The complete “racist rant” is here, for now, but I had a dickens of a time trying to find it. Better hit the play button while you can…with the understanding, which is obvious anyway, that the “N” word all spelled out is used repeatedly so it would not be appropriate for a delicate audience.

She’s being taken down by an essentially anonymous force here, which is winning only because it is anonymous. Consider the point she was making: If you take it upon yourself to use that word all spelled out, you’re in big trouble if you’re white but you can probably get away with it if you’re black, especially, if you’re a “black comic.” Then, after specifically lamenting this double-standard, she took the initiative — as a white person — and used the word when nobody else had.

Okay, so she’s toast. But you can’t toast her without proving her point. She used the word only as a phonetic repetition, directing it at absolutely nobody…and she’s not surviving this. There is not going to be a Shirley Sherrod event in which it is realized she was “taken out of context,” and we need to have a “national dialogue” and look “how far we still have to go” — none of that. She’s white, she used the word, she’s dead…right after she just got done saying what? That if you’re white, and you use the word, you’re dead.

This is not a defense. It was stupid to go there, when “The N-Word” works just fine for the point she was trying to make. And from the sounds of things, it seems “Jade” and her husband have a neighbor who repeatedly uses that word…although she didn’t come out and confirm this, I don’t think. I’d like to have known more about that. What kind of rube is on a first-name basis with a mixed-marriage couple, and regularly uses that word around them?

Well, here’s what Al Sharpton has to say about it, since everyone was wondering about that or something:

Immediately after the end of this footage, the host Mr. Cooper was heard to say “Hey waitaminnit, you faked a rape scandal! Get the hell off my show right now!”

No, that didn’t happen. That’s what would happen in a sane world. It didn’t happen here.

Sharpton says Schlessinger is wrong. The word is wrong no matter how it’s used or who is using it; her tangent about blacks voting for Obama, is something of which the Rev. specifically disapproves. And if Rev. Sharpton disapproves of something, of course, your career should come to a close.

All the smart people accept this. But if you accept it, of course, you have to support it. And who wants to live in a world like this, is my question.

Mayors do not have Sharpton’s power. Governors do not have his power. Presidents and Prime Ministers do not have his power. There is no finesse or delicacy to go with that power; none is needed, for it is the power to destroy, not to preserve or create. There is no accountability involved in this power either. There is no “Sharpton campaign” to drive Dr. Laura off the air. The situation is most adequately expressed in passive voice, with an object and not a subject: Dr. Laura is losing her place, because she said something dumb.

Which can only mean Dr. Laura was correct.

Sharpton says the word is wrong no matter where it’s used or how it’s used? I’d not be surprised at all to find out the good Rev. uses it in private. He’s certainly the last name on any list of mine, or very near the bottom of such a list, of people who perceive the world in any kind of color-neutral way. And I’d much rather have Dr. Schlessinger take my kid somewhere for a week, than Rev. Sharpton.

I’m speaking for myself, but I doubt like hell I’m alone in that.

We have built a code of cultural norms, in the mode of a collective, which would not find support in a single sane individual, ever. The first question a sane individual would ask, is “Are these cultural protocols working well and doing what they’re supposed to be doing?” Well, this doesn’t impress me as an effective way to banish racism or ease racial tension…and it doesn’t look to me like the code is having that kind of an effect.

But by all means, let us stand passively by as Wrecking-Ball-Al continues to demolish some more careers, while the rules about who can say what are written by those among us with the very lowest character. Let’s all allow it to happen, with my blessing, since we’re gonna do it anyway.

Wow, look at all the flak coming at these guys. This has nothing to do with race. It’s a war against the individual, and a rather craven one. Instructions are being broadcast about who to believe and who not to believe, and the people putting the instructions out won’t even take any responsibility for issuing them.

“It’s a powder keg, folks. People should not play games with it.”

Hat tip to Urban Grounds.

Via Gerard.

Neo-Neocon:

One of the most perverse things about Obama is that, when he’s trying to get tough with the opposition, what he says about them is often the best clue to what he’s actually doing, or planning to do.

Case in point—his latest declaration about the Republicans:

…[T]hey’re betting on amnesia. That’s what they’re counting on. They’re counting on that you all forgot. They think that they can run the okey-doke on you. Bamboozle you.

Like many of Obama’s most revealing remarks, these were made at a Democratic fundraiser, this time in Atlanta. And the word “bamboozle” is an especially nice touch, harking back to a famous scene in Spike Lee’s film “Malcolm X,” a reference that would most likely be recognized by a great many people in his Atlanta audience.

I said the speech appears in the film; Malcolm X never actually said the words in real life. But since movies about history have largely become a substitute for history, these cinematic words may be more famous than any the historical figure of Malcolm X actually uttered. The movie context was a speech made by Malcolm in Harlem, on the subject of the white man. Rest assured that Obama is aware of the racial code he’s employing, and what it means to many of the black people in his audience.
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And this is what Obama does—sows the seeds of racial hatred while maintaining a facade of plausible deniability.

[NOTE: Obama has been called on this before, during the 2008 campaign, when he used “bamboozled” and “hoodwinked” repeatedly to describe the actions of opponents.]

Because code words are an essential ingredient when you’re healing an ancient racial divide.

Remember The Sixth Sense when the stepmother is caught on video poisoning the little girl? She says something about not wanting to hear the soup tastes funny, just swallow it anyway. You need to eat it all up to get well again. It’s one of the more jaw-dropping scenes of the film — people want to put off the potty breaks until later. It’s engrossing, and it’s sickening.

Well…that’s pretty much what’s happening here. Racial tension is the disease, Obama is the cure. He’s just our long-awaited living, breathing, medicinal balm. Except when He isn’t.

Tom Bevan, Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics:

“There Will Be No Apology”
By Tom Bevan

Those are the words of the mother of Matt Dariano, one of the five kids at Live Oak High School in the San Francisco Bay Area who were sent home for having the temerity to wear American flag tee shirts on the “Mexican heritage day” of Cinco de Mayo.

“There will not be an apology,” Mrs. Dariano told the camera crew outside the school. “Matthew is part Hispanic, OK? He’s an American. So, no, there will be no apology from any Dariano.”

Guess who else uttered the exact same phrase last year? James Crowley, the white Cambridge cop who arrested black Harvard professor Louis Gates, Jr. and was singled out in a nationally televised press conference by President Obama for “acting stupidly.”

On July 23 of last year outside his home, a reporter told Crowley that Gates had asked for an apology from him for his handling of the incident.

“There will be no apology,” Crowley replied.

After a beat, the reporter followed up: “Is this now and ever, ‘no apology,?”

“Yes,” Crowley replied flatly.

The fact is, Americans are increasingly fed up with the racially divisive, politically correct insanity pulsating through the country today. After years of being pressured and browbeaten by the left-wing PC police about what they can say, do, think, and wear, many Americans have had enough. And they’re especially furious with being asked to apologize for things that aren’t or shouldn’t be in the least bit offensive.

The idea that high school kids anywhere in America would be called the principal’s office – let alone that they would be asked whether they should apologize – for wearing clothes bearing the image of the United States flag, is a perfect case in point.

It’s the kind of insanity that rankles the sensibilities of millions upon millions of Americans, and has them cheering when someone – whether a Cambridge cop or a Bay Area mother – stands up, refuses to back down, and says, “there will be no apology.”

I wrote once that this habit of looking at ourselves, and at each other, making decisions based on what we are rather than on what we do, is the cause of everything that is wrong with the world.

It seems lately we have started a habit of trying to get people to apologize for this. For being what they are, rather than doing what they do.

I notice too, lately, we’ve got an awful lot of people walking around projecting an image of struggle — they’re just trying to get along, trying to make their own way, just wanting to be left alone to live life as they see fit. But when you inspect the details you see this isn’t true. They want to mold and shape the entire world around them into a certain thing, at least all of the world that is within their earshot and line-of-sight. The lesbian who just wanted to go to a school dance — but wanted to wear a tuxedo — that’s a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about.

Griping about an American kid wearing an American flag at an American school, in America, because it happens to be Cinco de Mayo, that’s another illustration. You don’t get to say “I just wanna be me and I just wanna do what I wanna do” when you’re griping about what someone else is wearing. Nor can you wear something, designed to communicate a message, or to advocate something, or to recruit to a cause. To air the complaint that people aren’t allowing you to live your own life, you have to maintain an apathy about the decisions of others, and you can’t be trying to influence them. Call me unreasonable, but I insist on this.

Can we make that an iron-clad rule? Please? It’s only logical. Either you’re practicing non-interference and asking that it be returned to you in kind…or you’re trying to foment change. You can’t have both of those, you have to pick.

This is a dust-up from last week, but it’s worth talking about:

“So much time is taken up with addressing hoodlums, with kids who don’t want to be in school. We are talking about a small number of children.” — Janet Clark, Pinellas School Board chairwoman

Ever since school started this year, John Hancock Middle School in St. Petersburg, Florida has become more noteworthy for school brawls than academic excellence. Indeed, with over 60 arrests this year, the school gained a reputation as a hotbed of juvenile violence. One teacher openly wondered if it will take a death to get those in charge to do something to establish a safe and secure learning environment. What to do has been foremost on Ms. Clark’s mind.

As one former Washington DC bureaucrat can attest, it’s not what you say, but rather what other people think you’ve said that matters.

Stop!

That, to me, right there, is what is ridiculous about this. And you know who is reviewing this? Nobody. You know who owns that standard, who is ready to take the credit for putting it up…to say “yes, I am me, and I think that’s a swell idea”? Nobody.

It is the way it is. Don’t question it. You know why? Because it makes untalented people very powerful.

Just imagine historians studying this seventy-five years from now. They’ll have YouTube…they’ll have all kinds of electronic archives full of digitized news clippings, visual aids for sexual harassment courses.

What do those courses say?

“These standards and guidelines are put in place to ensure a more comfortable working environment for everyone.”

And…

“The important thing to keep in mind, is that it is not the intention of the person who spoke that matters — what matters, according to our rules, is how it was perceived by the person who complained.”

Get the impression this is one of those situations in which the word “everyone” doesn’t quite have the same meaning as you’d expect it to? Someone’s a ninny — just go with it, because you know if you round up a thousand people, one or two are going to be a ninny who complains about just freakin’ everything —

And the ninny sets his or her sites on you because of something you said. Aw you didn’t mean it, but it doesn’t matter. It’s up to the emotional vibrato emanating from the person who received (or overheard). That person is God, according to these rules that are owned by nobody. The ninny. Ninnies have godlike powers now.

That’s what happened here:

The outrage was initially voiced by some fellow members of the school board. Mary Brown, one of those members, had this to say about Clark’s use of the word hoodlum:

“They might be disruptive. They might be in gangs. They might be many things, but they are not hoodlums. I feel that that statement showed insensitivity to our children, and it certainly did not offer good guidance to our staff.”

Now Ms. Clark is getting blasted fellow board members, community activists and from the local NAACP chapter. Kobina Bantushango of a group calling itself the Uhurus says the word is racist and Clark, who is white, must step down.

Is the word racist? Well…

According to Michael Adams an academic who has studied slang, the word has no racial connotations, at least in its original and formal dictionary definition.

Stop it again. Right there. Yes, I know the next statement qualifies this…and I don’t care. Etymology says no, history says no, dictionary says no.

On my planet, Earth, that settles it. Not because my skin is white, but because I have red blood. Because I’m a non-weird non-alien human creature who cares about facts. That’s why you don’t want reckless folks like me making the rules I guess.

Anyway. It seems this story has a happy ending. Ms. Clark responds:

“I am not going to resign or step down and I don’t even think I’m going to apologize for using the word. We can’t continue making excuses when children don’t behave and disrupt the educational environment for teachers and students. That’s all I can say on that matter.”

Pretty awesome. It would have been better if Ms. Clark lashed out directly at the “Could Be Construed As” standard…just so future historians will see someone had something to say about it and we weren’t all so willingly living under a cadre of lawyers. In my mind that’s what this story is all about. Not black-and-white, not hoodlums, not dictionaries. That absurd standard we got going because we somehow thought our lawyers weren’t quite rich enough and our society wasn’t quite unstable enough. The idea that has no owner. The standard that has no signatory, because no one will fasten a name worth defending to something so patently absurd.

But if nobody else is doing that, I guess I can’t expect her to. That’ll have to be left up to relatively anonymous bloggers rattling away on their minibooks, in their underwear, on the living room couch, early in the morning.

That revolution is going to be an ugly one. Hope I live long enough to see it. The “Could Be Construed As” standard. It will be rated alongside the Spanish Inquisition, drawing-and-quartering, ducking stools and Roman crucifixions.

No offense intended to Spanish Inquisition people or Roman crucifixion people out there. Go construe somewhere else.

Because that question is unconstitutional. Or at least extra-constitutional. Casting ballots against this ongoing absurd silo-ing endeavor has proven to be futile. They just overrule our mandates in the courts and continue to silo us.

Hat tip to Smitty.

Barbequed by Breitbart.

Hat tip to Allahpundit, who provides a brief run-down of the antecedent events, and points several times to Patterico for a more thorough one.

When all the points you have to make are accusations, and every single accusation has a question mark at the end, something is terribly wrong.

Lee Doran provides a decent background as well:

More proxy offense taken on behalf of total strangers. Great stuff.

Hat tip once again to blogger friend Gerard.

Update: As one of the commenters over at his place points out, there are more black people at tea parties than there are at MSNBC. Pot, meet kettle?

If there is, as is often said, “still some racism out there”…how long would you have to stay quiet about it, if you made a point of waiting for the racism to come along that knows darn good and well internally that racism is what it is trying to be, and doesn’t have to have its own motivations explained to it by a pasty-faced blowhard hypocrite like Olbermann? If we’re supposed to do something to those people…educate them…convert them…banish them…the greater priority would be placed on the conscious and deliberate ones, right? Wouldn’t that just make sense?

What is this obsession with racists who need to be told they’re racists? “Look around at the other people marching with you”? Good heavens. I can see it now. “Hey! That feller on the teevee is right! Ah’m out here with a bunch o’white folks just like me! Ah’m a racist and Ah dunno it!”

Don’t give up — oh, sorry. That is your day job. How sad.

Slightly Related: Basil at IMAO puts Dramatic Chipmunk up against Dramatic Olbermann:

Call it a draw?

Gerard saw a real Newsweek cover, and it got his mind wandering about what might be coming out next week.

Feeling guilty yet?

Lloyd Marcus, writing in The American Thinker:

Thank you very, very much. You see us poor helpless inferior blacks, and you want to help us using your superior intellect. After all, we could not possibly succeed in this racist, homophobic and greedy country without your assistance.

I first met you guys in the 70s when I attended the prestigious Maryland Institute College of Art on a scholarship. A black kid from the ghetto, I found myself amongst white kids from well to do families. I worked a part-time job to cover my books and art supplies. You guys did not have to work.

And yet, I remember many conversations about how you would never bring a child into this “freaking world” and how “freaking screwed up” this “freaking country is”. You told me how “freaking selfish” your “freaking parents” were and how they only cared about “freaking money”. Then, you drove off in your convertible given to you be your “freaking parents” as I stood at the bus stop.
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In closing, you libs, please keep up the good work. With your continued diligence, we minorities and most Americans will not have to work or be responsible for anything. Your president is in the process of confiscating the wealth from those greedy rich white SOBs and redistributing it to us. Right on!

Now, if I can just figure out how to tie my shoes all by myself. But if I can’t, I know you libs are there for me. Fighting back tears of overwhelming gratitude, again, I thank you.

I recall President Obama got some props this last winter for doing His part to help fight this mindset. He got a lot of positive comments from people about this, and even one or two in casual conversation from me. Finally, a powerful message that a good plan for a young man, of any color, is to learn to take in information, form educated opinions, address people politely, be firm if necessary, but courteous whenever possible. Keep your anger off the table, and there’s no limit to what you can accomplish. It was a good message.

But the war against the individual, the war against personal independence, continues. And so the President has emerged as something of a disappointment here, not that I’m terribly surprised. The year has brought us, from the White House, just a handful of proposals…gargantuan ones, more a truckful than a handful, but still just a handful. Of the three or four of them, the common theme is that government should take care of things so individuals don’t have to worry about them. Just worry about hating who we tell you to hate, but help us pass this bill so you don’t have to worry about things that really should be your concern.

Standard democrat fare, in other words.

Hat tip: Rick.

Update: Blogsister Daphne has more words for the liberal race-baiters. Perhaps it belabors the obvious, but as is to be expected in her quarters it is exceptionally well written and well worth reading:

Do you people really see color? Is ethnicity your baseline of identification or cutline for judging another human being? Have we regressed once again to this foul level of dealing with one another on nothing more than the basis of race? Maybe I’m naive, but I find this whole color tone thing incredibly ignorant, bizarrely retrograde and seriously repugnant. I have never judged a man by the color of his skin. I have been an equal opportunity lover, wife, mother, friend and family member to the whole crayon box of humanity. Color doesn’t make the man, integrity does, always has in my book. I proudly claim membership in Bill Whittle’s Tribe.

I am speaking to liberals and black democrats here, you’ve taken our national discussion down to the level of Jim Crow and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. What in the hell are you doing? Turning back the clock forty years to make political hay is worth stirring this ugly shit back to the surface, instigating people’s natural instincts to categorize and separate across color lines? Do you have fucking rocks in your head? Do you really think this is wise?

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is named after a mathemetician, library administrator and brainy-guy who lived around two hundred years before Christ and figured out the size of the earth without the benefit of telescopes, spaceships or any other such gadgetry. This was not a disciple of Aristotle or Plato or Socrates; he was the head honcho of the Library of Alexandria, and had just about as much business measuring the planet’s size as…well, as a software engineer has figuring out that liberalism is bad for you. He figured out the size of the planet on which we live, and he did it by peeking into water wells. He made do with what he had, and used careful, responsible thinking to figure out and validate a fact about something much bigger than he was.

As such, this blog’s primary obsession is with a point-of-view about life itself: Information is to be taken in, worked over, and harvested into yet more information, by whoever among us possesses the mental skills do it. It is not to be cloistered behind ivy-covered walls, for the consumption of elites who periodically emerge from behind the walls to tell the rest of us what to think. We all have the responsibility of maintaining an inventory of what we know, versus what we do not know, and from that inventory figuring out what’s really going on. And, from that, figuring out what to do about it.

And so the time has come to opine on the Gates affair. You have already heard the background. Professor Henry Gates, a professor of Ethnic Studies at Harvard and a personal friend of our President, was questioned by a policeman inside his own home after breaking into it. The policeman was called by a well-intentioned neighbor who observed Gates and his driver forcing a door that had jammed shut.

I’ll leave the rest of the background to Leonard Pitts, who in my opinion has done a wonderful job of accurately recording all the facts, those which are in dispute as well as those which are not, and drawing all of the wrong conclusions from them.

The incident began when Gates, returning from a trip to China, found his front door jammed. When he and his driver tried to force it, a neighbor, thinking it a burglary, did the right thing and called police. [Sergeant James] Crowley responded, finding the driver gone and Gates inside. There are two versions of what happened next.

Police say Gates refused to comply with Crowley’s order to step outside, initially would not identify himself and became belligerent, yelling that Crowley, who is white, is a racist, that he didn’t know who he was messing with and that this was only happening because Gates is black.

Gates says he promptly produced his driver’s license and Harvard ID, that the officer refused to provide his name and badge number, and that he could not have yelled anything because he has a severe bronchial infection.

This much is not in dispute: Gates was arrested after providing proof he was lawfully occupying his own home. The police report says he was “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place.” That being his own front porch. Small wonder the charge has been dropped.

And here, Sgt. Crowley’s defenders would want you to know he is not some central casting redneck, but an experienced officer who has led diversity workshops.

On the other hand, Gates is hardly Sister Souljah himself. Rather, he is a man who did the things African Americans are always advised to do: work hard, get a good education, better yourself, only to discover that in the end, none of it saved him. In the end, he still winds up standing on his front porch with his wrists shackled.

Pitts, here, is guilty of peeking into one water well but not the other; he reaches whatever conclusion he wants to reach, relying on his personal sentiments rather than reason and logic. He fails to realize — there is a reason people are pointing out Sergeant Crowley works his diversity training workshops, and that reason is because Professor Gates was railing away about the Sergeant’s passionate racism. Crowley’s resume does not resoundingly falsify this; but it certainly deals the theory a blow, from which it never actually recovers. As such, it is revealed to anyone paying attention for what it is. The product of the overactive imagination of an Ethnic Studies professor with a giant chip on his shoulder. None of this matters to Pitts, who is arguing — essentially — that because Gates works in a prestigious university and relies on a cane to walk, dang it, he must be in the right here.

Not that too many other folks are doing a better job thinking this thing out. Last week, President Obama made sure we’d be talking about this for awhile, when he responded at length, Leonard-Pitts-style, to a question about it. During a press conference about health care.

I said Leonard-Pitts-style, and perhaps that is unfair to Mr. Pitts. Pitts had access to all the information, or at least, honestly thought that he did; President Obama, on the other hand, conceded that He didn’t have all the facts, but made up His mind anyway:

The final moments of President Obama’s press conference last week have gotten the most attention, and some of the president’s supporters have wondered whether his big-footed interference in the Harvard professor’s melodrama has overshadowed his push for health-care reform.

But the president’s response to Gatesgate actually sheds a lot of light on his approach to health care and other issues, for this reason: Obama adopts his positions before knowing what he is talking about. To be fair, Obama admitted as much, at least as far as Gates was concerned. “I don’t know all the facts,” he acknowledged, before launching into a lecture (later retracted) about the “stupidity” of the Cambridge police (while misrepresenting what had happened).

How could he not have known all the facts? Press secretary Robert Gibbs mentioned on Fox News Sunday that the Gates matter was one of the issues the White House press operation had briefed the president on before the press conference. Numerous accounts of the imbroglio were available online — though the president need only pick up the phone to get all the information he wants.

He didn’t want information. He preferred his comfortable, prejudiced view.

This is worth bearing in mind as the country takes a good, hard look at the president’s plans for health-care reform. On the day he announced support for embryonic-stem-cell research, Mr. Obama also signed an executive memorandum declaring that in the Obama administration, “We [will] make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” And yet, his health-care proposals — or rather the congressional ideas he has endorsed — seem to skirt facts and evidence at every turn.

A leader for our times?

Well, perhaps so. We all have this tendency to make up our minds that the earth is as flat as a pancake, before we’ve peeked into our first water well. From then on, as the evidence rolls in the most common error is to select said evidence. Cherish whatever substantiates this pre-selected conclusion of ours, and discard whatever may contradict it outright, or pose a simple challenge to it. This is the First Instinct fallacy, and it holds an appeal to us because it makes it easy to think we can sort of bumble into the right answer to something, and formulate a plan just as beneficial to our interests as something else constructed only with a lot of stewing and mental effort. It makes all this hard work seem unnecessary. Just go with your gut, and that’s probably right.

Well there’s a price to be paid for that: You have to wait around for someone to travel around the world in order to know how big it is. Of course, you can speculate uselessly on that to your heart’s content. Up with your side, down with the other guy’s side…you can think what you want. But you might have to backpedal. You might have to go the Obama route. You might have to resort to silly platitudes to get the shining spotlight off you, and issue your calls for a national dialogue. The disadvantage there, of course, is that platitudes eventually wear out…or at least, they might. Weren’t we all calling for a national dialogue on race right after Obama’s pastor was revealed to be a racist asshole? Yes, it seems like just yesterday. We were congratulating The Holy One for another fine speech, and suddenly everyone stopped talking about Jeremiah Wright and “God Damn America.” We stopped talking about race, too, at least in ways that might have any effect on the Obama campaign other than to help it along. National dialogue my left nut. That’s just a mantra, nothing more.

Here’s the trouble with the way we’re processing this.

First of all, the one thing you can do before any of the information rolls in, is to make a list of the possible conclusions. That’s quite justifiable, and even preferred. There aren’t too many: Professor Gates is in the right, or Sergeant Crowley is in the right. Add to that this popular “mixed bag” thing a lot of people are conjuring. It’s brain-dead, but there’s legitimacy to it as a possibility. They’re both equally wrong; they’re both wrong, but Gates is more wrong than Crowley; they’re both wrong, but Crowley is more in the wrong than Gates. That’s three, in addition to the two obvious extremes. Five total. Strong verdict for Gates because Crowley is a racist dickhead, milder verdict for Gates, toss-up, milder verdict for Crowley, strong verdict for Crowley because Gates is a troublemaker.

Well here’s the trouble. And this is what our “national dialogue” really has to address, in my view. I haven’t refined these possibilities overly much, opting instead for a big-pixel, thirty-thousand-foot view. But look what we have happening here: Our nation, and therefore our modern society that is a part of it, is burdened with this history of oppressing persons of color. Enslaving them, segregating them, discriminating against them, engaging in nasty shenanigans to keep them from voting when they should’ve been able to, and arresting them for nothing. And because of that, we sometimes act in haste to try to abjure any notions that any individuals among us might be racists…save for those who are advancing something we’re trying to stop. It’s the thirty-thousand-pound napalm MOAB of our modern times. Get this ordinance dropped, and your enemy disintigrates. Love the smell of napalm in the morning.

And so the Gates affair is a rather handy lesson for us. It puts the big reveal on what a wonderful job we’ve done, closing our eyes to the truth.

It’s the last of those categories, you see. The idea that the cop can be completely in the right, and the professor could have been completely in the wrong. Most of the folks who’ve already commented, have been caught off guard. In their haste to be exonerated from this lingering suspicion of racism, it has become popular to lop off that wholly legitimate conclusion even from the list of trivial possibilities. Something must have been wrong with what the cop did. There must have been an error made somewhere!

Trouble is, all of the evidence that has been wandering on in to view, be it at a quick trot or at a slow plodding, once it’s verified the bulk of it seems to support that final conclusion, that Professor Gates is as racially prejudiced as any American has been in modern times. Most problematic in this evidence is the report that Gates, once drawing his own conclusion that he was being unfairly hassled because of the color of his skin, nevermind whether that was with justification or not — started mouthing off at a cop. This is where my sympathy falls away. You don’t do that, regardless of the color of your skin. You just don’t get to walk away from that. And how did Gates draw these conclusions, anyway? It seems to say a lot more about Gates himself than about any situation in which he found himself. He has a personal complex about this stuff, and once finding himself being questioned by a policeman, injected race into the situation when nobody else had.

So at this point, the logically strongest conclusion is this: that Professor Gates created this incident.

It has become an unfortunately widespread weakness to close one’s eyes to this as a possibility, though, and therefore to any evidence that might lead to it. All too often, that has been eliminated, then First Instinct takes over. This is a disservice to Sergeant Crowley and to police everywhere, especially police who serve in urban areas periodically unsettled with racial tension. Too many among us fail to see that on an incident-to-incident basis, the officer on the scene just might have handled things properly. It’s possible. It is a possibility. We just can’t see it, because we’re too busy being sensitive. The cop must be wrong, somehow; a little, or a lot, but he must have done the wrong thing. Now let’s round up some facts to back that up.

We all know that’s not the way to go about this. But many are going to be preoccupied by pointing out it isn’t my place to be bringing any of this up. I’m a six-foot protestant white guy with all his limbs and twenty-one digits. This is none of my business.

Just like it’s none of a library administrator’s business to figure out the world is 40 thousand kilometers in circumference.

I can see how, in the minds of some, that might appear to be a legitimate thing to point out. But…it doesn’t make the world flat, now does it?

And not like Captain Renault. Really shocked…

On a Boston radio program this morning, Bill Cosby suggested that President Obama spoke too soon on the controversial arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

“I’ve heard about five different reports [on the details of the arrest],” Cosby said on Boston’s WZLX. “If I’m the president of the United States, I don’t care how much pressure people want to put on it about race, I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

“I was shocked to hear the president making this kind of statement,” Cosby said referring to the president’s remarks during last night’s press conference.

The comedian appeared to have dialed his comments back a bit in a later interview on Boston’s FOX 25 television station. Cosby cautioned those from coming up with their own conclusions, but gave the president some leeway.

“People who have not been there, people who don’t know are beginning to have their own personal feelings, but they weren’t there,” Cosby said.

“Does this include the president?” asked the FOX25 reporter.

“It includes everybody,” Cosby said. “[But] I would have to take into consideration that he lived in Cambridge for some time so he may know more than he’s saying about situations of that sort,” Cosby said.

Cosby isn’t alone in giving President Obama some benefit-of-doubt on this; white guy James Taranto, in yesterday’s Best of the Web, was charitable as well.

Let’s dispense with one common criticism of the president: that he should have refrained from commenting on the subject at all. “It’s the kind of question to which a president would normally reply with something like: ‘That’s a local police matter, I don’t know the details and I know it will be worked out responsibly,’ and move along,” says National Review’s Yuval Levin. “Very odd behavior for a president.”

True, this started as a local police matter, but by the time Obama was asked about it, it had become a contentious national debate. As he is the first president who is black, Obama’s views on a subject involving race relations were bound to be of interest and to carry considerable weight. And Obama evidently did have a strong interest in the matter. According to Politico, his answer to this question was the only point in the press conference when he “came alive.” (The rest of the conference was devoted to some policy issue or other.)

On the merits, we’d say Obama got it right. He expressed sympathy with Gates’s position while expressly declining to endorse the charge that the arresting officer had racially invidious motives. When the president made a general statement about racial profiling–a statement that is certainly debatable, but he, like everyone else, is entitled to argue for his side in a debate–he was careful to note that he was speaking “separate and apart from this incident.”
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It is important…to distinguish between the initial altercation and the subsequent public debate. In the former, Crowley was in a position of authority and thus bore a greater responsibility than Gates, who was merely a private citizen. But in pressing the matter now, it is Gates who is exercising considerable authority: the intellectual authority of a pre-eminent scholar of race in America, and the moral authority of a black man demanding equal treatment in a country with an acknowledged history of atrocious racism.
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On Tuesday Gates told the Boston Globe: “If [Crowley] apologizes sincerely, I am willing to forgive him. And if he admits his error, I am willing to educate him about the history of racism in America and the issue of racial profiling. . . That’s what I do for a living.” Gates is trying to be magnanimous. He doesn’t quite succeed, does he? Still, it’s not an unattractive offer. Lots of people pay big bucks for a Harvard education.

But a true scholar devotes his life to acquiring knowledge, not just imparting it. Crowley may have something to learn from Gates, but Gates may have something to learn from Crowley, too–about the challenges of police work and the vulnerabilities, both physical and psychological, that sometimes lead cops to act overzealously — even stupidly — when citizens challenge their authority.

Taranto’s dazzling display of even-handedness is a classic illustration of how sometimes too much effort put into so-called “balance” can be antithetical to effective, clear-headed thinking. Sometimes, to be blunt about it, it isn’t necessary to see both sides. Sometimes it’s counterproductive to see both sides.

That might seem harsh, and it is…but it isn’t illogical. To support the point, one has only to step out of that realm, which is narrower than most people think, in which negotiation is appropriate. Think about situations involving wildlife. Forces of nature. Cars. So many of us possess an immediate understanding of the situation of crossing in a crosswalk without looking both ways. We understand this because our mothers forced us to understand it: If a car also isn’t looking, and you’re not looking, and you’re in the crosswalk but the car flattens you like a pancake, why yes indeedy you’ll have the right-of-way. You’ll be “right.” Dead right.

My point, here, is that Professor Gates had exactly the same “right” to get surly with a cop, as a child has to cross a street without looking.

Taranto’s got it backwards here. Yes there is a professional expectation placed on the police officer that isn’t placed on the civilian. But for the civilian’s own welfare, he is placed under an expectation of sorts as well, just like the negligent and oblivious child crossing the crosswalk. He needs to be behaving responsibly, for his own sake, or else facing the consequences — as do we all.

Professor Gates failed to show this minimal, utilitarian level of personal responsibility. He mouthed off at a cop. I’m not mouthing off at any cops. If I do, I do not expect to get away with it. I would expect to get arrested for disorderly conduct, or worse, and in my case I would expect the charges to stick. Just like, if I cross a street without looking, getting flattened (or at least honked at) would be the very first thing on my mind. Responsible people of all colors think that way.

But that’s all a little bit wordy. We’ve been criticized by some of our more loyal readers lately for being too wordy. So let us snag this one biting comment left by Doug, over at Gerard’s place…this guy speaks for us.

Gates could have dispelled all the bad air by just saying, “thanks for stopping by officer; here’s my lisence, I live here.” Then he should have shouted out to his neighbor, “Good looking out neighbor; it’s me, Skip.” And then invited her (and the cops) over to his next Bar-B-Q. Done – settled with good cheer all around, in less than a minute and a half.

Instead we get Gates having the time of his life playing the poor black victim of police brutality. Here’s a guy that America has showered with every reward, living and working at the top of the game in academic USA. Yet that is not enough; this insecure little wart needs his radical 60s street cred; he gins up a big racial confrontation with a man who is just trying to do his job.

Flipping s**t at cops even in the best circumstances (there really are no best circumstances) is just not a smart thing to do…

We’ve got no sympathy for this guy. None at all. And I daresay, there is much to criticize in the way the debate about this situation is shaping up. Too many people are seeing the light…like Bill Cosby, as an example…and then they do this “gotta say something in favor of the other side” thing, like if they take the no-sympathy-at-all angle and are too puritan about it, they’re afraid of becoming a pariah in some social circle that will become valuable to them at some later time.

They may very well be right.

But like I said. Balance is not always desirable for clear thinking. At least, in some situations…and this is one of them. Professor Gates is a crybaby, an attention whore, and worst of all he’s a bad example — to millions and millions of people who are, in fact, watching. Learning all the wrong lessons.

Oh, and President Obama? Cosby’s first set of remarks, were right on the money. This was not a matter fit for comment by a true President of the United States. You’ve just been demoted. You are no longer the President who just so happens to be a race hustler. That was last week. This week, you’re a race hustler first and foremost, who just so happens to have wheedled his way into this gig as President.

Interesting argument put out by this San Diego Union Tribune editor-guy.

Republicans have a good case to make to African American voters about how the GOP is the real party of empowerment and opportunity, and how the Democratic Party is only interested in empowering itself at the expense of minorities. So much so that it will attack those uppity enough to think for themselves.

On education, for instance, Democrats side with mostly white teachers’ unions against black parents who want their children’s schools to be held accountable for student performance — finally purged of what a Republican president called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The educational reform law, No Child Left Behind, has the support of the NAACP, but is fiercely opposed by the teachers’ unions.

Many African Americans also find appealing the GOP’s adherence to personal responsibility, lower taxes, smaller government, and traditional moral values.

But Republicans never get around to making that case to the black community, because too many of them are busy making jackasses out of themselves and coming across as thickheaded, insensitive, and mean-spirited racists. The election of the first black president only made matters worse, as some conservatives, particularly at the local level, responded to this historic event by taking political discourse into the gutter with jokes and sophomoric stunts that don’t amuse but offend…

After the bullet list, he tosses out the meaningless bromide that “Republicans don’t have a monopoly on racism.” That’s Rule Number Four, you’ll recall, from How To Motivate Large Numbers of People To Do a Dumb Thing, Without Anyone Associating the Dumb Thing With Your Name Later On: “Make a Big Show out of Conceding Points That Don’t Really Mean Anything.” Makes you look all even-handed and what-not.

Trouble here is, the bromide is not meaningless. The dust-up between Hillary and Obama last summer was heated, sustained, and showcased in a most unflattering light the condescending attitude the central liberal-democrat power structure has toward minority groups, both female and of-color. The comparison being made, therefore, is between Republicans — who can name as their fellow party members, some isolated individual head-cases possessing some appallingly poor judgment — and democrats, who seem to be philosophically determined to use anyone non-white and non-male as sort of a political fuel. Their message seems to be “Ask not what your political party can do about the injuries you’ve suffered as a minority, ask instead what the injuries you’ve suffered can do for our party.” We know from last year’s melee that that there’s some kind of a complex “Superdelegate” hierarchy involved with these minority classes, almost like something out of Dungeons and Dragons; blacks have more “hit points” than women, but just barely.

This Navarette fellow seems to have lost track of his own argument. He’s trying to make the case that there is some asymmetry between how Republicans and democrats treat minorities. But according to the evidence he himself brings to the table, the demeaning remarks exist on both sides. The beneficial legislation that offsets the political damage done by such demeaning remarks — also — exists on both sides.

The difference? It seems to me the democrats who are in charge now, when they talk about becoming a color-blind society they can’t possibly mean it. Witness the 5-4 Ricci decision by the Supreme Court earlier this week. Barack Obama’s nominee replaces the retiring Justice Souter, who was one of the dissenting four; in fact, Judge Sotomayer contributed to the prior ruling on this case, which was overturned. The case was all about stopping a promotion exam in the middle and changing the rules if & when it looks like the wrong people are winning. It was all about setting up a routine promotion process as a heated contest between whites and non-whites — artificially injecting into the process a sense that what’s good for this race over here, must be bad for that one over there. And, also, a sense that if your skin is the wrong color, and you play by the rules and “win,” it becomes necessary to have a do-over.

That the Supreme Court lowered the kibosh on this, has ticked off the folks who won the elections eight months ago…and it’s ticked ’em off mighty well. The democrat party approach to this seems to be that this was not a good decision by the Supremes, and it illustrates why we need more liberals nominated to the High Court. So we can keep playing favorites. We’re not, in spite of all the platitudes so ritually tossed out, ready to get “past it once and for all.” These are not sins “of the past.” We have to keep a thumb on the scale.

I think that’s the real divide. What are these wild-eyed crazy bigoted conservatives saying about it? That you shouldn’t change the rules in the middle of the game; if the test scores came out a certain way, you should just let them stand. That if your skin lacks pigment, you still have the same right to petition your government for your grievances as anybody else. Gosh, y’know…I think to a lot of people, that just makes sense. It’s not that extreme of a position.

So I agree with the Navarette editor guy. Except I would amend the advice, slightly, to say Republicans should get rid of their bigots. Their judgment seems so questionable that their assets as political decision-makers, must be doubted. Maybe once they are kicked out for good, they can join the democrat party…which seems, from where I stand, ready willing & able to consume all the poorly-thought-out racial and gender stereotypes, that any twisted and diseased individual cares to put to paper or voice.

They can afford to so consume. They aren’t called out on it.

Phil bags ‘im and tags ‘im. If you’re familiar with Bob Herbert, you know this doesn’t take much. A work by Bob Herbert is a work of pure bile. Leaning hard on the negative. Hate, hate, hate. Even in the New York Times, there isn’t much like it…it’s an entire career built on one statement taken out of context in one of Ronald Reagan’s speeches from 29 years ago. Simply amazing.

The subject this time? What else. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, and the powerless but hated right-wing white males who have the temerity to speak out about it, specifically, the not-elected-or-appointed-to-anything Newt Gingrich and the not-elected-or-appointed-to-anything Karl Rove.

Phil’s spent more time on it than I have available to me here, and I don’t feel up to the task of excerpting. But this quote summarizes things nicely:

The deal is, the Republicans as a rule (far, far more than the Democrats) have been for equal treatment, and have been demonized in the past 30 or so years as being racist for not wanting to go beyond that and elevate minorities to a special status. It is not the Republicans being inconsistent. It’s the Democrats buying minority votes and convincing them that they are dependent on Democrats to keep those mean Republicans from putting them back under the boot.

I am not saying there are not racist Republicans, nor am I saying all Democrats are, or were, racists. Lefties can point to examples But you can’t ignore the numbers and the trend over our history.

What causes it? Goodperson Fever. People who define the postmodern liberal movement are in a great big hurry to showcase, over and over again, that they see all other persons as “equal”…they can never demonstrate that to the rest of us enough to feel satisfied…and the reason this thirst is unquenchable, is because that which is being so repeatedly proven again and again, is not true. These people are miserable if & when we have both a code and a culture that recognizes all classes as equal. That makes them supremely unhappy. All these classes have to be special in some way. We have to have a Year of the Woman, a Year of the Queer, a Year of the Disabled Person, a Year of the Differently Colored, et cetera. Nobody is ever fully respected…just as a person. Nope. There have to be special privileges to “make up for the errors of the past.”

Their sailboat is becalmed if the waters ever become truly smooth, and they damn well know it. They want the interclass jealousies and infighting to continue.

Now if you woke up a genie after two thousand years and let him live in one wing of your house for a few weeks…or if you rescued an alien who crashed here in a spaceship…seriously, how would you explain this to your houseguest? Affirmative Action plans and programs all over the place to help out those disenfranchised classes that can’t get a fair shake without ’em, and yet the most prestigious occupation in our entire country is occupied by a black dude. People screaming by the millions, “hooray, it’s true, anybody can do anything!” — but nobody dares to say “So when do we get rid of all these programs?” Your houseguest, who for purposes of our hypothetical possesses all of the critical-thinking faculties required, but is completely foreign to our recent history, would suggest the obvious to you and you’d be forced to agree. Someone is in charge of these little wrinkles in our society, and whoever it is wants us to keep fighting across class lines. What do you do when you want roof shingles to line up? What do you do when you want panels of sheet metal to fit in with each other? You erect one beam across the full length of the structure, and then you nail or rivet the units to this common bond. We don’t do that with our people. We’re opposed to doing that. Every class has to have its own beam or plank. It’s a rule. We don’t really want the nirvana we are supposed to be desperately and endlessly seeking. Or if we do really want it, we haven’t been grasping for it in the right way. We’ve been putting foxes in charge of the chicken coop. We’ve been appointing dividers to the task of unifying us.

And we’ve been putting rabble-rousers in the position of “informing” us, too. Bob Herbert is one of the most prestigious columnists, in our nation’s most prestigious newspaper.

And all he does is peddle hate. It’s as if his position exists solely to make blogs look more worthwhile.

When Sonia Sotomayor made her comments about white guys, she was simply displaying what nowadays passes for mainstream dedicated-lefty thinking…which means it passes for mainstream thinking on behalf of us all.

Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases,” she declared. “I am…not so sure that I agree with the statement. First…there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. [emphasis mine]

Better to have this thing done by that ethnic group than a bunch of white males, better to have that thing over there done by this group over here than a bunch of white males…et cetera. It’s not the same reverse-discrimination I remember from years ago, which sought to make the point it was someone else’s “turn” and left things at that. The message had to do with fairness and equality. Nowadays it has more to do with suitability. And differences. We like to talk about how little sense it ever made, to allow the white males to do anything. We w.a.s.p.’s have weaknesses other groups don’t have. Weaknesses, vices, phobias, we’re ignorant, we’re greedy, we’re cowardly…we lack empathy.

The next step after that is when someone calls you on your racist bullshit, you backpedal like crazy. So we’ve seen this stuff Before Sonia, and we’ll see it long after she’s confirmed. Or withdraws. Whatever.

James Taranto, writing in Best of the Web, notices something even more skewed. And I don’t know how you can top this. Today’s liberals behave exactly the way Archie Bunker used to behave…for laughs.

It reminds us of an exchange on an early episode of “All in the Family,” which we caught as part of a retrospective aired earlier this week on the TV Land cable network. Archie Bunker and the Meathead are arguing over a brochure advertising a slate of candidates for local office:

Archie: What’s the matter with this? I call this representative government. You’ve got Salvatori, Feldman, O’Reilly, Nelson–that’s an Italian, a Jew, an Irishman and a regular American there. That’s what I call a balanced ticket.

Meathead: Why do you always have to label people by nationality?

Archie: ‘Cause, how else are you going to get the right man for the right job? For instance, take Feldman there. He’s up for treasurer. Well, that’s perfect. All them people know how to handle money. Know what I mean?

Meathead: No, I don’t.

Archie: Well, then you got Salvatori running for D.A. He can keep an eye on Feldman. You know, I want to tell you something about the Italians. When you do get an honest one, you really got something there.

Meathead: Aw, c’mon, Arch.

Archie: Well, then here you got O’Reilly, the mick. He can see that the graft is equally spread around, you know. You got Nelson, the American guy. He’s good for TV appearances, to make the rest of them look respectable.

Like Sotomayor, Archie is not propounding a theory of racial or ethnic supremacy but describing the world in terms of culturally contingent stereotypes. He is engaging in identity politics.
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Today, you can easily imagine a conservative uttering the Meathead’s earnest query: “Why do you always have to label people by nationality?” But somewhere along the line, liberalism lost its ideals and adopted Archie Bunker’s theory of representative government.

There was an elegantly veiled undertone of preaching in this show, for those who are too young to recall. The message was always crystal-clear: Only a cigar-chomping rube from Queens would stoop so low as to think ethnic groups have characteristics that separate them from other ethnic groups. It doesn’t matter if you hold one group to be superior to another (which, pointedly, Bunker doesn’t do in the exchange above). Simply believing in such differentials is enough. Because we’re all the same.

Sotomayor went further than Archie Bunker, though, since her comment made it quite clear that she holds white males to be inferior. Sure her primary point was that the white males have missed out on some kind of experience(s), not that they would be white, or male. But the whiteness-and-maleness was somehow worth mentioning.

The whiteness-and-maleness accentuates the inexperience…or it is more of a hindrance to rendering a reasonable decision than the inexperience. Does it matter which one? Either way, the whiteness-and-maleness, in her mind, is obviously some kind of liability.

So go ahead and confirm her. Just bear in mind, though, that she represents exactly the mindset that, in a day long gone, “everyone” was so eager to leave behind. Since, y’know, when you’re walking in circles, it’s important to at least recognize that’s what you are doing.