How Leftists Play the Race Card Against Conservatives

ONE HUNDRED DAYS into the Bush Administration, few would deny that Washington is a changed town. In contrast to Bill Clinton – a political quick-change artist without regrets – the new President has already made good on the two principal campaign promises he made to voters during the recent election – a large tax refund to citizens overcharged for the expense of government, and a change of tone in the nation’s capital.

In other words, policy-wise, George W. Bush is as good as his word. Bush has also delivered on the political front, appointing the most diverse cabinet in the nation’s history and establishing "compassionate" issues like education and support for faith-based charities as government priorities. In fact, in the first 100 days, both the President and his cabinet have done more to reach out to minorities and citizens left behind than any Republican Administration since that of Abraham Lincoln. Those of us who voted for George Bush can take confidence and pride in this aspect of his governance too.

That is the Washington aspect to the story. But out in the country, the signs are not so encouraging and the future looks less bright. George Bush may have changed the tone in Washington for the better. But in the rest of the nation, Democrats have continued to change it for the worse.

Just after the Florida election drama drew to a close, an African-American staffer for one of the Republican House leaders was having a Christmas dinner with his family, when his twelve-year-old niece asked this question: "Now that Bush has been elected President, am I going to be treated as three-fifths of a human being?"

The same anecdote with slight variations has been reported from all ends of the country. A teacher at a rural black elementary school in South Carolina e-mailed me that her students were asking the same question as the staffer’s niece, and also whether – since Bush was now President -- they would be made slaves again. In the April 30^th issue of The Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen reports taking a group of black fourth and fifth graders from a Washington housing project to an outing in the nation’s capital. The trip was taken just after the Inauguration. A few days earlier, a man had been arrested for firing shots at the White House. Cohen asked the children what they thought of their new President:

Where on earth could these black youngsters be getting ideas like that? The Democratic Party perhaps? The Democratic Party’s presidential candidate? The leadership of the Civil Rights movement? The inescapable answer is: all three.

It was the Democratic Party and the NAACP that sponsored millions of dollars of ads on Television and black radio accusing George Bush of killing a lynch victim a second time, supporting hate crimes, incarcerating "75% of minority youth in Texas," and maliciously executing blacks and Hispanics on death row. And it was Al Gore who in an election campaign attack on Bush’s alleged judicial preferences repeated the libel claiming that the Framers of the Constitution regarded a black person as "three-fifths of a human being." (This is one of the most widely believed myths in black America today. In fact, it was the anti-slavery Framers who insisted on the three-fifths figure in order to diminish the electoral power of the slave South.) And it was Democratic and NAACP spokesmen in Florida who described the voting booth mess as a "return to slavery."

In sum, every element of the anti-Republican paranoia rampant in African communities throughout this nation was deliberately planted there by the Democratic Party and the Civil Rights leadership. Nor did the racial slanders end with George Bush’s election. The nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General was turned into a Star Chamber proceeding reminiscent of 17^th Century Salem, when a man without blemish on his public record was interrogated as though he were a modern-day witch: Mr. Ashcroft, are you now or have you ever been pro-slavery? Has everyone lost their senses? Slavery has been dead 136 years and there has never been a movement to revive it. Thousands of free African Americans actually fought for the Confederacy, yet John Ashcroft was nearly denied the Attorney Generalship of the United States because in an interview with an obscure historical journal he praised the loyalty of Confederate leaders to their cause!

The fact is that, in the nation’s public political arena, we have lost our senses. Or, rather, have been beaten senseless by the racial McCarthyism of the left. Republicans – and others – better learn how to combat this latter-day witch-hunting hysteria or surrender the fight in advance to any political opponent who is willing to employ a race-baiting attack.

John Ashcroft is now paying penitential visits to black churches to demonstrate that he really is not a witch. He has announced that ending "racial profiling" – a principal demand of the race-baiting left – will be a top Justice Department priority. Will this political appeasement of his persecutors work?

The visits to black churches are good in themselves – it’s time that Republicans reached out in a big way to African American communities. But they will not buy John Ashcroft peace. Not unless he surrenders to the left and gives up his conservative ideas.

The same rule applies to the Bush Administration which has also signed on to the campaign against "racial profiling." George Bush is a good and decent man and there is not a racist bone in his body. There is more racial animus in a single speech of Kweisi Mfume or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton than in all the words that George Bush has uttered in his entire life. Yet these men and the Democratic Party have willfully caused black children all over America to think of George Bush as a "racist" who would put them back in chains.

This will not go away with symbolic gestures like visiting churches or genuflections to left-wing causes like ending "racial profiling." It will only go away when the demagogues are exposed -- when those under attack are willing to call racial McCarthyism by its proper name and fight back on the issues themselves.

The symbolic aspect of the Administration’s gesture on racial profiling is sound. It is saying "we hear your concern." The problem is that there is no way to end "racial profiling" as the NAACP and Democrats define it, except by giving up the fight against crime. Black males will always be stopped and arrested in far greater numbers than they make up in the population because black males commit violent crimes in far greater numbers than they make up in the population. Black males, who represent 6% of the population commit more than 40% of the violent crimes. In New York City, based on victim reports, a black male is 13 times more likely to have committed a violent crime, than a white male. How are the police going to avoid stopping a greater percentage of black males than white, if they are to protect citizens from the criminals who prey on them? Readers who do not understand this proposition should read Heather MacDonald’s meticulous analysis, "The Myth of Racial Profiling," in the current issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal from which the following data is taken.

The racial profiling crusade began with a New Jersey Turnpike stop of suspected African American drug dealers. Under a deafening media barrage powered by the Jesse Jackson-Al Gore-Al Shartpon-NAACP left and abetted by Bill Bradley, Al Gore and the Democratic Party machine, the Republican Administration in New Jersey caved to the anti-profiling cause. A report was issued, which "confirmed" that there was indeed racial profiling by New Jersey cops thus giving life support to the myth. The report’s conclusion was based on the fact that 53% of the people stopped and searched by officers looking for drug dealers were black, while blacks make up only 13.5% of the population in the state. When an embarrassing photo of Republican governor Christie Todd Whitman frisking a black suspect was published in the press, she and her Attorney General Peter Verniero capitulated to the demagogues and certified the statistics assuring the public that this unacceptable racial profiling would be stopped. In February 1999, Whitman fired the head of the state police, to emphasize the point.

The problem, however, is that 60% of the drug dealers in New Jersey are black. In other words, the percentage of stops was prudent law enforcement. Race had nothing to do with it.

In an atmosphere in which racial demagoguery has made politics surreal, facts like these do not appear to present a problem. Testifying on racial profiling before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2000, New Jersey Senator Robert Toriccelli assured the Committee: "Statistically, it cannot bear evidence [sic] to those who suggest, as our former superintendent of state police suggested, that certain ethnic or racial groups disproportionately commit crimes. They do not." Well, Senator, actually they do.

As Heather points out, blacks make up over 60% of arrests in New Jersey for drugs and weapons violations. "Against such a benchmark," she writes, "the state police search rates look proportionate." MacDonald also points out that 64% of the homicide victims in drug turf wars are black and 60% of victims and perpetrators in drug-induced fatal brawls are black which computes with the fact that 60% of the drug offenders in state prison are also black. "Unless you believe that white traffickers are less violent than black traffickers, the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rate for blacks on drug charges appears consistent with the level of drug activity in the black population."

The result of ignoring these realities and outlawing "racial profiling" in the state of New Jersey? MacDonald reports that since the Whitman surrender, "Drug arrests dropped 55% on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey in 2000, and 25% on the turnpike and parkway combined. The inescapable conclusion: Unless you believe that drug dealers have responded to these facts by decreasing their own activity, the civil rights leadership, the Democratic Party and their Republican appeasers have increased the flow of narcotics to New Jersey’s inner city African American communities with all the destructive consequences that implies.

If Attorney General Ashcroft and the Bush Administration follow the pattern of appeasement and proceed down the politically correct path to the world the Democrats are demanding, two things are certain. The mainly minority victims of minority criminal predators will multiply, and the Democratic Party, waving the bloody shirts of racial persecution and Republican insensitivity will march to victory at the polls. Think of Christie Todd Whitman, the poster-girl of racial profiling. Would her capitulation to the Left have prompted the constituencies seduced by its myth to vote for her in the next election?

There are only two ways to combat this political pathology. The first is to fight it on the only ground feasible, which is that of reality. The facts must be aired; the demagoguery must be exposed. The second is to beat back the racial McCarthyites by calling them to account.

Let us begin with the reality. "Racial profiling" is only an injustice if it is profiling solely on the basis of race. There have been recent cases of rogue police officers and even rogue departments, which target minorities such as blacks because they are black. This is offensive and inexcusable, and the Ashcroft Justice Department should take every measure available to see that it is stopped.

But where "profiling" means that race is but one element in a clearly defined criminal dossier, it must be defended on the merits, because – among other things -- it is the best way to protect minorities themselves. That is the way to present the case for sound police methods against the attacks of the racial McCarthyites. While blacks do commit over 40% of the violent crimes, the overwhelming majority of their victims are black as well. It is to protect vulnerable communities, which are overwhelmingly black, that non-racist profiling is also necessary. Unless politicians like Ashcroft have the courage to explain this, and stand up to their ideological opponents, the left will roll over them, and the people will suffer – and these people will be mainly poor and black.

The profiling dilemma is characteristic of the challenge the Bush Administration – and Republicans generally -- face on the racial front. If Republicans are to succeed, they must not succumb to the illusion – as they did during the election -- that they can fly under the radar – avoiding the issue and ignoring the Democrats’ racial attacks. In the next election, this will not be an option because the political dynamics have changed as result of the last election. The results show that for Democrats the race issue is not a tactic they can do without. In the last election, Democrats needed 92% of the black vote – and the inflammatory race baiting that secured it -- just to stay even. Now George Bush has appointed the most diverse cabinet in American history, moved into the black community with a faith-based initiative, and shown that he is ready to contend with Democrats everywhere for the minority vote. This means that now more than ever the race card represents political survival – which for political animals -- like Democrats -- is life itself.

Thanks for posting this, Meekie. Do you remember the 'prayer meeting'/concert following 9-11 for the rescue workers held in Yankee Stadium? Hillary and Bill Clinton didn't sing America's National Anthem when it was played, but they sang the "Black National Anthem", held hands and swayed back and forth to the music. Knowing that they don't do anything that doesn't bring them greater fame, power, money...it's all anyone needs to know about the size and scope of the race-hustling industry today. Victimization pays big - in superficial ways (fame, power, money) - while destroying souls - and our country.

We cannot get our message out by telling the truth (they won't believe), by presenting source documents (history from a white perspective cannot be trusted), appealing to their faith (they even have talking points about our stealing their God, as if the Bible isn't for everyone).

I think we do need to make an effort to spend time, as many of us as possible, volunteering in the inner city. The left benefits from segregation - where groups can be readily reached for GOTV drives and kept from mingling with us 'enemies,' because once anyone gets out of the neighborhood and away from the constant victimization and hatemongering of the community leaders, once they work beside and live next to people of other colors, they no longer see us as evil. If they won't let their own people go, we can go to them.

Here's a little Saturday night oldie from Norm Liebman:

RACISM:

CLINTON'S CARCINOMA ©

by Norman Liebmann

It is the conventional wisdom that it is unwise to discuss religion or politics, although George Bernard Shaw contended they are the only subjects capable people really care for. To religion and politics, add race.

My father was an immigrant, and I have never known anyone who loved America more than he did. During my boyhood he sought to instill in me his love and respect for this land and the people who created this country, reminding me that America was founded by Christian people, and admonishing me, "Behave yourself. Always remember you are a guest in this country." One way or another, we are all guests in this country, and I think things would go a little more smoothly if we conducted ourselves with "company manners."

I have been told by priests and ministers, and find it reassuring, every Christian believes himself to be part of God's plan. Bill Clinton believes he is God's plan. Clinton is less of a practicing Christian than he is a practicing gynecologist. He can call himself anything he likes, but within the parameters of general understanding and respect to which that designation is accustomed, he's not a Christian, and, in fact, not even an occasional Christian. Whether you explore Bill Clinton with a MRI, a colonoscope, or a safari, you are unlikely to encounter anything that resembles a soul.

The absence of ambition in pigs makes their other idiosyncrasies tolerable, the pervasiveness of it in Bill Clinton makes him insufferable. The absence of hypocrisy makes a pig heroic. The sheer glut of it makes Bill Clinton vile. Lovers of the spectacle of faith rise early to see the sun come up. New age sophists get up early to see Bill Clinton spit in God's face. Everything about St. Francis of Assisi that is holy, is about Bill Clinton hellish. To find a cabal in history equivalent to the Clinton gang one has to hark back to the Herod Administration. If the analogy holds, the Crucifixion went forward based on polling data and the opinion of a focus group of Pharisees. One imagines the only agony more exquisite than drawing out the spikes by which Jesus hung on the cross, would be to require Him to shake hands with Bill Clinton afterward.

The American promise of "equality of opportunity" has been debauched by the worst lie of the Clinton cancerous corollary - that the government can insulate the mediocre from reality. The wellspring that nourishes this insidious dialectical malignancy (Clinton's Carcinoma) is his ability to disjoin and alienate the races, the sexes, the generations, the deviants, all being whirled away from the moral core and each other, spun out into darkness as if by centrifugal force. Simultaneously, they are his fall guys and his hellions. Yet, paradoxically, he has managed to form a coalition government of these groups, even after convincing them they are all the cause of each other's unhappiness. He forestalls eruptions from their discontents with bribes from the public coffers. If Clinton senses a loyalist group slipping away, he comes up with another bribe. It is said, currently, he seeks to consolidate his position with "gays" by offering a tax credit on sex change operations.

CLINTON'S JEWS

It is not known whether Bill Clinton arrived on his own or was sent from the bowels of this Earth, but his mission is the destruction of the Jews with his insidious corruption. Richard Heydrich was no less dedicated. Of course, in the Clinton plan, Israel, America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East, will be destroyed first. He has already sent his people to open its seacocks. Its list will begin to be apparent after the forcing of Israel to yield 13% of its land to Palestine, and Hillary's plan to make Jerusalem a suburb of Harlem. (Clinton sent James Carville to subvert the election campaign of Bibi Netanyahu. If Carville moved his bowels in Tel Aviv he left the best part of himself there, and the most substantive souvenir of the Clinton plan to desecrate and destroy that nation.)

I am much saddened and humiliated by my fellow Jews in Washington who have turned away from Jehovah and have begun worshiping the Arkansas golem. Clinton's Jews have taken a place in his legion of androids of ambitious ignorance, again wandering in the desert among bureaucrat zombies - Ivy League porn shop academics - grasping minorities - gay namedroppers - the apostate media - the underprivileged - the over-privileged - and most incomprehensible, Jews seeking social status and cultural corroboration from, of all places, America's descending colon - Arkansas.

We have had the Orthodox Jew, the Conservative Jew, and the Reform Jew. Now we have a fourth kind, the Clinton Jew. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, infected by the sepsis of Clinton's character, have seen fit to turn California into a rumpus room for sexual deviants, and a furnace for minorities to stoke the fire of their anti-Semitism and other resentments. Boxer and Feinstein call this "diversity", and will end not only as pariahs among their own people, but dropouts from the Jewish heritage, anathema in their ancestral homeland, rebuked for their part in denying Israel its place in Eternity, and their complicity in the plot by which Clinton who, through his vice, seeks to doom that small and holy state.

CLINTON'S BLACKS

During the thirties the Jews acquired what has now become a funhouse mirror image of champions for social justice. One would have thought they'd had enough tsuris just being Jews. The orders of the day were - periodically change the name of the victime due jure on their placards - and march. The blacks repaid them by making Louis Farrakhan their god and Rodney King his prophet. Black antipathy toward Jews might be attributed to the fact that people never forgive you for the sacrifices you make on their behalf.

Clinton keeps telling America how wonderful the blacks are, but fails to address the question of why they are constantly in need of so much maintenance and repair. One would think they would find it insulting to be treated as a forever rehabilitation-in-progress project designed to fodder a gluttonous ambition. Clinton perceives them only as a blank check. Now that they've got an administration and a media completely biased in their favor, if you'll forgive an inadvertent political incorrectness, one would think they would "lighten up." Still, their temperament grows less and less benign.

A recent manifestation of black discontent is their late-breaking resentment of Thomas Jefferson. We are unsure whether it's because Jefferson owned slaves or because he thought them not worth their keep and set them free. (It is, in either case, another endorsement of history's judicious reasoning, "Some days you just can't win.") Anyway, the metaphor might be: cattle would feel slighted if the rustlers failed to show up. Black people no longer seem provoked that they have it bad, so much as they are incensed that others have it good. Nothing mollifies. Nothing placates. Their cup runneth under, their Pennzoil is down a quart, and the birds in the trees can twitter "Stardust" but have not yet learned to "rap." They see their cup as half empty, and figure people who see their own cups as half full are trying to "ritz" them. They are petulant and disgruntled, and show no inclination to get "gruntled." Not much pleases them, and they are irked when having one of those days when everything seems to go right. Groucho Marx sang a song in a movie that could serve as their anthem, "Whatever it is, I'm against it." There's no point asking, "What's the beef?" New age legalisms like harassment have exorcised the need to be specific.

The right to be huffy, at an all-time high, is not attractive, but is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. All this allergic sensitivity has evoked a nationwide choir of black leaders and "blues shouters" trying to get folks "milling" like stampeding longhorns, while they figure out what's in it for them. They hope to turn up the pressure, harness all this ethnic steam, and convert it into money to buy themselves expensive pin stripe business suits.

Every time a constituent gives a telephone coin return slot a gynecological examination and finds it empty, it is considered to be a social injustice that must be redressed by "community leaders" - though they would do as well to unburden themselves to a sympathetic bartender, perhaps even the one Jesse Jackson tells his troubles to. (It is appropriate to note here, the United States has laws that make it illegal for a private citizen to conduct his own diplomacy with foreign nations. It is reasonable to believe if Dr. Jackson had been born Caucasian, he would find his lily-white ass in court telling it to a judge, not to a bartender.) The inner city has more Doctors of Divinity than Las Vegas has Elvis impersonators, and considering they are ministers of a religion that preaches forgiveness, they always seem to be suing someone. (One has anointed himself with the vainglorious title, Arch Luminary of the Tabernacle of the Immaculate Subpoena.)

Whether they know it or not, the blacks have had their revenge by enabling the carcinogenic that is Clintonism. It is hardly a poetic revenge, merely a suppository insertion of Bubba into the body politic, to vulgarize the America culture and bring down this nation and its heritage. The Count of Monte Cristo took artful revenge. He wasn't content just to whine and nag.

One supposes there is a comfortable spot in the blacks' deprivation or they wouldn't keep snuggling into it, enjoying what Richard III called "the winter of our discontent." They are nettled, and the nettled soon become nettlesome. Complaining becomes a way of life that turns everyone off. This relentless grumbling invokes the lyrical rebuke of an old ballad entitled, "Just Because You're Not in Love Don't Throw Shit at the Moon." Previous condition of servitude does not justify a lifetime of reprisals against society. ("My great- great- great- grandfather was a slave. Bang. You're dead.")

We confess again our fascination with reporter Toni Morrison's delusion that Bill Clinton is black. It would seem pushy to presume to tell people what race they are. We offer ourselves as a logical explanation of Clinton's ostensibly milky complexion that it's not his own white skin he's wearing, but that he's just "breaking it in" for a friend. Despite the oddball syllogism authored by Ms. Morrison, the color of a person's skin is still a reliable indicator of whether he is black or white. It's just possible in the social set in which Ms. Morrison moves, "outing" a celebrity's true race is a popular parlor game. If Morrison is indicating that Clinton has the same culture and values as blacks, it is a notion black people would do well to resist, for if, indeed, Bill Clinton is black, it removes the last distinguishing disparity between himself and Adolph Hitler.

If the enigmatic Ms. Morrison is trying to give "rednecks" another reason to get pissed off at "Slick", she arrived just in time to be too late. It's even past time when Chelsea Clinton could can come home from school and ask the naïve question, "Daddy, what color are we?" It doesn't matter the answer, as the record shows he is a chronic liar. What race Bubba is at a given moment depends in what neighborhood he's doing a fundraiser. What color Clinton was never a consideration for Monica Lewinsky, who was more concerned with what flavor he was. We will not consider here the merits of the argument, except to say, if he is not black, he creates an impression of someone who is trying to live down being white, which does him no credit. He backed away from his affiliation with the Caucasian race when he saw the political benefits to be accrued from romancing the black community. Still, we are indebted to Ms. Morrison for her instruction, we still live in a country where you can hate Bill Clinton no matter what color he decides to be, and, as La Morrison seems to perceive it, that's what America is all about.

The minorities may have inspired laws against anyone hurting their feelings but not against people saying derogatory things behind their backs. That may be next. We must reconcile ourselves that no legislation, no apology, nor having every white family sacrifice their first born child in atonement for slavery will put the matter right. We all have to live with it so long as others choose to make the case that guilt is inherited. The black leaders have told their flock, if they find a grudge lying in the street, and after ninety days nobody claims it, legally, it is theirs forever.

It is not known how long the word "minority" will be tolerated before it is overtaken by a demand to call it "the 'M' word" - or the term "inner city" is replaced by "endogamous metropolis" or "root Mecca" or "civic entrails." It is time for America to grow up and jettison these absurd political amenities. They are poisonous and they are crap.

The degree to which the blacks are alienated is the degree to which they find it convenient to remain so. Any group in self-rejection cedes to Bill Clinton the political "home court advantage." There is no question of the totality of support for Bubba in the inner city. It is not solidarity, it is lock step. Ninety five percent of blacks support him, and, likely, that number is an under-estimation. Nevertheless, they have mistaken the motive of Clinton's affinity for them. If Bubba had been born a hundred and fifty years ago, he wouldn't be demagogue-ing in the black churches with such transparent and insulting condescension, he'd be prowling the women's slave barracks.

The Republican Party must face the fact that the black leadership has not penciled them in, and nothing the GOP does will make it different. The Democrat Party that frenzied the aged with an over-ripe canard Republicans would end Social Security, are now terrifying black youth by telling them, if a Republican is elected President, the first thing he will do is abolish Saturday night.

The Clintons are Satan's spawn. Darlings of racism, they have made racial animosity the centerpiece of their political table, to re-inflame the insidious fatal ethnic divisions which Lincoln was at great pains to dispel. In reprisal, the Clinton legions are now "outing" Lincoln as being gay. Clinton sold Lincoln's bed and is now attempting to sell his soul. We are waiting for God. Let us hope God is not waiting for us.

And, oh yes -

CLINTON'S HISPANICS

Rapist sí. Racist no.

***

Link

Merry Christmas, Meek and Ming. (^;

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