House of Eratosthenes

Derrick Z. Jackson is upset about Janice Rogers Brown, or more precisely, he’s upset that she’s a black female judge and the Republicans are trying to get her nominated to the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia. He feels it’s hypocritical. This is the kind of thing that really cracks me up.

Born in the mid-1960’s, I have spent a lifetime listening to liberals “educate” me about how they are all for poor non-white minority groups, while conservatives are “against” those minorities. I grew up with a living room in which all the furniture was arranged to face toward the idiot-box, where my family and I would soak up prime-time idiot-shows designed to educate us idiots how enlightened liberals were and how bigoted conservatives were. ABC, CBS, NBC were all in on the act. M*A*S*H educated me that war was always insane, so logically of course, there was no reason to declare it, ever. Nevermind that we all lived in a free country that was started by a war.

Then as I entered the world of adulthood, funny things began to happen. Reagan was elected, and then he nominated the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hello? I thought Republicans wanted women to stay in the kitchen. Pundits in the newspaper, on television, on radio, started to try to tell me what to think. When minorities were nominated by Republican presidents it was evidence of hypocrisy, but Bill Clinton was supposed to be given credit for doing exactly the same thing. George H. W. Bush was supposed to apologize to somebody for nominating Clarence Thomas. Well wait a minute, I thought “special episodes” of Mary Tyler Moore had educated me that minorities weren’t supposed to be treated any different, especially when & if they were placed in positions of trust.

I grew up in a state of perpetual confusion over this. Being concerned in any way at all over the subject of someone’s skin color, I was told, was the province of dimwits. At the same time, I watched people I was told were overwhelmingly smart, get into verbal knock-down drag-outs over peoples’ skin color.

Now all pretense of subtlety has been dropped, at least by Derrick Z. Jackson who is angry with Republicans for, once again, standing behind Brown who is female and black. Jackson is upset about something: He has detected a trend in the way Brown’s background is played up by Republican sponsors. “Daughter of sharecroppers.”

Sure, I agree. Janice Rogers Brown must have done something more noteworthy & accomplished than being the daughter of sharecroppers.

And your point is? John F. Kennedy did more noteworthy things than be the scion of a wealthy American family struck multiple times by (Darwinian) tragedy. His wife did more noteworthy things than own a silly hat. So what? When it comes time to recite Jack & Jackie’s resumes, the first things to tumble out of people’s mouths have something to do with “family has endured so much tragedy” and “pink pillbox hat.” We hear it over and over again, and that’s politics. Hillary Clinton has “worked hard.”John Kerry is “nuanced.”

Let us just cut through the bull for a second. Derrick Jackson is upset because Republicans are supporting, and therefore reaping political profit from, a person with dark skin. Derrick Jackson thinks Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to do this, that it is a privilege reserved for Democrats & other factions opposed to Republicans. It’s hypocritical, in their case, after all. Republicans never back minorities. Except when they do…in which case, it doesn’t count. Because then, Republicans are being hypocritical.

The free will enjoyed & exercised by Janice Rogers Brown, herself, is particularly vexing to people like Jackson. Brown is plenty sharp enough to understand what Republicans and Democrats are all about, and she’s plenty proud enough to refuse to be exploited. Since she’s black, and she obviously agrees with the Republican platform at least in some respects, she’s terribly dangerous to the status quo. She has made a conscious decision: I’m black, I grew up poor, and I could profit from my status through affirmative action. I choose not to, because if I do that, it will congest any avenue of success for those who come after me. I choose to rely on my own abilities, come what may, because this will open up avenues for other people who have abilities, regardless of what their skin color may be and how they grew up.

Congratulations to her. And as I’m often fond of saying about this and many other issues: If one person can do it anywhere, then anyone can do it everywhere.

Jackson, emotionally, is incapable of handling this in silence.

His article, boiled down to its rough essentials, says this: Lay off those black people, you Republicans! They’re OUR pawns!

Jackson, and those sympathetic to his point of view, are all going to be fascinating people to watch in the next few weeks. They’re journalists, but ironically they are trying to stop facts from getting out — any facts that would be damaging to the liberal monopoly of “minority rights” — “minority” as Democrats define them, and “rights” as Democrats define them. I think this is a professional betrayal: Journalists are supposed to be all about objectivity, and getting facts out. So let’s cause further pain to traitors like Derrick Jackson…let’s piss on the snowman a little bit more. Just for grins.

Democrats have a VERY checkered history with minority rights, and that is a charitable description. Let’s go over some of the problems in history, shall we.

1. During the Civil War, Republicans fought not only to win the war & free the slaves, but to make sure that full rights were conferred on those freed-men. Democrats opposed this. Republicans supported, and Democrats opposed, the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

2. During the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a faction led by southern Democrats tried to defeat the CRA. Republicans voted in large numbers, in both houses, to get this legislation passed. If Republicans did not back it, the numbers would not have been there to get it through.

3. The case of Strom Thurmond opposing civil rights and then becoming a Republican, is highly deceptive. If you were in Kindergarten when Strom Thurmond ran for president as a DEMOCRAT segregationist, you would have completed high school, and almost certainly college as well, before Thurmond ever became a Republican.

4. Although Thomas Jefferson is claimed by Democrats as the founder of their party, things get interesting if you read what he actually wrote, especially during the time of his presidency from 1801 to 1809. He sounds just like Rush Limbaugh. Especially when he starts complaining about Federalists taking over the “judiciary” because they can’t win at the ballot box.

Don’t believe a single word of any of the points above. Do your own research.

The notion that Democrats champion minority rights, or have a history of doing so, is ripe for challenge, as is the notion that Republicans have any heritage of inherent hostility to same. Even if this were not the case, it is hardly productive to castigate one party or the other for nominating a “daughter of sharecroppers” to an appeals court, or to use that tagline in promoting her nomination. Most Americans want to live in a place where people have the opportunity to achieve whatever they want & whatever they’re willing to prove they can do, regardless of how they grew up. We also want to live in a place where the press tells us what the facts are, and we are left to form our own opinions — not where columnists like Jackson tell us that Republicans “overdid” something “to a level that is laughable”.

Jackson, to the best I can tell, makes no case anywhere in his article that the allegation about sharecropper parents is false. He doesn’t seem to be concerned with the veracity of the statement, only about whether or not it is offensive to him when it is pointed out.

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They’re OUR Pawns!Wednesday, June 15th, 2005

They’re OUR Pawns!
Wednesday, June 15th, 2005