A National Conversation on Race

For as long as I can remember liberals have liked to suggest that we need a “national conversation” on something or other.

As often as not, that national conversation was about race.

Of course, liberals were not actually proposing a real national conversation about race. They were proposing something rather different and rather more sinister.

They were proposing to tell Americans what to think about race, what to feel about race, what to do about race, and if you didn’t agree with their prescriptions you had better shut up. Because if your voiced your disagreement you would be branded as a racist.

We know what this was all about. It was all about power, liberal power. The liberal ownership of the race issue allowed them to corral about 90 percent of the black vote, ever since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. With that vote liberals could stop any reform of the welfare state and maintain their power, their perquisites, and their tenure.

In this liberal policy on race there were good cops and bad cops. Liberals were the good cops, telling us that their race-based quotas and set-asides were all for our own good. Then there were the bad cops, the black race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and at the local level, men like Jeremiah Wright, pastor of a black nationalist church in Chicago..

The job of the good cops was to keep the white population cowed. The job of the bad cops was to keep blacks voting Democrat in a frenzy of race rage.

Then along came Barack Obama and promised Unity and Change. He was understood instinctively by white college-educated Democrats as offering a way out of the race ravine. In the words of Shelby Steele, Obama is a “bargainer,” offering “the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism.”

It’s lucky for Obama that he came along when he did. I’d say that American whites are getting close to the point where they are going to say “enough already” on race and refuse to be cowed by the race baiters.

But it turns out that Barack Obama is not exactly the race healer he pretends to be. How could he be when he has been attending a church of race hatred for most of his adult life. Barack Obama is asking us to believe that he is a race healer when he has belonged to a church, the biggest black church in Chicago, run by race baiter Jeremiah Wright.

[N]othing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable.

You know what, liberals? I think we are about to have a national conversation on race. And this will be the first one in living memory in which liberals don’t get to set the rules.

So there’s a chance that the conversation will be a real conversation. For the first time in living memory.

Another Day Another Dollar

Is there enough fear out there after the Fed moved in to stop the rot at mortgage meltdown victim Bear Stearns?

Sure, I’m scared. Who wouldn’t be?

But the job of the Fed is to act as the banker of last resort and stop the spiral of credit contraction. And that is what it did over the weekend when it gave away Bear stearns to JPMorgan Chase for a couple of cents on the dollar and a bunch of guarantees on Bear Stearns’ “dark matter.”

It was the failure of the Fed to do that in 1929-1933 that made the Great Depression a ten-year vale of misery.

Larry Kudlow is confident. But then he always is. He commends the Fed for doing the right thing. But then he takes a shot at the Democrats.

Senator Schumer is calling Bush "Herbert Hoover." But Hoover signed protectionist Smoot-Hawley, just as Hillary and Obama are today trying to break up NAFTA. Hoover signed a huge tax increase, just as Hill-Bama are preaching. The Dems are emulating Hoover. Bush is trying to stop it.

That’s a very important point. Herbert Hoover made the first mistakes that made the Great Depression “great.” He let the banks collapse, he jawboned business to keep prices and wages up, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. He increased tax rates You could read it all up at Stuck on Stupid.

Democrats really have never learned the lessons of the Great Depression. They think that it was the genius of FDR that got us out, with the NRA, Social Security, the Wagner Labor Act, and TVA.

On the contrary. All those policies made the Depression worse.

If they try the same policies again then the American people will suffer greatly.

That is you and me.

Double Standard on Bigotry

One thing that conservatives and Republicans really know. When we step into the public square we have to be whiter than white. Anything we’ve said or written that doesn’t square with the liberal zeitgeist will be hauled out and used to prove that we are bigots, racists, and homophobes.

Barack Obama has, for twenty years, belonged to a church in Chicago. His minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., has opinions that, in a conservative or a Republican, would disqualify him from the public square. As Ronald Kessler reports:

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama’s longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.


"Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

It’s ok to say stuff like that if you are liberal and black. But a Republican saying that would be driven from the public square, and anyone connected with him would be convicted of guilt by association.

But in America, we have a Double Standard. Liberals and blacks get a pass when they say racist and bigoted things. Well, their hearts are in the right place.

Some day, when the American people just can’t take it any more, this double standard will crumble into dust and a new double standard will arise to wave cynically over the fruited plain.

But that day is not yet.

Bill Buckley Didn't Like Writing

What a grand life Bill Buckley had, doing what he loved, and being so good at it. That’s what young Anthony Dick said to Buckley while serving as research assistant on a book on Goldwater.

He quickly corrected me. He did not love writing. He found it difficult, tedious, and increasingly painful. Nor had he ever loved politics, which was awash in sordidness and banality. He would rather be reading, or sailing, or visiting friends, or enjoying any of the other luxuries his wealth could have afforded.

No. He worked out of a sense of duty, Buckley said, to repay for all the beauty he had received and to “resist the totalizing designs” of the folks who want to ratchet up the power of politics.

CA Homeschooling Decision an Opportunity

Conservatives and homeschooling parents are naturally worried and upset over the recent decision by a California state appeals court, in Re Rachel L, that parents lacked a presumptive right to educate their children in their own way. Parents needed to get a credentialed private tutor if they didn’t send their children to school.

But I am not discouraged. I take the view of the great Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry. Bring. Them. On.

It’s encouraging, for a start, that both of the Smart Guys, liberal law school prof Erwin Chemerinsky and conservative law school Dean John Eastman, in their review of the case on the Hugh Hewitt Show, came out in favor of the right of parents to homeschool . Said Chemerinsky:

I think they’re going to reverse the California Court of Appeal here. I think based on the Supreme Court precedence we’re going to talk about, I think the California Supreme Court is going to say though the government has a compelling interest in making sure that children are well educated, there’s a way of achieving it that’s less restrictive of parents’ rights than completely outlawing home schooling.

Conservatives and school choice advocates must understand that the education blob isn’t going to go quietly. They have developed a government monopoly that gets paid to educate our children but that has no real accountability. Why would this protected elite give up a privilege like that for the hard work of actually having to produce results?

We need fights, public fights, that put the average homeschooling parent in the role of helpless victim being bullied by an uncaring government bureaucracy. And we need the American people to observe these fights and we need to teach them to side with the little guy. Or next time it could be them!

I sent my $100 contribution in to the folks fighting the good fight on this, thePacific Justice Institute, using their online contribution page. You can too.

Free Speech Means Free Speech

University of Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins has spproved performances of the lefty agitprop play The Vagaina Monologues at UND and conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt are upset. Hewitt doesn’t think that lefty agitprop has a place at Notre Dame. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of other places where you can go to see the Vagina Monologues.

Father Jenkins justified his action on the following grounds:

"My decision on this matter,” Father Jenkins said, “arises from a conviction that it is an indispensable part of the mission of a Catholic university to provide a forum in which multiple viewpoints are debated in reasoned and respectful exchange—always in dialogue with faith and the Catholic tradition—even around highly controversial topics.

I agree. The Vagina Monologues is, no doubt, a foolish and a hateful piece of work. But we conservatives must never deny lefties the right to be heard. What we can and must insist upon is our right to be heard.

That is the great issue upon which conservatives should plant our flag. Too often we cringe before the bullying of the lefties and do not oppose their folly and their bile with sufficient vigor.

David Allen White, Shakespeare scholar issued the following challenge to Notre Dame on the the Hugh Hewitt Show.

I will issue a challenge to Notre Dame, okay? I do it publicly. I do it on the air. I have taught Shakespeare at the Naval Academy for 27 years... Will Notre Dame let me come and lecture on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which presents a contradictory view to the Vagina Monologues? Public challenge ’“ academic freedom ’“ will they bring in a Shakespeare scholar to talk about one of Shakespeare’s plays, to give an opposing point of view?

Maybe Notre Dame will accept the challenge. But what about the 1,001 other colleges in America? Would they allow the voice of Shakespeare, Dead White Male, to compete with traditionally marginalized progressive voices of the Vagina Monologues? I don’t think so.

To Ease or Not to Ease

When the economy turns south, what should the politicians do? Sometimes they do too much. Sometimes they do too little.

In his first term, Bruce Fein relates, President Nixon vowed he would not resort to the expedient of wage and price controls. Until he did.

Nixon soon renounced his declamation in August 1971 as a presidential election year approached: "The time has come for decisive action. Action that will break the vicious circle of spiraling prices and costs. I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States for a period of 90 days."

On the other hand, the Great Depression was made immeasurably worse because the Federal Reserve Board failed to act as the lender of last resort in the four long years from 1929 to 1933. Banks failed in the thousands. Then the government ran around trying to bail everyone out in the New Deal, and that was just as bad.

So what should the government do?

Right now the Federal Reserve is doing all it can to ease the “credit crunch” of the last few months. On the other hand it is clear that the residential mortgage market was way overblown and house prices need to come down.

A recession is the natural cleanup process, the liquidation of the malinvestments of the previous boom. But a huge depression threatens the very fabric of the nation as people get desperate and flock to leaders who promise a way out of the wilderness.

Today the Federal Reserve Board, in conjunction with other major central banks, injected liquidity into the financial system, as reported by Jeannine Aversa.

The Fed announced the creation of a new tool, called the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), geared to provide primary dealers — big Wall Street investment firms and banks that trade directly with the Fed — with 28-day loans of Treasury securities, rather than overnight loans. They would pledge other securities — including federal agency residential-mortgage-backed securities, such as those of mortgage giants Fannnie Mae and Freddie Mac — as collateral for the loans of Treasury securities.

Always remember. The one thing that really matters to the government is the market in US Treasury securities. And that means looking after “the big Wall Street investment firms and banks that trade directly with the Fed.” Before the voters, before widows and orphans, before even the majestic AARP, the government cares about the Treasury markets. Right now, of course, it looks pretty good, with short-term Treasuries yielding 1.5 percent and 30 year bonds yielding 4.5 percent.

That is fine, but the rest of the financial market is tanking. And if the rest of the market goes south then it affects the big ivestment firms and banks that do business with the Fed. So you can never be too careful, so that’s why the Fed intervened today to shore up the financial markets.