Comments From & On Our Race Baiter In Chief

Obama appeared at today's White House Press Briefing to weigh in on the Zimmerman trial, its aftermath and racism in America. Some of what he said was good, some was bad - but unfortunately, the most important of his points were simply utterly outrageous.  Here are his entire remarks:



Here are the test of those remarks with comments in blue:


The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week, the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling. I gave an — a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday, but watching the debate over the course of the last week I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.

First of all, you know, I — I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle’s, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they’ve dealt with the entire situation. I can only imagine what they’re going through, and it’s — it’s remarkable how they’ve handled it.


I think it horrendous that, at no point does Obama similarly mention George Zimmerman, his family or parent, nor the mountain of death threats being made against them.


The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there are going to be a lot of arguments about the legal — legal issues in the case. I’ll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues. The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a — in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works.

But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.


According to the racial grievance industry, our nation is still 1950 Selma, Alabama writ large. Outrageously, many in the racial grievance industry - including the NAACP and members of the Congressional Black Congress - are comparing the Zimmerman case is to the savage racist murders and subsequent denial of justice in the cases of Emmet Till and Medger Evers. Emmet Till, a 14 years old Missippi boy, was tortured and murdered in 1955 by a group of white men for the crime of flirting with a white girl. Two men were acquitted by an all white jury at trial, after which they bragged of their act of murder. Medger Evers was a former soldier and civil rights activist assassinated in 1963, Mississippi, by a member of the KKK, Bryan de la Beckwith. Two trials held at the time resulted in hung juries. Beckwith was not successfully prosecuted for the murder until 1994.

Obama just blessed off on that viewpoint as, at least, not unreasonable.  That is absolutely outrageous.


There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.


One, Obama is suggesting that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled by George Zimmerman.  Wow.   No one on either side of the trial claimed that by the conclusion of the trial.  Nor is there a single bit of evidence of that.  But Obama just gave it a wink and a nod.

Two, there is a reason people, including blacks such as Jessee Jackson, react that way at the approach of young black men that they don't know.  It is because, statistically, blacks are exponentially more likely to commit crimes, and especially violent crime, including murder and robbery, than other racial groups.  In 2011, blacks made up 13% of the population. Yet according to FBI Crime Statistics, in not a single category of crime, with the exception of DUI was the number of total criminal incidents committed by blacks equal to or below their proportionate representation in society. In 2011, blacks in the U.S. were responsible for 49.7% of all murders, 55.6% of all robberies, 32.9% of all forcible rapes, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. The FBI does not publish like statistics for victims, but looking at the numbers, blacks were just as likely to be the victims of crime out of all proportion to their representation in society. In 2011, 49.9% of all murder victims were black.

So if the presence of blacks, and particularly young black men, causes such an unfortunate reaction in others, it is not because of their racism, its because of the reality of rampant black criminality.  That is not a fault of whites, nor for that matter, Jessee Jackson.

Three, this plays right into the claims that there should never be racial profiling.  Now, after listening to many in the racial grievance industry speak about "racial profiling" this past week, it seems that what they mean is they don't want anyone not black to feel suspicious about a black person, irrespective of how they are acting.  That is not merely a philosophical argument - it is as real as the crime and murder rate differentials between NYC and Chicago.  New York City, under Nanny Bloomberg's aggressive 'Stop & Frisk' policies, something the same racial grievance industry claims is racism - now has less than a third of the murder rate of Chicago where, if you are black, it is statistically less safe to live than it is to be a soldier in Afghanistan.


The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.


This is an attack our criminal justice system without adjusting for the reality of grossly disproportionate black criminality relative to population.  Further, it is a back handed slap at the Zimmerman verdict.  Regardless of the facts at trial, Obama is saying that it is reasonable that blacks interpret it as a racist incident.  Just horseshit.


Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context.


This is a non-sequiter.  There is no ":historical context" for massively disproportionate criminality in the black community. The racial grievance industry interprets the plight of all blacks through is the utter canard that all whites in the U.S. are racist.  We - and in particular those on the right - are all Bull Connor Democrats.  That is not a "historical context.  That is an incredibly destructive fantasy,


We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.


No, black violence is not born out of a "very violent past."  That is not merely an excuse, it is false.  It is born out of a breakdown in the black family unit that has gotten worse, not better, since Daniel Patrick Moynihan's landmark report of 1965.  It there is ever going to be a true "dialogue" on race that has a chance of improving the plight of blacks as a whole, that is where it has to begin.  In fairness, that dialogue would, as Moynihan pointed out, have to acknowledge the role of racism in current situation of blacks.  But we arrived at that point in the dialogue in 1965.  Any and every attempt to continue the dialogue since then has been met with the 'race card.'      .


And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So — so folks understand the challenges that exist for African- American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it or — and that context is being denied. And — and that all contributes,


So, if I understand this argument, unless non-blacks are willing to drown themselves in guilt for past historical sins that they did not commit, then the racial grievance industry is justified to be frustrated..


I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.


This is the single most outrageous statement that Obama makes - one that undergirds the whole racial grievance industry,  It, to use the words of Obama, painting America with a "broad brush."  He condemns our society and our legal system as irredeemably racist.  It means that we are still the America of Till and Evers.  And that is pure bullshit.
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Two cases come immediately to mind - O.J. Simpson and Roderick Scott.  Simpson was given the same treatment that the murderers of Till and Evers were given.  That case was a travesty of justice, but leave it aside.  Roderick Scott is of particular note.  His case, decided just days ago, was a photo negative of the Zimmerman case. Scott is a black man in Rochester, New York who came upon three 16 year old white boys whom he believed were stealing from cars in the area. Brandishing a gun, he ordered them to stay in place until the police arrived. According to Scott, one of the boys charged him, saying that he was going to "get" Scott. Before the boy so much as touched Scott, he lay dead of two gunshot wounds that Scott claimed he fired in self defense. Unlike Trayvon Martin, the person Scott shot had no history of any troubled past. Like Trayvon Martin, the boy's parents are inconsolable, believing their innocent son was murdered. Scott was acquitted of manslaughter charges within the past week following a jury trial.


Now, the question for me at least, and I think, for a lot of folks is, where do we take this? How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction? You know, I think it’s understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family.


Again, Obama portrays Martin as an innocent victim.  Trayvon's death is a tragedy, but what did he do on that night he died for which he should be honored?  The only possible inference is that he is a martyr to racism.


But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, are there some concrete things that we might be able to do? I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it’s important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government — the criminal code. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.


Obama just told the racial grievance industry that, try as they might, there will be no federal civil rights case filed against George Zimmerman.  It is called burying the lead.


That doesn’t mean, though, that as a nation, we can’t do some things that I think would be productive. So let me just give a couple of specifics that I’m still bouncing around with my staff so we’re not rolling out some five-point plan, but some areas where I think all of us could potentially focus.

Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it’d be productive for the Justice Department — governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists. You know, when I was in Illinois I passed racial profiling legislation. And it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing.

And initially, the police departments across the state were resistant, but actually they came to recognize that if it was done in a fair, straightforward way, that it would allow them to do their jobs better and communities would have more confidence in them and in turn be more helpful in applying the law. And obviously law enforcement’s got a very tough job.

So that’s one area where I think there are a lot of resources and best practices that could be brought bear if state and local governments are receptive. And I think a lot of them would be. And — and let’s figure out other ways for us to push out that kind of training.

Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations. I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.


Given that neither racial profiling nor Stand Your Ground laws were implicated in the Zimmerman case, this is Obama's way hoodwinking blacks into believing that he and the rest of the racial grievance industry are standing up for them.  And therein lies the true irony of the racial grievance industry.  The demands of Obama will, if pushed forward, have their most clear and negative impact on one identifiable racial group - blacks.  The racial profiling laws would make another Chicago of New York City.  Taking away Stand Your Ground laws would most hurt the black population, those most subject to violence and those most likely to rely on Stand Your Ground in defense.  That pales in comparison, though, to the fact that while more black teens will murdered and more blacks put in jail for defending themselves, at least more money will flow into the coffers of the NAACP and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus will have a better chance of reelection. It's obscene  


Number three — and this is a long-term project: We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?


This is the only redeeming part of Obama's remarks.  It is the thousand dollar question.  It is unfortunate that Obama only gets to it after reinforcing all of the canards of the racial grievance industry.  And because of that, it is why nothing will happen under Obama's watch to change the dynamic in the black community.  That is the real tragedy of what will be President Obama's legacy.


You know, I’m not naive about the prospects of some brand-new federal program.  I’m not sure that that’s what we’re talking about here. But I do recognize that as president, I’ve got some convening power.

And there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that — and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed — you know, I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was obviously a tragic situation. And we’re going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.

And then finally, I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. You know, there have been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.

On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s a possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

And let me just leave you with — with a final thought, that as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. I doesn’t mean that we’re in a postracial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are. They’re better than we were on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.

And so, you know, we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues, and those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days I think have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long, difficult journey, you know, we’re becoming a more perfect union — not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.

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Stand Your Ground: Holder's Pandering And The Reality Of The Black Community

Eric Holder's latest paen to the vociferous racial grievance industry is to suggest that Stand Your Ground laws play an unfair role in violence against blacks. As I said the moment Holder made the claim, the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus will eat this up. It will give many in their constituency the illusion that their leaders are taking a firm stand against something implicated in imaginary rampant white racism. Of much greater import, I opined that those who would be most hurt by removing Stand Your Ground laws would of necessity be blacks - that group of people far more likely to suffer violent crime, and indeed, to suffer it from other blacks. And lo and behold, this from the Daily Caller:

African Americans benefit from Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law at a rate far out of proportion to their presence in the state’s population, despite an assertion by Attorney General Eric Holder that repealing “Stand Your Ground” would help African Americans.

Black Floridians have made about a third of the state’s total “Stand Your Ground” claims in homicide cases, a rate nearly double the black percentage of Florida’s population. The majority of those claims have been successful, a success rate that exceeds that for Florida whites. . . .

But approximately one third of Florida “Stand Your Ground” claims in fatal cases have been made by black defendants, and they have used the defense successfully 55 percent of the time, at the same rate as the population at large and at a higher rate than white defendants, according to a Daily Caller analysis of a database maintained by the Tampa Bay Times. Additionally, the majority of victims in Florida “Stand Your Ground” cases have been white.

African Americans used “Stand Your Ground” defenses at nearly twice the rate of their presence in the Florida population, which was listed at 16.6 percent in 2012.

So Hodler takes a law to task as racist that actually protects law abiding blacks most of all. What a nightmare.

There are several inexcusable obscenities in American society. One is the endless cycle of poverty, single parent homes, criminality and poor education effecting a large strata of black society. Another is the racial grievance industry that does NOTHING beyond paying lip service to these conditions. It paints a picture of America still in 1950's Selma with the deeply racist Bull Connor Democrats still in control. I truly hope that there is a special place in hell for the leaders of the racial grievance industry. They are causing untold harm to our nation and, even worse, they are devastating to black culture and society.

Related: Speak of the devil, I just now saw this from The Hill:

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are readying a flurry of bills in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal on charges in last year’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin.

The lawmakers are drafting proposals intended to rein in racial profiling; scrap state stand-your-ground laws; and promote better training for the nation’s neighborhood watch volunteers, among other anti-violence measures. CBC members had remained largely silent throughout the trial, but following the verdict, argued forcefully that, decades after the civil rights movement, the nation’s criminal justice system still discriminates against blacks and other minorities.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), an icon of the civil rights era, said the decision “seems to justify the stalking and killing of innocent black boys and deny them any avenue of self-defense.” Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), head of the CBC, decried “the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color.”

“George Zimmerman targeted Trayvon Martin as a potential criminal because Trayvon Martin is black,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told MSNBC Monday.

“Anyone who denies that racism isn’t alive today, particularly in the so-called justice system, is exceedingly delusional,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who wore a hoodie on the House floor last year in a demonstration.

“This verdict points to the reality that there are far too many walking America’s streets wearing a hoodie, carrying snacks and soft drink, which can result in a ‘death sentence’ particularly if they are young, black and male.”

Leading the legislative charge is Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a CBC member, who for years has pushed legislation to curtail racial profiling in the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

Conyers’s proposal is still being crafted, but past iterations have barred any law enforcement agent from targeting people based solely on race, gender or religion. It would also mandate race-sensitive training as a condition of receiving federal funding and require the Justice Department to provide Congress with periodic reports detailing discriminatory profiling practices.

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), a CBC member who represents the district where Martin lived, said problems would persist until Congress acts.

“Until we pass meaningful laws against profiling, Americans will continue to be singled out and arrested for driving while black, shopping while black, walking while black and just plain being black,” said Wilson, who’s also working on the racial profiling bill. “My own children, and nearly all of the young men I know, have been stopped by the police at least once, for no apparent reason.”

Right - because laws against profiling will help blacks every bit as much as repeal of stand your ground laws. Compare and contrast the black murder capital of America, Chicago, a place more deadly than for Americans than Afghanistan and a place that studiously does not "profile," with, and I hate to say it, but Nanny Bloomberg's New York City. Under Bloomberg, NYC has instituted a highly aggressive stop and frisk program - something that clearly falls in the CBC's definition of profiling. That program has had a tremendously positive impact on crime in NYC, to the benefit of all but, particularly, to blacks and hispanics. This from NPR:

Closing arguments are set to take place Monday in the federal class action trial involving New York City's stop-and-frisk policy. The trial has been going on for two months in Manhattan.

Plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York claim the New York Police Department, its supervisors and its union pressured police officers to stop, question and frisk hundreds of thousands of people each year, even establishing quotas. They argue that 88 percent of the stops involved blacks and Hispanics, mostly men, and were in fact a form of racial profiling.

The police and the city argued that these policies were goals, not quotas, and have made New York the safest big city in America.

"I can't imagine any rational person saying that the techniques are not working and that we should stop them," says Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The city also argued that these stops took place in high crime areas where the crime was often black on black or Hispanic on Hispanic. As NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told public radio station WNYC: "Ninety-six percent of the shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic. Crime is down in this city in the last two decades 80 percent."

So the CBC and Eric Holder want to ritually sacrifice George Zimmerman, they want to repeal all stand your ground laws, and they want to end "racial profiling." Not a single one of those actions will help, in any way, the black population of our nation. To the contrary, each in their own way will do significant damage to the black population - including the sacrifice of the racially innocent George Zimmerman. But all will help the racial grievance industry to gather money and stay in power. Bastards. Absolutely worthless bastards.

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The Racial Grievance Industry & A Juxtaposition Of Three Cases - Zimmerman, Scott & Spooner

What do George Zimmerman, Roderick Scott and John Henry Spooner have in common? All three are men who shot and killed boys who were below the age of 17 and of a different race.

Zimmerman of course shot Trayvon Martin, black, during a brutal attack that left him bloody. The penultimate issue for the jury was whether Zimmerman was under a "reasonable" belief that he faced a threat of imminent bodily harm. That the jury did so has caused the racial grievance industry in the U.S. to go into overdrive.

John Henry Spooner is a an elderly white man in Millwauke who shot and killed an unarmed 13 year old black boy - and his neighbor - outside of the boy's home because he suspected that the boy had stolen some of his guns. He goes to trial tomorrow. There is no claim of self defense. It appears from the few facts known that this was murder, pure and simple.

Roderick Scott is a black man in Rochester, New York who came upon three 16 year old white boys whom he believed (or observed, not quite sure) were stealing from cars in the area. Brandishing a gun, he ordered them to stay in place until the police arrived. According to Scott, one of the boys charged him, saying that he was going to "get" Scott. Before the boy so much as touched Scott, he lay dead of a gunshot that Scott claimed he fired in self defense. Unlike Trayvon Martin, the person Scott shot had no history of any troubled past. Like Trayvon Martin, the boy's parents are inconsolable, believing their innocent son was murdered. Scott was acquitted of manslaughter charges yesterday following a jury trial.

Now, I admit, I only know about the facts of Spooner and Scott cases from news stories, not from the jury trials, so the thumbnail sketches that I have given above do not tell the whole story, and indeed, could well be biased. That said, let's assume the stories are accurate. Which of these two cases would you think would be national news and why?

Zimmerman did, of course, but the other one is, it may surprise you, the Spooner case, which is being billed by Yahoo News at least as "a case that bears some striking similarities to George Zimmerman's." No, there are virtually no similarities between the Zimmerman and Spooner cases. But the Zimmerman and Scott cases are indeed photo negative similar. Both were within the bounds of reasonable questions of fact on manslaughter and self defense - and both have been answered by a jury. These cases are indeed strikingly similar.

Yet you likely won't hear a single person on the left who knows of the Scott case. You will not hear of it on the national news. The Rev. Al will never mention it. And rest assured that the NAACP will not be making it their raison d'etre to insure that Scott is punished under federal civil rights laws. There will likely not be death threats against Mr. Scott, nor will he have to spend the rest of his life being hunted by the members of the racial grievance industry. And indeed, the Scott case is strictly making it to the local news - it appears nowhere on Yahoo news, ABC, CBS, NBC, or even for that matter, MSNBC.

There is probably no greater proof of how the racial grievance industry is manipulating blacks and this nation than the treatment of these three cases.

And there are others. Former representative and army officer Allen West - a man who believes that Zimmerman should have been given a trial, but solely for manslaughter - in fact points out that the Zimmerman case is no longer about justice. It is only about power and money for the racial grievance industry. Where is, he asks, the NAACP in respect to outrageous black on white violence, or for that matter, the statistically significant problem of black on black violence?



Where are they indeed.

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Economics & Race, Tragedy & Travesty

A juxtaposition of three stories tells a lot about the state of our nation. Our economy is fragile. Our GDP declined in the 4th Quarter and our economy is facing yet more headwinds in the future. The sector hurt the worst by Obama are his most loyal constituents - blacks. And lastly, is California a cautionary tale for the rest of the U.S., or is it a blueprint for our future.

Our nation's economy actually contracted .1% during the fourth quarter of last year according to the preliminary report issued by the Commerce Dept. Hot Air does a good analysis of the numbers. This may well be anomalous, associated with a quarterly drop in government spending and the reduction in inventories, but it still shows just how fragile our economy is going into Obama's second term. Tthat despite four years of massively increased government spending and historically low interest rates. And on the horizon are tax increases already passed that will punish the job creators and hurt capital formation. There are all the taxes and expenses associated with Obamacare that will begin kicking in as 2014 approaches. And then of course there is the tsunami of new regulations expected in Obama's second term. A portion of that tsunami will be new EPA regulations further expanding Obama's war on energy sector, something Obama all but promised during his second inaugural speech. The best case scenario is four years of very sluggish growth and little if any job creation.

The second story, via Gateway Pundit, is NAACP President Ben Jealous who, while appearing on Meet The Press last Sunday, made the admission that blacks are doing "far worse" under Obama. This should come as a surprise to no one. Blacks are loyal to Obama and the left, but that loyalty is a one way street. Blacks identify with Obama as black. The true irony is that they don't realize that his skin color is, well, only skin deep. It is meaningless to his identity as a highly ideological leftist. And with that as his motivating force, blacks run a distant second to moneyed interests - i.e, public sector unions - and pathways to greater power - i.e., the green agenda.

Lastly, there is a wholly depressing column from V.D. Hanson at PJM, wherein he gives a eulogy for his state, California, a state sinking under decades of left wing political experimentation that are driving out the productive middle class in droves. In assessing the cause, he writes:

California has changed not due to race but due to culture, most prominently because the recent generation of immigrants from Latin America did not — as in the past, for the most part — come legally in manageable numbers and integrate under the host’s assimilationist paradigm. Instead, in the last three decades huge arrivals of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America saw Democrats as the party of multiculturalism, separatism, entitlements, open borders, non-enforcement of immigration laws, and eventually plentiful state employment.

Given the numbers, the multicultural paradigm of the salad bowl that focused on “diversity” rather than unity, and the massive new government assistance, how could the old American tonic of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration keep up with the new influxes? It could not.

These three stories demonstrate the insanity that is America's politics today. Obama proved in his first four years that he wasn't qualified to run a lemonade stand, yet he gets reelected. Over 90% of blacks, the people who have as a group suffered the most under Obama, nonetheless pull the lever for him. The left wins the Hispanic vote by campaigning against the values and economics that made our country great. It is a devil's pact destined by simple math to end very badly. And yet, the left is the dominant force in politics today.

Just as V. D. Hanson sees the future as exceedingly bleak for his state, I see the future exceedingly bleak for our nation. I cannot see our economy recovering. And until Conservatives are able to break the left's stranglehold on black and Hispanic voters, there is simply no way we are going to win a large enough majority to change our nation's economic and cultural trajectory. Given objective reality, we should be able to do this on the basis of conservative principles, but I don't see anyone on the right making a serious attempt to do so. It is both tragedy and travesty.

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Blood On Their Hands

Imagine if the KKK were acceptable in polite company. Imagine if the KKK made regular appearances on your television, compliments of a press that viewed them uncritically. Imagine if cable carried KKK-TV. Imagine if the message of the KKK was repeated daily to the people of America. What if there were KKK studies at every major university where their message of racism was taught, contemplated, and made the subject of acceptable academic discourse. Do you think that white racism would be endemic today? Of course.

So what would happen if the roles were reversed?

Well, in fact, they are.

The NAACP calls the Tea Party racist. The Congressional Black Caucus claims to have been subject to repeated acts of racism in March by the Tea Party - something that even the NYT now acknowledges is false. Rev. Jeremiah Wright preaches Black Liberation Theology, an ideology premised on the belief that whites are the enemy and racism in America is pervaisive. When the worst act of violence on our soil hit home on 9-11, Wright called the violence justified as "America's chickens coming home to roost." Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, has been even more vociferous than Wright in pushing these same canards. Indeed, he preaches a degree of racism and vitriol every bit as toxic as that of the KKK. The Nation of Islam is also a major player in prison ministries. Then there is King Samir Shabazz, the leader of the New Black Panther Party, who, when he isn't trying to intimidate voters at Phillidelphia polling stations is advocating the murder of "cracker babies."

In academia, some of the most brilliant black minds teach Critical Race Theory, a belief system that racism is eternal and pervaisive. Others teach that all white Americans alive today are responsible for slavery and oppression that occurred before they were even born. These same academics teach that whites owe the black community penance for their sins in the form of reparations.

Jesse Jackson, a man who makes his millions throwing the race card with wild abandon, wants a new "black national anthem." Al Sharpton, well, he's a class unto himself. If you have not read the bloody history of this race baiter, do see this now decade old column by Katherine Jean Lopez. (H/T Soccer Dad)

The bottom line, what appears to be at least a substantial minority of blacks are taught to view the world through an entirely racial lens. If something happens that they do not like, than it must be racism. It promotes a lack of personal responsibility, mis-placed anger, simmering hatred and a deep-seated sense of grievance. It is toxic.

At best, this leads to massive and daily distortions in our society. At worst, predictably, it leads to violence. Though the reality of racial grievance as a motivating factor in black violence is studiously ignored by the press, it has shown up in some very high profile cases. The first time I noticed it was in the Virginia sniper case. No one seem concerned that it was The Nation of Islam that inspired the snipers John Muhammed and Lee Malvo. No MSM outlet that I am aware of paid any serious attention to the role of the toxic teaching of the Louis Farrakhan in that incident, though it certainly was not hidden in the testimony at trial. This from a local NBC affiliate reporting on the trial in 2006:

Muhammad trained Malvo in weapons, kept him on a rigorous diet that allowed only one meal each day, and introduced him to the teachings of the Nation of Islam, Malvo said. Muhammad hated America and thought white people were "the devil." . . .

Recently, in Knoxville during one of the trials for the subhuman acts of rape, torture and murder of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian, two white UT students, perpetrated by a gang of four black men, one of the witnesses testified that one of the defendants was "Muslim and hated white people." Whether that hatred was a motivating factor in this crime - a crime itself studiously ignored by the MSM - I do not know. But it would seem likely based on the above testimony.

And now today, there is the following on the motivations of the black man who, the other day, killed eight people where he worked until being terminated for theft:

A black man who went on a shooting rampage at a beer distributor calmly told a 911 operator that it was "a racist place" and that he "handled the problem" but wished he had shot more people.

Omar Thornton called 911 after shooting 10 co-workers - eight fatally - on Tuesday morning at Hartford Distributors Inc. He introduced himself as "the shooter over in Manchester" and said he was hiding in the building, but he would not say where.

"You probably want to know the reason why I shot this place up," he said, his voice steady. "This place is a racist place. They're treating me bad over here. And treat all other black employees bad over here, too. So I took it to my own hands and handled the problem. I wish I could have got more of the people."

Connecticut State Police released the audio of the four-minute 911 call on Thursday, the day company and union officials rebutted suggestions that the company had ignored Thornton's complaints of racism.

Thornton, 34, went on his rampage moments after he was forced to resign when confronted with video evidence that he had been stealing and reselling beer.

The 911 call confirmed suggestions from his relatives and girlfriend that he believed he was avenging racist treatment in the workplace.

Hartford Distributors president Ross Hollander said there was no record to support claims of "racial insensitivity" made through the company's anti-harassment policy, the union grievance process or state and federal agencies.

"Nonetheless, these ugly allegations have been raised and the company will cooperate with any investigation," Hollander said.

The union said 14 of 69 dock workers, or 20 percent, were racial minorities - four black, nine Hispanic, one Asian.

The idea that Thornton's motive may not have been retaliation for losing his job has not sat well with many of the people who knew the victims and have firsthand knowledge of the environment inside the enormous distribution center in Manchester.

"Everybody just thinks this race card is such a wrong thing," said Michael Cirigliano, whose slain brother, Bryan, was Thornton's union representative at the disciplinary meeting and the president of the local union.

Michael Cirigliano also spent three decades working at the warehouse before he retired two years ago.

"The Hispanics and the blacks were telling me they've never seen anything they're accusing the company of in the bathrooms or anywhere else at HDI," he said. "It's never been separated white, black, Asian. It's never been like that."

He said the company had increased its hiring of minorities in recent years.

"They've been bringing in more and more minority people to fill the positions," Cirigliano said. "You could almost go as far as that's reverse discrimination. They were hiring the groups to balance the workplace, because that's what we are in America, there's a balance."

Anthony Napolitano, the son-in-law of victim Victor James, 60, of Windsor, said James treated everyone equally, regardless of race or religion.

Truck driver David Zylberman, a 34-year employee of the company, said that the racism claims "pissed me off because they were good people."

Thornton's ex-girlfriend, Jessica Anne Brocuglio, told The Associated Press on Thursday that he had a history of racial problems with co-workers at other jobs and believed he was denied pay raises because of his race. . . .

Nine people dead because of a black man who saw everything bad that happened to him through the prism of race. That act, like the Virginia snipers and possibly the Newsom-Christian murders noted above, are the extreme but wholly foreseeable results of those who preach racism as their meal ticket.

So this is where I think we are . . .

It is long past time that we on the right start demanding an end to the hatred and reverse racism that pervades and is accepted by so many on the left.

It is long past time for we on the right to stop accepting uncritically the teaching of Critical Race theory and similar canards in our colleges and universities.

It is long past time that we allow people like Rev. Wright and Louis Farrakhan to exist in America without demanding that everyone, blacks and whites alike, denounce them utterly and fully to the point that they are not tolerated on the left or the right.

It is long past time for the MSM be held to account for reporting unsubstantiated claims of racism.

And, I think, it is now time for an end to affirmative action and the use of disparate impact to persecute companies and people for racism where none actually exists.

Bernard Chapin wrote a few days ago, "racial blindness is a conservative thing." It is true. But it is not enough. Conservatives need to demand equality for minorities and condemn racism whenever and whereever it is found. But equally, it is time to vociferously demand the same from the press and from minorities. The current situation is untennable and immoral.

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Dean Throws A Boomerang Race Card - Politico Sees Only Half Of It

Go to 2:54 in the clip, when Howard Dean accuses Fox News of being "absolutely racist," then has to backtrack as Chris Wallace points out an absolute defense - that Fox News Channel never even mentioned Shirly Sherrod's name before she was fired by the Dept. of Agriculture and denounced by the NAACP.



I would say that is pretty embarrassing for Howard Dean. But you would not get that impression from reading about the above exchange in The Politico which plays up Dean's charges and his inane backtracking.

All of this should be viewed in the context of the sudden decline in power of the race card and the left's utter terror that their entire power base will crumble when the race card is fully overdrawn. Please see my post on this issue here. What we are seeing are the first tremors in what will eventually be a seismic shift in American politics.

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State of Racial America

Columnist Dennis Prager has written an exceptional essay at NRO on the state of racism and race relations in America today. This from Mr. Prager:

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, every prominent conservative I know was unhappy that a left-wing Democrat had been elected but very happy that a black American had won. Among conservatives, the general thinking was that it was good for America, good for blacks, and good for the world to see that America, so often (and in the conservative view unfairly) criticized as racist, could elect a black man as president.

True enough, with the caveat that it was obvious prior to the election that, Obama's promise to lead America into an era of post-racial politics was tripe. Everything in Obama's background, from his 20 year association with vile racist, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to his role in law suits to enforce racial quotas in lending suggested otherwise.

For decades, the conservative position has been that the Left’s criticism of America as a racist country — one with “systemic” racism — was a calumny. We conservatives did not merely believe, we knew that America had become the least racist country in the world. That is why, among many other indicators, more blacks have emigrated from Africa to America than came here as slaves (New York Times, February 21, 2005). Apparently, these Africans did not believe the lie about America’s racism. They came here for liberty and opportunity and got both.

When it came to the likely consequences of the election of a black president, conservatives — including this one — were fooled. The election of a black president of the United States has evidently had no impact on the use of the lie about American racism. Just as the American people’s adoration of a black woman, Oprah Winfrey, and the appointment of two blacks — including a black woman — by a Republican president as secretary of state had no impact, so too the election of Barack Obama has had no impact.

If Mr. Prager was fooled, it was the triumph of his hope over objective reality. For more than four decades, the entire raison d'etre of the far left has been to place people in victim classes, demand special treatment, and to claim that every attack on their politics is some sort of illegitimate attack on whatever particular victim class. The flip side of that is the left's zero tolerance for any would be member of a victim class who refuses to toe the far left party line. This has nothing to do with actual racism or sexism and everything to do with political power. Thus, there is nothing that America could do, including the election of a black female lesbian transgendered disabled illegal alien president, that would convince the left to give up its politics of victimhood. They have lived by it. They will die by it. The facts do not matter.

Virtually every liberal commentator who has written or spoken on this issue has described political opposition to Obama — and not only that of the tea parties — as racist.

Now, the NAACP has demanded that the tea parties cleanse themselves of the racist elements in their midst. . . .

One year and eight months after the president’s election, one can say with certitude that the election of a black has done nothing to change the dominant story (because the Left dominates our stories) about American racism. It is as central to the liberal/left depiction of America now as it has been since the civil-rights era.

But there is one very big difference. The vast majority of non-blacks no longer cower before the charge of racism. You can see it in the anger and ferocity of various tea parties’ responses to the false accusation of the NAACP. Before the election of Barack Obama, an NAACP attack on one’s anti-racist credentials might have been debilitating. No more. . . .

That is not just a big difference, it is the unequivocal beginning of a titanic shift in American politics. When the cries of "racism" or "sexism" no longer operate to shut down debate or delegitimize an opponent, the far left will lose virtually its entire power base - and its deeply distorting hold on America's political discourse.

The charge of racism leveled by liberal organizations, whether black or white, is now regarded as the politically motivated falsehood that it is. It is rightly seen, along with its six siblings — sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, bigotry, homophobia, and Islamophobia — as the Left’s way of avoiding argument by demeaning its opponents.

People who are labeled something they know they are not — and conservatives know they are not racist — snap at a certain point. One day the charge loses all its moral power. That happened this past year as a result of the liberal attacks on conservative opposition to President Obama as racially based. Every conservative knows that opposition to the Democratic agenda has nothing to do with the president’s color. Does any liberal honestly believe that if Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid were president and pursued the same leftist agenda Barack Obama has, there would be less conservative opposition because Pelosi and Reid are white?

So, something good has come of this: the de-fanging of the “racist” label. It no longer intimidates conservatives as it once did.

But there remains a major downside. To the extent that black Americans still believe that America is racist, or even merely that conservatives are racist, they pay a terrible price. Nothing is more debilitating than to regard oneself as a victim when one is not.

For that reason, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People not only fails to advance colored people, it inhibits them. And one day most black Americans will know this.

We hoped that day would be Election Day 2008. Many Americans believed that the fact that a black man was elected president — and the fact that among 300 million people there was virtually no identifiable negative reaction to America’s having a black president — would finally prove that this country is essentially race-blind.

But that apparently did not happen.

Therefore, if the NAACP’s preoccupation with white racism reflects the thinking of most or even many blacks, it means that there is nothing white America can do to undo the ongoing perception of endemic racism in this country — a perception that is now considerably more destructive to blacks than to American society as a whole.

Unfortunately Mr. Prager's assessment is spot on. The most ill served by the far left's victim politics are the victims themselves.

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The National Association For The Advancement of Some Colored People

The NAACP, once a great organization that pursued equality before the law and an end to racism, is today a corrupt organizaiton that embraces racism and reverse racism as a tool for political power. And if you happen to be black but don't embrace your status as a victim, the NAACP may well be your enemy.

Several months ago, at a Town Hall, Kenneth Gladney, a conservative black, was beaten up and subject to racial slurs by SEIU thugs. Now the NAACP has weighed in with a rally . . . wait for it . . . on the side of the SEIU thugs. Coming on the heels of the NAACP's praise for Robert "KKK" Byrd, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. But it is firm evidence of the NAACP's utter corruption. Gateway Pundit has the story - and the video.

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Reverse Racism and the Politics of Obama

To promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for the children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.

Mission Statement, Charter of the National Association For The Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1911

. . . I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." . . .

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . .

Martin Luther King, Jr, Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, 28 August 1963

What has happened to so thoroughly corrupt the "civil rights" movement in America. Once it was a noble and laudable struggle for equality. Today, at best, it is nothing more than a naked political tool of the left, to be trotted out as a means of destroying the credibility of the left's opponents. It has nothing to do with achieving equality. It has everything to do with political power and money.

Exhibit 1 - on Tuesday, in a nakedly political move, the NAACP's Board of Directors perpetrated an atrocious libel, voting to condemn the Tea Party for "tolerating racism."

The resolution initially said the NAACP would "repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties" and stand against the movement's attempt to "push our country back to the pre-civil rights era," though the wording was amended to downplay criticism of all Tea Partiers while asking them to repudiate bigots in their own ranks.

"We take no issue with the Tea Party movement. We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy," the NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a written statement announcing the unanimous vote. "What we take issue with is the Tea Party's continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements.

"The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no place for racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in their movement."

NAACP leaders have referenced an incident in March when Tea Party protesters allegedly hurled racial epithets at black lawmakers on Capitol Hill ahead of a health care vote.

The "March incident" refers to when members of the Black Caucus went out into the crowd of Tea Party protesters seeking to solicit any hint of racism. Later that day, several of the members of the Black Caucus claimed to have heard numerous racial slurs hurled at them. They had Jesse Jackson Jr. walking behind them recording their march through the protests. Virtually every broadcast news network and a great many individuals were also recording. Yet not a single bit of evidence has been produced to substantiate their claim. In other words, Rep. Clyburn and every other member of the Black Caucus seem, in fact, to be engaging in slander of grotesque proportions.



None of that has stopped the left from using the "March incident" to tag the Tea Party with racism, and equally outrageous, none of it has stopped the left wing MSM from playing right along. ABC hyped these scurrilous charges, as did the AP, in their reporting of the NAACP's vote to tag the Tea Party with racism.

Elsewhere in just the past week, we were treated to Jesse Jackson twisting Cleavland Cavaliers owner's statement of displeasure at the lack of loyalty of Lebron James into the most vile of racist charges. Most people merely shrugged. It was just Jesse being Jesse.

Then we have one of more odious individuals on the planet, Louis Farakhan, a man who preaches hatred and racism with every move of his tongue, demanding reparations from "the Jews" for the their history of racism and their role in enslaving the blacks. It actually makes a nice circle to this post to point out that the founders of the NAACP were three white people, and one of those three was in fact Jewish - Henry Moscowitz. Historically, Jews were deeply involved in the efforts to achieve racial equality for blacks. It is estimated that "50 percent of the civil rights attorneys in the South during the 1960s were Jews, as were over 50 percent of the Whites who went to Mississippi in 1964 to challenge Jim Crow Laws." None of that of course makes a dent in the wall of ignorance and reverse racism that oozes from the pours of Farrakhan. Nor does it matter to Farakhan that the worst of the worst when it came to the slave traders have been Muslims - and that includes the enslavement of blacks. It should also be noted that the high minded NAACP, while asking the Tea Party to denounce anti-Semitism in their ranks (is their any), is wholly ignoring the single most virulent font of anti-semitism in the U.S. today - Louis Farakhan.

Then there is Obama, a President deeply, if not overtly, involved in the politics of race. Instead of trying to "heal the racial divide," Obama has injected racism ever more into the laws and the national dialogue. What does it say when the First Lady, Michelle Obama, speaks at the NAACP Convention the day before they vote to tag the Tea Party as racists. What does it say when Obama chides the police for arresting Henry Louis Gates, himself a race baiter of the first order, when Gates refused to cooperate with police conducting a lawful search.

Then there are Obama's legislative proposals. Obama's proposed new financial regulations do not merely continue the race based social engineering into lending standards that brought us to financial ruin, they actually expand that engineering. Further those same regulations establish de facto hiring quotas for minorities and women throughout the financial industry.

All of that is vast racial overreach by Obama. But then there is racial corruption at DOJ. Crediting the testimony of whistleblower J. Christian Adams, the DOJ is no longer accepting voting rights cases in which the defendant is black, they are refusing to enforce the law requiring states to scrub their voting rolls, thus suborning vote fraud, and they have lied to Congress about the decision to drop the civil prosecution of the New Black Panthers. And as outrageous as all of that is, it is perhaps dwarfed by the decision of the Holder DOJ to refuse to answer lawful subpoenas from the Office of Civil Rights seeking to investigate these charges.

And on a final note, there is the ultimate betrayal - the fact that virtually all of the "black leadership," in pushing their vile reverse racism, are doing precious little to actually improve the plight of that significant minority of blacks still mired in the poverty and violence of inner cities. These race hustlers preach and push everything through the lens of racism to accrete power and wealth. They would keep all blacks focused on America circa 1859 for the same reason. They don't preach advancement, they preach balkanization. Merely juxtapose two relatively recent bits of news to demonstrate this reality.

The first bit - the death of former KKK member Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd was never a believer in equality of man. As the Daily Caller points out, he did not merely vote against both the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he filibustered the latter for three months. "In 1997, he voted against a voucher program for D.C.; when the program passed almost a decade later despite his objections, it ended up helping African-American students in ways that the District’s failed public schools could not." Yet upon his death, this same man was feted by the NAACP.

Juxtapose against that the utter travesty of Obama and the left's handling of the school voucher program in DC. By all accounts, the DC voucher program was a huge success, offering hope to numerous inner city students whose public school system was the worst in the nation. Within months of his coronation, Obama shut the program down. Why he did so is not a mystery. On the one hand were blacks mired in poverty who were benefiting significantly from a program. Weighed against their plight was a teachers union flush with money taken involuntarily from all teachers and who did not want to see the voucher program continue. It was no contest. So where was the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and the Congressional Black Caucus when Obama decided to end the DC Voucher Program?

And to it all, a corrupt media yawns, imposing on America the most outrageous of double standards. Where people should be hounded out of office and the public square for their vile reverse racism, for their gross hypocrisy, they instead given a pass by the media and feted by the left. It is perverse and grossly unfair. Most of America supported the call for equality of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the NAACP, else it would not have happened. There can be no doubt whatsoever that most of America fully supports the notion of equality today. But what the NAACP, the "black leaders," and the far left in Washington are seeking today has absolutely nothing to do with racial equality. And tagging Middle America as racist - not the brightest of moves. I said two years ago that electing Obama would set back race relations in America by decades, because it was clear from his history that his claim that he would "heal the racial divide" was purely false. His entire history pointed in the opposite direction.

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Standing At The Crossroads - Identity Politics, Multiculturalism & The Melting Pot (Updated & Bumped)

Note: An abbreviated portion of this post appears at MLK Day 2012: The Civil Rights Movement, The Left & The Legacy Of MLK

Liberal African American NYT columnist Bob Herbert recently had this to say in extolling the virtues of the left:

Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.

Mr. Herbert pretty much sums up what has been the far left / liberal / progressive line for decades. But then how to explain all the vicious, ad hominem and unhinged Palin-bashing coming from the left? To take it one further, how to reconcile that Palin-bashing with the left's acceptance of people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a part of their stable? It seems quite the conundrum unless one knows a bit of history and can identify the massive deceits. Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:

- The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

- The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) is the only living member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.

- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.

- "Bull" Connor was not a Republican.

- and finally, as an aside, Mr. Herbert does not name a single Republican - and I can find none from 1854 to the present - that has ever been drummed out of the Republican party for their opposition to civil rights. That charge is libelous. Could this be projection on his part? I ask since purges to insure ideological purity have occurred recently on the left.

Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.

Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, the raison d'etre of their wing. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. JFK, Truman and FDR would recognize precious little of today's Democratic Party.

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anamoly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert, quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.

For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades.

We are either a melting pot wherein "all men are created equal" - the ideal of our Founders for which we have long strived and are ever closer to succeeding - or we are to become a multicultural nation of pigeon-holed special interests. We are to become a nation where groups are encouraged to remain apart, defining themselves by their victim class before defining themselves as Americans. Multiculturalism is unworkable - we can see it destroying Europe and Britain - but that has not stopped the far left in America from their embrace of the concept. Nor has it slowed their efforts to weave multiculturalism irrevocably into the fabric of our society.

The far left has long pushed forward minorities and women to prove that they are the party of inclusiveness. On the right, the process has been slower. You had the percolation of minorities and women to major positions through the natural process of time and selection of the fittest. Only the most jaded would ever argue that Colin Powell and Condi Rice did not earn their positions solely on merit. And love her or hate her, Kristi Todd Whitman was both well qualified and a very good governor.

I have long been waiting for a self-made and accomplished woman or minority to rise to the very top in Republican politics. It is something that would intrinsically expose the incredibly damaging canard that the far left has pushed for near half a century. I had hoped Colin Powell would be that man a decade ago. As to Condi Rice, had things worked out differently for the Bush administration and had she not selected the Sec. of State slot (a killer for anyone with Pres. aspirations) I thought that perhaps she would have a good shot at running in 2008. I've been waiting for Thomas Sowell to run for any elected office for decades - and yes, I would consider him for beatification. These are people for whom neither their skin color nor their gender makes them a victim. These are people for whom what unites us in common as Americans is more important than what divides us into sub-groups. And these are people who earned their success by virtue of their excellence rather than the distortions of identity politics.

It is inevitable that one of the two concepts I earlier described - a melting pot of equals or a multicultural morass of victim groups - will gain ascendance in America. I have long felt that we are at a crossroads in our nation for precisely this reason, and that the ramifications of how we decide this issue will be existential.

On this blog, I congratulated Obama for achieving the status of the first African American nominee for President. I meant that sincerely, though I have also said before that he is the product of identity politics. He is the polar opposite of the post racial candidate he held himself out to be initially. It seems likely that the policies he would institute in America would represent the victory of multiculturalism - and indeed, Obama has explicitly stated his view of multiculturalism as the future of America. It would alter our nation fundamentally to create not simply a house divided, but a house with countless divides.

Will Sarah Palin represent the opposite choice? I think she does. As Victor Davis Hanson said of her:

Sarah Palin is the emblem of what feminism was supposed to be all about: an unafraid, independent, audacious woman, who soared on her own merits without the aid of a patriarchal jumpstart, high-brow matrimonial tutelage and capital, and old-boy liaisons and networking.

What we have seen in shrill reaction from the far left to Ms. Palin shines a giant spotlight on the far left's agenda. Their goal is not equality for women or any other minority, else the rise of Sarah Palin would be welcomed on its merits, irrespective of other political disagreements. There would be no need or attempt to delegitimize her. The frothing and vitriolic reaction of the far left shows their goal to actually be the maintenance of a permanent victim class that can be used by the far left to further their fundamantal goal of remaking society into a socialist utopia. Sarah Palin, by her very being, exposes the canard and is thus an existential danger to the far left.

All of that - the deception, the rewriting of history, the true agenda - is why Mr. Herbert can wax eloquent about the great civil rights victories of the modern left even as his compatriots set out to wholly destroy Sarah Palin. And all of that makes Sarah Palin's ascendance meaningful indeed. The rise of Obama and Hillary on the left have pushed us to the center of a crossroads on all of this, with the only option being of a turn in one direction or another. McCain's utterly brilliant selection of Gov. Palin as his running mate clarifies the issues completely and makes the choices stark. Because of that, my personal belief is that this election will have ramifications long beyond the next four years. A victory for Obama will go a long way to fundamentally reworking our society in the far left mold. A victory for McCain/Palin will mark a major step backwards from that abyss. It will be a truly major blow against the far left and their agenda for this country. There is much at stake indeed this November.

Photo at the top taken from Gateway Pundit.

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