Category Archives: Media Criticism

Let’s Repeal Some Laws

I’m shocked to find myself in agreement with John Boehner:

House Speaker John Boehner says Congress “should not be judged on how many new laws we create” but on “how many laws … we repeal.”

Yes. We have too damn many federal laws, more (as he notes) than we have the resources to enforce and more than are needed to make all of us multiple felons every day. I’ll vote for the guy who promises to gut the federal code. Moreover, the notion that we should judge a legislator’s record on how many laws he passes (or has his/her name attached to) is as stupid as judging a diplomat on how many treaties he signs. The quality of the output is much more important than the quantity.

The Rallies For Travyon

What does their microscopic size mean?

Could it be that the citizenry, including African-Americans, supposedly so greatly injured, have seen through the media hype (what I earlier called media pornography) and themselves realize this case is simply an accidental, anomalous one-off and not that big of a deal?

I certainly hope so, because what we have been going through is a form of national nervous breakdown, taking us rapidly backwards on race relations, something that has improved consistently in our country over the last fifty years.

What we do not need now is a “national conversation on race.” That’s like taking a scab that’s slowly healing and, just when it’s about to whither away, scratching it as hard as possible until the wound comes back.

The only reason to have a “national conversation on race” is to once again stir up the slaves on the “liberal” plantation leading up to next year’s election (which was the same reason that the Democrat race mongers in the media had to spin the false Zimmerman narrative last year as well). Fortunately, unlike the IRS scandal, this actually does seem to be fizzling.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Why I left the NAACP”:

Progressives in the NAACP called me a “bad soldier” for the organization. I refuse to fight for agendas that hold my community down in poverty. Black Americans are only 13.5 percent of the total population, but we represent 34 percent of all welfare recipients. The culture of dependency has our abolitionist forefathers rolling in their graves.

The organization’s attempted manipulation of Martin’s tragic death for its own gain – the NAACP even held its 2013 annual convention as close to the media covering Zimmerman’s trial as it could – is just the latest example of a once-great organization gone completely off the rails. The case had nothing to do with “racial profiling,” but the cynics at the NAACP saw an opportunity to score political points on a buzzword issue and relentlessly pounced.

It’s time for black Americans to reject the NAACP’s message of entitlement and victimhood. It’s time for members of the black community to educate themselves on the values they won’t hear from the NAACP pulpit.

It’s been a long time since that organization was for the actual interests of colored people.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Shelby Steele:

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.

…here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment’s mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

At this point, their moral authority should not be just depleted, but completely dissipated. And it would be if we had an honest press.