Scott Spiegel

My, what a difference two years make!

Namely, a 50% jump in the unemployment rate, a tripling of the federal budget, and a tenfold increase in the annual deficit.  But who’s counting?

Behold the 10 most remarkable outcomes from yesterday’s historic midterm elections:

1. Illinois Senate:

This one says it all.  Amidst allegations of corrupt and incompetent business dealings and public program administration, Democrat Alexi Giannoulias couldn’t stave off the GOP tsunami and retain Senator Barack Obama’s former seat.  Fiscally conservative, socially moderate Representative Mark Kirk ran on his votes against the stimulus bill and ObamaCare and eked out the most important symbolic victory of the evening.

2. Florida Senate:

George Hamilton lookalike and lizard descendent Charlie Crist disingenuously switched parties in May to become an Independent, rather than risk facing a primary loss, and after the primaries promised to caucus with Senate Democrats.  Marco Rubio was an early Tea Party darling the mainstream media labeled unelectable; Rubio overcame a last-minute race-baiting dirty trick by Bill Clinton and received nearly as many votes as his Independent and Democratic opponents combined.

3. Kentucky Senate:

Jack Conway stooped almost as low as Florida’s Alan Grayson by cutting last-minute ads implying his opponent wasn’t a true Christian because of a college prank 27 years ago.  Rand Paul unapologetically espoused radically libertarian, small-government positions, wisely endorsed more aggressive and active foreign policy positions than his isolationist father Ron Paul, and was brave enough not to back down from saying government should not interfere with private hiring decisions.

4. Pennsylvania Senate:

Arlen Specter swayed back and forth with the political winds for two years until he was uprooted like a weed and blown into disgraced retirement.  Democrat Joe Sestak not only didn’t hide from his embarrassing support for the lethal Big Three signature Obama policies—the stimulus bill, cap-and-trade, and ObamaCare—but argued all should have been bigger and more government-heavy.  In contrast, Club for Growth President Pat Toomey was an unabashed fiscal conservative and Tea Party favorite who won despite an unfavorable blue-state climate.

5. Wisconsin Senate:

Russ Feingold was a long-term incumbent and influential, far-left scourge of conservatives in the Senate, due to his cosponsorship of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act and solitary losing vote in the Senate’s initial 98-1 vote on the PATRIOT Act.  Businessman Ron Johnson was a Tea Party conservative, unapologetic global warming skeptic, and ardent offshore drilling supporter who fought long odds and an opponent with a massive campaign war chest to achieve another important symbolic victory.

6. Ohio Governor:

Six-term former Representative and incumbent two-term governor Ted Strickland couldn’t hold his seat due to his support for Obama policies and his role in Ohio’s miserable economic conditions.  Former Representative and House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich ran on his conservative record in Congress and took over an office that will be crucial in managing campaign finance operations in the 2012 presidential election.

7. Arkansas Senate:

Blanche Lincoln paid for her support for ObamaCare and couldn’t extend her long-term incumbency despite her Blue Dog Democrat status.  John Boozman hammered home his opponent’s ideological similarity to Obama, reiterated his opposition to ObamaCare and cap-and-trade legislation, and destroyed Lincoln by a whopping 20 points.

8. Florida House 22:

Ron Klein defeated Republican Colonel Allen West in 2008 and voted with Democrats 98% of the time in the 111^th Congress.  This year West got his revenge by defending himself against smears about his service in the Iraq War and fearlessly fighting back claims of Uncle Tomism to become the nation’s most prominent black Tea Party elected official.

9. South Carolina Governor:

State Senator Vincent Sheheen tried to hide his liberal record but couldn’t sway South Carolina voters, even after Governor Mark Sanford’s sex scandal.  Nikki Haley came back from last place in the Republican primary, fought disgusting allegations of extramarital affairs, and rode the Sarah Palin/Jim DeMint/Tea Party wave to become the nation’s second Indian American governor.

10. Colorado House 4:

Incumbent Representative Betsy Markey floundered after her support for ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, and the stimulus bill.  “Young Gun” State Representative Cory Gardner defeated Markey due to his vocal support of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan’s radical, fiscally austere Roadmap for America.

As for dear Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon, John Raese, Carly Fiorina, Carl Paladino, Meg Whitman, Charles Baker, and Sean Bielat: Better luck next time!



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Where the Republican Rout Leaves Obama and the Dems (time.com)
• US midterms 2010: download the election results data (guardian.co.uk)
• US midterms leave Democrats bruised and battered – but not beaten (guardian.co.uk)
• Voter anger puts GOP back in charge of the House (capitolhillblue.com)
• Republicans seize control of U.S. House of Representatives (calgaryherald.com)

“I’m particularly offended by these people who want to take the nation back…  If you read the Republican Contract with America, you can see the bigotry in between every line.” – Maida Odom, “One Nation Working Together” rally attendee, October 2, 2010

In a desperate, last-ditch attempt to salvage their miserable midterm election prospects, Democrats have been tarnishing Republicans and Tea Partiers with the smear of—wait for it… racism!

Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth…

At a recent rally in Philadelphia, President Barack Obama warned the audience, “They’re counting on young people staying home and union members staying home and black folks staying home.”  Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Harold Jackson declared that the Tea Party is the ignorant, Negrophobic reincarnation of the pro-slavery wing of the Know Nothing Party.

Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B. Wells, Roy Innis, Eldridge Cleaver, Samuel B. Fuller…

Actually, Democrats have been crying racism throughout Obama’s whole presidency.  For example, New York Times columnist Frank Rich has been using this trick to try to fool Americans into thinking conservatives oppose ObamaCare because they don’t like black people such as bill architects Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  Maureen Dowd proposed that Joe Wilson’s exclamation regarding coverage for illegal Mexican immigrants was… anti-black.  Leftist civil rights leaders sullied their reputations by falsely accusing Tea Party protestors of calling Representative John Lewis the N-word and spitting on Representative Emanuel Cleaver.  Obama supporter Henry Louis Gates, Jr. falsely accused a poor working-class cop in Massachusetts of racial profiling.

Martin Luther King, Sr., Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Alveda King…

Democrats have been playing the race card since even before Obama was elected, as in their ludicrous claim that failure to elect Obama would lead to race riots.  Such efforts have done miracles for Obama’s promised improvement in race relations: Rasmussen recently reported that perceptions about black-white relations have gotten much more pessimistic since Obama took office.

Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, Shelby Steele, Mychal Massie, Deroy Murdock, John McWhorter, Erik Rush…

To hear Democrats tell it, you would think there were no African American historical figures, civil rights leaders, commentators, politicians, judges, authors, athletes, or celebrities who are Republican, conservative, libertarian, right-leaning, or Tea Party supporters.  Or if there are, that they’re all misguided, brainwashed Uncle Toms.

Armstrong Williams, Lloyd Marcus, Stanley Crouch, Angela McGlowan, Amy Holmes, Sonja Schmidt, Alfonzo Rachel…

You might also be forgiven for thinking that such organizations as the National Black Republican Association and The Alliance of Black Republicans were apocryphal, mere fictional entities.

J. C. Watts, Gary Franks, Alan Keyes, Lynn Swann, Ken Blackwell, Rod Paige, Allen West, Star Parker, Tim Scott, Ryan Frazier, Isaac Hayes, Robert Broadus…

Because Democrats view individuals as voting blocs and interest groups to be Balkanized along racial and ethnic lines, they’ve been caught engaging in some appalling acts in recent years.  Since Obama took office, we’ve been treated to the spectacle of the NAACP applauding Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod for reporting that she had once racially discriminated against a white farmer; Barbara Boxer condescendingly lumping ideologically opposed black groups together based on skin color; and Bill Clinton defending Robert Byrd’s Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops positions as necessary for getting elected to public office as a Southern Democrat.

Clarence Thomas, Janice Rogers Brown, Ward Connerly, Colin Powell, Michael Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Michael Steele…

It’s hard to discern who exactly is supposed to be offended by these smears.  Any thinking black person is surely aware of the black conservative movement, and any unthinking black person is clearly uninterested in the movement and mindlessly committed to the Democratic Party.

Jackie Robinson, Don King, Ernie Banks, Karl Malone, Jerome Bettis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Herschel Walker…

And any thinking non-black person waits for leftists to produce actual evidence of conservative racism and reserves judgment until that time.  Any non-thinking non-black person is happy to accept lies about Republicans spread by race hucksters and reject evidence to the contrary.

James Earl Jones, Jimmie Walker, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, L. L. Cool J, 50 Cent…

When accusations of racism are thrown around often enough, with as little evidence as they typically are, in place of discussion of the issues people really care about, the net effect can only hurt one-trick pony politicians who know that running on their record and their positions will hurt rather than help them.

…and on and on and on and on.

But if Democrats want to spend their dwindling political capital on a charge so old and worn-out even they don’t believe it, hey—I won’t let myself be prejudiced against their strategy.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Race and the Race (politico.com)
• Black Republicans offer hope after Barack Obama’s failures on race (telegraph.co.uk)
• So much for the ‘post-racial’ president | Lloyd Marcus (guardian.co.uk)
• Lack of new black Dem leaders forces first lady to campaign (thegrio.com)
• “Crying Bigotry: Last Refuge Of The Liberal” and related posts (investors.com)

Saturday Night Live (SNL) is held up by “television historians” as a paragon of insightful, ruthless satire of the political scene.

Whatever merits SNL might have once had in that department, lately its level of political analysis has been about as deep as the shot glasses its writers undoubtedly empty before they pen each week’s program.

In its recent season opening skit—which was overlong and dolefully unfunny, like the rest of the show these days—SNL mocked Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell over—wait for it… her wacky background!  The tasteful, thoughtfully written sketch included an O’Donnell impersonator admitting that she masturbates constantly and an interlude in which the onanist pleasured herself off-set and returned to ask fellow performers for snacks.

Two years ago, during the 2008 presidential election, Tina Fey’s impression of Governor Sarah Palin was a hit, not because it was especially accurate, but because (1) it was amusing to watch the antics of this colorful, clueless, moose-hunting politician Fey had created out of whole cloth who bore no characterological resemblance to her real-life model, and (2) there was schadenfreude in seeing the snarky Fey gussy herself up and try but fail to imitate the classiness and charisma of the real Palin.

In a similar display of what passes for the evidentiary basis for Democratic public policy nowadays, comedian Stephen Colbert testified before the House last week on the plight of migrant workers.  Colbert cited as firsthand experience the publicity stunt whereby he recently spent a few hours in comfy upstate New York being photographed loading crates of vegetables for the United Farm Workers.  Colbert bored and abused committee members with his bottomless ego, then demonstrated his pro-gay credentials by telling a charming joke about Iowan “corn packers” that caused his audience to groan in revulsion.

Even Democrat John Conyers, Chair of the Judiciary Committee, had to ask Colbert to leave the hearing during the middle of his testimony, though his sponsor—nutty California Democrat Zoe Lofgren—urged him to stay.  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was later shamed into calling Colbert’s testimony “an embarrassment.”

And Jon Stewart, the number one hard news source for leftists under 40, is bringing his oh-so-clever Rally to Restore Sanity to the National Mall next month, where it will compete with Colbert’s isn’t-it-ironic March to Keep Fear Alive.  Both are supposed to be satires of Glenn Beck’s recent Restoring Honor rally and the massive Tea Party gatherings held in D.C. the past two Septembers.

So millions of sincere and patriotic Americans travel hundreds of miles to the nation’s capital on a heartfelt quest to show solidarity with fellow citizens who are disgusted with unprecedented government spending, regulations, and deficits—and the brightest and most influential minds on the left respond by pointing fingers and giggling at protestors’ clothes.  How about a Stewart rally defending the merits of the stimulus bill or ObamaCare instead of one poking fun at people for wearing tri-corner hats or dressing up like Benjamin Franklin?

Contemporary leftists have learned that one way to avoid sober analysis is to ridicule one’s opponents for personal quirks and fringe elements in their followings.  It’s true that laughter can be used to draw in an audience or emphasize a genuine point, but it can also be used to sidetrack discussion and win over sympathizers via a superficial, crowd-pleasing style rather than through probing facts and penetrating arguments.  As political communication expert and professor Lauren Feldman reports, “[P]olitical comedy suppresses argument scrutiny.  What this means is that when audiences are exposed to political humor or satire they are less likely to counter-argue the information contained in the message or question the fairness or accuracy of the message, relative to a non-humorous message.”

If comedy’s what the public wants, then a truly astute, non-PC SNL political satire would, say, chronicle the addle-headed trillion-dollar stimulus bill and its ludicrous, disproven Keynesian assumptions; the administration’s risible invention of the “jobs created or saved” metric; its snail-paced implementation of projects, tongue-tied lies about funded projects, and use of funds for ridiculous pork projects; and the bill’s predictably laughable failure to bring down the unemployment rate.

A series of hilarious sketches might skewer ObamaCare proponents’ side-splitting claim that the law will cover 30 million more Americans yet somehow bring down the cost of care; the preposterous Wile E. Coyote schemes Democrats plotted to pass the bill such as reconciliation, “deem and pass,” the Christmas Eve vote, and the Cornhusker Kickback; and Democrats’ kamikaze obduracy in passing the bill against the public’s wishes.

But no: having Kristen Wiig don a witch’s hat and fly away on a broomstick—now that’s getting to the heart of what’s wrong with the political system in America!

Since they’re so obsessed with the backgrounds of Tea Party candidates, let’s consider the history of various storied SNL actors’ fates: died from drug overdose (John Belushi), died from drug overdose and obesity (Chris Farley), murdered by drug-addicted wife (Phil Hartman), committed suicide (Weekend Update anchor and Reagan impersonator Charles Rocket), for starters.  These are part of the cadre of fine, upstanding thespians lecturing O’Donnell for having friends who dressed as goths in high school.

Republican politicians need SNL, Colbert, Stewart, Bill Maher, and other leftist chuckleheads like an elephant needs a flock of blue-footed boobies picking nits off its backside—less, actually, since the birds provide a useful function by keeping the elephant clean.  These “comedians” feed on the right-wing political class like parasites, then pass off their antics to rubes on the left as serious political discourse.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Obama’s Palace Guards: Desperate Maher, Colbert, Jon Stewart Go All In to Save Dems (newsbusters.org)
• The Rally to Restore Sanity: A Growing Impact for Political Parody? (bigthink.com)
• Stewart and Colbert plan spoof of Tea Party rally (omg.yahoo.com)
• O’Donnell is first political target of SNL season (news.yahoo.com)
• Boehner: Dems Have Time for Comedy, Not Tax Cuts, in Congress (foxnews.com)

Once upon a time, there was a fantastic Tea Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware who promised to reduce the size and scope of government and adhere to constitutional limits on its power—and, as a bonus, did not tell Bill Maher that when she was in high school some friends had experimented with “witchcraft,” did not express mixed feelings about masturbation 14 years ago on camera, did not default on her mortgage in the middle of the housing crisis, did not misstate the number of counties she won in her prior run for Senate, and did not take more than four years to graduate from college.

Unfortunately that candidate doesn’t exist.  A candidate who was the real Christine O’Donnell’s primary opponent, however, does exist: he voted for the Democrats’ cap-and-trade legislation, bank bailout, and stimulus bill, and has refused to support repeal of ObamaCare; his name is Mike Castle.  O’Donnell’s general election opponent Chris Coons supports all of the above and more, and is also Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s self-described “pet.”

Similarly there’s a candidate for governor of New York named Carl Paladino who has promised to cut state spending by 10% and taxes by 20%, reduce economically crippling state pension obligations, and cut 60,000 positions held by workers deemed incapable of executing their responsibilities.

You may consider Paladino unfit for office, because he had an extramarital affair and also forwarded some e-mails he had received with offensive jokes in them—until you consider his general election opponent Andrew Cuomo, who as President Bill Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary played a key role in the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Then there’s Sharron Angle, who’s running for the Senate in Nevada: she wants to abolish the bankrupt Social Security program, the meddlesome Federal Reserve, the intrusive Internal Revenue Service, the worthless National Department of Education, unconstitutional gun control restrictions, pointless offshore drilling bans, useless global warming regulations, and the U.S.’s embarrassing membership in the United Nations.  But—detractors have accused her of having ties to celebrity Scientologists Kelly Preston and Jenna Elfman!

Angle ran against primary opponent Bob Bennett, one of two cosponsors of the failed 2008 Healthy Americans Act—precursor to ObamaCare—which likewise would have required all Americans to purchase government-approved health care plans.  Angle’s general election opponent Harry Reid was instrumental in getting ObamaCare passed in the Senate.

Let’s not forget Rand Paul, Senate candidate from Kentucky and self-described constitutional conservative, who opposed the free-speech-limiting McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, the wasteful bank and car company bailouts, and ObamaCare.  His great flaw is that he was politically incorrect enough to state that, had he been in Congress 50 years ago, he would have supported only 9 of the 10 Civil Rights Act titles, and would have contested the one prohibiting discrimination in private hiring and lending.  Oh—and he was involved in a college prank 27 years ago!

Paul is running against general election opponent Jack Conway, who supported ObamaCare, favors the union “card check” bill, and is open to cap-and-trade legislation.

How about Joe Miller, who’s running for Senate in Alaska?  He favors reclaiming unspent Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to help cut the deficit, repealing ObamaCare, and enacting a balanced budget amendment.  His Achilles’ heel is that he’s never held elective office before.

On the other hand, Miller’s primary opponent Lisa Murkowski has been in office for nearly a decade, and she opposes repealing ObamaCare and bucked the majority of Republicans to vote for the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

And on and on it goes for the Tea Party candidates: South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley had unproven extramarital affairs, Florida House candidate Daniel Webster supports covenant marriage, Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck was rude to birthers at a Tea Party rally.

Regardless of whether these Tea Party candidates are electable—and most of them are—fair-minded independents who seek outsiders to rein in government but are concerned about some of these mavericks’ personal quirks should focus on the big picture.

As The Intellectual Activist’s Robert Tracinski noted, “If you think a Christine O’Donnell has a lot of personal ‘baggage’ and that her personality makes her unelectable, fine—then send us someone better who stands for the same principles.  But our principles are the one thing we’re not going to bend on.”

Here’s a request for the mainstream media: as soon as we’re allowed to focus on Tea Party candidates’ substantive merits and faults relative to their opponents’, rather than whether they played Dungeons & Dragons 30 years ago, please let us know.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Christine O’Donnell hits the stage at Values Voter Summit (politico.com)
• Has Christine O’Donnell “Grown Up”? (newsrealblog.com)
• 46 Days to Decide: Dem Candidate Coons Comes Under Scrutiny in Delaware Senate Race (foxnews.com)
• Harry Reid’s ‘Pet’ (nationalreview.com)
• Paladino Is Taunting in a Letter to Cuomo (nytimes.com)

The stimulus bill Congress passed in February 2009 was supposed to be spent predominantly on infrastructure rebuilding projects.

At an address to AFL-CIO members at Laborfest in Milwaukee on Monday, President Barack Obama pushed an additional $50 billion-plus stimulus bill designed to fulfill the novel task of… rebuilding the country’s infrastructure.

Obama warmed up his working class audience by wearing an open-collar shirt with rolled up sleeves, referring to his listeners as “folks,” and reminding them of the miserably unprosperous Reagan years, when unemployment plummeted from a Carter-induced 10% in 1982 to 5% by the end of Reagan’s second term.

The President’s proposed infrastructure spending aimed to rebuild roads, railways, and runways, not to mention public union coffers and Democratic Congressional reelection campaigns.

The bill would be paid for by eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies, also known as “raising taxes.”

In addition, the President proposed a new federal Infrastructure Bank of unspecified cost and scope that would use tax dollars to borrow private funds to fuel future projects.  You know—sort of a cross between Amtrak and Fannie Mae, with all the efficiency of the former and all the transparency of the latter.

Chastising Republicans for their platform of “No, We Can’t” and their propensity to oppose everything he suggests, Obama declared, “If I said the sky was blue, they’d say no.  If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no.”  Actually, if he said never-ending Keynesian spending orgies stimulate long-term economic growth, we’d say no.  But close!

Obama announced that he would “keep fighting, every single day, every single hour, every single minute to turn this economy around.”  (He did not say “every single second”—a guy does need time to get in some golf swings and order shrimp baskets in between bouts of pondering the economy.)

Behold a president whose economic ideas are so muddled that he could pronounce, in his speech, “[A]nyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it’ll trickle down to working folks… just [hasn’t] studied our history”; and then, a few paragraphs later, brag, “[W]e’ve given tax cuts to small business owners…  [W]e’re cutting taxes for companies that put our people to work here at home.”  Gee—I wonder how giving tax breaks to companies helps the middle class?  Perhaps, when taxes are lowered, wealthy company owners have more money to hire workers?  You might almost say that tax cuts cause jobs to “trickle down” to the working class.

When the stimulus bill failed to reduce unemployment last year, liberal commentators snickered at how dumb conservatives were for expecting the bill to have an effect right away.  In late spring 2009, when unemployment was at 8.5%, they said, Just wait a few more months.  At the end of the summer, when unemployment was at 9.5%, they said, Just wait till the end of the year.  At the end of the year, when unemployment was over 10%, they said, The stimulus could actually take years to lay bare its brilliant results.

Eighteen months after the stimulus bill was passed, the House Ways and Means Committee reported that more than 2.5 million jobs had been lost.

In order to minimize the egg on their faces a year from now, the Obama administration simply refuses to estimate how many jobs its new not-a-stimulus stimulus bill would create.

Obama’s announcement represents a perverse stubbornness to acknowledge that his party’s economic ideas simply aren’t working.  The one thing that might save his presidency would be for him to turn into President Bill Clinton and start governing from the center, but then he would have to admit that he was wrong, which he refuses to do.

The clincher that liberals know they should be following conservatives’ advice always comes when they trot out the old canard that “Republican leadership hasn’t brought any helpful ideas to the table.”  That’s what they said when conservatives rejected their nationalized health care scheme last year.  The claim was belied by dozens of innovative health care reform bills Republicans had introduced in the House that never even left the referral stage.

The Tea Party’s Contract from America, for starters, lists 10 fantastic ideas for strengthening the economy and creating an environment favorable to growth and development, such as simplifying the tax system, imposing caps on annual federal spending increases, and permanently extending the Bush tax cuts.  In other words, “no helpful ideas.”

Obama’s latest tin-eared proposal is final proof, in 12-foot tall, blood-red, block letters, for those who still need it, that he doesn’t get it: Americans are furious and terrified about the mountains of debt he has piled on top of us, and don’t believe any of his spending programs have done a thing to help the economy.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Obama assails GOP, promotes new jobs program (yahoo.com)
• 1938 in 2010 (nytimes.com)
• Re-Stimulating (washingtonpost.com)
• Obama Offers a Transit Plan to Create Jobs (nytimes.com)
• GOP proposes renewing tax cuts, freezing spending (yahoo.com)

Ben Jealous, President of the NAACP, declared at last week’s annual convention that the impetus for the Tea Party is hatred of nonwhite people and resentment of a black president.  Of the rise of the movement, Jealous announced, “Here comes the genetic descendent of the White Citizens Council, burst from its coffin.”

I don’t know if Tea Partiers are genetically descendent from the White Citizens Council or not.  (Hey—isn’t an obsession with “genetic descendents” usually associated with racism?)

What I do know is that they’re not politically descendent.

The overwhelming majority of voters and congressmen who identify as Tea Party supporters are Republicans.

In contrast, the early leaders of the White Citizens Council were Louisiana politicians William Rainach and Joseph Waggonner, Jr., justice Leander Perez, and publisher Ned Touchstone, all Democrats.  The group was formed in reaction to political activities carried out by the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, led by black Republican T. R. M. Howard.

As part of its recent campaign against the Tea Party, the NAACP posted on its website a slideshow of Tea Party rally signs bearing such patently, explicitly anti-black sentiments as “Now Look!  Nice People Forced To Protest!  This Must Be Serious,” “Obama & His Gang of Thieves = America’s Toxic Assets,” “Freeloading Illegals Are Raping U.S. Taxpayers,” “Obama Was Not Bowing.  He Was Sucking Saudi Jewels!” “It’s 1939 Germany All Over Again,” “The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens,” and “Hang ‘Em High!  Traitors in Congress—Pelosi, Reid, Waters, Schumer, Frank, Dodd, Conyers, Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy.”

The NAACP was once, many moons ago, a pioneer in spearheading crucial and controversial civil rights work, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since then, the NAACP has distinguished itself as a water carrier for every racist fringe element in society but the KKK.

The writings of former local NAACP chapter president Robert F. Williams, for example, influenced the violent tactics adopted by the Black Panthers, the far-left, quasi-Marxist/Maoist revolutionary group formed in the 1960s that sprouted the Black Power movement and instigated numerous fatal confrontations with police over the next decade.

A revived version of the group, the New Black Panther Party, started in 1989, and was soon vilified by the Anti-Defamation League as “the largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in America” and labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Law Poverty Center.

More recently, in 2000 the head of the NAACP in Dallas, Lee Alcorn, used his radio show to slam Al Gore for selecting a Jew as his running mate: “If we get a Jew person, then what I’m wondering is, what is this movement for?  [W]e need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level, because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kind of things.”

After ABC News exposed the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary racist sermons in the spring of 2008, the NAACP invited him to give a keynote address to an audience of 10,000 members at a fundraiser in Detroit, where Wright unrepentantly reaffirmed his views to a welcoming audience and accused candidate Obama of disavowing his sermons for political reasons.  (As Bill Clinton might say, Obama had a “fleeting association” with black liberation theology.)  Wright added some charming eugenics-inspired comments about how blacks and whites’ brains are different and reflect separate but equal learning styles—remarks that also met with approval from the NAACP audience.

In November 2008, members of the New Black Panther Party brandished police batons and made menacing comments toward voters outside a Philadelphia voting center.  The Bush administration filed a lawsuit against the NBPP, which resulted in a slap-on-the-wrist injunction against one of the defendants.  In June 2009, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed the suit against the remaining defendants in the case with no explanation.  Liberal commentators have dismissed the voter intimidation incident as “street theater”—you know, like break dancing or singing James Brown tunes, only with nightsticks and paramilitary gear.

Bill O’Reilly observed, “[A] number of New Black Panthers have been shown on TV saying incredibly bigoted things.  NBPP member King Samir Shabazz even suggested that black Americans kill white babies…  One of the weaknesses of the NAACP is that it has rarely acknowledged black racism.  The organization is silent on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan.  Yet, it is outraged about the Tea Party.”

In a recent column titled “Is NAACP blind to Farrakhan & Co.?  The Nation of Islam is built on racism and lies,” Stanley Crouch highlighted the NAACP’s ongoing support for the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam and suggested that “were Jealous and the rest disturbed and vocal about [Louis] Farrakhan’s presence [in the NAACP], it would suggest some actual integrity of the sort we are not accustomed to hearing from ‘black leaders’ and ‘public intellectuals.’”

This week Andrew Breitbart unearthed video showing U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod admitting she had engaged in racist behavior toward a white farmer years earlier.  The remarks were made at an award ceremony held by the NAACP, whose audience members clapped and cheered and peppered her remarks with sounds of approval, all before they realized that she was citing her bad behavior as a mistake made on her way to embracing racial equality.

The NAACP responded to the Sherrod case by presenting video of Tea Party speakers telling audiences that tax cuts should be targeted toward whites and not blacks, and attendees shouting agreement with these sentiments.  Oh wait—no, they didn’t.

Tunku Varadarajan summed up the contrast between the two groups well: “Here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization—the NAACP—that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings.”

In true “post-racial” fashion, expect Obama to hold the equivalent of a beer summit between leaders of the NAACP and representatives of the Tea Party movement, in which both sides are treated as equally morally culpable, calls are made to put aside differences, and reputations and character are obfuscated rather than clarified.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why the silence from The Post on Black Panther Party story? (washingtonpost.com)
• Bozell Column: The NAACP Cries Racism (newsbusters.org)
• Sherrod Blames NAACP for Firing (politico.com)
• N.A.A.C.P. Backtracks on Official Accused of Bias (nytimes.com)
• Why Martin Luther King Was Republican (humanevents.com)

ObamaCare supporters who claim that opposition to the recently passed health care legislation is motivated by hatred of empowered minority group members are right about one thing: those who oppose the bill and want it repealed are in fact motivated by hate.

They hate a lot of things they’ve witnessed over the past year, none having anything to do with African Americans, Latinos, or women wielding power in Washington.

Among other things, they hate:

The health care bill:

•    Its unconstitutional individual mandate and general abridgment of liberty

•    Its ban on non-government-sanctioned health care plans, including catastrophic coverage that many young people prefer, and its usurious taxing of “Cadillac plans”

•    Its boneheaded enforcement mechanism which, in addition to being miswritten, would simply lead people to pay a relatively piddly fine instead of buying health insurance until they needed it

•    Its paying only six years of benefits while levying ten years of taxes and claiming to be a deficit reducer

•    Its stubborn and complete absence of free market reforms, such as malpractice tort reform, removal of the ban on selling insurance across state lines, and health insurance tax credits for the self-employed

•    Its excessive length and complexity, and the insufficient time the public and even Congress has been given to read and understand its various iterations

The way in which the bill was passed:

•    The stipulation of repeated, and repeatedly missed, arbitrary deadlines for holding this or that vote, including the infamous Christmas Eve session, for no reason other than political expediency for Democrats

•    The abuse of the Congressional Budget Office’s authority, whereby Democrats fed the CBO misleading parameters, then bragged to the public that the bill saves money, based on the evidence that the CBO was forced to say so, according to the Democrats’ rules of the game

•    The shady deals made to bribe reluctant Congressional Democrats to support the bill

•    The use of a phony, unenforceable, last-minute executive order banning federal funding of abortions, which contradicts the text of the bill, in order to get the last few votes needed for passage in the House

•    The inappropriate use of the budget reconciliation procedure to get the bill over the finish line

Politicians’ willful ignorance of the consequences of socialized medicine elsewhere, including:

•    The horrific rationing of care and substandard service in Britain resulting from regulations enforced by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence

•    The decline in rates of drug and medical device development in countries that nationalize health care, and the frequent use of the U.S. health care system by foreign travelers who can afford it

•    The spiraling costs that follow the addition of a massive entitlement program to a precariously debt-laden economy

Politicians’ refusal to heed the will of the American people:

•    Their shunning the results of polls that for months have shown a majority of Americans opposing the bill, and far more Americans strongly opposing than strongly supporting it

•    Their avoidance of constituents at townhall meetings and their evasion of constituents’ questions

•    Their attempt to obfuscate the public’s understanding of the bill by blurring the definitions of such terms as “tax,” “preexisting condition,” “profit,” and “government-run healthcare”

•    Their insulting the public’s intelligence by claiming that the bill will provide insurance to 32 million more people, yet somehow save money

•    Their disingenuous protestations that they are not looking to expand government control of health care to a single-payer system in the future

•    Their condescending lecturing and patronizing attempts to explain and sell the bill to us thickheaded constituents

•    Their paternalistic insistence that they know better than us what we need, and that we’ll like the bill once we find out what’s in it

The ugly mischaracterization of ObamaCare opponents:

•    As “teabaggers,” a vulgar term never used by any Tea Party patriot

•    As simpleminded, emotional, easily manipulated fear mongers and rabble rousers

•    As racists who supposedly shouted the n-word and spat at black lawmakers marching to Selma—er, to the House vote

Apparently unnoticed by the mainstream media is the fact that numerous, prominent, pasty white males have been instrumental in getting ObamaCare passed, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Vice President Joe Biden, and most of the Democrats in Congress, not to mention the cheerleaders at MSNBC, The New York Times, and every other left-leaning news organization in the country.

Americans are indeed starting to mobilize peaceful armies and reload for another round of the fight against the bill they hate.  But their motivation is not to stigmatize supporters of Obamacare.  It is to stop them.



 Print This Post

Related articles by Zemanta

• Health Care (citizeneconomists.com)
• Rep. Artur Davis Seeks To Become Alabama’s First Black Governor While Distancing From Obama’s Health Care Bill (urbanbellemag.com)
• Prohibition’s lessons relevant to health care (timesunion.com)
• Our Unhealthy Financial Future (newsweek.com)
• Reid Supporters Accused of Throwing Eggs at Tea Party Bus (foxnews.com)

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.

Jonathan Martin of Politico notes that, even though racism against the president is supposedly widespread, “it’s still a sensitive enough issue that the [Democratic] party doesn’t broach it directly.”  By “sensitive,” of course, he means “far-fetched, ludicrous, and laughable.”

Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) claims that in Senator Joe Wilson’s outburst toward the president last week, Wilson “kind of winked at that element” of the U.S. that disrespects Obama because he is black.  I’m not sure what criminal statutes are on the books for “kind of winking” at an “element,” but I do know that Democrats’ charges of racism until recently have been so timid and indirect, because they know that if they made them openly, they might have to produce actual evidence of racism.

Lately some of the attempts to label opposition to socialized medicine and trillion-dollar deficits as racism have gotten more blatant.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright was just caught on video snarling, “I think the racists in the right wing are upset because poor people are about to be helped.”  And it wasn’t even during one of his weekly sermons!

Jimmy Carter weighed in on the subject over the weekend: “[A]n overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man… [and] a belief among many white people… that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.”

MSNBC bloggers recently wrote, “Whether it’s fair or not, there is a perception growing that race is driving some elements of the opposition to Obama.”

Maureen Dowd wrote of Wilson in the New York Times, “[F]air or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”  Oh, the New York Times doesn’t need to be fair!  Stop being so hard on yourself!

According to Dowd, who was praised by liberal bloggers everywhere for finally stating openly what they believed but didn’t feel comfortable expressing, “Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.”  Note to Dowd: None of the conservatives in Congress did, and it had nothing to do with Obama’s being brainy or black—it had everything to do with his being wrongheaded and pompous.

Dowd lamented “the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as… socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people.”

I don’t know—some would say that taking over banks, car companies, and the health care industry is a bit socialist; wanting to “spread the wealth around” is a bit Marxist; having a spiritual mentor who railed against white people in church for 20 years is a bit racist; nominating former communists as czars is a bit Commie; receiving material support from groups that beat up health care protestors at townhall meetings is a bit Nazi; and planning to set up government panels to ration end-of-life care implies a willingness to snuff old people.  Then again, some don’t write for the New York Times.

Dowd added, “Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president… convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”  Yes, and the “shocking disrespect” for the office of Congressman at mostly white Senators and Representatives’ townhall meetings has convinced me: Some people just can’t believe white people can be in Congress and will never accept it.

Dowd charged that Obama is “at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension” and that “this president is the ultimate civil rights figure—a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.”

For liberals, the equation is “challenged” plus “black” = “victim of racism.”

I suppose we need to inform Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Walter Williams, Sonja Schmidt, Mychal Massie, and other fantastic black conservative and libertarian commentators and harsh Obama critics that their opposition is based on mere black self-hatred.

It was also insinuated by major media outlets that the massive tea party held in Washington over the weekend was fueled by racist resentment of a black man in the White House.  As amply documented by photos of the event, however, signs protested the actions of not just Obama but: Bush, Congress, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Steny Hoyer, Saul Alinsky, government, and the mainstream media, among many other targets.

Tea party signs protested Medicaid and Medicare’s insolvency, passing on trillions of dollars of debt to future generations, providing health care to illegal immigrants, paying for abortions through health care legislation, excessive taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, government takeover of the automobile industry, and the appointment of czars.  (Take that, NAACP!)

Finally, signs supported tort reform, health savings accounts, a flat tax, gun rights, the war on terror, and a strange, unheard-of cult called “Liberty.”

Notably absent from protest signs were calls for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act and the resegregation of water fountains.  As Obama correctly observed in one of his health care speeches this summer, “This is not about me.”

As for the occasional reference to race on protest signs, Martin writes, “Republicans see an important distinction between Obama critics who are genuinely worried about his… policies and those whose fears go beyond the president’s liberalism…  But for some Democrats, it’s difficult to make that distinction when conservative marchers take to Washington bearing images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Obama that read, ‘He had a dream, we got a nightmare.’”  And for some Republicans, it’s difficult to make a distinction between signs comparing King and Obama that would be acceptable to liberals and those that would be branded “racist.”

As one prescient and widely photographed sign at the protest read, “It doesn’t matter what this sign says—you’ll call it racism anyway.”