The New, Post-Racial America

When Democrats support a black Democrat for President, they are heroically redeeming America.

When Republicans support a black Republican for President, they are racists.

Because.

Behold, as the Honkies Gather on Wall Street

Via Instapundit, a collection of pictures of the Angry Vegan Brigade on Wall Street.

Notice the distinct lack of color at these gatherings. Why, surely if their ideas weren't racist, they could persuade others of darker hues to support them. Right, Angry Proggie Commentator?

Absolutely right, you teabagging bastard.

I mean, this is a white crew we got goin' here. How white are they? As white as:

• A Laurence Welk audience
• Dudley Do-Right's pasty rear end
• A sun-bleached copy of The Turner Diaries
• Warren Gamaliel Harding's taste in music
• The maiden aunt of that English chick who used to tell people they were the Weakest Link and then snap up an octave saying "Good-Bye"
• Anyone who's ever complained about people calling bandages "Band-Aids," because Band-Aid is a brand name!
• The cast (and audience) of How I Met Your Mother
• Robin Williams' sad, desperate attempts to act black

I'm sure Ace of Spades has something similar ginned up, as he did here and here, but it's hardly like Top Ten  Lists were his idea.

Democrat Try to Take Allen West "Into the Woodshed"

Racists (h/t: Instapundit)

This stands as another demonstration of the fact that protected identities are a boon granted only to leftists. No Republican would ever dare suggest that Elijah Cummings or Charlie Rangel needs to be taken to the wooshed, because RAAAAACISM! But Gwen Moore can suggest it of Allen "Uncle Sambo" West, and it's all good in the hood.

Allen West, of course, was a fellow disciplined in Iraq for interrogating a prisoner with a pistol. Somehow, I don't think the Congressional Democratic Caucus scares him.

Janice Hahn Fails

In case you had forgotten, Janice Hahn is the Democratic Candidate for CA-36 who got called out by Ladd Ehlinger for putting gangsters on the public payroll as part of a bogus gang-pacification campaign.

He did so using a hilarious attack ad that offended all the right people. Hordes of them poured into the comments section of the link waving the bloody shirt of Honky Offendedness:



Everyone told Ladd he was wasting his time. They were wrong. How can you tell that Hahn is now realizing this is a problem?

Her attorneys sent Fox11 a cease and desist letter forbidding them from pursuing this story.

 She may as well have paraded her dog in front of the camera and told everyone she is not a crook.

"White Girl Bleeds a Lot"

Over at Other McCain, the blunt truth of "youths" engaging in mob violence yields another:

“Liberals believe ‘racist’ is the antonym of ‘Democrat.’”

Indeed.

2012: Year of the "RAAAAACIST!"

Over at Is This Blog On, the owner gets called a Klansman for suggesting that Michelle Obama isn't as toned and healthy as everyone says she is.

No, really.

Here, his response, wherein you can read my comment.

Is it just me, or is this the only rhetorical hill they have left to die on?

The New York Times on Freedom and Equality, 1860 edition

This post at Protein Wisdom, about the bipolar interpretations of the Constitution (Shorter Fareed Zakaria: If a document ever changes, then any change is a good one), brings up the old canard, that "The Constitution said blacks were three-fifths of a person." In the comments, dicentra points out this:

Three out of five SLAVES were counted for apportionment.
Free blacks in the north were counted normally.
Important distinction

This led me to Google "free blacks in the south" to see what popped up. I found a few historyish web sites that made various claims (free black property owners in some northern cities could vote, free blacks in the South lived in fear, but a few became plantation owners) without showing their evidence. But then I stumbled upon this February 17, 1860 editorial in The New York Times (interesting to note just how old the New York Times is). As an expression of a thoroughly middleground viewpoint between slaveholders and abolitionists, it fascinates.

Here, the beginning:

E.J. Dionne Brims with Sound and Fury on Voter ID Issue, Signifies Nothing

I promised a Fisking, and yeah, a Fisking I shall deliver:

An attack on the right to vote is underway across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here, so there’s barely a whimper.

Right. Because when the corrupt regimes of "emerging democracies" steal elections, they do it by requiring people to identify themselves as residents and legal voters. Boss Tweed and Saddam Hussein loved that ruse.

Although I certainly consider the Left's whining on this subject to be "barely a whimper."

The laws are being passed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem — and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place. Some of the new laws, notably those limiting the number of days for early voting, have little plausible connection to battling fraud.

Ladd Ehlinger, Jr. Remains Awesome

His attack ad:



Before you call racism, note all the honky criminals, such as Capone and Manson, whose pictures float in an out whilst the gangbangers bang their gong.

Before you call sexism, the content is no different from what routinely played on MTV, back when MTV played videos. Most of that content is defended on the grounds that it is at least partially tongue-in-cheek. As Chuck D put it "When a man says 'nigga buggin'' he's saying a lot of things beside 'nigga buggin''." As the whole point of this ad is to take that content and hold it up to ridicule, the defense should apply even more. So who're the real sexists? The people who mock gangsters and the way gangsters treat women, or the people who celebrate them?

And before you punt and call this ad "Willie Horton on steroids" be ready to have the facts at hand. It's not 1988 anymore; the Internet exists.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Didn't Mean What She Said, And She Totally Meant It

She walks back the Jim Crow label, and then proceeds to repeat the substance:

I don't regret calling attention to the efforts in a number of states with Republican dominated legislatures, including Florida, to restrict access to the ballot box for all kinds of voters, but particularly young voters, African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

Because young voters, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans don't have/can't possibly be expected to verify their identity. Except of course, when they drive, drink, open checking accounts, start jobs, or do anything else.

But Republicans are still racists. Because, shut up.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is a RAAAAACIST

She's going to have fun being the bete noire of the rightosphere. She's got the silly name, and she put her foot in her mouth so far during WeinerGate that she swallowed her own knee Game On.

Is This Blog On has the skinny:

About 25 percent of African-American voters don’t have a valid photo I.D. I mean – and – and the reason it’s similar to a poll tax is because you’ve got the expense. You’ve got the effort.The – there’s difficulties for s- many people in getting photo I.D. So, you’re literally just throwing a barrier in the way of someone who’s trying to exercise their right to vote.

Now it would seem that W-S is speaking on behalf of African-Americans, which would seem to preclude all accusations of racism. But such childish remonstrances will not deflect from the obviousness of Debbie's White Privilege. I will prove it five ways, one for each of the A's in "RAAAAACIST":

This is Not Racism

But the Tea Party? Totally racist. Totally.

Will Saletan: "Glenn Beck is Not a Racist"

At least, not anymore:

The resemblance doesn't mean that Beck wants to take us back to the days of segregation. It means the opposite. Crying "socialism" is what conservatives do before they yield to change. It's a stage in the process of defeat. But the process doesn't end with defeat. It ends with absorption. It ends with the political descendants of George Wallace embracing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Beck today is just catching up to where King was 50 years ago. That's because King was in the front of the civil rights bus, and Beck is in the back. And it's a really slow bus.

It's always a good idea when reading the Left to assume projection, or as Breitbart put it, that they accuse others of doing what they do. So when Saletan says "you know, these wingnuts really don't hate on black people," he's the one making the real concession. He's conceding that there's another principle operant in his opponents than bigotry, that opposition to racism is an idea that the Right has fully, finally embraced. And he's admitting that them crazy crackers do this all the time.  And if this is true, then what animates the right must be something else.

It's official: the race card is maxed out. The cudgel lacks only a ceremonial bronzing.

Unequal Outcomes can never be tolerated!

Every Community has a Right to demand of all its agents an account of their
conduct.
-Declaration of the Rights of Man

We must be vigilant, friends. Racism lurks in every corner, growing wherever it may hide, yea, even in the very ovaries of our young.

Behold: Puberty Is Racist!

Language Mongrelized.

It occurs to me that I have been blogging about the grim subject of race more than any other subject, since The Essayist was re-booted. Indeed, it was the very subject that prompted its re-boot. So today, I lingered at The Root far more than I normally would at so leftyish a web site, and was treated to their Would a Black Person Get Away With This? feature.

The continuing irony of race relations in America is the degree to which people of different races don't hear each other making the same arguments. There isn't a white person in America who doesn't think that there are things you can get away with when you're black that you can't when you're white, and so it's nothing short of amusing to note blacks feeling the reverse is true.

Behold, blunt evidence of what we honkies speak of: President Obama Calls African-Americans a "Mongrel People".

The president's remarks were directed at the roots of all Americans. The definition of mongrel as an adjective is defined as "of mixed breed, nature, or origin," according to dictionary.com.

I have no difficulty believing that. I'm fine with the word "mongrel" and have no objection to the way the President used it. But imagine, just for a second, these same words, with this exact same intent, coming out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, and then imagine someone on the left saying "that's fine".

You can't do it, can you?

The Full Sherrod

The story of Shirley Sherrod begins when she was 17 years old, when a white man murdered her father and got away with it. I'm going to repeat that. When Shirley Sherrod was 17 years old, a white man murdered her father and got away with it, because the elder Sherrod was black, and if you were a white man in Georgia in 1965, you could kill a black man and get away with it.

So yeah, she doesn't particularly like white people, and the speech which led to her resignation was mostly a description of how she came to move beyond that. When the edited snipped first appeared on Big Government I could tell immediately that she'd been cut off in the middle of a thought. I wondered if that thought was going to lead someplace into the light. The Anchoress, ever the voice of reason, thought so, too. And, well...

Why yes, I will be using it every time...

And yes, Andrew Breitbart would have done well to wait for the full footage before he released what he had. And yes, Barack Obama would have done well to demonstrate the stiffness of spine that the good Lord gave a flatworm and await events before demanding her head (unless of course, he really did leave the decision to Vilsack, which doesn't reflect very much better on him). Last night, Left and Right were as one in saying that the raw deal was Sherrod's.

And then she started opening her mouth.

Given American history, I am the sort of fellow who considers it perfectly understandable for African-Americans of a certain age to distrust and dislike white people. Shirely Sherrod most certainly possesses that age and experience. But to forgive her resentment does not oblige me to call it something else. For a woman of her education to publicly call out Andrew Breitbart as nothing more than the ghost of Jefferson Davis not only gives the lie to her supposed conversion, but bespeaks a shocking ignorance of the rhetorical situation, an ignorance that strikes at the heart of what Breitbart was getting at.

African-American activists like to pretend that the souls of white folk are theirs for the reading, that they know our deepest motivations better than we do ourselves. They've made mountains of racism out of molehills of speech for a long few decades. That they should feel the need to do this, after the horrible experiences of African-Americans, should surprise no one. But the expectation that I or Andrew Breitbart or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else should be bound to it, that raises an eyebrow.

It may take another hundred years before African-Americans have fully achieved what their ancestors labored so cruelly, suffered so miserably, to attain. Halley's Comet may return before the ancestral memories of fear, mistrust, and righteous anger become just memories. Charity and forgiveness alone may accelerate this process.

In the meantime, expect many people of many colors to vomit up the words that others attempt to put in their mouths.

Here be Racists...

Over at the Patheos blog, Theodore Dalrymple explains why the Left returned to their "Teabaggers = RACIST!" meme as soon as the leak in the Gulf got plugged. He chalks it up to the Theory of the Missing Motive:

Unable to see a rational and noble motive at the center of the Tea Party movement, liberals supply a darker and more convenient motive instead. Just as ancient cartographers wrote "there be dragons here" beyond the bounds of the world they knew, so liberals write "there be racism here" because the mind of the Tea Partier is undiscovered country in their map of the world. The Tea Party cannot be rationally and nobly motivated, the liberal believes, because the Tea Partiers are not rational and noble.

In other words, the problem is not that liberals dislike the principles promoted at Tea Party rallies. Most do not understand those principles. The problem is that liberals dislike the kind of people who go to Tea Party rallies.

I wrote similarly a few years ago, summing up the source of the fevered antipathy to President Bush:

There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.  

In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous

From 2005 to now, despite a slew of victories, the Progressives have not changed. 



 

Garafalo = PWNED

Change the context, and she's suddenly talking about something very different. Except she isn't.

I guess the foot's on the other hand now, isn't it, Kramer?

The Essayist #21: With The Rich And Mighty, or Is Roman Polanski as Smart as Michael Vick?

[The following was originally posted at my livejournal last October. It is the Definition of "Overtaken by Events". Polanski has skated away scot free again, and while Vick has once more, albiet briefly, become a "person of interest". Nevertheless, in the light of Whoopi Goldberg once more rising to the defense of her fellow entertainers, it needs to be said again.]
An alien or archaelogist from the future, seeking to re-create what early-21stcentury humans meant by “controversy” could do worse that to make the Polanski case his study. All the elements abound: famous men, young girls, taboo sex and quaint drugs, rumours of judicial malfeasance, the drama of exile, competition for the status of victim, etc. If I cared, I would be enthralled.

But I do not care, and indeed plan to explain my not-caring in some detail. This being the case, one may fairly ask why I bother to put fingers to keyboard to pontificate on the subject. And I will fairly answer that my lack of caring is a feature, not a bug. It grants that most precious of journalistic bona fides, objectivity. So before I make comparison between Michael Vick and Roman Polanski, bear with me through the following Declaration of Disinterest:

The Essayist #19: Rand Paul is not a Bigot, Just a Dumb Libertarian

In the wake of Rand Paul putting his foot in it, Ace does yeoman's work explaining in exact detail why the 1964 Civil Rights Act is not unconstitutional.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were specifically enacted with the purpose of eradicating slavery and duly -- constitutionally -- empowered Congress to pass legislation in furtherance of this purpose. To say such laws are "unconstitutional" is simply in error -- previous to the lawful and constitutional passage of those amendments, such laws would have indeed have been unconstitutional and an unlawful overreach of granted Congressional power.
After their lawful passage, however, Congress did have that authority.

And the reason that Congress decided that it need that authority was because certain states were violating the rights of their citizens, of failing to do the thing governments are created to do. The Constitution thus comes  more fully in line with the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence.

Peasants in feudal society weren't technically slaves, but they were peons, persons with sharply-curtailed rights and certain obligations (including deference) to their social betters/masters. I think a fair reading of "slavery" includes the idea of "peonage," too. Unless there is some critical constitutional point here to be vindicated, I do not see any defensible purpose in arguing these amendments outlawed slavery but gave full constitutional blessing to regime of enforced peonage.

Precisely. Slavery and peonage are offenses against liberty, that can only be maintained by the use of force. As Governments exist to secure liberties, our government should be willing and able to act against one person's attempt to destroy the liberty of another. Hence, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a necessary and constitutional redress against 400 years of slavery and peonage.

Would it have been better if it was not necessary? Assuredley. Are there things about the way the Civil Rights Act as been used that I consider wrong, and offenses to liberty? Without doubt. But the law, as intended, has no legal or ethical flaw.