Cain Rebuts Freeman’s Raaaaacism
Posted on | September 25, 2011 | 27 Comments
by Smitty (via Lucianne)
The New York Daily News has the story:
The Republican presidential candidate called the Oscar-winning actor’s eyebrow-raising remarks “short-sighted” on Friday. “Most of the people that are criticizing the Tea Partiers about having a racist element, they have never been to a Tea Party,” Cain told Fox News.
Freeman, who endorsed Obama in 2007, created a firestorm when he told CNN’s Piers Morgan earlier this week that conservative opposition to the President has enflamed racism in America. He added the Tea Partiers have the mentality of “Screw the country, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man out of here…It is a racist thing.”
Despite the criticism, Cain said he wasn’t offended by Freeman’s comments. “Name calling is something that is going to continue in this because they don’t know how to stop this movement and this movement is making a big difference in politics,” said Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.
One applauds Cain’s de-escalatory approach. It seems that since the Left hasn’t got leg #1 to stand on in terms of logically consistent arguments, the Left instead defaults to trying to push the hormones off the cliff.
Wasn’t there a candidate once who was supposed to have fixed all this? United the country? Applied balm to the wounds?
In other Raaaaacism Industrial Complex news, Salon offers some William J. Stuntz:
. . .the last half of the twentieth century saw America’s criminal justice system unravel. Signs of the unraveling are everywhere. The nation’s record- shattering prison population has grown out of control. Still more so the African American portion of that prison population: for black males, a term in the nearest penitentiary has become an ordinary life experience, a horrifying truth that wasn’t true a mere generation ago.
and (formatting mine):
There are three keys to the system’s dysfunction, each of which has deep historical roots but all of which took hold in the last sixty years.
First, the rule of law collapsed. To a degree that had not been true in America’s past, official discretion rather than legal doctrine or juries’ judgments came to define criminal justice outcomes.
Second, discrimination against both black suspects and black crime victims grew steadily worse — oddly, in an age of rising legal protection for civil rights. Today, black drug offenders are punished in great numbers, even as white drug offenders are usually ignored. (As is usually the case with respect to American crime statistics, Latinos fall in between, but generally closer to the white population than to the black one.) At the same time, blacks victimized by violent felonies regularly see violence go unpunished; the story is different in most white neighborhoods.
The third trend is the least familiar: a kind of pendulum justice took hold in the twentieth century’s second half, as America’s justice system first saw a sharp decline in the prison population — in the midst of a record-setting crime wave — then saw that population rise steeply. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States had one of the most lenient justice systems in the world. By century’s end, that justice system was the harshest in the history of democratic government.
Yeah, I don’t remember this rising wave of anarchy, either. I just wish that there was a ‘propaganda’ section to contain this sort of tripe, or that it at least be positioned near the Danielle Steele where it belongs.
For a brief counterargument, consider that the economic destruction of America has led to an over-Federalization of crime. And I’m not just throwing Holder under the bus here. As Federal over-reach has sucked the economic vitality out of the country, State and local law enforcement has been made less meaningful.
However, one suspects that Stuntz’s task may be to exacerbate problems, instead of working to minimize them.
Thanks to AiPolitics on Twitter:
It would be very interesting to know who got to Morgan Freeman with the 30 pieces of silver.
Update: to Ann Althouse, on Herman Cain, regarding the straw poll performance:
Is this just a message to Perry and Romney or are we supposed to believe that a man who has never held political office could serve as the President of the United States?
Dude, given the miserable performance of this Administration, never having held office is very arguably a feature.
Update II: Cain also rocking Legal Insurrection straw poll.

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