The racers may not win this race

The New Neo Posted on by

I just came across two excellent discussions of the racers and their tactics.

The first, entitled “An allergic reaction to the race card,” is by William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection. The second, by Jules Crittenden, is called simply “Race card.” Both are well worth reading in their entirety, even if you think you’ve already heard quite enough on this topic.

Crittenden calls on President Obama to disown the racers:

The moment has arrived for President Obama to start working on his legacy as the first post-racial president. Either that, or to face a legacy of having the most racially divisive presidency in modern American history…

That’s why it is time for the president to rise above his own shortcomings and political agenda, and do something for the nation. At some point in the not-too-distant future, whether his health-care plan continues to crash and burn or is resurrected in a new figleaf evolution, the president needs tell the nation that it is OK to disagree with him, that political dissent and even anger do not equal racism. Also, that if he fails, he prefers to be seen as having failed on his own merits, as an American political leader, rather than as a black man who is being handed the crutch of theoretical racism, for which there is no evidence whatsoever in this debate.

My first reaction to Crittenden’s call to Obama to denounce the racers was, “Good luck, fat chance, it’ll never happen.” And I still think that’s true. But if Obama were really clever, he’d play the good cop to the racers’ bad cop, condemning them for their charges while profiting from them at the same time, knowing they won’t stop.

Of the fact that Obama has encouraged the racers, sometimes subtly and sometimes more openly, I have little doubt. I’ve previously mentioned an Obama quote from his campaign days that first opened my eyes to that fact, but it bears repeating:

It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

Crittenden reminds us also of one of Obama’s most famous previous pronouncements on race relations:

Obama was applauded in last year’s campaign for a big speech in which he excused the racism of his pastor, and said that white America is incapable of understanding the black experience, that racism on the part of blacks is different. A lot of people thought it was a watershed moment in American race relations. It wasn’t.

And Jacobson reminds us of a few other incidents from the Obama campaign:

During the campaign, Obama supporters successfully ended scrutiny of Obama’s overstated opposition to the Iraq war by accusing Bill Clinton of racism for calling Obama’s narrative a “fairy tale.” False accusations of racism also were used against Hillary supporter Geraldine Ferraro and against John McCain in order to frame the political debate.

These tactics were not used by Obama himself, to be sure. But, just as in the recent accusations of racism against the Tea Party protesters and Joe Wilson, he never condemned them, either (and if my memory is incorrect and you can find a time he did, please note it in the comments section).

What’s the result? As Jacobson says:

The effect of these accusations is poisonous. Race is the most sensitive and inflammatory subject in this country. By turning every issue, even a discussion of health care policy, into an argument about race, liberals have created a politically explosive mixture in which the harder they seek to suppress opposing voices, the harder those voices seek to be heard.

So far, the American people don’t seem to be buying the racers’ arguments. Both writers cite this Rasmussen poll indicating that only 12% of Americans think opponents of Obamacare are racist, 67% say they’re not, and 21% don’t know.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Good.

Birthers and truthers are not equal

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already weighed in on the birthers, and let’s just say I’m not particularly simpatico. But the following sentence from this piece by Mark Salter caught my eye:

Today’s “birthers,” are no more offensive or weird than those who believe the Bush Administration was complicit in planning the attacks of September 11 or invaded Iraq to increase the profits of defense companies.

It’s become commonplace to roughly equate the birthers with the truthers. And although, as Salter says, birthers are no more offensive or weird than truthers, he fails to point out that birthers are actually less offensive and weird than truthers.

If you don’t believe me, let’s take a look for a moment at what each group is actually alleging, rather than the fact that each group is marginal or weird or paranoid or offensive.

Birthers believe that Obama is lying about a certain fact. Truthers believe that many people within the Bush administration were engaged in a large conspiracy. So the first difference is one involving the number of perpetrators.

Another difference between birthers and truthers is subject matter. Birthers believe that the current President has covered up facts about his birthplace and his parents’ status that would mean he is actually not eligible to be president (and basing this at least in part on his bona fide secrecy about a great many facts of his early life). Truthers believe that President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as well as unspecified other members of their administration, either conspired to murder three thousand innocent Americans or at the very least had enough advance information to stop their murders and instead chose to let the murders proceed in order to increase their own power and to advance their geopolitical interests.

Thus we see that the magnitude and degree of the offenses involved are not even remotely comparable. The birthers are alleging Obama committed an offense that is a technicality; a serious transgression to be sure, but one mainly involving the fudging (or hiding) of some papers in order to advance his political career. Such an act would be duplicitous, illegal, and profoundly wrong. But, to use a criminal analogy, it would be something in the nature of a white-collar crime.

The truthers are alleging that Bush, Cheney, and an unspecified number of people in their administration either committed or knowingly allowed the mass murder of their own country’s citizens on an enormous scale, the greatest act of terrorism in our history. Not only would that be a crime against humanity, it would be a crime perpetrated against Americans by their own leaders. Such an act would be in the nature of the darkest evil of which the human soul is capable, worthy of a Nuremberg-type trial and execution for war crimes.

The two sets of allegations are hardly equivalent, and speaking of them as though they balance each other out on some sort of scale of paranoid fringe beliefs is a nothing less than a moral outrage.

Succinct summary of the change process

The New Neo Posted on by

Now here’s a changer:

Some of the [Sept. 12] protesters had traveled farther than just the distance between their home town and Washington. Dr. David Levine, a psychiatrist from Rockford, Illinois, was Ramsey Clark’s volunteer press secretary when the ultra-liberal former U.S. attorney general ran for the Senate from New York in 1976. Now, Levine, wearing a faded NEWT GINGRICH 2008 t-shirt, was on the streets of Washington in a crowd of conservatives. What accounted for the change? “It started when liberals just stopped making sense to me,” Levine said. “I was listening to NPR, and nothing was making sense. So I started reading more and more conservative things, and here I am.”

Me too.

One of the ways in which Levine’s story is similar to mine, and to that of many other left-to-right changers, is that in his earlier days he didn’t read much in the conservative press. Once he started doing so, he realized that it made more sense than the liberal press.

That’s a pretty powerful experience; take it from me. And it’s one of the reasons liberals and the Left are so intent on reviling outlets such as Fox News, or even shutting down some of the talk shows on the Right if possible, in order to get followers to shy away from even listening to these information sources in the first place—or, if they do happen to listen, to automatically distrust and discount as partisan lies what they hear there. The Left correctly views media on the Right as dangerous to their cause, as is anything else that challenges the indoctrination and message control they otherwise are able to practice through the MSM and most of academia.

Here’s another guy who recently changed his mind about Obama. It would be rather difficult for the “racers” to call this particular man a racist, for obvious reasons—although I’m sure they could manage it somehow. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. They could probably start with his suspicious phrase “those kind of people,” which might be a code word for black—except for the inconvenient fact that the speaker himself is a black man:

“The company you keep tells a lot about who you are,” says Tres Berden, a truck driver from Newark, New Jersey. “With all of those associations of [Obama’s], from Rev. Wright to Van Jones — you don’t know those kind of people without being one.” Berden, one of the few African-Americans in the crowd, is a Democrat who now considers himself a libertarian. He voted for Obama, but quickly became disillusioned. “He isn’t the person he sold us,” Berden says.

[NOTE: If you’re interested in my take on that unrepentant Leftist Ramsey Clark, see this.

And if you’d like to see just what methods the Left uses to racially attack a black man who doesn’t support Obama, see this. And those letters he quotes from the Left aren’t pretend or projected racism; they’re the real thing.]

The racers

The New Neo Posted on by

For the sake of convenience, I’ve decided to call people like Maureen Dowd, who see hidden racism in every complaint about Obama, “racers.”

If I could sum up the underpinnings of their position, it would be a riff on Descartes’s proof of existence: “I think, therefore I am.” For racers, it goes something like this: “I think it, therefore it is.”

Such thoughts don’t require logic or evidence—just a gut feeling, a hunch, and to racers that makes them real. To understand the extent of the racers’ projections, and read how much they demonize those on the Right, you need only wade through the comments section of the Dowd piece. I’ll just offer one fairly typical example to give you the flavor of what I’m talking about:

All you have to do is look at the photographs of the people at the protest Saturday in Washington and at the ones showing up to scream at town hall meetings. They look like the wild-eyed crazies that showed up to throw tomatoes at black children trying to go to integrated schools in Little Rock in the 1950s. It’s the same bunch. They can’t stand black people and they’d rather burst their own blood vessals and scream until their veins bloat out of their necks than get used to the fact that it is the 21st century. From their attitudes to their hairdos, everything about them screams 1950s racists.

The hairdo theory of racism—heaven help us.

It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? With the election of Barack Obama, many of us (I include myself among them) thought for one brief shining moment that race relations in this country would improve. But it turns out that if racism really ceased to exist (which of course it has not), racers would have to invent it. With the precipitous decline of overt racism against black people, racers must imagine covert racism everywhere to take up the slack.

[NOTE: For those who are interested in actual history rather than projection, I offer a glimpse back in time to an era when the racism a black person experienced in the House of Representatives was all too real. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was the first black person elected to the House from New York, back in 1944. He was a controversial figure who ultimately was censured by the House for some shady financial practices, but he was also instrumental in some important fights against a racism that was blatant and open:

As one of only two black Congressmen, Powell challenged the informal ban on black representatives using Capitol facilities reserved for white members only. He took black constituents to dine with him in the “whites only” House restaurant. He clashed with the many segregationists in his own party”¦He passed legislation that made lynching a federal crime, as well as bills that desegregated public schools. He challenged the Southern practice of charging Blacks a poll tax to vote, and stopped racist congressmen from saying the word “nigger” in sessions of Congress.]

Our era of non-civil discourse

The New Neo Posted on by

Victor Davis Hanson has a good article on how uncouth public speech has gotten in recent years. And he’s not just talking about Joe Wilson.

The Hanson piece reminded me of the fact that I was a bit ahead of the curve on this one. I wrote the following in March of 2005, and I think it’s even more apropos today. So I thought I’d republish it. Note, please, the quote from the man who has since become our Vice-President, Joe Biden.

I was reading Dr. Sanity’s recent post, in which she quotes Fred Siegel from the NY Observer. He describes an encounter with some undergraduate Dean supporters prior to the 2004 primaries thusly:

I was taken aback by my conversation with the Deaniacs; their sheer coarseness stunned me. Even at the height of the “Ronald Reagan is going to blow up the world” mania of the 1980’s, I had never seen a “Fuck Reagan” button. But the coarseness was consistent with the dominant mood in academia outside of the sciences.

Well, I hate to break it to you, Fred, but it ain’t just academia. At the risk of sliding even further into old-fuddydud-ism (and perhaps even my use of the word “fuddydud” is emblematic of the fact that I’m already hopelessly mired there), I have to say that I myself have noticed recently a remarkable rise of what Siegel delicately refers to as “coarseness” in public life, not just academia.

Clinton donned shades and played the sax on TV. That wasn’t any problem; it was fun. But now we have candidates using the F-word in interviews with the media. Kerry in Rolling Stone, describing Bush’s Iraq policy–well, at least that was Rolling Stone, which appeals to a certain demography, so there was a bit of logic behind it, although I think it did absolutely nothing to enhance his candidacy or his person. And, just to show that I’m a nonpartisan equal-opportunity critic, there was Dick Cheney dissing Patrick Leahy on the floor of the Senate–although that was a personal spat, apparently, rather than a public interview.

What’s up? We’re all baby boomers here, and we tiresome boomers used to crow about how we liberated the language (and a lot else) from the confines of earlier ideas of propriety, etiquette, and politeness. Some of this liberation was good, no doubt.

But there’s something to be said for propriety, especially in public life. Now Joe Biden, in an article in the 3/21/05 New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “The Unbranding,” is quoted as saying, “What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn’t give President Clinton the authority to use force” have now become, he said, moral interventionists. “Give me a fucking break.”

Does this make you want to vote for the man in 2008? Does it make him seem more “muscular?” Does it make him seem young and hip, or merely juvenile? To me, it’s the latter.

I’m a child of the 60s myself, and not averse to an F-word here and there in my private life. But I can’t imagine Roosevelt or Truman giving an interview and purposely using language that they no doubt were familiar with, but thought should be confined to private life, if uttered at all. They were aware that there’s public and then there’s private words, and as leaders of the Western world they had some funny notion of retaining a little dignity in public discourse.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, spellcheck agrees. It wanted me to replace “assholes” with “assails,” and “fucking” with “bucking.”]

Patrick Swayze RIP

The New Neo Posted on by

By now you’ve probably read the news that Patrick Swayze has died.

Swayze was an actor and dancer who became famous for the surprise blockbuster film “Dirty Dancing.” But I liked him best in “Ghost,” which didn’t even feature his formidable terpsichorean skills, although it made good use of his athleticism, not to mention his sexy torso. “Ghost” was always a tearjerker, although a clever, funny, and fast-paced action-packed one. Now it is even more of a weeper than before, because of the real-life fact that Swayze himself—like his character in the movie, Sam Wheat—has died too young.

Swayze’s bio lets us know where some of his supreme physicality, that mix of artsy grace and macho brawn, might have come from: his father was a champion rodeo star and his mother a prominent ballet teacher. Isn’t that the very combination of elements Patrick Swayze personified? I learned for the first time when reading his history that he’d also been a multi-sport star as a young man, participating at a high level in gymnastics, swimming, football, and ice skating as well as dance. In fact, his first professional performing role was in a “Disney on Ice” show.

Swayze’s body and the amazing things he could do with it were responsible for a good part his fame, but they were certainly not the only reasons. He had a nice-guy demeanor that could also turn sharp if needed, and he was a credible actor too, although he had his share of clunkers. Swayze also had that greatly prized but highly unusual (especially for a Hollywood hunk) asset: a long and seemingly happy marriage to his sweetheart from their teenage years.

I could post the corny but almost unbearably poignant (and now even more poignant) clip from the end of “Ghost,” where Swayze’s character says goodbye to his beloved girlfriend and is met by beings of light and then escorted to heaven (you can watch it here, if you’d like). Instead I’ll feature one of the funny parts from the film, where he tries to reach out to previously-fake “spiritual adviser” Whoopi Goldberg, much to her surprise and consternation:

Watching parts of the film now, I can’t help but be struck once again by the timelessness (and timeliness) of its deeper message: our very human desire for love to be eternal. RIP, Patrick Swayze.

Wilson’s wife said, “Say it isn’t so, Joe!”

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Wilson’s wife tells us that she watched Obama’s health care address to the joint session of Congress, and then:

Joe called me after the speech on Wednesday night and I said, “Joe, who’s the nut who hollered out “you lie” or “you liar”? And he goes, “It was me.” And I said, “No, really, who did it?”

The Wilsons have turned the whole incident into this campaign ad:

Obama and Bush: when is a lie not a lie?

The New Neo Posted on by

Tom Bevan analyzes Obama supporter Bob Herbert’s startling admission that “I have not spoken to anyone, either on Capitol Hill or elsewhere, who believes that [Obama’s pledge that his health care plan will not raise the deficit a dime] is doable.” Nevertheless, Herbert asserts that Obama believes that it is.

It’s worth reading Bevan’s whole piece, but the gist of it is that old question: what does Obama think? Herbert says Obama believes what he says about health care reform being deficit-neutral. But Herbert also observes that Obama is virtually alone in that belief. That would make Obama a fool, one who ignores the fact that the vast and almost unanimous preponderance of evidence is against what he’s asserting about the plan’s effects on the deficit.

But I suppose that it’s better for a supporter to believe Obama a fool than a liar. And remember, if Herbert had called Obama a liar, he’d be guilty of racism. That would be especially upsetting because Herbert himself is black. It’s all so very confusing, isn’t it?

Bevan helpfully points out that when George Bush believed that Saddam had WMDs, he was backed up by most of the experts in the world. But when Bush and those experts turned out to be wrong (and despite evidence that Saddam could have reconstituted his program, and planned to do so once sanctions were lifted), Bush’s opponents became unremitting in accusing the president of having lied. Having been mistaken wasn’t enough.

This double standard is part of the shrieking hypocrisy of politics. Like Humpty Dumpty, Obama’s supporters get to define “lie” exactly as they wish. They don’t think they need to worry about being consistent, if they are effective.

[ADDENDUM: On the other hand, Jim Miller offers the notion that Obama doesn’t even think about whether what he’s saying is true or not.]

Wilson: to be censured for “breach of decorum?”

The New Neo Posted on by

House Democrats are planning to censure Joe Wilson for “breach of decorum” for yelling “you lie!” during Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.

We all know how deeply devoted to decorum our Democrat representatives were back in 2005, when Bush addressed Congress on the issue of Social Security reform and they booed:

Perhaps the House Democrats will even retroactively censure themselves for that act, so dedicated to decorum are they.

[NOTE: The possibility that this action will backfire on House Democrats probably will do nothing to stop them. But it’s interesting to me that Michael Kinsley, a man of the Left (although a relatively moderate one), has requested in this WaPo opinion piece that the Democrats cease and desist in their hot pursuit of Wilson.

Kinsley’s argument is a pragmatic one; he’s not calling the Democrats out as hypocrites, nor does he defend or approve of Wilson; if fact, he criticizes him in no uncertain terms. But still, Kinsley’s is a voice of comparative reason (and even humor) compared to so many others in the Democrat camp:

If [Wilson] won’t apologize on the floor, [House Democrats] want a resolution officially declaring that he’s “it” or he has cooties — or whatever the appropriate language is under House rules.

…The more times [Wilson] is required to write “I will not call the President a liar” on a special blackboard set up in the well of the House, the bigger hero he will become to a large chunk of the population. And, of course, forcing him to grovel will not help to convince him or his supporters that the president is not a liar…

Wilson is obviously a bozo. (I can say this because I’m not on the House floor.) But all the attention is making him more popular within his own constituency, not less so. Why can’t the Democrats be the class act here and just drop it? Sticks and stones, and all that.

Kinsley asks a good question. I’ll make a stab at an answer: because they can’t help themselves. Power has a tendency to encourage people to overreach and overdo, and most politicians have a head start on that sort of behavior anyway, as well as a vast serving of hypocrisy.

There’s also hubris, and then there’s nemesis. We’ll see whether these ancient laws will play out and the tables turn. It’s interesting, as well, to note that among the offenses featured in the original ancient Greek definition of hubris was the “humiliation of a defeated foe.” Hmmm.]

[ADDENDUM: I further commend Kinsley for writing that entire WaPo piece without once calling Wilson or his supporters racists. How refreshing.]