Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Just when you thought Joe Biden couldn’t get any lower he finds a new bottom to scrape. In an act of desperation to save the sorry state of this administration Joe Biden introduces rape and murder as justification to pass their latest job bill and implies that if you oppose the jobs bill you are in favor of more rape and murder.
photo by Kevin Dooley
One of the main reasons the current economic problem is so hard to solve and the battle lines are so starkly drawn is that there is strong disagreement on what the problem is and likewise the solutions. The mantra from the left is that the problem is Bush’s fault, there was too much deregulation under Bush, although no one points to any particular regulation repealed under Bush that caused the crisis, and that we don’t tax enough. Those on the right have a different view.
Carolyn McCarthy is a victim. Her husband was tragically killed and her son paralyzed by a madman, Colin Ferguson, who opened fire on a crowded Long Island Railroad train killing six and injuring nineteen. McCarthy, who was a Republican, switched parties and ran for Congress on the gun control issue after her Congressman Dan Frisa voted against an assault weapons ban that she supported and she won the seat. She has been on a mission ever since to impose tighter and tighter restrictions on guns, believing that will make the world safer. She wants you to feel her pain, literally.
What is racial profiling? I think most people would agree it is where an individual is observed and because of his or her race, some assumptions are made about their behavior. Let’s examine the Louis Gates case
Sergeant Crowley
Sergeant Crowley responded to a call of a possible Breaking and Entering. This was the result of a call to 911 reporting that a passerby and a neighbor saw two men, no race mentioned, attempting to force their way into a house. Crowley, who is white, and two other officers, one black and one Hispanic, responded to the call. Crowley began to investigate and Gates responded belligerently and called Crowley a racist. The altercation moved outside where a crowd began to form. Crowley warned Gates several times that he was becoming disorderly and even showed his handcuffs to make his point. The 911 caller said there was only one person shouting and it was Gates. Crowley is a highly regarded officer who trains other officers regarding racial profiling.
Dr. Gates
Dr. Gates is a well respected professor at Harvard University and had just returned from a long trip and found he was locked out of his house. To be fair, he was probably tired and irritated and having to deal with the issue of being locked out. He and another individual tried to force their way into the house. The witnesses, not knowing it was Gates and concerned about other reported burglaries in the neighborhood called 911. The police arrived, Gates saw that Crowley was white and assumed that Crowley’s being there was racially motivated and proceeded to call him a racist, insult Crowley’s mother, and take the dispute outside the house. So who exactly profiled whom?
Obama
Barack Obama, who was supposed to be the post-racial president really stepped in it, when he said the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly.” Perhaps there is a silver lining. By raising this local issue to national prominence, perhaps we can finally put to rest the battle of racial animosity. Let’s face it, there will always be prejudice. We are wired to be prejudiced. Our survival depends on being able to size someone up quickly as friend or foe and take the appropriate action. It is a natural instinct. However, unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and control our instincts.
This self control has been driven into whites for 40 years. You are guilty. You are racist. You must be re-educated. You’ve got to control yourselves. Has it worked? Well in a country that is still predominantly white, we elected a black man president with 53% of the popular vote. That’s more than Bill Clinton ever got by a long shot. It’s more than either Bush got and for a Democrat you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to find better poll numbers.
On the other hand, minorities have been told for the same period of time, you can’t be a racist, no matter what you say, because you don’t have power (that’s over, with Obama in the White House). It’s not your fault; you are a victim of society. You didn’t get the job because of racism, so let’s throw out the test. There is so much prejudice in this country you can’t get into college unless we put a box on the form to indicate your race and give you a helping hand. It’s not your faul; it’s not your fault. With all that conditioning who could be blamed for throwing the race card whenever there is a bad outcome and the other guy is white? It’s a conditioned reflex.
Playing the Race Card
I taught a graduate course in telecommunications. There was a student, who was black, that I really enjoyed having in my class. He actively participated and really enlivened the discussion. There was one topic that he didn’t seem to grasp and as a result he did poorly on an exam. He asked for a makeup exam, which I granted. My policy was that my makeup exams were notoriously tough. The reason was that the makeup focused on what you got wrong on the first test, and didn’t include a lot of what you got right. If you were going to get another bite at the apple, and you had more time to study and you knew where to focus, I felt that was the only way to be fair to the other students. He did worse on the make-up than on the original test but I took the higher grade of the two. With his other work in the class, he still got a good grade for the course. I later saw him on the elevator and he said to me, “I know why you failed me on those tests. It’s because I’m black.” Everyone took the same test, whites, blacks, Indians, Asians, immigrants, Hispanics, but I was accused of singling him out and failing him because he was black. What I found most interesting was that his body language showed he wasn’t really comfortable using the race card. He said it tentatively, rather than with the outrage some someone truly wronged. It was if someone had coached him to use it. Very sad.
A New Chapter
At the conclusion of today’s beer summit at the White House, they should symbolically take out a card that says RACE in bold letters on it and burn it. This should signal that we are all Americans, and using the race card should be as scorned as racial profiling. Whites have been learning this lesson for forty years; it’s time for everyone else to get the same education. We all have our prejudices. We must not assume that the motive behind every action is racial. Maybe the reason you didn’t get the job is that you weren’t qualified. Maybe the reason you didn’t get into the Ivy League school is that very few people do and your grades were not as good. Maybe the reason you didn’t graduate high school is that you didn’t study. With Barack Obama as President, it’s time to accept that anything is possible in this great country. You have to accept responsibility and work hard. I may not agree with much of what President Obama believes in, but he got to there by working very hard at what worked to get him there. There is no Affirmative Action checkbox in the voting booth.
Sometimes I wonder if this is all a bad dream and I will wake up at some point, in a cold sweat, comforted in knowing that it was just that. With the enhanced interrogation techniques, aka waterboarding, that was used on exactly three very bad men, and yielded 60% of what we learned about Al Qaeda, we are now Mirandizing terrorists on the battlefield. For those who never got a sufficient dose of crime dramas on TV here is how the Miranda rights start:
“You have the right to remain silent…”
Say no more. That is all you have to know. From using a technique to compel these murderous fiends to give up information about their likeminded associates, we have moved to telling them it is their right not to say anything. Here’s my advice… steer clear of tall or government buildings.
How 9/11 Happened
This is exactly how 9/11 happened. The Clinton Administration treated terrorism as a law and order issue rather than a war on our way of life. They constructed walls between the FBI and CIA forbidding them to share information. What the CIA learned about the terrorists before 9/11 they couldn’t tell the FBI and vice versa. As a result we got blindsided.
It is interesting to note that in putting together the 9/11 Commission to investigate how it all happened and what we could do to prevent it happening again, Jamie Gorelick, the individual who constructed this barrier in her role in the Clinton White House, was added to the Commission panel when she should have been testifying before it. (Later, without any financial background she was appointed Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, made millions during her tenure, and Fannie Mae’s actions led to the current financial debacle).
What more will the Obama Administration do to weaken our defenses?
