A conundrum

In 2001 Mark Steyn wrote about Louis Farrakhan,

...But objecting to Farrakhan as a bigot overlooks the more basic objection that he's a fruitcake.

...he claims that once a month he's taken up into a spaceship orbiting the earth to commune with Elijah Muhammed - but faced with a man talking gibberish to the biggest gathering in Washington in decades, the media froze. You can say a man's dangerous and demagogic, but, if you point out he's a loonytoon, what does that make the huge tide of people hanging on his every word? ...So the major newspapers declined to report the Minister's numerological excursions, treating those portions of the speech like Victorian piano legs and obscuring them with discreet ellipses.

Laid low by colon cancer in recent years, Louis Farrakhan is now back on form and befuddling America as thoroughly as ever: some on the Right insist that, underneath the overheated rhetoric, he's an exemplary social conservative and a natural Republican ally; some on the Left admire him as a pioneer of Balkanised identity-group politics long before they were popular. But to all but the most partisan observers Minister Farrakhan presents a more basic conundrum: how nutso does an African-American community leader have to be before his fellow blacks hoot with derision and walk away?

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