Is that what all the race baiting is about?
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 Tax Record Scandal
The Department of (In)Justice declines to prosecute the officials involved.
Of course it does.
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.
Detroit’s Impossible Situation
You can only defy economic gravity for so long. And California is on the same, course, as is the country itself, if we don’t come up with new policies.
Trayvon Martin’s Sympathizers
A message for them that they need, but don’t want, to hear.
[Update a couple minutes later]
What George Zimmerman’s police calls tell us about his attitude toward blacks.
The amount of lies and nonsense that have been spewed about this case over the last year and a half have been staggering, even for the leftist media.
Helen Thomas
Letting her speak for herself.
The MSM’s not going to point this out. They’re too busy with their encomia for this “brave, ground-breaking journalist.”
The Post-Zimmerman Poison Pill
Heather McDonald has a palliative to the continuing race baiting:
Criminal-law professors across the political spectrum agree that the Zimmerman verdict resulted from prosecutorial overkill, not juror bias. . . . Close on the heels of the “biased justice system” conceit, however, is the preposterous implication that the primary homicide threat faced by young black males comes from honorary whites such as George Zimmerman. “Our children are targeted. Our community is targeted,” Martin Luther King III told the NAACP national convention on Wednesday. Protesters at the Orlando, Fla., courthouse this week held signs proclaiming “Endangered species: young black men and boys.” The New York Times ran an article today about the “painful talks” black parents are having with their children about how not to get gunned down by whites. A nurse’s assistant in Missouri told the Times: The whole situation ‘“would just make me skeptical about what crowd of white people I put [my son] around.’”
In fact, if a black parent wants to radically reduce his son’s chance of getting shot, he should live in a white neighborhood.
Yup.
More from the notorious right-wing racist, Jeralyn Merritt:
Obama said if Martin had been white the result would probably have been different. Not once did he acknowledge that if Trayvon Martin had not attacked George Zimmerman, the outcome might have been different.
As a former Constitutional law professor, I would expect our President to acknowledge that the purpose of a criminal trial is not to send messages to the American public. It is merely to test the Government’s evidence: Did the state prove guilt and disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt.
By the President comparing himself to Martin 35 years ago, is he saying he would have responded as Martin did, and physically attacked someone for following him? I hope not because our laws do not allow such conduct. It is not illegal for a private citizen to follow someone. It is illegal to physically assault another person who has not threatened him with the imminent use of force.
I am very disappointed that the President has chosen to endorse those who have turned a case of assault and self-defense into a referendum on race and civil rights. And that he is using it to support those with an agenda of restricting gun rights.
The President, like so many others, refuses to acknowledge that George Zimmerman had no avenue of retreat from the beating Martin was inflicting on him. Zimmerman would have prevailed on self-defense without a stand-your-ground law. The only additional element a stand-your-ground law adds to traditional self-defense is the elimination of a duty to retreat if one is available.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott says there will be no change to Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. I hope he’s right. The law does not need to be changed. People have a right to defend themselves from attacks like the one Martin initiated against Zimmerman. They should not have to wait until the next blow, which could be a fatal one.
Shameful. But the president has no shame (which is apparently true of some of my commenters as well).
Future Temperature Forecasts
They have to start adjusting their prognostications now, or risk looking more and more like fools when reality continues to get more and more out of line with the models.
Mitch Daniels
Why he was right about Howard Zinn. Not to mention schools of education.
As Glenn notes, Zinn was a communist, and his works (and those who admire them) should be no more worthy of respect than those of an avowed Nazi.
[Update a few minutes later]
More:
The AP story is a sort of hit job, intended to discredit Daniels who is coming up for his six-month review as head of Perdue University. Its actual effect, on me, anyway, was to increase my already high esteem for the man. Here is a chap that not only saved the state of Indiana from the fiscal nightmare that leftist-run states like Illinois and Michigan are suffering (remember Detroit?), but he is also someone who can spot a Communist fraud at 100 paces and isn’t afraid to say that left-wing propaganda is not the same as history and should not be purveyed as such on the taxpayer’s dime. Zinn’s book, wrote Daniels in one of those emails, “is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.” That’s exactly right.
…Note well, Daniels doesn’t say Zinn’s book oughtn’t to be allowed to be published. He doesn’t want to censor the book. He merely says it shouldn’t be taught as history. He would, I’d wager, say the same thing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And he’d be right.
The country needs a lot more Mitch Danielses. It’s a shame that he didn’t run in 2008.
[Update late evening]
First link was broken. Fixed now. Sorry!