A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Content of Character, or Political Expediency and Petty Jealousy?

Thomas Sowell is the clearest thinker on the Right today.  A renowned professor of Economics, and now a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Sowell writes the pithiest, most insightful columns every week.

In today's piece, Dr. Sowell addresses a topic he has written extensively about: the profoundly negative consequences of perpetually playing the "race card":

Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.

You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stayed away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed.

When a few African-American Democrats walked into the Capitol the weekend of the vote, they passed through a crowd of citizens expressing their anger. According to some Democrats, these expressions of anger included racial slurs.

This is a serious charge — and one deserving of some serious evidence. But, despite all the media recording devices on the scene, not to mention recording devices among the crowd gathered there, nobody can come up with a single recorded sound to back up that incendiary charge. Worse yet, some people have claimed that even doubting the charge suggests that you are a racist.

He continues:

Among the people who are likely to be most disappointed with the Obama administration are those who thought it would usher in a post-racial society. That they wished for such a society is a credit to their values. But that they actually expected a move in that direction suggests that they ignored both Barack Obama’s history and the heavily vested interest that too many people have in race hustling.

This is just one of many areas in which this country is likely to pay a very high price for the fact that too many voters paid attention to Obama’s rhetoric while ignoring his actual track record.

However soothing the Obama rhetoric, and however lofty his statements about being a uniter rather than a divider — both racially and in terms of bipartisanship — everything in his past fairly shouts the opposite, but only to those who follow facts.

The tragedy of the Obama administration has been two-fold in my eyes: First, that he and the leaders in Congress seem hell-bent on drastically increasing the size, scope, role, and power of government. This is antithetical to America's founding and historical, legal, and ideological narrative. The second, and potentially equally devastating, is that the man (Obama) who was going to bring races, creeds, political factions, and faiths together has done absolutely nothing to use his bully-pulpit to promote, encourage, or facilitate racial reconciliation. In fact, he's done just the opposite.  He accused the Harvard cop of racism. He and his lackeys accuse the Tea Party movement of racism on a daily basis. He's failed to denounce the ridiculous charges of racism after the health care bill was signed that Sowell (and Andrew Breitbart) have so powerfully addressed in the past three weeks.

Please watch this short clip and hear the stark contrast of Sowell's common sense wisdom to Charlie Rose's lock-step, emoted liberalism.

Charlie Rose...I know you mean well, buddy, but listen to your friend Thomas Sowell.  He's trying to help you out.