As a good conservative, appearing on Wisconsin Public Radio's Week in Review program on Friday, I was asked to repudiate racism.
"I denounce racism wherever it exists, including in the NAACP," I answered.
No one asked Ed Garvey, my liberal counterpart, to do the same. Genial Ed even tried to tar the Republican party with the racist brush. I consoled Ed on the loss of Sen. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, the former Klansman and filibusterer of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which would have been defeated by the solid Democrat south (including Senator Gore, senior, of Tennessee) were it not for Republican support.
The NAACP has stirred up a hornet's nest midway through the first "post-racial" president's term (note the snotty quotation marks) by accusing the Tea Party of cosseting racists.
"Leftwing McCarthyism" is what George Will calls it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oNstZWLySU&feature=player_embedded
The NAACP takes its notion from the supposed peppering of U.S. Rep. John Lewis with the N word when he walked past tea partiers on the day ObamaCare passed. Meanwhile, no one has picked up on Andrew Breitbart's offer of $100,000 for any evidence -- despite the ubiquity of video cameras on that newsworthy day and of cell phones.
Now we have a black USDA official bragging how she refused federal aid to a southern white farmer.
Her racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups' racial tolerance. The NAACP Awards; Racism 2010.
Note: See the post from July 21, Whitewashing the race issue.
The USDA official was fired on Monday.
... That an organization like the NAACP, after years of fighting against genuine racism, should now be playing the game of race card fraud is especially painful to see. [Thomas Sowell, Race Card Fraud]
Tunku, tunku very much
Tunku Varadarajan in the Daily Beast on the NAACP and the Tea Party:
The NAACP senses - knows - that the electoral momentum is building inexorably against President Obama. And they hope to slow it by playing the race card. Let there be no doubt that nothing would have been tabled at this NAACP meeting without President Obama's imprimatur-especially with the first lady as the keynote speaker. Our first black president-with his lowest approval ratings ever-is using his race politically, through a surrogate.
And who's being talked up as a "dark horse" candidate for president? Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather's Pizza and a favorite on the tea party circuit. I heard him talk this spring at the tea party in Lake Delton.
What took so long?
The ombudsman for the Washington Post laments his newspaper's failure to cover the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party captured on video in front of a Philadelphia polling place. The U.S. Justice Department was poised to win the case when the Obama administration decided the case was "over-charged" and settled for an injunction prohibiting the thug from brandishing a nightstick at any polling place -- until after 2012.
If Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his department are not colorblind in enforcing civil rights laws, they should be nailed. If the Commission on Civil Rights' investigation is purely partisan, that should be revealed. [WaPost: Why the silence ... on Black Panther Party story?]
I want to correct something I said on Joy Cardin's radio program. I mistakenly attributed to CNN what I should have attributed to MSNBC, the journalistic libel of crying racism at the open carry of a gun at a tea party rally when, in fact, the carrier was a black man. Yeah, there's been a lot of "situational ethics" (more snotty quote marks) on the issue of racism.
That is why I have revised the Samuel Johnson quote to read "Accusing racism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Now here is another Joe, Veep Joe Biden: "I don't believe, the president doesn't believe that the Tea Party is - is a racist organization. I don't believe that."
Rioting and looting for its own sake?
The story that dominated the San Francisco Chronicle while I was in the city by the bay was the trial of a white subway cop in Oakland for the shooting death of an unarmed black man. The cop was convicted by a jury of involuntary manslaughter last week. The reaction in Oakland? Rioting and looting that damaged 100 businesses. Why the violence? The rioters apparently wanted a murder conviction.
This is Heather MacDonald in the Weekly Standard:
The routine, daily bloodshed in inner cities is regarded as the ordinary course of affairs. The hundred or so homicides in Oakland each year are part of nearly 6,000 murders nationally committed by blacks, mostly of other blacks, compared to just over 5,300 homicides committed by whites and Hispanics combined. (Blacks are 12.8 percent of the U.S. population, whites and Hispanics, 81 percent.) Only in those extremely rare cases where a white police officer mistakenly shoots a black man do the activists, who allegedly care so much about the unjustified taking of black life, spring into action. (Needless to say, fatal police shootings of whites rarely get national press coverage and don't raise fears of riots.)
Such a double standard regarding police shootings of blacks and criminal shootings of blacks is perfectly in keeping with elite priorities regarding crime and the police. The academic world and the media churn out a constant barrage of reports purporting to show that the police unfairly target blacks for unnecessary enforcement and that the criminal justice system is racist. ....
MacDonald notes that a bunch of do-gooder groups in New York have brought suit against the practice of routine police patrols in public housing projects on the grounds that the projects are mostly black.
... The alleged bias against blacks is the only law enforcement topic that consistently gets media, professorial, and professional attention; the costs of crime on victims and society are beneath notice.[The Weekly Standard: Excusing the Oakland Rioters; looting is not a form of civil rights protest.]
Ring any bells? Sounds like the Dane County Task Force on Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System, doesn't it? The Task Force recommended, among other idiocies, an impact study on whether new laws and ordinances would disproportionately affect black people. In other words, forget about the color-blind society. We now want a reverse-racist law enforcement system? Slip the blindfold off lady justice. [Blaska's Blog: Do we really want a racial quota system for crime?]
Yes, get the Obama BS removal kit
