Scott Spiegel

Weighing in on the controversy surrounding the Senate Majority Leader’s racially insensitive remarks about candidate Barack Obama, Kanye West declared at a recent benefit for Haitian earthquake victims, “Harry Reid doesn’t care about dark-skinned black people with Negro dialects!”

Oh, wait—sorry, he didn’t.  According to Harry Reid’s electability criteria for black Democratic candidates—“light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one”—I notice that the following are all A-grade presidential material: Hillary “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired” Clinton, Rod “I’m Blacker than Barack Obama” Blagojevich, and Bill “Our First Black President” Clinton.

On the taboo list are Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Marion Barry.

Also forbidden because of their complexion are many dark-skinned black Republicans, such as Clarence Thomas, J. C. Watts, and Alan Keyes.

Democrats’ response to Reid’s outrageous remarks, which were revealed in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s new book “Game Change,” was to get angry at… Trent Lott.

Last week my column “Liberal Syntax: A Noun, a Verb, and a Bush Smear” offered a rule that characterizes liberals’ defense of their mishandling of national security and the economy.  For more general purposes, such as their defense of Reid’s remarks, I propose replacing “Bush” with “Republican.”

Since they brought up Lott’s comment, let’s drag it out into the light again and hold it up next to Reid’s sentiments.  Lott: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.  We’re proud of it.  And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

For starters, compared to Lott’s words, Reid’s comments were explicit and vulgar and revealed a race-obsessed mindset.  They bring to mind, not Lott’s tribute to a fellow Southerner and half-century veteran of the Senate who was practically on his deathbed, but rather Joe Biden’s condescending statement that Obama “is articulate and bright and clean” and Bill Clinton’s dismissive remark to Ted Kennedy about Obama that “a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”  In contrast, Lott’s comment, which echoed a remark he had made in 1980 comparing Reagan and Thurmond’s small-government, fiscally responsible views, requires several questionable levels of inference before you can jump to the conclusion that Lott was endorsing a segregationist Republican platform in 2002.

Reid’s motivation for his comments about Obama was to use race to cynically calculate, for political purposes, the electability by the Democratic base of token black candidates under consideration.  Similarly, other Democrats regularly exploit blacks to get their votes, as in Hillary “Nobody Told Me That The Road Would Be Easy” Clinton’s feverish recitation of spirituals (in a Negro dialect) in black churches.  Lott’s motivation was to find something nice to say about the life work of a senator on the occasion of his retirement and 100th birthday.

This is how it always works: a Republican says something that is milder or no worse than something a Democrat says—but, due to a combination of Republicans’ sense of honor (or lack of fortitude, depending on your perspective) and Democrats’ vicious persistence, the Republican is out, and the Democrat is in.  Democrats never come to the Republican’s defense, but Republicans frequently come to the Democrat’s defense—as many have with Reid—in an attempt to be fair, a favor that is never returned.  That’s the pattern—Democrats have no honor, Republicans aren’t vicious, so Democrats get to stay and Republicans have to go.  This is then seen as evidence by the media—and biased historians with no sense of context—that the Republican was guilty after all and the Democrat did nothing wrong.

Anyway, the larger issue is not whether Reid is a racist.  The issue is whether Democratic leaders have historically manipulated African Americans for political gain, offering them freebies and using their “dialect” and pretending to stand for their interests, while privately looking down on them as a dependent, infantile interest group to be pandered to.

As succinctly affirmed by Allen West, black Republican candidate for the House in 2010 from Florida, “Reid’s comments [are] indicative of the true sentiment elitist liberals have toward black Americans.  The history of the Democrat party is one of slavery, secession, segregation, and now socialism, born from the Johnson Great Society programs that have castigated blacks as victims…  I would rather be called ‘an Uncle Tom and a sellout’ than lose my self-esteem and be considered an inferior by liberals…  I am not just some articulate, clean, well spoken Negro…  [I] shall never submit to the collective progressive ideal of inferiority.”

Warning: Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, and Balloon Boy are nowhere to be found in this list!

1. Iran Election Upheaval – Brave protestors took to the streets of Tehran and Twittered to the world shocking pictures and videos of civilian beatings and shootings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, despite the inability of our Commander-in-Chief to raise an eyebrow over the carnage for a week.  As “President” Ahmadinejad continues to mock the West’s demands that Iran halt its uranium enrichment, the outrage of the emboldened and mobilized protest movement has the potentially farthest-reaching consequences of any event in 2009.

2. Health Care Reform Debate – Simultaneously the most outrageous and boring story of 2009.  On the one hand, we listened all year in disbelief as conservative think tanks unearthed fresh horrors in evolving versions of the bill; on the other hand, we listened to Democrats recite tired lies about “45 million uninsured” and “bending the cost curve” and “Nancy Pelosi approving a surtax on Botox.”  As Obama supporter Camille Paglia admitted, “By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.”

3. Climategate – In which more pages of e-mails and computer code than in all the healthcare reform bills combined were leaked to the press, revealing climate “scientists” fudging data, threatening to delete data, and doing everything but counting pregnant chads to make the results come out the way they wanted.  Here’s a deal for Michael Mann, author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature over the past few millennia: if “trick,” “hide,” and “decline” no longer mean what they once did, then neither do “dire,” “peer-reviewed,” or “consensus.”

4. Afghanistan Surge – General McChrystal begged President Obama in private and in public to give him the troops he needed to implement the counterinsurgency strategy Obama had hired him to carry out back in March.  After four months of dawdling, Obama gave McChrystal 75% of his revised request—which was 50% of his initial request—with no rationale provided for his bargain basement offer.  If this is how Obama treats the “good war,” I’d hate to see what he does to the bad one.

5. Tea Party Movement – Rasmussen released a poll in December showing that in a three-way generic race among Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party candidates, the Tea Party contender would beat the Republican by 5 points.  Despite the left’s ludicrous charges of racism and desperate use of lewd sexual terms never adopted by any Tea Party patriot, the biggest mass uprising against government spending and abuse of power since 1773 grew angrier and more forceful as the year went on, and will only be further inflamed by the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care spending act.

6. Stimulus Bill Passage – It would give you a concussion if it fell on you, even if dropped by Obama at the nadir of his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emperor of Japan.  Four months after its urgently required, life-or-death passage, only 5% of stimulus funds had been spent, a detail the administration papered over by simply lying about funded projects.  Naturally, this summer Democrats began clamoring for another stimulus package.

7. Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation – Proof that Democrats were never the party against racism—they were once the party that supported racism, and now they’re the party that supports reverse racism.  If Our Wise Latina’s speeches on biological differences between the races had been half as incendiary, the media would be consoling us that she might have been rejected for the Supreme Court if what she had said had been any worse; yet the fact is, if her words had been twice as offensive, wimpy Republicans in Congress would probably still have voted to confirm her.

8. Ft. Hood Shootings – The first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, which was allowed to happen for the same reason as 9/11—the politically correct refusal to identify the danger of Islamism and its adherents’ wish to obliterate us and our allies for promoting freedom.  The most damning detail was Major Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation to a group of army scientists on the Koran’s injunction to decapitate infidels—to which the army responded by giving Hasan a promotion in Texas to get him out of their hair.

9. Pakistan Helps the U.S. Fight the Taliban – The Pakistan Army finally stepped up to the plate, no thanks to Obama’s dithering over the U.S.’s own commitment in the region.  Pakistan began Operation Path to Deliverance, in which they managed to send the same number of troops Obama finally agreed to as part of General McChrystal’s surge (30,000) to South Waziristan to beat back insurgents.

10. New Jersey/Virginia Gubernatorial Elections – Last year, liberals hooted that Republican primary candidates were avoiding George W. Bush like the plague, but the joke’s on them—their messiah is turning into the kiss of death in just his first year of office.  Obama’s multiple campaign stops for would-be governors Corzine and Deeds did nothing to assist them, and possibly even hindered their candidacies.

Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Dede Scozzafava… whoops—that’s the Huffington Post’s Top 10 Conservatives of 2009!

10. Hannah Giles, Conservative Activist and “Performing Artist” – Twenty-year-old Giles helped bust ACORN with her brilliantly direct scheme of walking right into their offices and asking their staff if they’d help her set up a prostitution ring with underage El Salvadoran girls, to which they responded by falling all over themselves to comply.  It’s so horrifying it’s like those classic psychology experiments in which researchers had no idea their subjects would actually carry out their instructions, like Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiment.

9. Sarah Palin, Democratic Congressional Reelection Death Panelist – This summer Palin helped put Democrats’ health care “reform” initiative on indefinite life support by identifying the logical conclusion of their plans to expand health care coverage while slashing Medicare and not increasing the deficit—i.e., health care rationing, or “death panels.”  In addition to resigning in July and saving Alaskans millions by heading off costly and baseless ethics complaints against her, she released an autobiography that’s on track to become the best-selling political memoir ever.

8. Dick Cheney, Former Vice President and Current Presidential Superego – If there’s anything that can compensate for not having Dick Cheney as VP anymore, it’s getting to hear him expound on the pigheaded mistakes the new President is repeatedly making on foreign policy.  Cheney hammered Obama for promising to close Guantanamo Bay, for releasing the “torture” memos, for “dithering” over his decision on General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan, and for bringing self-confessed 9/11 masterminds to Manhattan for civilian trials.

7. Rick Santelli, CNBC Editor and Ranteur Extraordinaire – On a wintry day in February, some prescient burst of fiery indignation took hold of this outspoken CNBC commentator, who railed on-air against the irresponsibility of Obama’s Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan and got the CME Group futures traders on the floor around him up in arms.  His idea led to the grassroots Tea Party Movement, which spawned rallies on April 15, the July 4 weekend, and September 12 in thousands of cities across the country, with hundreds of thousands of attendees.

6. Doug Hoffman, RINO Party Crasher – Though he lost the special election for the open House seat in New York’s 23rd congressional district, he came remarkably close to winning, and he forced out a RINO who had backing from ACORN and was as bad as or worse than the Democratic candidate.  Hoffman reenergized the GOP on a national level, and an Obama visit or two to New York’s 23rd district, like the multiple stops he made for losing gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia, would probably have pushed Hoffman over the top.

5. Liz Cheney, Accomplished Conservative Mother of Five Who Isn’t Palin or Bachmann – Cheney tirelessly fought off the fact-deficient ravings of Andrea Mitchell, Norah O’Donnell and others, demonstrating the temerity desperately needed by the GOP in defending its principles against an MSM stacked against us.  Cheney will indisputably be a figure on the national political scene in coming years, because she’s already said she’s “open” to running for public office—and in politics, “no” means “maybe” and “maybe” means “yes.”

4. John Boehner, House Minority Leader and Stimulus Bill Percussionist – Boehner played an unassuming but important role, out of the spotlight, visible mostly only to his colleagues on the House floor.  He consistently pushed for free market reforms to health care and denounced the Democrats’ plans to increase government involvement and spending in health care.  He also ably deconstructed Obama disasters like the stimulus bill and Cash for Clunkers.

3. Rush Limbaugh, Racist Attention-Seeker Who Hates Obama for Personal Reasons – Rush could have taken the year off and coasted into the top 10 with the cumulative influence he’s had on the conservative movement, but in 2009 he had a particularly effective year, one in which he dissected the Obama administration’s schemes and always kept his listeners one step ahead of the MSM.  Rush stated early on, “I hope Obama fails.”  Everyone, including Rush’s opponents, knew exactly what he meant—and Rush never backed down from his statement.

2. Michele Bachmann, America’s Favorite Tea Party Hostess – This was the year that Bachmann, like Liz Cheney, became a conservative rock star.  She rallied the troops at Tea Party gatherings, including the massive march in D.C. in September, proposed her own health care reform bill, and cosponsored others.  Gail Collins labeled her “Washington’s newest Famous Strange Person,” proving once again that liberals have no measure of the force of the reinvigorated conservative movement that is about to hit them.

1. Mark Levin, Best-selling Author Never Interviewed by ABC, CBS, or NBC or reviewed by the Times or the Post – Sarah Palin was photographed carrying it at rallies, Michelle Bachmann called it “the book of all time,” and Rush Limbaugh predicted conservative college students would clandestinely pass it around in plain brown wrappers.  Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year, spending three months at #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list; Levin also had the best year yet of his radio show, still the fastest-growing in the country.

Honorable Mention: Joe Wilson, Destroyer of Obamacare Illusions – Wilson refused to let Obama get away with lying about illegal immigrants’ not being covered under his health care reform bill; the Democratic denouncement of his “You lie!” outburst resulted in a heated, protracted debate over an issue that was supposedly already settled.

Ineligible, but Fought the Good Fight: Joe Lieberman, Obamacare Obstructionist – He’s not reliable—he marched three miles to the Capitol on the Sabbath to vote for a $2 trillion spending bill, after all—but this Independent Democrat stalled health care “reform” long enough to push the Senate’s deliberations into the no-man’s land of a midterm election year.

Special Award: Jake Tapper, Reporter So Ruthless in Investigating Obama You Couldn’t Tell What Party He Belonged To – From uncovering Tom Daschle’s unpaid taxes to investigating the President’s phony stimulus spending claims, Tapper deservedly ended the year at the top of Mediaite’s list of most influential journalists in the country.

President Obama has invited Sergeant James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to the White House for a beer to clear up hard feelings over Crowley’s arrest of Gates for disorderly conduct two weeks ago.

Notice how, now that the facts have come out, no one is taking Gates’ side anymore; those who initially sided with Gates are arguing that both men are at fault and that we should all “learn from this incident” and move on.

If anyone still cares, the fact is that both sides are simply not at fault.

Here are a few myths about Crowley’s arrest of Gates:

Crowley overreacted in arresting Gates.

Not according to the Cambridge Police Department; the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association; the Massachusetts Municipal Police Coalition; the Cambridge Multicultural Police Association; mixed-race police unions across the country; Sgt. Leon Lashley, the black cop who accompanied Crowley; or black public figures such as Bill Cosby and Juan Williams.  Other than that, the experts are unanimous—he overreacted!

Gates’ behavior was not an arrestable offense; Crowley should have walked away after establishing his identity.

According to police protocol in such an incident, you leave the scene only once all actors are quiet and issues have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.  You do not slip away while one party is still unhinged, screaming like a lunatic, insulting a police officer’s mother, badgering officers, and frightening neighbors who have gathered out of concern.  If the object of investigation shows no signs of calming down, it is not police procedure to leave such a raving maniac poised to cause additional mayhem.  The police have seen too many cases in which angry residents have gone on to cause further trouble; it’s foolish for anyone to second-guess the Cambridge cops and pronounce that they should have known what Gates would do next.  Gates had dozens of opportunities to cooperate with Crowley’s attempts to defuse the situation and back away, and every time he chose not to.  That is why he was arrested.

As a public servant, Crowley should have been more respectful of Gates.

Gates’ wealthy Harvard neighborhood had experienced a rash of break-ins in recent months, including Gates’ own home.  The job of a public servant in Sgt. Crowley’s position is to forcefully protect property owners—once they are definitively identified as such, which Gates made difficult to accomplish—from those who would aggress against them and their property.  That is what Crowley was trying to do.  Had Gates lived in a poor neighborhood and the two men trying to break in been real burglars, and had Crowley let the men get away without proving they lived there, his department would no doubt have been faulted for ignoring “black-on-black crime.”

Crowley arrested Gates for “disrespecting” him.

Crowley did not arrest Gates because Gates “dissed” him—he acted lawfully in response to Gates’ disorderly conduct, which involved Gates’ following Crowley to the porch, yelling epithets about Crowley’s mother, and startling pedestrians.

Crowley engaged in “racial profiling.”

Ignoring the fact that “racial profiling” does not, by definition, take place when an officer has been called to a resident’s home to investigate a burglary, there’s far more evidence that Gates is guilty of “class profiling”—singling out a working-class cop for abuse because he thought Crowley wasn’t powerful or confident enough to stand up to him.

Both men are prejudiced toward those from different backgrounds.

I can’t say how Gates feels about working-class cops, but Crowley had been hand-selected by a black police commissioner to teach a course on avoiding racial profiling, which he has done for the past five years.  I think that gives him just a smidgen of credibility in claiming he does not go around engaging in egregious on-the-job racial discrimination.

It’s Crowley’s word against Gates’.

Not having been there myself, I’ll nonetheless trust the judgment of a universally praised sergeant who taught an anti-racial profiling class for five years; the black sergeant who accompanied him in the arrest; the Harvard University Police officers who appeared as backup and witnessed the scene; the Police Department who trained Crowley and tracked his implementation of protocol; and Emergency Communications and 911 Center staff who received updates on the incident in real-time.  All of those parties support Crowley.

The police dropped the charges against Gates because their case was weak.

The prosecutor’s office, not the Cambridge Police Department, decided to drop the charges, most likely because of Gates’ status in the community and because he raised such a stink about it.  The Cambridge Police Commissioner has since publicly stated that he wishes the charges had not been dropped and Gates were forced to defend his actions in court under a strict examination of evidence.

Obama should have criticized both men for their behavior.

Obama should have refrained from making a summary judgment on a local case until he knew the facts.  He is President now, not a rabble-rousing community activist “promoting awareness” of social ills.

Crowley reports to the mayor of Cambridge, the governor of Massachusetts, and the President of the United States, and should have accepted their criticism without question.

Crowley was backed up by his superiors and his department.  He does not report directly to the mayor, the governor, or the President, and he is not contractually prohibited from speaking up and defending himself against spurious allegations by citizens he is protecting.

In any event, it appears that Crowley was big enough to agree to meet Gates and Obama at the White House.  In the meantime, he can look forward to the audiotapes of the arrest being released and clearing his reputation.

Two ineluctable facts stand out when scrutinizing politicians’ actions on gay issues over the past 30 years: (1) Republicans are not anti-gay and (2) Democrats are not pro-gay. By 2009, there are few differences between Republican and Democratic politicians on gay issues, except that Democrats are more likely to jerk gay voters around and Republicans are more likely to quietly favor pro-liberty stances. There may have been a difference between the two parties once, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time.

In 1978, California governor Ronald Reagan opposed the Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gays from teaching in public schools. In an op-ed penned as he was beginning his presidential campaign, Reagan wrote, “Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.” This, in the late 70s, while Jimmy Carter was publicly refusing to meet with gay groups. The initiative was overwhelmingly defeated, mostly due to Reagan’s efforts, and this momentum was instrumental in forming the Log Cabin Republicans.

Reagan was the first president to invite two openly gay men—interior decorator Ted Graber and his partner—to spend the night at the White House. Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser called Reagan a “closet tolerant.” If Reagan was closeted, it was because no one asked him his views, not because he was hiding anything.

The number of gays discharged from the military dropped every year under Reagan. In contrast, the number of gays discharged increased every full year under Bill Clinton except one, doubling from 617 in 1994 to 1,231 in 2000. The number of gays discharged decreased again every full year under George W. Bush except one, halved from 1,273 in 2001 to 612 in 2006. Gay rights groups report the number of gays discharged over decades, but they never break it down by administration, because the numbers make Democrats look bad and Republicans look good.

More recently, Obama claimed he would repeal the ban on gays in the military—and has spent precisely zero time working to fulfill this promise. He refused to issue an executive order staying the investigation of gays until the law is changed, and is content destroying through inaction the military careers of servicemen like Arabic translator Dan Choi.

Our Gay Marriage Opponent-in-Chief kicked off his inauguration with an invocation by Rick Warren, robust financial sponsor of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8. Happy days are here again!

Independent Gay Forum reports that around the 100-day mark of Obama’s presidency, WhiteHouse.gov removed discussion of almost all gay issues from its Civil Rights page including mention of repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, cut its number of “promises” to gays from eight to three, and slashed discussion of gay issues from half a page to a few sentences. After bloggers objected, some material returned but not the promise to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act or a quote about gay civil rights. “Change we can believe in” apparently means “we can be confident that campaign promises to gays will get scrubbed from Obama’s website on a regular basis.”

In Washington D.C., former Democratic mayor Marion Barry recently woke up from a nap to realize he had accidentally voted with a unanimous City Council to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, and subsequently asked the council for a do-over so he could take back his vote.

Meanwhile, gay-friendly candidates and policies are making inroads even in the religious wing of the Republican Party. In the 2008 presidential primaries, televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Guiliani, the most pro-gay major Republican candidate, a man who shacked up with a gay male couple after his divorce and promised them if New York ever legalized gay marriage he would preside over their ceremony.

Focus on the Family, James Dobson’s group, recently expressed their openness to a gay Obama Supreme Court nominee: “The issue is not their sexual orientation. It’s whether they are a good judge or not.” Sexual orientation “should never come up. It’s not even pertinent to the equation.”

If, in 2009, gays want to support the Democratic Party because they happen to agree with every one of their non-gay-related positions, fine. It’s a bit suspicious that so many gays tout the full Democratic Party line, from global warming to Guantanamo Bay. But if they’re voting for Democrats because of their superior stance on gay issues, they’re not getting much out of the bargain.

How about these “pro-gay” positions? Republicans are more aggressive than Democrats in the war against Islamic extremists, who are extraordinarily harsh in their condemnation and punishment of gays.

Republicans are tougher on law enforcement than Democrats—a boon for gays, who are more likely to suffer bias crimes. Republicans are more likely to support gun rights, as in the recent D.C. gun law Supreme Court case, which included as plaintiff a gay man who wanted to protect himself against anti-gay violence.

Republicans favor lower taxes than Democrats, and gays have more disposable income than heterosexuals.

Why is the Republican Party the real pro-gay party? The fact that Republican politicians aren’t anti-gay and Democratic politicians aren’t pro-gay helps. The fact that Republican positions make more sense than Democratic positions on some gay issues (e.g., opposing “hate crimes” laws for preferred minority groups-of-the-moment) also helps. But the main reason is that the Republican Party is more inclined to protect individual liberties, inarguably in economic realms, and even in some social realms (e.g., smoking and nutrition-related). They’re more likely to support tough law enforcement that allows liberties to be protected. And they’re more likely to support national defense, which allows us to maintain a country that protects liberties in the first place.

If the Republican Party is better for this country, and the party that is better for this country is better for all of us, then the Republican Party is the real pro-gay party.