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WASHINGTON, July 16, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – US President George W. Bush has chosen to address the Urban League while declining to attend a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People assembly, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the Washington Times Thursday.  NAACP chairman Julian Bond, at the organization’s national convention, called Republicans “neo-fascists,”“the white-people’s party” and “a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts,” who “draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban wing of American politics, and now they want to write bigotry back into the U.S. Constitution.”“It really is disappointing to see the current leadership continue to repeat the hostile rhetoric that they have used, which really shows that they are not interested in a constructive dialogue,” McClellan told Times reporter Bill Sammon.  President Bush is the first to not address at least one national convention of the NAACP since Herbert Hoover. The president will appear in Detroit Thursday for an Urban League convention instead, a group that favours “having a constructive dialogue,” according to McClellan.  Education Secretary Rod Paige, also black, wrote a Wall Street Journal column titled “Naked Partisans.” He accused the NAACP of “hateful and untruthful rhetoric about Republicans and President Bush.”

Paige also criticized former president Bill Clinton. “Through his education policies alone, President Bush has done more for the African-American community than any previous president, including the so-called ‘first black president,’ Bill Clinton,” he said. “That’s a secret some black leaders may not want millions of African-American voters to know.”

Read Washington Times coverage: https://www.washtimes.com/national/20040716-123128-2949r.htm   tv