Those Aborted Black Babies

One of the whackier aspects of Reverend Wright’s sophisticated worldview is the unthinking acceptance of liberal doctrine on abortion.

In his celebrated “Government Lies!” rants he came out four-square against undoing Roe v. Wade.

As a confirmed racist he seems to have got confused. Why would a black racist approve of a policy that reduces the number of black babies? Reverend Wright is hopping mad about the white plan to decimate blacks through inventing AIDS. But what about Planned Parenthood, founded by a eugenics enthusiast, Margaret Sanger, who clearly intended to reduce the number of “unfit” babies?

Conservative bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr. is concerned about Planned Parenthood and black babies, citing the following facts:

• “[E]xperts estimate that 75% of Planned Parenthood centers are located in close proximity to minority neighborhoods.”


• “[O]ver 35% of the total number of babies aborted in the nation” are black.
  
• “Planned Parenthood facilities around the country have been accused of accepting contributions from racist donors.”
  
• “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” said Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

When you think about life exclusively in racist terms, you’d have to believe that you’d want to keep black women as far away from Planned Parenthood as possible.

You Can't Say That

Our lefty friends call it “controlling the narrative.” In plain English it means controlling what people are allowed to say.

Whatever nonsense people talk about the First Amendment it remains patently clear that you are not allowed to say certain things. The name of the game in politics is to be the guys to control what is allowed to be said, who get to say: “I can’t believe what I just heard!”

In the aftermath of his month from hell, Senator Obama doesn’t want us to talk about character and the company he keeps. He wants to talk about the issues. Translation: He wants to stop people talking about his snooty Whole Foods arugula culture and his disreputable lefty friends.

And even John McCain has got into the act, sending a message to the Republican Party in North Carolina imploring them to stop running an ad featuring the racist Rev. Wright. But Instapundit Glenn Reynolds wonders what the flap is all about.

MICKEY KAUS: "What exactly is so terrible about that North Carolina GOP ad?" Seems like a pretty typical political ad to me, too. Watch it yourself and see what you think.

An emailer writes to Instapundit to explain the whole thing. It’s an extension of the Democrats’ “Don’t question our patriotism” meme.

Don’t question their patriotism, don’t question their economic policies, don’t question their tax policies, don’t question their record in office, don’t question their character, don’t question their shady business and political deaings, don’t question, period.

The great thing in politics is to get your ideas into the public square, to get people talking and thinking about them. But first you have to brave the nay-sayers who will say: “Who is the turkey/racist/sexist/homophobe who just said that?”

Back when Rush Limbaugh was just starting out people would call into the program and breathlessly say: “Rush! You’re not allowed to say that!”

Not any more.

The Company You Keep

Remember the old saying? You can tell a man by the company he keeps.

On the other hand, you can say that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

So the question facing US voters this Fall is whether it matters that Barack Obama counts among his supporters Sixties radical terrorists like Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorhn.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter if Ayres and Dohrn had renounced their radical follies, but they haven’t. As Hugh Hewitt writes,

Guy Benson, a young journalist friend of mine who works for Chicago’s Sandy Rios Show in my network and hosts his own weekend radio show, went digging, and what he found was the tape from a 2007 reunion of the SDS, on which both Ayers and Dohrn talk at length about how they view America today[.]

What you hear in the tapes is unreconstructed left-wing extremism, with the United States as incipiently fascist, the belly of the beast.

So the question is: can we trust the judgment of a politician who freely associated with these left-wing terrorists? We can deal with his down-the-line big-government-for-every-problem philosophy. It’s wrong, and it hurts millions of people every day. But it is still mainstream.

But of even more concern than his ideas is the fact that his judgment about people and ideas is terribly flawed. It had to have been not to have been able to see the quite obvious anti-American extremism of Ayers and Dohrn or to have objected not just to a handful of Pastor Wright’s sermons but to much of the material published in his church’s bulletin.

We’ve been here before, of course. In the 1950s conservatives raised the question about liberals who had been Communists in the 1930s, and maybe still were. Could we trust them?

The response of liberals then and ever since was telling. How dare you question our patriotism, they said. How dare you accuse us of being Communists. Anyway, you have no right to ask. Anyway, even if we did associate with Communists, what of that? How dare you accuse us of guilt-by-association. They decided that the whole thing was a McCarthyite “witch hunt.” And ever since, whenever anyone raises a question about the allegiance of a liberal, the McCarthyite bloody shirt is waved and we get to see on TV Senator McCarthy looking and sounding sleazy at the Army McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

Of course, if a Republican senator had ever been within a country mile of an abortion clinic would-be bomber, his career would be toast. All the fine distinctions and the questions about guilt by association would mean nothing in such a case. Nor should they. We expect Republican senators and presidential candidates to have good judgment and we expect to judge their whole lives when they run for President of the United States.

But enough of the finer points. The problem for Democrats is that the Reagan Democrats just aren’t going to vote for a man like Obama. They just don’t trust a guy that has palled around with terrorists. Hewitt:

The Democratic voters of Pennsylvania, like those of Ohio, are the core of the old Democratic Party, the party of Roosevelt, Truman and JFK...


They aren’t going to buy the Obama package, no matter how wonderfully wrapped...


It has nothing to do with race, and it isn’t because they question Obama’s patriotism.


But they don’t and won’t trust his judgment. And they will never be friends with his friends.

That, as they say, is a problem for Democrats in a year when they ought to win the presidential election going away.

What Price Education?

When you subsidize sometehing then you get more of it.

If you subsidize mortgages you get a housing boom.

If you subsidize college you get a ton of colleges.

And other things don’t get made or built or done. The simple rule is that subsidy is a net waste of resources, because resources are scarce. If you overuse them, becuase someone is handing them out for free, then you abuse them.

Conservative Thomas Sowell makes this point rather clear in his three part article on The Economics of College. Part II, and Part III. If people had to pay the true costs of college, they would use much less college, he writes.

But what about the poor? Well, they could raise the money by issuing stock in themselves. Savvy investors could make money off them with equity participation in their careers. And the price would be much less because if college education weren’t subsidized then it wouldn’t cost as much.

Here at Road to the Middle Class we believe that even K-12 education should be free of government subsidy. Most people can afford 3-4 years of basic education. (And charities could help those that can’t.) Then most people would probably do better going to work at 12 or 13 and doing their education in apprenticeships or internships as they went along.

What? Child labor? Yes, and it would do them a power of good. After all, we are not talking about sending children into textile mills or down the mine. We are talking about sending them to McDonalds or even onto the construction site.

But what about 12-year-olds operating construction equipment? Why not? At 12, young boys might actually take instruction from their elders. By the time their hormones are really kicking in at 16 they might be competent behind the wheel. Unlike now.

Liberals Against the Tide

Last week the US Supreme Court decided a Kentucky death penalty case. It ruled that a three-drug sequence for execution by lethal injection was not cruel and unusual punishment. But a day later, to the delight of the New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, Justice John Paul Stevens “renounced the death penalty.”

Er, not to put too fine a point upon it, Your Honor, but the death penalty is the law of the land. You are sworn to uphold it.

Did you know, by the way, that liberal groups are working like mad to stop Ward Connerly’s Civil Rights Initiatives, coming up for a vote in four states in November? They are contesting the initiative in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Nebraska. But they are not arguing on the merits. Oh no. As Harry Stein writes in City Journal:

Knowing that such anti-preference initiatives enjoy strong public support... the activists have zero interest in waging these fights on the merits. Rather, their goal is to keep the initiatives off the ballot by any means necessary, up to and including political chicanery and outright physical intimidation.

Let’s see. Missouri. Reminds me of the Missouri Compromise. Nebraska. Reminds me of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Sound familiar? They should. They were fateful milestones on the road to the Civil War back in the early to mid nineteenth century.

Then, as now, an intransigent minority was putting road blocks in the way of civil rights. In those days, before the Civil War, the political argument was over allowing slavery in the newly-admitted states. Now it is an argument over when, if ever, we are going to stop race-based preferences in government employment, contracting, and schooling.

Here’s what I suggest to you liberals. Play fair. Don’t try, as Justice Stevens is apparently trying to do, to subvert the will of the people with shenanigans on the Supreme Court. The people are strongly in favor of a death penalty.

Don’t try, as these lefty groups are trying to do, to trip up Ward Connerly and his Civil Rights Initiatives. The whole point of democracy is that the people get to decide. If they are wrong, then it is probably better to let them have their way and experience their mistake for themselves.

But if you hold up the will of the people, and dam up their clearly-expressed preferences in tactical shenanigans then the chances are that when the dam bursts, as it will in the end, it will end up flooding the fruited plain with a raging river. And that’s not good for anyone.

Obama's Three Unforced Errors

Government is always the rule of the few over the many. Always.

You may think that is obvious, but a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to convince us otherwise. Politicians, for example.

But if government is always the rule of the few, then politicians are always elitists. That puts politicians in a bit of a box because the royal road to winning elections is to convince the voters that “s/he cares about people like me.”

That is why Senator Obama’s three recent unforced errors could be so damaging. They spoil the tear the comfortable illusion that Obama the elitist is OK because he cares about people like me.

They also penetrate the veil of illusion that the Democratic Party maintains that it is the party of the little guy, civil rights, and patriotism despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In the Bittergate (or Bitterquiddick) incident we have Obama treating the working-class whites of Pennsylvania as objects. It’s true his remarks were, from an elite point of view, understanding and thoughtful. But they still showed that for Obama, the working-class whites are the Other. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the “little people.” Bittergate seemed to suggest that it was not.

In the Rev. Wright controversy another veil was punctured. Democrats are supposed to be the party of civil rights. This has been more and more difficult to maintain over the years as Democrats have supported race-based policies and condoned the frank racism of black leaders. Democrats didn’t need to have the racist Rev. Wright in the news.

In the Ayres/Dohrn flap voters are being reminded that the domestic terrorists of the 1960s are considered Just Folks in the Democratic Party. Most Americans, particularly white male Americans don’t get a pass like that. Imagine a Republican candidate with pals in the Ku Klux Klan or militia guys like Timothy McVeigh. Voters don’t need to be reminded that the reflex of many elite Democrats is to Blame America First.

Rush Limbaugh this morning says that none of this matters to Obama supporters. For them, Obama is a likeable chap who believes in the future. The past is the past. Forget it.

As usual, Rush is right. The question is whether the Obama image of a likeable uniter working for the future is getting a little tarnished of late.

Because the truth about Obama is that he is the representative of an old and discredited politics of the past.

The Way to Rise in America

Today America’s thoughtful Mom, Peggy Noonan, muses over the Obama setback, the end of the honeymoon and the revelation of Senator Obama as a normal politician.

The problem is his obvious inexperience, a problem for older voters. “They are not hostile to his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.”

But then she writes a little about the charge of elitism, which is obviously particularly grating for Michelle Obama, child of a working-class home. How could she be possibly branded as elitist?

But America is full of people who started low, rose high and internalized what the right people think, which is another way of saying what the elites think. To rise in America is to turn left, unless you are very, very tough or protected by privilege of the financial or familial kind.

She is right, of course. You can rise in the United States in the flyover country of business, but you don’t really “rise;” you don’t exist in the way that a rising star in politics, media, culture, or academia exists.

That’s because politics, media, culture, and the academy are all solidly liberal and solidly closed to people who “don’t think like us.” The female university administrator Jane Canney put it so well, according to Mike S. Adams. She didn’t want to invite black conservative Star Parker to speak at the university, she said, because she just didn’t feel “comfortable” with the sponsors, the Young America’s Foundation.

There you have the challenge for the next generation of conservatives. It’s not that the liberal go along to get along culture is corrupt, although it is. It is not that the liberal menu of political issues is stale and harmful to ordinary Americans, although it is. It is not that the liberal-staffed government sector is dysfunctional and wasting dollars by the trillion, though it is. It is not every time you turn around you are being bothered by a liberal health Nazi, a liberal safety Nazi, or a liberal climate-change Nazim, although you are.

The problem is that a conservative of good will has a terrible struggle developing and sustaining a career in the public square against the “disomcomfort” of the reigning liberal administrators.

That is something we must change.