Whatever the Outcome, I Was Wrong

    At the time I am writing this, Fox has the electoral college tied at 153.  This race is much closer than I thought it would be, which means this country has drifted further than I thought.  President Obama and the Democrats have run explicitly on what government can do for the people.  Don't borrow money from your parents for college, like Romney suggested... borrow it from your neighbors' parents, courtesy of the federal government.  Healthcare?  Federal government.  Contraceptives?  Free from the federal government.  Jobs?  Today the NAACP released a poll of 1,600 African American voters (via Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner) that contains an astounding finding.  In the words of the NAACP:

95% of all respondents believe the federal government should be engaging in job creation opportunities for all Americans.

    I do not believe for a moment that this attitude is somehow unique to blacks.  Far too many in this country have turned JFK's most famous pronouncement on its head, and liberals have encouraged, promoted, and even campaigned on it.  It's a sad situation.

    I am currently reading Witness by Whittaker Chambers.  It is a fascinating book, and remarkably timely. The fight against communism abroad was tied to the fight against liberalism/socialism at home.  That fight is not over, and is actually getting more intense.  Whittaker Chambers was instrumental in exposing the extent to which Communists had infiltrated the federal government, and while they were largely purged, the liberals never left.  What America needs is a Whittaker Chambers of liberalism, or more than one.  Those who will expose the philosophy for what it is and what it is doing to the country and what it does to the human soul.  Those who used to be on the inside, who were true believers, but are willing to admit they had committed their lives to a ruinous political system.  Are there any such men or women out there?

    Chambers was concerned in the 1940s and 1950s about the United States drifting towards the socialist tendencies of Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries.  Even at the time of his death, Chambers continued to believe communism would eventually triumph.  The fall of the Soviet Union eventually proved him wrong.  But the larger battle rages on.  And on a night like tonight, it's hard not to share Chambers's pessimism.

    Therefore, I must recall what I wrote last night.  God "called" this election long ago.  Even as his life was literally in danger, Chambers himself took comfort in Divine Providence.  How can those of us who are believers do anything less?

The First Refuge of the Scoundrel

    If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then surely the charge of "Racism!" is quickly becoming the first.  Although MSNBC's Touré created the latest stir with his inexcusable and vulgar attack on Mitt Romney, Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast puts on a virtual smear clinic in his August 13th column entitled "How the GOP Plans to Block the Black Vote."  Rather than documenting evidence, a tedious task, Tomasky employs sweeping, unfounded generalizations based on his personal experience and apparent omniscience.  His use of superlatives is breathtaking: "every single election I’ve ever covered"; "a constant through every election I’ve seen"; "Every election come the warnings..."; "delegitimizes everything else about the Republican Party"; "in every single election in this country where the black vote matters"; "Republican Party operatives in every state in the country"; "yet everyone generally knows."  And he raises the argumentum ad populum fallacy to an art form:

I’ve seen the fliers, heard the robocalls, been at the polling places with the mysterious malfunctioning machines. No one ever knows exactly who does these things, and yet everyone generally knows. Republicans...

But we do know that in every single election in this country where the black vote matters, these mysterious things happen in African-American neighborhoods in the run-up to the election and on Election Day itself. We never know exactly who does it, but it’s pretty self-evident that it isn’t Democrats. 

    Needless to say, Tomasky is not exactly in possession of hard evidence, for instance, perhaps a photo of Republican voter  intimidation taking place.  Remarkably, Tomasky does not even bring up the recent high profile case of voter-suppression via robocalls in the 2010 Maryland gubernatorial election.  Could it be because one of the accused, Republican Paul E. Schurick, even after being convicted, was aided by "[s]cores of letters from prominent Republicans and Democrats [who] asked a Baltimore judge for extreme leniency"?  In his letter to the judge, Democrat State Comptroller Peter Franchot "wrote that while voter suppression is 'morally and legally unacceptable,' Schurick’s legacy in Annapolis is foremost that of a bipartisan solution seeker."  Schurick is apparently not the wild-eyed racist Tomasky would have us believe populates the GOP.
    In spite of the evidence to the contrary, how is the anonymous cabal of Republicans carrying out their dastardly work this election cycle according to Tomasky?

This is a conspiracy of thousands of people, Republican Party operatives in every state in the country (except those where the black vote is small enough not to matter), all of them agreeing that denying the most fundamental civic right to a group of citizens because they vote the wrong way is a good idea—and knowing that they can get away with it because, after all, it’s “just” “those people.”

It's a nice touch, using the quotation marks when he's not actually quoting anyone - gives a ring of authenticity to the smear.  But Tomasky nearly outdoes himself in his closing paragraph:

 I cannot understand how any individual can be anything other than abjectly ashamed to be associated with a political party so thuggish as to try to rig elections like this and then at its conventions have the gall to invoke Abraham Lincoln and hire lots of black people to sing and dance and smile, to make up for their absence among the attendees. A black mark indeed.

I would link to Tomasky's source for the hired-minstrels accusation, but of course, he doesn't cite any.  Perhaps he felt it would interrupt the flow of his parting shot to insert proof or facts.
    Despite Tomasky's penchant for relying on his own opinion unencumbered by corroboration, he does call upon two persons to support his claims, Former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer and Attorney Mike Freeman.  But perhaps he'd have been better off sticking with pure opinion:

Greer—and I should say up front he’s under indictment... his credibility is open to question. He’s accused of funneling party money to himself, about $125,000. He’ll stand trial sometime this fall. Obviously, we don’t know whether he’s guilty of that...

Incredibly, as poor a source as Greer appears to be, Tomasky makes it worse by noting that Greer made his charges against the Florida GOP in an interview with Al Sharpton!  Does Tomasky really believe that invoking Sharpton, the ringleader of the Tawany Brawley hoax, adds credibility to his charges?
    But what about Mike Freeman, who challenged the notion raised in a new book that felons in part helped elect Democrat Senator Al Frankin in 2008?  Tomasky reports that "Attorney Mike Freeman rebutted their charges this week.  I can’t swear that Freeman is correct..."  I'm sure Freeman, writing at Alternet (!), appreciates the vote of confidence.

    So in the midst of all the broad-brush charges and dubious accusations against Republicans, how does Tomasky portray black voters, the alleged victims?

Every election come the warnings that if you haven’t paid your telephone bill yet or what have you, you won’t be permitted to vote. Something that like, which I saw all the time in New York City, can be pulled off by a handful of ne’er-do-wells, and the party leaders themselves can maintain plausible deniability.

 Tomasky's smoking gun, his coup de grace evidence of out-of-control thuggery committed by the "racists [who] left the Democrats and joined the GOP... in the late 196os [when] these voter-suppression efforts began," consists of "warnings that if you haven’t paid your telephone bill yet or what have you, you won’t be permitted to vote."  How stupid does Tomasky believe black voters are?  After decades of get-out-the-vote and voter registration drives, all it takes is a "you didn't pay your phone bill" to keep black voters home?  Does Tomasky have such a low opinion of “those people?”
    The paternalism of Tomasky and his ilk towards minorities is perfectly showcased in his column.  Without the Democratic party, voters, especially black voters and other minorities, are helpless.  True racism certainly still exists in this country.  But when is the last time an actual racist was called to account?  The race-baiters at too busy tilting at windmills and skewering the innocent to honestly deal with the issue.  To borrow Tomasky's words, "It’s a sick and sickening situation," but as President Obama tries to eke out a second term during these next eleven weeks, it's likely to get a whole lot worse.

Judging a Man By the Color of His Politics

    In a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, Fredrick Harris, professor of political science and the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, wrote that we in America are "still waiting for our first black president."  This may come as a surprise to anyone who was an inhabitant of earth in November 2008 or has arrived since.  But according to Mr. Harris, Barack Obama has not properly fulfilled the role that his black father apparently bequeathed to the future president merely by virtue of his race.  Mr. Harris fills his essay with phrases such as "issues of specific interest to African Americans," "issues of particular interest to us [blacks]," and "it appears that the nation is instead becoming non-racial," but the following passage just boggles the mind:

Politicians such as former governor Doug Wilder of Virginia, former Seattle mayor Norman Rice and former New York mayor David Dinkins ran campaigns that largely deemphasized race, stressing the need for racial unity and advocating policies that they said would benefit everyone, rather than any particular groups. It was probably necessary to shatter the glass ceiling and win office in majority-white jurisdictions, but these victories came at an unintended cost: They undermined the ability of black voters and activists to place race-specific policy issues on the electoral agenda.
After winning office, such race-neutral politicians don’t normally embrace issues and positions that black voters might prefer. Instead, the imperatives of reelection take over. To maintain their winning coalitions, these politicians usually need to govern in a racially neutral manner as well. (Black Americans understand this: In the 2008 ABC News-USA Today-Columbia University Black Politics Survey, nearly half of all black respondents believed that African Americans must play down their racial identity to get ahead in the United States.) [emphasis added]

    Mr. Harris is making the case that US politics is in danger of losing race as an issue, and these "race-neutral politicians" (one gets the sense Mr. Harris is using this label as a pejorative) are responsible.  The advances made by millions of individual blacks and their families are interfering with the ability of Mr. Harris and his allies to segregate the black race into a homogenous voice to advance Harris's political and social goals.

    President Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod expressed similar sentiments in reaction to talk of the conservative Marco Rubio being on the short-list of possible Romney running mates.  The Washington Times reports:

"I think it would be an insult to the Hispanic community to choose Senator Rubio ... if Governor Romney thinks that's sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card for all of the things and the positions that he's taken," Mr. Axelrod said.

    Why an insult?  Because Rubio does not fit the stereotype that Axelrod believes Hispanics/Latinos should box themselves into.  Rubio is a hypocrite for allowing his ideology to trump his racial makeup.
 
    The Democratic Party has comfortably settled into its strategy of division and group politics, even reflecting it in their campaign websites and outreach.  In an ostensible attempt to achieve equality of outcomes, the decision was made to abandon color-blindness for (as Harris puts it) "communities of color." What we are left with now is the spectacle of Fredrick Harris lamenting that Obama's "early discussions of injustice gave way to calls for policies to benefit all Americans and tough-love speeches for African Americans."   [emphasis added]  When "policies to benefit all Americans" is seen as a step down, the towel has been throw in.

    In the midst of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Martin Luther King famously said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Traditional racists say they can tell you what kind of person someone is by the color of his skin.  Frederick Harris and David Axelrod look at the color of someone's skin and tell you what kind of person he should be.  Not much of a dream, is it?