Tuesday, August 04, 2009

On race, 'No, he can't!'

By Andrew Breitbart

Well, that was pathetic. And it wasn't an accident. The fix was in from the beginning. Last week's lackluster "Beer Summit" featuring Sgt. James Crowley, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was orchestrated to end a national discussion on race, not begin one. That's why there were no microphones, even though each participant showed himself to be perfectly qualified, astoundingly articulate and camera-ready for an illuminating and much-needed public debate.

The problem for the White House was the more the esteemed professor talked, the more trouble he created for his friend, the president. The clever photo-op sans audio was crafted to yank the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research off the stage, lest anyone begin to question what is being taught at Harvard these days.

Conversely, the more Sgt. Crowley weighed in, and his brave black co-workers spoke out, the more obvious it became that a national discussion featuring this cast of characters may not end with the results the professor and the president wanted. The status quo was at risk, and Mr. Obama used his extraordinary powers to protect it.

Any serious discussion would have put multiculturalism on trial, but the pretrial public hearings showed America opposes this false and corrosive idea, an opposition that our chattering classes can only understand as bigotry and prejudice. In the public eye, being a victim of past injustices does not win the right to propagate current and future ones, and that's intolerable to those in charge of the race industry today, whose power relies on maintaining forever a latent rage that can be turned on and off at the will of the nation's elites.

America is Tiger Woods country for a reason, and she elected Barack Obama to punctuate this new reality. The nation's laws, education system and media attitudes now need to catch up, but such catching up is exactly what Mr. Obama doesn't stand for.

My long-held fear is that Mr. Obama is hiding something about his education. During the endless 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama would not release his college grades. Given that President George W. Bush and Sens. Al Gore and John Kerry all had proved mediocre grades were no impediment to a presidential bid, Mr. Obama likely had other concerns.

While I have no desire to see Mr. Obama's birth certificate, I do want to see his college transcripts. My suspicion, one could even call it a conspiracy theory, is that Mr. Obama committed himself to a radical curriculum, aligned himself with the far-left professoriate, and sought to keep this biographical information from his political enemies, especially then-rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, for fear that they would paint the former community organizer and follower of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as something other than an advocate of racial reconciliation.

Through his acts over the last few weeks, Mr. Obama has reinforced my fears and my admittedly speculative thesis. He has shown he has neither the desire to provide a fresh angle on race, nor wants to draw attention to the bad ideas that dominate higher education and stifle the mainstream media.

Not only were there no fresh ideas about race and living in multiethnic America, but there were hardly even any stale ones. Perhaps this was because Mr. Obama's and Mr. Gates' initial - and thus probably most authentic - reactions in playing the race card had proved so unpopular, and so they just wanted to have their frosted malt beverages and get outta Dodge.

But for whatever reason - this ballyhooed beer summit proved merely to be a semi-private photo-op that just happened to be held at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. There were rote, banal and opaque statements, with no public discussion, no interaction with reporters, or even with voices as identifiably conservative as Mr. Gates is identifiably liberal. For what Mr. Obama had called a "teachable moment," the teachers were pretty much absent and there wasn't even much of a lesson plan.

Isn't the mainstream media that built up the narrative of the black professor versus the white cop the least bit curious why in a tailor-made scene the wondrous orator and America's first multiracial president failed miserably to fulfill his great promise to usher in an era of better race relations?

The Democratic Party - which is now Mr. Obama's party - now depends on the ability to keep blacks in fear: of cops, of Republicans, of conservatives, of "Uncle Toms," and even of Tiger Woods, who proves that America, while still imperfect, is clearly heading in the right direction.

The beer at the White House tavern was served flat last Thursday because the president is less the living embodiment of America's melting pot than he is an adherent of the toxic ideas that - "thanks" to Mr. Gates among many, many other tenured radicals - dominate the modern university, permeate media thinking, saturate public policy and seek to define us in perpetuity by the color of our skin.

It took black and white blue-collar civil servants to expose that the race game is rigged at the highest levels. The majority in the United States wants to enter a better, more egalitarian and diverse, and even racially mixed future. We still need to have this big national discussion. We'll just have to have it without the president of the United States.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Sweden downsizes government to deal with economic crisis: “Think the answer to America’s problems is bigger government? Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg has seen the result up close and says it’s not pretty for the economy or investors. Anders Borg has a message for those who look to government to take over health care, rescue the financial system and run troubled corporations: I have seen the future — and it doesn’t work. As the finance minister of Sweden, Borg is the chief financial officer of a country long known as a walking billboard for a social welfare state …. Left-leaning politicians pushed government spending, excluding investment outlays, from 22% of gross domestic product in 1970 to 30% in 1980. Real growth fell from an average of 4.4% annually in the 1960s to 2.4% in the 1970s and remained low for the next two decades. ‘Like many societies, we went too far in our welfare-state ambitions,’ say[s] Borg.”

Dismissing your thoughts: “When I entered college, after a four year stint in the US Air Force, I discovered that a great many intelligent people commit what is called the genetic fallacy. As the entry in Wikipedia puts it, this fallacy is committed when ‘a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone’s origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context.’ Whenever I would voice any of my views about politics, economics, child rearing or whatever, these folks explained it away by my origins, my having been born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, then a Soviet (communist) satellite. Everything I thought and said was deemed to have been caused by my background. This approach to understanding what people think and do has one very serious problem: the person’s views who is doing the explaining would then also be subject to such an explanation; indeed, the explanation would have to be considered caused by that person’s background.”

Wanted: A modest Obama : “By all accounts, Barack Obama’s father, the Kenyan student studying in America, was cocksure and impressed with his own talents. The arrogance gene must be dominant. Obama clearly has it. And that, more than any other factor, is driving his summertime swoon. Hubris made him reach for too much, too soon; brazenly overpromise about the effects of his program; overestimate his control of events; think the golden touch of his brilliant team could solve intractable problems; and believe his words could trump reality. The Obama team is fiddling with his health-care talking points. But the verbiage is beside the point. What Obama needs is a little modesty.”

The stimulus lesson : “Let’s stipulate that Congress may yet pass some sort of health insurance overhaul by the end of the year, that the future in politics is never a straight-line projection from the present, that President Obama is a savvy and charismatic guy, that Democrats control both houses of Congress, and — yadda, yadda, yadda — that the climate for ‘reform’ has never been better. Still: One can’t help noticing that the more Obama talks about his health plan, the less the public supports it. Why? Partly because voters have connected the dots between the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and Obamacare. They have seen the meager results and huge deficits that the stimulus produced, and can’t come up with a good reason to embark on yet another government shopping spree. For the public, the stimulus was bad economic medicine. Now Obama wants it to try another, unapproved experimental drug.”

It’s a new bull market: “Let’s call this what it is: A new bull market in stocks has emerged from the ashes of the financial meltdown and the deep recession that followed. And it’s signaling the onset of economic recovery. Free-market capitalism is more durable, resilient, and self-correcting than its detractors would have us believe. This is not just a summer rally — although a 12 percent market rise since July 10 is absolutely splendid. There’s a lot more going on here. Over the last five months, since March 9, the broad-based S&P 500 is up 46 percent. If I’m not mistaken, a 20 percent rally that is not quickly reversed constitutes a bull market. We are more than double that, and there will be no total reversal. Consequently, I want to change the agenda. This is much grander than what most commentators are describing. This is a new bull.”

For women, not resisting attackers can be a lethal strategy : “The following story challenges the belief that resisting your attacker only escalates the violence. Just give them what they want and they’ll leave you alive, right? Seattle residents Teresa Butz and her partner were in bed sleeping when Isaiah. M.K. Kalebu allegedly broke into their home and stabbed both multiple times. The women escaped the house, while Kalebu ran away. A neighbor heard somebody screaming for help and ran outside. Butz died at the scene from her injuries. A neighbor said Butz told him the attacker said that if they did what he asked, he wouldn’t hurt them. Her last words: ‘He lied, he lied.’”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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