Beaver County Reds – 3/24/12

Rather than a full-blown critique of this piece, I direct you to a few papers I wrote regarding the left and civil rights for most of my take.  Please read “Lefty race baiters,” “Democrats – The party of civil rights – not,” and “Republicans – Civil Rights.”  As you read this piece, you will find it has nothing to do with Trayvon Martin.  It’s simply an attempt to turn a truly sad event into some perceived political advantage.  I apologize in advance for any snarkiness on my part.

Mr. Davidson wrote, “President Obama finally spoke up, with the proper caveats against prejudging ‘current investigations,’ but adding that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon, a point he made to show empathy with the Martin family.”  “[T]o show empathy?”  Sure.  I mean no offense to the Martin family, but what makes Trayvon Martin’s killing – justified or not – so special?  How many teenagers are killed every year and how many of them did Mr. Obama single-out “to show empathy with the … family?”  Mr. Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”  So what?  Would Mr. Obama feel differently if Mr. Martin didn’t “look like” Mr. Obama’s hypothetical son?  Would Mr. Obama feel differently if Mr. Martin had been Hispanic and Mr. Zimmerman (a Hispanic whose relatives also include blacks and whites) black?  We may have the answer.  On February 28th, a white, 13-year-old boy was allegedly set afire with gasoline by two older boys.  According to a Huffington Post article, both alleged attackers are black.  Fortunately, in this case the victim survived the alleged attack.  I missed Mr. Obama speaking “to show empathy with” the victim and his family.  Why?  Was it because the alleged victim survived, because he doesn’t look like Mr. Obama’s hypothetical son, or because of some other reason?  (Not that it should matter, but there are now reports indicating Mr. Zimmerman is a registered Democrat.  That said, I haven’t yet found this claim on any outlets I know to be credible.  I mention this only because the usual suspects are trying to blame Republicans for this incident.)

The “empathy” thing might be easier to swallow if we hadn’t been down this road before with Mr. Obama.  You may recall in 2009 Mr. Obama insinuated himself into another “race” case he admittedly knew nothing about and asserted “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” when they arrested a friend of his.  Mr. Obama’s comments about Mr. Martin were coldly calculated to exploit the incident and had nothing to do with “empathy.”  As Mr. Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said shortly after the 2008 election, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

I’m not a big Newt Gingrich fan, but I agree with his comments as quoted by Mr. Davidson.

Mr. Davidson wrote, “Gingrich fancies himself an historian.”  If Mr. Gingrich “fancies himself an historian” as Mr. Davidson asserts, it could be because, according to his campaign website, Mr. Gingrich earned his “Bachelor’s degree from Emory University and Master’s and Doctorate in Modern European History from Tulane University.  Before his election to Congress in 1978, Newt taught History and Environmental Studies at West Georgia College for eight years.”

Mr. Davidson wrote, “the KKK terror started in South Carolina by lynching nearly as many poor whites as Black Freedmen.”  Subsequently Mr. Davidson wrote, “There is nothing colorblind about lynching.”  Which is it?  When Mr. Davidson wrote of “lynching,” “KKK terror,” and so on, did you notice what was missing?  What somehow escaped mention was Democrats ran the South during this time.  And who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964?  Yep, it was Democrats.

Mr. Davidson wrote, “But as lynching rolled on over the decades, tens of thousands of Blacks bore the brunt of it.”  According to the University of Missouri using Tuskegee Institute data, 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched from 1882 to 1968, not “tens of thousands.”  Perhaps Mr. Davidson included family and friends of the lynched in his figure.  In any case, the lower figures are no less abhorrent; the point of noting them was to drive home that we can’t accept what we hear and read without doing our own research.

Mr. Davidson wrote, “Anti-Lynching laws, also for decades, were promoted mainly by Blacks and a few radical allies, while white reactionaries blocked them.”  And who were those “few radical allies” and the “white reactionaries” who opposed them?  According to Wikipedia, “in 1920 the Republican Party promised at its national convention to support passage of [an anti-lynching] law.  In 1921 [Republican] Leonidas C. Dyer sponsored an anti-lynching bill; it was passed in January 1922 in the United States House of Representatives, but a Senate filibuster by Southern white Democrats defeated it in December 1922.  With the NAACP, Representative Dyer spoke across the country in support of his bill in 1923, but Southern Democrats again filibustered it in the Senate.  He tried once more but was again unsuccessful.”  At the time, cloture required a two-thirds vote.  Since Republicans didn’t have a two-thirds majority at the time (67th Congress), and they lost six seats in the next session, Republicans could not invoke cloture on their own even if 100% of the Republicans (unlikely) had voted for cloture.  I could not find the roll-call vote for cloture of the H.R. 13 filibuster so I can’t give you a vote count by party.

Mr. Davidson wrote, “The trade union movement over the years has paid some high tuition to learn that mutual respect among nationalities is not rooted in being ‘blind’ to each other’s distinctiveness.  Solidarity with a white top and a Black bottom simply doesn’t get the job done.”  Seriously?  The Davis-Bacon Act (DBA) forces all contractors on federal construction projects to pay at least the “prevailing wage” in the area of the project.  “Prevailing wage” is a euphemism for wages set by labor union management.  One of the reasons for the DBA was to exclude companies who employed blacks because labor unions tended to exclude non-whites.  (Sadly, Sen. James Davis (R-PA) and Rep. Robert Bacon (R-NY), for whom the law is named, were Republicans as was Progressive/Republican President Hoover.  At the time, however, Democrats held large majorities in both the House and Senate.)  Even decades later, as I noted in “Democrats – The party of civil rights – not,” “The management of the United Steelworkers of America union, along with nine steel companies, was slapped with a federal consent decree in 1974 to address ‘discriminatory hiring, promotion, assignment, and wage policies directed against women and minorities.’”  More recently, in 2003 the EEOC charged AK Steel – Butler with racial bias.  The EEOC charged “that the steelmaker condoned offensive language and graffiti and the open display of nooses, swastikas and Ku Klux Klan videos at its plant in Butler.”  If the charges were valid, what was union (Butler-Armco Independent Union at the time) management doing?  Shouldn’t union management have filed grievances on behalf of the offended employees long before employees had to involve the EEOC?  If the offending employees were union members, couldn’t union management have handled the problem internally?  The idea Democrats and labor unions are pals to minorities is a fraud.

When lefties write of “mutual respect among nationalities is not rooted in being ‘blind’ to each other’s distinctiveness,” they are referring to group “distinctiveness,” not that of the individual.  That is, all members of a given victim group are expected to act and think alike and toe the lefty line in return for lefty beneficence.  That’s one reason why lefties are especially vicious in attacking conservative blacks, Hispanics, women, et cetera.  “Why is this?” you may ask.  The answer is simple.  When a person in a victim group is successful without adhering to leftist dogma, it lays bare the lie of leftist policies/programs for all to see.  It also confirms the observation that advocacy groups like the NAACP and NOW really aren’t for advancing “colored people” or women unless they subscribe to leftist ideology.  The treatment of people like Clarence Thomas, Sarah Palin, Michael Steele, Condoleezza Rice, and so on are examples.  These groups are simply recruiters for the left.

Do you remember the rushes to judgment in the Tawana Brawley, Duke Lacrosse Team, and Cambridge Police/Henry Gates cases?  I do.  Regardless of how this turns out, there are no winners.

FYI, according to NPR, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) “offered a $10,000 bounty for the capture of George Zimmerman.”  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “The New Black Panther Party is a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.”  I’m sure Mr. Obama and the BCR family of websites will publish pieces condemning the NBPP action any day now. <g>

Finally, it’s not a lefty rant without the obligatory mention of MLK and ritual bashing of Fox News.

At the beginning I wrote this would not be “a full-blown critique of this piece,” but as I got going I found there was far more here than I saw at first.

In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity. <g>