Shouting Racism, the Last Resort of Scoundrels

Obama Plays the Race Card

By Alan Caruba

I was frankly surprised when Barack Obama was elected President in 2008. I thought his self-identification as a black American would tip the scales to John McCain in a nation that has had a long history of racial enmity towards blacks.

None of this is new. Race was a factor in American life in pre-Revolutionary days and slavery had to be papered over even in the writing of the Constitution. It took a Civil War to get amendments to end slavery and ensure the rights of citizenship were extended to blacks. It took another hundred years to make it real.

It is apparent in hindsight that a sufficient number of white Americans wanted to show the world that America could elect a black man President.

Well, they have succeeded and a year and a half into his term, a lot of them are having some serious buyer’s remorse. In the words of Spike Lee’s film, they were trying to “do the right thing.” Many are beginning to sense the feeling is not reciprocated.

Obama has benefited from the robotic, ninety-plus percent support of blacks in the Democrat Party. Even so, there are signs of discontent, not just among whites, but among blacks particularly in light of the disproportionate numbers who are unemployed. The “Get Out of Jail” card blaming George W. Bush has expired.

I suspect that the Obama administration will be seen by historians as no less racially divisive than its predecessors.

Americans got an initial glimpse of this when Obama deemed the arrest of a black Harvard professor “stupid” in the wake of his resistance when police arrived to investigate what could have been a break-in. That incident required a photo op in which the police officer, Prof. Henry Lewis Gates, and the President sat down for a beer together.

The pot really began to boil with the appointment of Eric Holder as the Attorney General. In February 2009 he said America was “a nation of cowards” who would not address racial issues. A lot of Americans thought we had.

Having lived through the Civil Rights era of the 1960s I thought that odd because thousands of Americans, white and black had participated in sit-ins and marches to achieve the 1964 Civil Rights Act. All displayed courage. Some even gave their lives.

The latest incident, largely ignored by the news media is the treatment accorded the New Black Panther Party, two members of which were caught on video clearly trying to intimidate voters in Philadelphia. Let go locally with a mild slap on the wrist, if a white duo had engaged in similar behavior, it would have been big news as a voting rights infraction.

Eric Holder’s Department of Justice ignored prosecution at the federal level and a staff member resigned in protest. He was heard by the Civil Rights Commission offering some very damning testimony about bias within the DOJ suggesting blacks would receive different treatment than whites.

There are two black Republican candidates running for Congress, Tim Scott in South Carolina’s first district and Allen West who is challenging Rep. Ron Klein (D) in Florida’s 22nd Congressional district.

West has been sharply critical of the Obama administration for declining to prosecute the New Black Panther Party on voter tampering charges. “The die has been cast in this election cycle,” said West. “Democrats and their liberal progressive socialist allies will continue to play the race card when it is politically expedient.”

If either West or Scott is elected, they will be the first black GOP lawmaker since Rep. J.C. Watts (R-OK) who retired in 2003. It is surely lost on no one that Michael Steele is the visible voice and face of the Republican Party these days.

Having lived through a period of rioting in many U.S. cities that were ignited by racial grievances, I am hopeful that the recent riot in Oakland is not a precursor to more. A court judgment finding a white police officer guilty of involuntary manslaughter of a black man served as little more than an excuse for looting.

President Obama has just over 900 days to go in his present term in office. Putting aside racial issues, he is failing on most counts and so spectacularly that an entirely new political movement, the Tea Party, has arisen independent of both political parties. The response from the Left has been to falsely accuse its members of being racists.

The undercurrent of divisiveness is being seen, heard and felt throughout America. It is far less about race and far more about fears that unwanted legislation is being forced on all Americans, that solutions put forth to invigorate the economy have failed, and that the nation is being shamed and embarrassed by the actions of the President.

A lot of progress has been made by blacks in America, but the White House and the judicial branch of government could set back the clock for reasons that are mostly political, but that have a disquieting racial element.

On the blog, WakeUpBlackAmerica, a recent post said, “As a black male, it was beyond embarrassing watching blacks in South Central Los Angeles destroying their city over a two bit hood rat drunk (referring to Rodney King in 1992) who was beaten by the LAPD. Now I have to watch black men making fools out of themselves yet again over an incident that wasn't racist in nature.”

“Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't the election of Barack Obama supposed to have ushered in the era of ‘post racial harmony’ or something like that?” Good question.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Prelutsky: Dems Call GOP 'Racists" but....

"One of the great mysteries of life is how Democrats have managed to tar Republicans as America’s racists. I mean, unless I’m entirely mistaken about their party affiliation, FDR’s favorite Supreme Court liberal, Hugo Black, and that grand old man of the U.S. Senate, Democrat Robert Byrd, were proud members of the Ku Klux Klan.

George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Strom Thurmond and even Theophilus “Bull” Connor, all came to political prominence with a (D) after their name. What’s more, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The bill, by the way, had spent months bottled up in the Rules Committee, thanks to its chairman, Rep. Howard W. Smith (D). The fact of the matter is that the Democrats spent 83 days filibustering against its passage until Republican Senator Everett Dirksen used his power and prestige to get it enacted.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that the first three black men elected to the United States Senate, Hiram Revels; Blanche Bruce, who was the son of a slave; and Edward Brooke, were all Republicans."

To read Burt's complete commentary, click here

Why Some PhDs are Jerks

By Alan Caruba

I was talking with a friend about the latest hot topic involving Prof. Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department.

We both agreed that some of the stupidest people we have ever known were PhDs who too frequently turned out to be over-educated fools.

In this country, we have been taught to revere anyone with the title of doctor, starting with physicians and working our way through the maze of doctors of law, education, music, library science, and the long list of fields of a study that grant these degrees.

These days physicians leave medical school owing about $100,000 on the average and, if the president’s healthcare reform passes, they will never be able to pay it back no matter how long they are in practice. Having to pay $200,000 for insurance against malpractice every year has done more to drive up the cost of medical care than anything else.

I used to work for an institution of higher knowledge, a well-respected institute of technology and, while I came to respect the technical achievements of those pursuing engineering or architecture degrees, I also learned that many of those teaching these ancient skills and modern technologies often displayed all the personal failures of judgment and deportment of those far less educated than they.

The one thing one learns in a college or university is that the admiration which its faculty and deans feel toward themselves. It is their bulwark against the real world where people are actually growing, inventing, making, and selling things.

The problem, as my friend noted, is that PhDs may know a great deal about a particular thing, they are often totally out of their league when it comes to extrapolating that niche of knowledge to practical matters or the great issues of the world.

The recent passing of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for Lyndon B. Johnson is a case in point. A good and decent man, McNamara was a wunderkind of the Ford Motor Company who had previously taught at Harvard. He was one of “the best and the brightest” brought into government by John F. Kennedy.

The re-airing of a C-Span interview with him made clear that he went to his grave knowing that he, President Johnson, and his colleagues had been quite thoroughly wrong about expanding the Vietnam War beyond the provision of U.S. military advisors. One can be very gifted in an area of expertise, but that does not necessarily transfer to real world, real time situations.

Moving forward in time to the present, President Obama has surrounded himself with lots of PhDs and each one is just weirder than the next. Dr. John Holdren, his science advisor, once advocated putting stuff in the food supply that would reduce the fertility rate. His Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, is a Nobel Laureate who thinks painting all our roofs white will stave off global warming. His Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is hell bent on ensuring that not a drop of oil is sucked out of the vast U.S. reserves, nor a single new ton of coal if he has anything to say about it.

Barely a day goes by when one of these loons says something so stupid that you have cause to fear for the future of the republic.

The reason “Joe the Plumber” made all those headlines during the campaign was that he was not a PhD. He was a working man with a very useful skill and he was smart enough to know that Obama was a…how can I say this nicely? Someone not telling the truth and a Marxist.

Prof. Gates suffers from the hubris that goes with being a Harvard professor. He has made his reputation on the basis of his research about the Negro race in America. Any ghetto homeboy could have told him to be polite to the police officer, but Prof. Gates flew into a rage when asked to identify himself and continued to hurl the racism charge at a police officer who was immediately defended by his Black and Hispanic colleagues.

President Obama, despite saying he was unfamiliar with the details of the incident, could not resist visiting the theme of racial profiling. We are now decades passed the great achievements of the Civil Rights movement but the beat goes on.

America used to be a meritocracy. Now the nation is so heavily into “diversity” that we are dumbing down the standards for everyone from firemen to surgeons.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution when some PhD advises you on anything more complex than your digital camera. It is said that a little education can be a dangerous thing, but too much education can actually blind those chosen to lead the nation and teach its youth to the lessons of history and to plain old common sense.

Democrat Party Secrets Revealed

By Alan Caruba

The Democrat Party has made much of the fact that this year they had a woman candidate and a black candidate vying for the party’s nomination to be its candidate for President.

To some of us with long memories and who lived in the South as I did from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, the Jim Crow, segregated society that existed was a fact of life with all its indignities. Throughout the South the Democrat Party was the Party. You could find five possums faster than you could find five Republicans. It was a solid voting block that Democrat Presidents counted upon.

That’s why the preening of the Democrat Party over how much more sophisticated and egalitarian it is these days strikes me as a lot of posturing.

And that’s why Jeffrey Lord’s article in the current issue of The American Spectator
(http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13681) is so instructive. When the Democrats gather in Denver to congratulate themselves on selecting a black presidential candidate, they might also want to explain why the Democrat National Committee website has been sanitized to remove the following:

No reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery. There were 6 from 1840-1860.

No reference to the number of Democratic presidents who owned slaves. There were 7 from 1800-1861.

No reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation or were silent on the subject. There were 20 from 1868-1948.

No reference to “Jim Crow laws,” nor is there any reference to the role Democrats played in creating them. These laws segregated public schools, public transportation, restaurants, rest rooms and public places in general.

There is no reference to the fact Democrats’ opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses Grant. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public places and public accommodations.

There’s much more, but not only did the Democrats oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1866, they also resisted that one signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, mostly as a tribute to the slain John F. Kennedy.

In my lifetime, the Democrat Party was so divided over civil rights that, in 1948, a group dubbed the “Dixiecrats” led by Sen. Strom Thurmond actually fielded candidates of their own at one point in a States Rights party. They eventually returned to the fold.

After signing the bill, Johnson famously told an aide that the Democrat Party had just lost the South for the foreseeable future. He was right.

To be charitable, perhaps the Democrat Party is just trying to make amends for all those decades in which racism was intertwined in its politics. I suspect, however, that today’s generation of Democrats running the party and supporting it have little knowledge or recall of its ugly history.

For that reason alone, I have always wondered why blacks in America have clung so strongly to the Democrat Party. Didn’t anyone tell them that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican?