Posted on 07/06/2004 12:27:37 PM PDT by mrustow
OPINION -- With the June 25 announcement by conservative Republican Jack Ryan that he was dropping out of the U.S. Senate race for Illinois, the seat falls to Democrat candidate Barack Obama virtually by default.
But who is Barack Obama? Is the charming, handsome, articulate 42-year-old state senator who dominated a field of six in the March 16 Democrat primary with 53 percent of the vote, the herald of a “new kind of politics” or merely a new voice calling for the same old, racist, urban welfare politics the Democrat Party has promoted for forty years?
On June 4, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert pitched for Obama.
“In a political era saturated with cynicism and deceit, Mr. Obama is asking voters to believe him when he talks about the values and verities that so many politicians have lied about for so long. He's asking, in effect, for a leap of political faith.”
Herbert crafted two cover stories, as to why voters should support Obama: 1. He is a left-of-center candidate whose message transcends partisanship; and 2. He is black. (Actually, Obama is biracial; one can only call him “African-American” by reading his white mother out of his genetic code.)
Forget number one. Herbert wants Illinoisans to elect Barack Obama to the Senate, because Herbert has defined him as black.
Imagine how Herbert and millions of other black and white “liberals” would react, if a white columnist called on voters to elect a political candidate, merely because the latter was white (or was defined as white).
Herbert tells us that Obama is a “left of center” pol who believes in "a set of core values that bind us together as Americans." Herbert writes that Obama’s “partisans describe [him] as a dream candidate, the point man for a new kind of politics designed to piece together a coalition reminiscent of the one blasted apart by the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy in 1968.”
“Core values” talk -- logic and morality be damned -- always seems to lead to the demand that black and Hispanic Americans (and Hispanic non-citizens!) be privileged under the law, and white Americans be disenfranchised. And in fact, Obama is a rabid supporter of affirmative action and other racially biased policies, though Herbert did not see fit to divulge those facts. Indeed, Herbert provided no credible or substantive information about Obama’s politics.
Obama , who currently represents Illinois' 13th Senate District, on the largely black South Side of Chicago, is also an ardent supporter of abortion, and a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago. But has he ever read the Constitution? The Supreme Court’s decisions deeming abortion a “fundamental right” and in favor of affirmative action were, constitutionally speaking, some of the worst in the history of the Court.
According to another fawning, if brief, profile in The Economist, “He has worked hard to reach across racial lines, but his core support comes from blacks and white urban progressives, and he has pinned his primary hopes largely on the Chicago area.” The anonymous Economist editorialist also indulged in some cheap race-baiting: "Are Illinois voters ready for this? In a city with deep Irish roots, a local commentator suggests that he might do better as O'Bama."
Had the writer at The Economist bothered to check his facts, he would have known that Chicago today has twice as many blacks as Irish. Apparently, he only knows Chicago from 1930s' 20th Century-Fox movies about Mrs. O'Leary's cow .
The media coverage of Obama that I have seen, has been an endless series of puff pieces, many of which employ the same fork-tongued rhetoric: ‘He transcends race (but support him, because he’s black).’ Such uncritical campaign propaganda from the press should not surprise students of the media - Obama and the people “covering” him are overwhelmingly leftists. Alleged journalists see helping Obama win as a matter of political honor.
But are Illinois voters ready for Obama's race politics?
Affirmative Action: America has already suffered for almost 40 years under a system in which incompetents are accepted to college and graduate and professional school, hired to responsible jobs, and given government contracts, due solely to their race, ethnicity, or sex, while qualified people suffer egregious discrimination, based solely on their race, ethnicity, or sex. Obama would maintain such vicious programs in perpetuity.
The unrealistic attitude of many black supporters of affirmative action was succinctly expressed by Obama’s wife, Michelle, as recounted in yet another valentine, by New Yorker writer William Finnegan. “Michelle’s father was a city worker, her grandfather a handyman. ‘They were bright, articulate, well-read men,’ she says. ‘If they’d been white, they would have been the heads of banks.’”
People have lived under the racist regime of affirmative action for so long, that they may fail to see the connection between it and contemporary racialist policies which are in fact direct outgrowths of it. Affirmative action has for over thirty years been defended by, among other rationalizations, the theory of “disparate impact.” According to “disparate impact,” any category in which a “preferred minority” (or women) does less well than white men, is automatically a case of racial discrimination. No evidence is required of those charging discrimination. Not only are claimants released from the onus of proving their case, but in recent years, a paranoid conspiracy theory has been joined to disparate impact theory, in order to foist pernicious race hoaxes on the public, such as the fiction of “racial profiling.”
Law Enforcement: Obama drafted successful legislation ensuring that all interrogations in death penalty cases are videotaped; “passed model legislation designed to curb the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement”; and “has been a leader in reforming the juvenile justice system to keep more young people in school and out of prison, and has fought to increase penalties for domestic violence.” (Quotes are from Obama’s official Web site.)
The videotaping requirement Obama got passed is part of a national movement to have all police interrogations videotaped. The movement gathered steam in late 2002, as part of the ultimately successful campaign to get the convictions of the five New York men who in 1989 as teenagers had admitted to assaulting, sexually abusing, and leaving for dead Tricia Meili, whom whites had known for years as “the Central Park Jogger” thrown out. (Blacks knew Meili’s name, because black media had constantly publicized it from the start.)
According to the Supreme Court, police are legally permitted to use deceit, in order to trick suspects into confessing to crimes, but some members of the public, particularly among blacks, oppose such tactics. And while some supporters of videotaping all interrogations have claimed that the practice is necessitated by the history of Chicago police coercing confessions, those same advocates believe that there is no such thing as a true, voluntary confession, at least not by minority suspects. (Advocates' ultimate goal is to get ALL confessions, at least all by minority suspects, thrown out of court.) Those who support the videotaping of interrogations hope that juries will be so disgusted by detectives’ use of deceit, that they will acquit the guilty, or that detectives will be so handcuffed by public race-baiting, as to be rendered impotent.
The Illinois legislation against so-called racial profiling requires that all local police departments record the race of anyone police stop for questioning. The legislation's rationale is that if “too many” blacks are stopped, the police are guilty of racial profiling. “Too many” is virtually always framed by race advocates as being more than the black (or black and Hispanic) proportion of the local population.
But in Illinois, as in the rest of the nation, disproportionate numbers of minority group members are violent criminals. “Anti-profiling” legislation leads to “de-policing” , whereby in order to have the "right numbers" and to avoid charges of racism, police ignore violent crimes committed right in front of their noses by minority criminals, while arresting whites for the pettiest of offenses. Another consequence of “anti-profiling” agitation is police departments’ doctoring of crime statistics, in order to compensate on paper for what police may not do on the street.
Obama’s “reform” of the juvenile justice system is designed to protect violent, young, black (and, to a lesser degree Hispanic) felons from having to pay for their crimes. But why would someone who is so lax with violent, young felons be so draconian with men convicted of domestic violence? For one thing, such legislating -- like his support for unlimited abortion rights -- burnishes Obama’s feminist credentials with white, female progressives. For another, such legislation primarily targets white men. “Domestic violence” is largely about locking up unruly and violent white husbands. (Violent wives get a pass.)
Seventy-seven percent of white children are born to married parents, while only 31 percent of black children are. And so, such legislation is tailored to harm white men. Note too that “domestic violence” law tends to get treated de facto as an adjunct of family law, in which constitutional protections are routinely violated. And so, Obama, a lecturer on constitutional law, wants to fabricate ever broader, new legal protections for black and Hispanic criminals, while doing away with legal protections for heterosexual, white, married men.
To me, Barack Obama comes off like Bill Clinton, a former professor of constitutional law who also apparently never read the document. Like Clinton, Obama also is a man of great charm. That charm and a historical decline, such that policy proposals that once would have been publicly denounced as racist nonsense are now taken seriously, makes Obama so much more dangerous, than if he were simply a crudely vicious racist like Gus Savage.
No wonder so many liberal journalists seem to fantasize about Obama eventually being elected the nation’s second “African-American” president.
[Nicholas Stix has written for the New York Post, Daily News, Insight on the News, Weekly Standard and American Enterprise. His weekly column appears at www.therant.us and other fine Web sites.]
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What’s your thoughts concerning the issues raised in this commentary? Write a letter to the editor at letters@illinoisleader.com, and include your name and town.
Please don't say that -- I'm stuck here. :-(
LOL, he's Half-rican-American.
LOL.
That's very interesting. Do you have any links, or any more focused recollections? You're the first person I've heard say that. From what I've read, his "spiritual" yearnings always hgave a political payoff. Chicago ... Islam ... NOI ... black racist vote?
This is new. I never heard this rule for 'african-american' before.
It doesn't sound like a rule for African American to me; it sounds like a rule of biology, honesty, and decency. My son is biracial, and if you referred to him as if he weren't half white (i.e., as if I weren't his father), I'd knock you on your a$$.
You may be correct on that. Too many Democrats live in big cities. Republicans are a minority now. They live out in the rural areas.
This is one of the most widely distributed untruths about Obama. Say what you will about his politics, but the man is a Christian, heavily involved in his church. I'm not going to vote for him, but I'm not going to spread false rumors about him either.
He is a devout supporter of unlimited abortion rights. He denies the existence of hell. He emphasizes a notion of "separation of church and state" hostile to fundamentalists, while violating that very distinction in politicking in black churchess. His spiritual beliefs are indistinguishable from those of the left wing of the Democrat Party.
Now, I'm no Christian, but I actually studied Christianity some, and spent years hanging out with religious Christians, and there's no connection between the Christianity I learned about from them, and Obama's Christianity. But like I said, I'm no Christian, and so maybe Christianity really does teach the sanctity of Roe v. Wade and the denial of Hell...
not!
Suppose a college were to set up a program which reduced admissions and graduation requirements for blue-eyed-blond women, and these reduced requirements were well-publicized. What do you think the response would be?
Outrage. The media offensive to end all media offensives. Demonstrations. Riots.
Peter Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, the RINO party absolutely despises him. Given a choice between Fizgerald and Obama, the RINO machine would back Obama.
I'm afraid you're right. Although he would likely lose, if Fitzgerald were to run, it would be a nice thumb in the eye to the state party leadership that so loathes him. He would be running against both the Party and Obama. The dramatic implications would be incredible.
Outrage. The media offensive to end all media offensives. Demonstrations. Riots.
What would be the complaint? That it's unfair to Blacks to offer such treatment to anyone else, or what? Certainly I don't think they'd want to express outrage in any manner that might hint that the program would perpetuate "dumb blond" perceptions.
But I don't think 'half white' and 'african-american' are mutually exclusive.
mrustow: Outrage. The media offensive to end all media offensives. Demonstrations. Riots.
supercat: What would be the complaint? That it's unfair to Blacks to offer such treatment to anyone else, or what? Certainly I don't think they'd want to express outrage in any manner that might hint that the program would perpetuate "dumb blond" perceptions.
mrustow: Your mistake is in assuming that blacks would approach the matter the way whites do. When whites protest anything to do with race or ethnicity, they worry themselves to death about whether they might be perceived to be spreading bigoted perceptions, and then protest in such a muffled, defensive, apologetic, self-castrating manner, as to abort their own opposition.
Blacks, on the other hand, take the offensive, and do not for one moment worry about whether they could be perceived as spreading bigoted perceptions. They know that as blacks, by definition, they cannot be guilty of racism. If white folks see things otherwise, that's just their "perception." But if blacks see racism, that's their PERCEPTION. (In case you think I'm making this up or exaggerating, I had a black female boss in the late 1980s, who used the same word -- "perception" to mean opposite things, depending on the race of the user. And the "cannot by definition be racist" stuff has been written to death since the 1980s.)
I've never met a black who saw any contradiction in the notion that the 14th Amendment justified preferential treatment for blacks.
All the blacks I've known in New York saw them as mutually exclusive.
That's something my father would say, and he'd actually do it too. Anyway, Barack Obama knows where the money is and right now it's in race hustling (no one can beat Jesse Jackson for that though). Aside from that, his platform on issues is disgusting but because of the mess that is the republican party he'll be elected.
I'll concede your point about the Islam connection for the time being (I think it was the NOI) - as I've lost the link to the article mentioning it. As for the idea of such a person being a "committed Christian" - such a definition applies only if you consider one who advocates the violation of every significant moral teaching of Christianity for two millenia to be a committed Christian. Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy are all likewise "committed Christians" by such a standard.
He can call himself whatever he wants, but Obama's real religion if the same as that of Lenin and Stalin. He's just not as honest about it as they were.
LOL.
Anyway, Barack Obama knows where the money is and right now it's in race hustling (no one can beat Jesse Jackson for that though). Aside from that, his platform on issues is disgusting but because of the mess that is the republican party he'll be elected.
I hear phrases like "the combine" bandied about, in terms of a graft machine, but I don't know how much graft they can steal, if no Republicans get elected to office.
I'm afraid you're absolutely right about this. I had a debate today with a woman who claimed to be a black conservative. She cited has one of the reasons for the multitude of ills in today's black community was the fact that the collective pain and anguish of the black community over slavery had not been acknowledged by suitable therapeutic solutions. One of the most important solutions, according to her, is the establishment of racial preferences in affirmative action. She was absolutely un self-conscious as she advocated unconstitutional and illegal discrimination against whites and Asians.
I am a black man and counter this attitude over and over and over and over again amongst black people that I speak to about this subject. The sort of racial identity politics that the race industry merchants and multicultural white liberals have nurtured has borne bitter fruit almost much of today's middle-class black population. We have a lot of work to do to bring much of the black community back to a principled understanding of the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
There is another pernicious aspect to this situation that has just occurred to me. Almost every press description of Obama endlessly reminds us of his credentials. They are those of a Harvard law graduate, editor of the law review there, constitutional scholar, Illinois State senator, ad nauseam, along with the fact that he is attractive, articulate, and charismatic. Even I am forced to admit that he is qualified, particularly if you're looking for a senator for the Politburo.
Deference to the ambitions of minorities is almost a de riguer nostrum to counter the past evils of discrimination and exclusion, particularly when the person in question is "qualified". I fear that a desire to compensate for the wrongs of the past will blind many voters in Illinois to Obama's advocacy of positions that they would find unacceptable if advanced by a white candidate. I think that we are being conditioned by the politically correct press to vote for this man as a panacea for past elective biases. We might want to point out to those so inclined that that is also a form of racism.
Another interesting fact is that Obama is the product of an interracial marriage between a black Kenyan and a white American woman. Obama Sr. left the family early on and he was raised by his white mother. I realize the perculiarly insidious nature of the racial construct and the racial politics of this country would cause most to identify Obama as black, but one would think that since at least half of the genetic material that makes him what he is comes from a Caucasian woman, that he would counter this to some extent by paying homage to the mother that apparently did such a successful job of raising him and stress the bi-racial nature of his personal history when others posit him as an "African-American". But then that might not make him as eligible for the exalted mantle of the first black elected male senator of the Democratic Party, increase the danger of alienating some segments of the black vote, and the enable him as the beneficiary of politically correct bonus points.
I am a black man and counter this attitude over and over and over and over again amongst black people that I speak to about this subject. The sort of racial identity politics that the race industry merchants and multicultural white liberals have nurtured has borne bitter fruit almost much of today's middle-class black population. We have a lot of work to do to bring much of the black community back to a principled understanding of the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.
Thanks. I figured, this man must have some thick skin. Then I looked up your profile, and got the proof. Thanks for your service, both here and in country.
People must say all kinds of sweet nothings to you, since even white socialists who are usually scared to death of offending blacks, have been "granted permission" at least since the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, to insult black conservatives. (I can remember the specific act, when NAACP chief Ben Hooks publicly gave whites permission to viciously insult Thomas.)
I wish I could say that that "black conservative" woman didn't exist, but I know that her type does. Based on its positions on affirmative action and immigration, I despise the GOP as much as I do the Socialists, I mean, Dems. Cowards, utter cowards. Instead of standing on principle, and eliminating the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Department of Education, the EEO, etc. (like they said they would, when they were out of power), they brag, 'And now we have our blacks in there, instead of their blacks.'
An incredible dichotomy obtains between older and younger black conservatives. For my money, Thomas Sowell is the greatest living social scientist in the English language (world?). And I used to consider Walter Williams the most brilliant columnist. (I still think he's brilliant, but these days I consider Mark Steyn God's gift to the English language). (Clarence Thomas is in-between, age-wise, but his position as justice inhibits him from writing the sort of books I believe he has in him.)
Then you look at the younger generation, and what do you see? Glenn Loury was supposedly a conservative, but he got lonely, and jumped at the chance to join the popular kids' clique. I was briefly impressed by Deroy Murdock, who is very intelligent about economics, but then I read something he wrote that was essentially PR for Rudy Giuliani's crime-fighting strategy (which was less a crime-fighting than itself a PR strategy). Larry Elder is a very bright man (though I guess he's not so young anymore), and there are other bright writers, like LaShawn Barber, but to paraphrase Samuel Clemens, the difference betweeen them and the likes of Sowell and Williams is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Perhaps the most telling example regarding the dearth of young black conservatives is the case of the young linguist, John McWhorter, who is touted by some -- most notably the Manhattan Institute, as a conservative. McWhorter is brilliant, but I don't he's a conservative (as opposed to a moderate Democrat), and as far as I know, he hasn't even claimed to be a conservative. But bright young black conservatives are so rare, that conservative organizations will sponsor moderate black thinkers, and I suspect, try to gently nudge them to the right. And considering the violent shoves any black intellectual who consorts with conservatives will get from pc blacks and the left, showing any receptivity to conservative groups could result in a black intellectual landing "right."
Every now and then, I'll read or re-read something by my journalistic hero, George S. Schuyler, and wonder what happened to America, that there can be thousands of black mediacrities, but no one who comes close to Schuyler.
Larry Elder is a very bright man (though I guess he's not so young anymore),
*** WABC used to broadcast his show but cancelled it. He wrote a good book called Ten Things You Can't Say in America.
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