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Posts Tagged ‘race’
January 16th, 2017 at 2:12 pm
Stat of the Day: Terrible Deterioration of Race Relations Under Obama
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In our Liberty Update commentary last week, we noted the many failures of Barack Obama as president over the past eight years.  Today, as the nation celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a Washington Post-ABC News survey shows just how disastrously race relations have declined under his watch:

In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 63 percent of Americans think race relations are ‘generally bad.’ Shortly after Obama took office, that number was 22 percent. In the same time period, those who think race relations are ‘generally good’ plummeted from 66 percent to 32 percent.”

Of his failures and disastrous legacy, this may be the most depressing.

May 9th, 2014 at 1:35 pm
Liberal Pundit Debunks Crist’s Make-Believe Racism Charge

By now you may have heard about Charlie Crist saying he left the Florida Republican Party because of racism.

The former Florida Republican Governor and one-time U.S. Senate candidate rationalized his switch to the Democratic Party this way: “I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president, I’ll just go there. I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing, it was intolerable to me.”

In reality, what really pushed Crist into the Democratic Party was a 40 point swing in his poll numbers relative to a Republican state representative named Marco Rubio.  In the 2010 GOP U.S. Senate primary, Rubio pummeled Crist with the latter’s liberal gubernatorial record. Crist’s anti-conservative tendencies included voting to increase state spending, appointing liberal justices to the state supreme court and vetoing legislation to link teacher pay to student test scores. All this and Crist still claimed in a debate with Rubio that, “I think we can both agree we’re both good conservatives.”

As liberal pundit Chris Cillizza explains, Crist’s party switch was driven by the failure of his actions to align with GOP orthodoxy, not racism. And lest we forget, Florida Republicans voted for the Hispanic Rubio over the Anglo Crist; hardly the result one would expect if racial considerations dominate GOP thinking.

Fundamentally, Crist is dogged by skepticism that he has any core principles worth fighting for. That, and not some imaginary racial bias, is what made Florida GOP voters reject his bid to go to Washington. Now that Crist is seeking his old job as governor under the Democratic label, Sunshine State liberals should be equally as suspicious of statements that seem to align with their ideology. As Crist has proven time and again, he’ll say anything to get elected.

August 30th, 2013 at 6:00 pm
The Hollywood Slander of Ronald Reagan
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Ronald Reagan may have been the only American president to emerge from Tinseltown (excepting the fact that Barack Obama is clearly a character created by Aaron Sorkin), but that hasn’t inspired any loyalty. The new movie, The Butler, is rife with mischaracterizations of racial progress in America (as ably pointed out by Richard Epstein for the Hoover Institution) — and it’s especially unkind to the Gipper. As Steve Hayward, Paul Kengor, Craig Shirley, and Kiron Skinner — Reagan biographers all — note in today’s Washington Post, Reagan demonstrated a lifetime’s worth of tolerance and enlightenment on racial issues.

One of the film’s larger errors is an implicit assertion that Reagan opposed economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa out of simple indifference to black suffering. But as his chroniclers note, the reality is much more complicated:

The unfairness of this scene can be demonstrated by any number of historical facts. In June 1981, still recovering from an assassination attempt, Reagan sent his closest foreign policy aide, William Clark, on his first official trip; it was to South Africa to express America’s disapproval. An unsmiling Clark told Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha to his face that the new president and administration “abhorred apartheid.” Clark walked out on Botha.

While accurate in depicting Reagan’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa, “The Butler” does not explain why he opposed them. Reagan saw sanctions as harmful to the poorest South Africans: millions of blacks living in dire poverty. He also feared that the apartheid regime could be replaced by a Marxist/totalitarian one allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba and that communism would spread throughout the continent. South Africa’s blacks were denied rights under apartheid, but communism would mean no freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, conscience, emigration, travel or even property for anyone. Moreover, in communist nations such as Cambodia and Ethi­o­pia, people had been slaughtered and starved on mass scales. Nearly a dozen nations had become part of the Soviet orbit in the immediate years before Reagan became president. He didn’t want South Africa to undergo the same catastrophe.

Reagan adopted a policy of “constructive engagement,” seeking to keep South Africa in the anti-Soviet faction while encouraging the country toward black-majority rule — no easy feat. In one of his finest speeches, he told the United Nations on Sept. 24, 1984, that it was “a moral imperative that South Africa’s racial policies evolve peacefully but decisively toward . . . justice, liberty and human dignity.” Among his administration’s successes was the Angola-Namibia agreement, which led to the withdrawal of the white South African regime from Namibia and paved the way for that nation’s independence.

Moral preening is always easiest when one bears no responsibility for the consequences. Statesmen weigh trade-offs. Ronald Reagan knew that. Thanks to the current situation in Syria, Barack Obama is about to get a master’s class on the topic.

July 18th, 2013 at 5:10 pm
The Wages of Liberalism
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This story would be slightly less depressing even if we hadn’t all seen it coming for years:

Detroit on Thursday became the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy, as the state-appointed emergency manager filed for Chapter 9 protection.

Kevyn Orr, a bankruptcy expert, was hired by the state in March to lead Detroit out of a fiscal free-fall and made the filing Thursday in federal bankruptcy court.

A number of factors — most notably steep population and tax base falls — have been blamed on Detroit’s tumble toward insolvency. Detroit lost a quarter-million residents between 2000 and 2010. A population that in the 1950s reached 1.8 million is struggling to stay above 700,000. Much of the middle-class and scores of businesses also have fled Detroit, taking their tax dollars with them.

This, of course, doesn’t take the analysis back quite far enough. The population and tax base are symptoms, not causes. Why did people actually leave? Well, there were local officials intent on driving out part of the population on racial grounds, the dominance of unions that ended up choking the auto industry, overwhelming crime rates, and a spate of corrupt politicians.

For decades now, Detroit has been a laboratory of liberalism. Today’s news only makes explicit what many of us concluded long ago: the experiment has failed.

November 28th, 2012 at 8:37 pm
More Thoughts on Partisan Polarization
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Ashton correctly notes below that the Democratic Party is incapable of discovering “diversity” anywhere other than in the melanin count or chromosomal pairings of its members, beyond which measures the party is remarkably homogeneous. I want to add one note to that, which plays into my longstanding irritation with the raw deal that African-Americans get from the Democratic Party.

While Debbie Wasserman-Schultz crows about the greater diversity in Democratic ranks, what goes unspoken is that the process by which minorities get elected to the House of Representatives actually thwarts their ability to move into higher office. Consider: in the outgoing Congress (the 112th), there are 44 black members, or just over 10 percent of the body. Blacks are 12.6 percent of the nation’s population, but there’s no iron-clad law by which we should expect them to achieve elected office in perfect proportion to their share of the population. Still, this is pretty close.

Now, how many black senators are there? 0

How many black governors? 1, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick

When you consider that the House often acts as a feeder to both of these higher offices, the discontinuity only gets stranger. So what’s the cause?

Of the 44 black House members, 26 (59 percent) come from congressional districts where the majority of the population is black (as a bit of a trivia on the side, it’s worth noting that there’s one district — the Tennessee 9th, located in Memphis — where a majority black population is represented by a white member, liberal Steve Cohen). An additional four come from districts where the black population is over 40 percent. And the representatives who come from districts with smaller black populations include some of the most left-wing members of the House, including Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Keith Ellison.

The problem is that Democrats have long agitated for lawmakers to gerrymander these minority-majority districts as a means to ensuring electoral success for black candidates. That’s worked so far as it goes, but it’s also generated a generation of black politicians who have no experience appealing to anyone other than their fellow urban blacks. Since that group represents a small population in statewide races (even in Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of African-American residents, blacks make up only a little over 1/3 of residents), these House members end up being precisely the wrong kind of figures to obtain higher office. Indeed, it’s notable that Governor Patrick and President Obama, the two most prominent black public-sector executives in the nation, never served in the House (Obama lost a bid for the Democratic nomination in the First District of Illinois in 2000).

The vast majority of Americans agree that we should be striving for a color-blind nation. We’ve made remarkably brisk progress towards that goal in civil society for the past several decades. But, if anything, we’re lagging behind on the political front. Segregating black politicians from non-black voters is not the solution.

September 1st, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Pasty White Wolffe Doesn’t Get It

MSNBC’s Richard Wolffe, a pasty white pale-skinned nothingburger if there ever were one, just doesn’t get it.  Like eleventy-umpteen squadrillion feeble-minded liberals before him, he seems to be so focused on President Barack Obama’s skin color that he thinks nobody else could possibly be motivated by anything other than a reaction to said skin color. The criticism of Obama’s nakedly transparent effort to upstage the Republican debate, said Wolffe, is nothing other than yet another example of how conservatives disrespect Obama just because he happens to be a shade darker — on some days — than John Boehner. Frankly, methinks Wolffe suffers from pigmentation envy. But no matter. As one who has repeatedly fought the good fight against white racists (oh, PLEASE, Mr. Wolffe, pretty please with sugar on top, challenge me on that one), I think I can safely say that the criticism of Obama would be the same even if Obama were a whiter shade of pale than the Procul Harum-inspired Mr. Wolffe himself.

Or has Mr. Wolffe not noticed that conservatives were equally critical of Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Dingy Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Frank Church, George McGovern, and Tom Hayden? Actually, he’s on to us: We know their secrets: Kennedy, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Church, McGovern and Hayden all are secret bearers of Negroid blood, which is why we oppose their politics. How did Wolffe figure out that we had figured out the Kennedy-Pelosi gang’s dark secret?!?

For the record, we are rather less than enamored of Mr. Obama not because he has African blood, but because he is arrogant, rude, self-absorbed, self-referential, condescending, leftist, Alinskyite, dishonest, incompetent, petty, peevish, unaccomplished, demagogic, and radical. He is the single worst president we’ve ever had, including Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan.

Let’s see Mr. Wolffe skip the light fandango and turn cartwheels across the floor about that list of Obama’s non-skin-related defects.

February 26th, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Texas Anglos Adjusting to Life as a Minority Group

With a Rice University demographic expert projecting that only 20 percent of the state’s public school enrollment being Anglo by 2040, the makeup of the Lone Star State’s population will be decidedly more Hispanic.

Reflecting on the fact that Anglos are already a minority in Texas (at 42% still the largest minority), a group at Texas State University, San Marcos announced a new scholarship offer for white males with at least a 3.0 GPA.  Says the group’s leader, “We’re not looking for blond-haired, blue-eyed, stereotypical white males.  My feeling is that if you can say you’re 25 percent Caucasian, you’re Caucasian enough for us.”

Welcome to a new America.