Libertarian Leanings

Looking For Racism In All The Wrong Places

With the presidential election season fast approaching, it's time for progressives to trot out the racism strategy.  Not that they've given it much of a rest, lately.  It's alive and well, on display 24/7, at the Huffington Post.  

To that end, Robert Kuttner has published an article, Racism Hidden in Plain View, that purports to identify the structural racism that plagues us.  Turns out, it's a reiteration of arguments put forth by BlackLivesMatter, concluding with this:

We are fighting battles that we thought we won in the 1960s. Structural racism still runs far deeper than the victories of a single generation. 

He might have summed it all up in one sentence: "Republicans are racist."  It is, after all, the prevailing view among HuffPo audience members, and if HuffPo is about anything at all, it's about getting Democrats elected.

HuffPo commenter, Dranoel Kciddir represents himself with a picture of Malcolm X on his Facebook page.  It's not a bad choice.  Malcolm X was a great champion for African-Americans, urging African-Americans to do for themselves, even to the extent of taking up arms, if necessary.  Like a militia.  It's not an alien concept to a libertarian.  But in a small way it captures the contradictions that seem to exist within the African-American political view.  While Malcolm X might have envisioned the possibility of armed insurrection, Dranoel Kciddir seems to come down on the political side that favors gun control.

It's not just gun control.  Progressives come down in favor of gun confiscation, and even Mr. Kciddir hints that guns are the problem.  Could he be unaware that the first gun control legislation enacted in the U.S. was part of "The Black Codes," laws aimed at keeping African-Americans in a virtual state of slavery after the American Civil War had freed them?  

Be that as it may, here is his comment on the article by Robert Kuttner, followed by the reply that I couldn't resist.  Spoiler alert:  It's not about gun control.

Comment by Dranoel Kciddir:

"its appearent that the racist in this country are not interested in true peace, they practice this horrid racism and hid behind their guns and excuses. Jails are not built for them, the criminal justice system protects them, its institutionalized and nationalistic, naked as the emperor of Rome yet they deny it even exist, further more they accuse the victims of reverse racism. Yet they travel the world trying to act as a self made policeman.

I envision a world of peace and justice for everyone, everyone should have a right to their own lives, but those in power, to continue their political ambitions they feed the workers ism's and scism's while they rob the country while we sleep. They know that is not about black and white, its about green (money), most racist don't have much of it. We either stand together or die apart. We have a choice. I have long ago lost all hope, God help the young and innocent children who are the future citizens of this country."

Reply by Tom Bowler:

"They know that is not about black and white, its about green (money)..." 

Bingo! But I doubt that Mr. Kuttner's "battles we thought we won in the 1960s" include the rise of the welfare industry, an industry that quickly evolved into a trap for inner city African-Americans. But at least it was a trap that had an escape hatch -- education.

Then the quality of inner city schools (inexplicably?) took a nose dive. Not really. The decline of inner city educational opportunities can be traced back to the rise of teachers unions that have made teacher and administrator well-being the focus of schools rather than the education of inner city children.

But unions are huge contributors to Democrats and so Democrats, including our president, contribute to unions by fighting tooth and nail against charter schools -- charter schools that might offer educational alternatives to inner city kids, but charter schools that are non-union, charter schools that compete with unionized public schools. Since charter schools offer no dough for Democrats, charter schools must be stopped!

It's quite the nice little trap. And of course anybody who looks to break the grip of the welfare/education industries, to remove them from blocking the path to African-American prosperity, that person will be labeled racist. 

You are wise to look beyond racism and to follow the money.

I don't suppose Mr. Kciddir will follow the money down those particular paths.  But I wish he would.  As long as I've been paying attention, government has been a great money making operation for many of the people who chose it as the path to their great fortunes.  But never have I seen government so blatantly used to serve government above all else, as is happening today.  

I've put this post with my comment exchange up here on Libertarian Leanings because a couple of my earlier HuffPo comment replies have gone into the bit bucket, down the memory hole, never to be seen again.  But there seems to be an aberration here.  Though it deviates from acceptable HuffPo thought, my comment is still up.  After more than an hour.  Still, the HuffPo censors have not struck.  I must be losing my touch.

Vote No to Jeanne Shaheen

Jeanne Shaheen is one of seven Senate Democrats who signed a March 2012 letter requesting Douglas H. Shulman, Commissioner of the IRS, "to immediately change the administrative framework for enforcement of the tax code as it applies to groups designated as 'social welfare' organizations."

Shaheen's letter got results. A year later in May 10, 2013 a headline in the Washington Post read, "IRS admits targeting conservatives for tax scrutiny in 2012 election." Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw tax-exempt groups, blamed the Cincinnati Office saying, "They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title."

When asked about this at a congressional hearing Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw tax-exempt groups, refused to testify invoking her fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. What better indication of improper political activity by IRS than this? In effect the IRS suppressed the conservative message through tax policy in order to enhance Barack Obama's re-election chances.

Another four years of Barack Obama. Lucky us. But there is a point to this. If you don't believe the IRS should be working for the Democratic party, vote "No" to another six years of Jeanne Shaheen.

Hope and Change!

This ought to be a bumper sticker! A hat tip to Michael Walsh!

You Are Not Mary's Cause

The charges leveled in this powerful campaign ad by Elbert Guillory against Louisiana encumbant Senator Mary Landrieu could also be said of any other Democrat running this year...  and those not running, as well.

Via Instapundit.

Advice for Republicans -- From James Carville

Well actually, his advice is for Democrats and it goes like this:

Oh, by the way, go negative, early and often.

But going negative is bad, isn't it?  Nah.  Democrats only say it is, and they that say so that Republicans won't do it.  It tends to work.  When Republicans point out Democratic failures in leadership, the mainstream media wring their collective hands and lament about the sad state of politics these days.  Why, they wonder, can't candidates talk about the issues that matter to the American people?  Haven't we talked about Benghazi enough? 

Candy Crowley sure thought so back in 2012 when she dove out onto the Obama/Romney presidential debate stage to cut of any discussion about Benghazi when Romney was about to deliver a haymaker. 

On the other hand, when Harry Reid accused Mitt Romney of not paying any income tax, that was just Harry talking about the issues.  In support, the media jumped in to complain that Romney hadn't turned over his income tax returns for the last 50 years.  Investigative reporters pondered, what is Romney hiding?

At any rate, the point of Carville's article was to say that as bad as things look for Democrats, it's worse for Republicans who are viewed negatively by a majority of Americans.

According to the Pollster average, two-thirds now disapprove of the Republican Party. We are not talking about Congress or even the Republicans in Congress. The party itself, the Republican Party, has a net -40 approval rating. With just a quarter of the country approving of the GOP, that means not even all of the party’s own members are giving it a positive rating.

There's a reason for that negative view, and it's not because of negative campaigning by Republicans.  Democrats and the media have been waging a relentless and successful campaign to smear the Republican brand.  It's been going on at least since Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, and it really heated up when Newt Gingrich orchestrated a Republican takeover in the House of Representatives in 1994.

Here's a clue, Republicans.  Your approval rating is not going to go down if you engage in what the media calls negative campaigning.  It's going to go down because Democrats and their friends in the media are going to be waging negative campaigns against you. 

Wake up and smell the coffee.  Your campaign issue is the Democratic party.  Look what they've done to the country.

Wendy Davis -- Standing for Texas Women?

Lefty feminists have their latest heroine in Wendy Davis, who made a name for herself by filibustering Texas abortion legislation.  In her words,

So while the “people’s filibuster” will go down in history for putting a stop (if only temporarily) to a misguided bill, the filibuster was more than organized opposition or even endurance — it was an expression of mainstream Texans standing up against partisan power-mongers who no longer act in Texas’ best interest or even tell Texans the truth. These partisans have depicted their bill as an effort to improve the quality of care available to women in local clinics. However, the filibuster exposed their real intent — to close clinics all over the state of Texas and deny health-care services to thousands of Texas women. And now Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst have rammed these new restrictions through the state legislature in a special session, without concern for health care or constitutionality.

In reality the Texas legislation put a limit on late term abortions, and that is something which is quite unacceptable to lefty fems.

Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator running for governor, became a liberal superhero last June when she filibustered a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks.

Here is the reality of it in more accurate terms, as reported by Charles Krauthammer.

And the issue, as most succinctly defined by the late liberal Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is infanticide. Describing one form of late-term abortion known as partial-birth, Moynihan said: “I had once remarked that the procedure was too close to infanticide. And now we have testimony that it is not just too close to infanticide, it is infanticide.” How else to describe crushing the infant’s skull in mid-delivery before the head leaves the birth canal?

Quite the little heroine, Ms. Davis.  As Mr. Krauthammer advises, if Republicans are going to campaign on gender issues this year, this is the one.

Talk policy — specifically, the issue that brought Davis to national prominence.

What was her 11-hour filibuster about? Blocking a state law whose major feature was outlawing abortions beyond 20 weeks. Make that the battlefield. Make Davis explain why she chose not just to support late-term abortion but to make it her great cause.

It should matter that half of those babies at risk would grow up to be women.  What about them?

The Myth of the Deserving Rich

Did you know that there was one?  A "myth of the deserving rich," I mean.  Neither did I.  But according to the NYT's Paul Krugman, there is one and it's a topic of such acute importance that he asks,

'So how can the myth of the deserving rich be sustained? Mainly through a strategy of distortion by dilution. You almost never see apologists for inequality willing to talk about the 1 percent, let alone the really big winners. Instead, they talk about the top 20 percent, or at best the top 5 percent.'

In case you're wondering, inequality is topping the list for campaign topics in this year's midterm elections.  If you're a partisan like Krugman, this is the only viable avenue for rescuing Democratic fortunes in the face the ObamaCare disaster.  ObamaCare hasn't gotten any more popular than it was when it passed four years ago.  In all likelihood it's going to get even more unpopular as the year wears on.  So what's a progressive to do?

If you're Obama you'll continue to do what you'e been doing right along.  He attacks his opponents, calling them racist, greedy, dishonest, or all of those things.  Racism, greed, and dishonesty is so rampant, according to Obama, that it must be fought using the powers of federal government.  Like when he sicced the IRS on Tea Party groups.  Look for it to be the new perk for Democratic presidents.  He started out using the Federal Election Commission to outlaw political campaigning by the other side.  But when the courts found that to be unconstitutional, Obama transferred his political hacks over to the IRS who continued the practice from there.

And on the public relations front he talks about inequality.  It's perfect.  Inequality is really the natural state of things.  Let's face it.  Not everybody can play Major League Baseball.  But talking about inequality likes it's some kind of conservative plot to keep the disadvantaged from taking their money?  That's caught on as a winning campaign issue.

So we get Paul Krugman talking about the deserving and undeserving.  

'I’ve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor.'

He moralizes over pretend conservative moralizing.  And who are those conservatives who moralize about the poor.  Why, they're the undeserving rich.  In the face of rising inequality these lowlife undeserving rich engage in 'a determined campaign of statistical obfuscation.'  Ah, but what about his own obfuscation?

'For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no further than a recent column by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to assert that rising inequality was no big deal, because everyone has been making big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen 186 percent since 1979!

If this sounds wrong to you, it should: that’s a nominal number, not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on The Journal’s website.'

Think about it.  There is a bottom fifth of the U.S. population.  As unjust as this may sound, eighty percent of the U.S. population will be richer than they are.  Next year there will be a bottom fifth of the U.S. population, and a hundred years from now there is still going to be a bottom fifth.  

But the question never addressed is, who's going to be in it?  Answer:  Just about everybody.  Almost all of us start at the bottom, and that's the way it should be.  Now, those of us who weren't delusional when we started out, didn't expect to pull down CEO-sized salaries when we were selling toys in a department store, washing dishes in a restaurant, or picking tobacco.  We got minimum wage.  On tobacco it was less than minimum wage.  But it was not a career and we knew it.  We were just starting out.

Which brings me to this startling fact.  There are still such things as entry level jobs.  Usually, they're minimum wage jobs and historically they've been part of the education of American workers.  With any kind of luck there will be entry level jobs 50 years from now, though if progressives like Obama can hold onto power there will be much fewer of them than there are workers who want them.  Why is that?

It's not fair unless Democrats get to decide who is entitled to be rich.  That's why.  This is something way too important to be left to the uncaring mechanics of the marketplace.  The Democratic approach is to make sure people are not exploited in low wage jobs.  It's simple, really. 

Think Keystone Pipeline!  20,000 jobs right there for the taking.  Just approve the project and let construction and the hiring begin.  Construction pays better than minimum wage, but the infusion of construction cash into local economies would spin off the entry level jobs as the demand for the necessities of life explodes.  Those entry level jobs are the one the Democrats strive to prevent, and by preventing their formation they save thousands from exploitation.  By stopping Keystone Democrats save countless people from the ravages of minimum wage jobs -- or any other jobs for that matter.  

For Democrats, an important function of government is saving the disadvantaged from the disadvantages of a job.  They've been extraordinarily successful at it, too.  Come to think of it, with immigration reform they're saving our nation's youth -- particularly African American and Hispanic -- from the indignities of low paying jobs.  Undocumented workers from Mexico, Central, and South America can have them.  

But we can't expect all of their compassion and hard work for nothing.  Our deserving Democrats hope and expect to be returned to power where they can do more such good works, and of course be paid handsomely.  They can't be expected to fight greed for nothing.

60 Minutes on Benghazi

What a remarkable opening:

When Chris Stevens was killed in Benghazi, Libya, on the anniversary of September 11th last year, it was only the sixth time that the United States had lost an ambassador to its enemies. The events of that night have been overshadowed by misinformation, confusion and intense partisanship. But for those who lived through it, there's nothing confusing about what happened, and they share a sense of profound frustration because they say they saw it coming.

"...overshadowed by misinformation, confusion, and intense partisanship."  About that misinformation.  In 20-20 hindsight it's clear that the administration knew right away that Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foriegn Service Officer Sean Smith, and former Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty were all killed in a well planned terrorist attack.  Yet five days later President Obama sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice off the the Sunday talk shows to say that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a YouTube video that insulted Islam.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi last week was not premeditated, directly contradicting top Libyan officials who say the attack was planned in advance.

“Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo,” Rice told me this morning on “This Week.”

Later on President Obama made prominent mention of that YouTube clip in a speech to the UN General Assembly, implying that somehow the video was a catalyst for the violence in Benghazi.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even promised to prosecute the film maker.

Woods explained, “I do appreciate her taking the time from her schedule to meet with the four families. While we were in the pod over there with our family she came over shook my hand and I reached out and hugged her shoulder. Her countenance was not good. And she made the statement to me that first of all she was sorry and then she said ‘We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.’ ”

It's as if the murderers themselves were not to blame.

60 Minutes may be commended for finally working up the integrity to report how additional security for the consulate in Benghazi had been requested and denied.  Unfortunately, the program studiously avoided any investigation into why the Ambassador's requests were denied.  The names Clinton and Obama are conspicuously missing from the program script.  

We got what we normally get from the mainstream media — a pretense at integrity, an attempt to rehabilitate a reputation destroyed by the partisan bias of its own reporting.  Events were overshadowed, CBS says, by "misinformation" and "confusion."  Unmentioned is that the misinformation originated in the White House and the confusion was desperately needed in order to get Obama re-elected.  

For promoting the diversion that saved Obama's re-election, Susan Rice was rewarded.  She got onto the short list of nominees for Secretary of State.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is set to go straight from misleading the country about a matter of national security to a promotion.

A top candidate to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Rice famously purveyed erroneous information about the Benghazi terror attack on five Sunday shows a few days after the deadly incident.

But, hey, these things happen.

For the sin opposing a Secretary of State nominee who deliberately misinformed the American public about what happened in Benghazi, Republicans were labeled racist.  This is the "intense partisanship to which CBS referred in its introduction to the Benghazi piece.

Ironically, every word that CBS said is true:  Events of that night really have been overshadowed by misinformation, confusion and partisanship.  But in the context of the moment CBS can be confident that the larger part of its audience will believe that Republicans were guilty of intense partisanship for grilling administration officials about what actually happened.  60 Minutes can reasonably expect that its audience will chalk up the misinformation and confusion to the fog of war, not from the fog that emanated from the White House.

CBS has not set the record straight.  it's a year after the critical re-election of Barack Obama, and now CBS has judged that it's safe to broadcast some of the facts about Benghazi.  In fact, now it's probably even necessary.  The 60 Minutes Benghazi broadcast is a bid to re-establish the illusion of integrity.  Without it the network will be hamstrung in its battle to elect a Democratic in the 2016 presidential race.