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

Hey Black Man, Aren’t You Uncomfortable Around Whitey?

I can't wait to get home, download my new podcasts for the day, and hear what Dennis Prager has to say about this story.

The insinuation from this "reporter" is, of course, that black people only really vote for liberal Democrats, so a black man at a Tea Party rally must be there by accident and afraid for his own safety among such racist, homophobic, xenophobic bigots.

I understand why a reporter like Kelly O'Donnell thinks the way she does.  I just don't like it, and firmly believe that her mindset (i.e. all black people not only should be, but are, progressive liberals and supporters of bigger and bigger, unsustainable government) ought to wake some people up to the fact that it is the Left who is obsessed with race.

The Tea Party movement is all about fiscal responsibility, personal and national accountability, limited (Constitutional) government.  It's sad that so many Americans (liberal Democrats and progressives) don't believe in those things; it's even more tragic that they resent those of us who do.

Finishing Sowell’s Thoughts On “Race and Politics”

Last week I posted Parts I and II of Dr. Thomas Sowell's series on "Race and Politics".  I won't offer much in the way of my commentary here, but I wanted to at the very least link to both Parts III and IV that came out last Thursday and Friday, respectively.

Part III discusses the erroneous notion most have that there is an exclusive link between "causation and morality".

An excerpt:

Today's racial dogmas are no more realistic, when they try to dismiss or downplay behavioral and performance differences among racial and ethnic groups, blaming different outcomes on the misdeeds of others. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings. But the fatal misstep is to assume that those sins must be the reason for the differences we see.

The more fundamental question that almost never gets asked is whether there was ever any realistic basis for expecting different racial, ethnic or other groups to all have the same skills and orientations, even if they all had the same genetic potential and there were no injustices.

Those who see differences among groups as being due to environment, rather than heredity, too often think of environment as the current immediate surroundings. But a major part of any group's environment is the culture that they have inherited from the past.

In Part IV, Sowell hammers some convincing nails into the "multiculturalism rules!" coffin:

One of the most ominous developments of our time has been the multicultural dogma that all cultures are equal. It is one of the many unsubstantiated assertions that have become fashionable among self-congratulatory elites, with hard evidence being neither asked for nor offered.

But, however much such assertions minister to the egos of the intelligentsia and the careers of politicians and race hustlers, the multicultural dogma is a huge barrier to the advancement of groups who are lagging economically, educationally and otherwise.

Once you have said that the various economic, educational and other "gaps" and "disparities" of lagging groups are not due to either genes or cultures, what is left but the sins of other people?

Sins are never hard to find, among any group of human beings. But whether that actually helps those who are lagging, or just leads them into the blind alley of resentment, is another question.

We are all blessed to have access to the clarity and wisdom of Tom Sowell.

Sowell’s Back With More Wisdom

Dr. Sowell wrote a fantastic column on "race" issues in American yesterday, and today he's back with Part II.  This time out Sowell focuses on the misconception far too many Americans have that quotas are not only necessary, but "good."

No dogma has caused more mischief-- and, in some countries, tragedies-- than the notion that there is something strange and wrong when some groups are "over-represented" or "under-represented" in some occupations or institutions.

This dogma is so widely accepted, and so deeply entrenched, that no one asks for evidence and no speck of evidence is offered.

Moreover, tons of evidence to the contrary are ignored.

Despite its humble appearance and influence, my website (and the articles I link to and/or write) matters a great deal to me.  I post things that I think matter.  There are few things more important than healing the racial divisions in this country, and few people who represent my worldview in this area than Dr. Sowell.

The Left has dominated this discussion for 40 years, but conservatives and Republicans, especially religious ones, have been on the side of freedom, liberty, abolition of slavery, and civil rights since our nation's inception.  We've ceded the intellectual and moral ground that is rightly ours to people whose good intentions (via social engineering projects such as welfare and affirmative action) have been disastrous.

Sowell continues:

Not only the media and politicians, but intellectuals and even the highest courts in the land, presume discrimination when some groups are "under-represented" in an employer's workforce or are "over-represented" among children disciplined in school. Tests that show some groups more proficient than others are declared to be "culturally biased." Higher infant mortality among some groups are assumed to be society's fault for not providing "access" to prenatal care for all.

A major factor in the housing boom and bust that created the present economic predicament was massive government intervention in the housing market, supposedly to correct discrimination in mortgage lending. How did they know that there was discrimination? Because blacks were turned down for mortgage loans at a higher rate than whites.

It so happens that whites were turned down for mortgage loans at a higher rate than Asian Americans, but that fact seldom made it into the newspaper headlines or the political rhetoric. Nor did either the mainstream media or political leaders mention the fact that black-owned banks turned down black mortgage loan applicants at least as often as white-owned banks did.

For me to post something from the same author two days in a row ought to signal just how important I truly believe this topic is.  Here's another Sowell video clip to wet your whistle:

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.

Typical Conservative Racism

What's with these religious, free market conservatives that they're always racist too?  This time it was Harry Reid, the Democrat...wait a minute...a Democrat called President Obama "light-skinned", and someone who spoke with "no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one"?  What gives?

Oh well, honest mistake.  I'm sure the media will let this slip-up go without much fanfare.  You know, the way they do with most Republican slip-ups.  Especially when its a high-ranking Republican in the Senate.

An excerpt from the Associated Press reports:

Reid's comments are included in the book, obtained Saturday by The Associated Press and set to be published on Monday. "Game Change" was written by Time Magazine's Mark Halperin and New York magazine's John Heilemann.

The book also says Reid urged Obama to run, perceiving the first-term senator's impatience.

"You're not going to go anyplace here," Reid told Obama of the Senate. "I know that you don't like it, doing what you're doing."

Oh how boring it must have been to only be a Senator!  Small potatoes.

Thomas Sowell and the “underdog”

Combining two of my favorite things, Thomas Sowell's commentary and baseball, this latest column from Dr. Sowell is nothing short of brilliant.  In it he contemplates the nature of "underdogs", and America's fascination with them.

An excerpt:

Nobody told me that I couldn't make it because I was poor and black, or that I ought to hate white people today because of what some other white people did to my ancestors in some other time.

Nobody sugar-coated the facts of racial discrimination. But Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University, who wrote with eloquent bitterness about racism, nevertheless said to me when I prepared to transfer to Harvard: "Don't come back here and tell me you didn't make it 'cause white folks were mean."

He burned my bridges behind me, the way they used to do with armies going into battle, so that they had no place to retreat to, and so had to fight to win.

Here's more from Sowell on race, affirmative action, and diversity: