats, took one look at Oscar Goodman’s resume and said, “He’s the kind of man we want representing us!” In 1999, Goodman swept 69% of the electorate, in 2003 86%, and in 2007 84%.

Goodman told a class of fourth graders that if he was stranded on a desert island he’d most desire “a showgirl and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin” (a brand of liquor he’s been paid to pitch) and that one of his hobbies was “drinking.” “I’m the George Washington of mayors,” he told the press, refusing to apologize afterward. “I cannot tell a lie. If they didn’t want the answer, the kid shouldn’t have asked the question.” Obama could more justifiably have responded similarly to the uproar over his own school statements in New Hampshire.

Goodman photographed a topless model for Playboy’s website. The Russian-born girl, 40 years his junior, had been Playmate of the Month in January 2001. In 2003 the mayor suggested legalizing prostitution to generate revenue. This de facto meant prostituting primarily white, Mexican, black, and Asian girls. (Prostitution is currently legal in Nevada outside Las Vegas.) During the first ten months of that year, Las Vegas police arrested 127 prostitutes under 18 years of age; 368 other hookers (a different group) tested positive for HIV.

Another Goodman brainstorm was to propose whippings and canings for children who misbehave. “I’m dead serious,” he said on TV. On the same program he advocated cutting off the thumbs—on television—of people who deface public property with graffiti. Funny—I distinctly remember the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine demonizing Saudi Arabia in the 1980s for allegedly endorsing similar behavior.

Trained attorney Goodman also objected to a Tom Clancy video game set in Las Vegas. Sounding like Abraham Foxman of the ADL or “civil libertarians” Alan Dershowitz and Cass Sunstein, he said, “It may be something that’s not entitled to free speech (protection). . . . I will ask . . . whether or not we can stop it.”

Will anyone seriously contend that this upper-class, Our Crowd member, and longtime pol, who’s rubbed shoulders with the most vicious and powerful underworld scum as well as the country’s elite, isn’t fully cognizant of the implications of what he said about America’s African president? According to an Amazon reviewer who says he attended grade school with Goodman’s biographer and dined with the mayor, the latter’s first big defense case in Las Vegas revealed an “ease at interacting across the tracks to Las Vegas’s old, black West Side [that later] served him so well.” Nothing about Goodman suggests he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing when he calls the President, with careful emphasis, a “real . . . slow . . . learner.”

To top off this entire farce, the half-Kenyan Obama was not even sincere when he made his original statement. His unctuous political rhetoric was aimed squarely at dingbat Middle Americans. “There is no place better to have fun than Vegas, one of our country’s great destinations,” he subsequently said.

By doing so, Obama essentially apologized to Goodman and Berkley for their public bullying and Goodman’s racist insult! How like the Old Plantation! You know that Jews owned slaves, don’t you? You know that Jews were among the biggest slave traders?

Jews must say a prayer each night: “Thank you, g-d, that America doesn’t have reporters, editors, and media barons who treat Jews the way they treat goyim—particularly white people!”

TOQ Online, February 5, 2010