The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Hmm. @JamesTaranto Mildly Disagrees With @AnnAlthouse? Let Me Try That.

Posted on | August 29, 2013 | 109 Comments

OK, so a Puerto Rican guy kidnapped and raped girls in Cleveland and everybody reported about that case, and not once do I remember anyone arguing that Ariel Castro’s crimes, or the reporting about his crimes, had any specifically racial context. Everybody was just horrified by it, and nobody said either (a) that Puerto Rican guys are particularly prone to chaining up kidnapped girls in their rape dungeons, or (b) that reporting about Ariel Castro was motivated by deliberate racist fearmongering to demonize Puerto Ricans.

Why, then, is there some kind of score-keeping about crime involving blacks and whites? Why can’t we all just get along — and worry about those crazy Puerto Rican rapist kidnappers?

Also, dildo-wielding lesbian cheerleaders, but I digress . . .

Brian Beutler’s shoddy assertion that he knows the Secret Motives of those who have reported about black-on-white crime — and these are, of course, evil racist right-wing motives — mistakes the reaction for the action. That is to say, if there is some kind of backlash going on here, to what is it a backlash, and is it justified? And if Beutler would care to explain why the original action (i.e., relentless wall-to-wall media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case) was justified, he’ll find himself hard-pressed to refute those who argue that a reaction is equally justified, if not more so, by quite similar arguments. This is not an argument about race. It’s an argument about media bias.

The correct conservative argument is that liberal media hyped up and deliberately distorted the Trayvon Martin case because it was an election year and an apparently juicy story about racism and gun control was a nice way to exploit black grievances against whitey. Let’s be honest: If you’re a black person who thinks The Man is keepin’ you down, you’re not going to vote for Mitt Romney, and so Trayvon Martin became a Democrat Party voter-turnout poster child.

There, I said it: This was just Democrats playing ugly partisan politics.

Democrats have never recognized any standard of decorum, civility, decency or honesty in political rhetoric, and the fact that they would exploit a shooting in Florida this way surprises no one who has paid attention to American politics.  (Fact: In 1916, Woodrow Wilson’s re-election slogan was, “He Kept Us Out of War”; less than a year after he was re-elected, America went to war.)

Democrats are just goddamned liars. The fact that one of their more politically useful falsehoods nowadays is telling black people that their problems are caused by white racism should not require us to treat that lie any more seriously than we do any other Democrat lie.

When Democrats say we need “a conversation on race,” what they really mean is they want to have a monologue, a tedious lecture about all the evils perpetrated against black people by those evil racist Republicans. Your part of the “conversation” is, shut up.

All of this was motivated by James Taranto’s defense of colorblindness, including a strategic disagreement with Ann Althouse:

Counter-Trayvonism, according to Althouse, refers to efforts “to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case” by “looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white . . . to undo the distortions.”
She thinks this is a terrible mistake . . .

Althouse’s argument includes the assertion that reporting about black crime “gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.”

Whoa! Hold on there, Professor: Are you saying you know such people? Have you reported these dangerous haters to the Department of Homeland Security? Oh, wait, never mind . . .

Here’s Professor Althouse’s headline: “The conservatives’ high ground on race is colorblindness, and they’d be fools to abandon it.”

And who can argue with that?

Yet the fact remains that Democrats mopped the floor with the GOP last year by exploiting all manner of transparently false appeals (“War on Women,” anybody?) aimed at special-interest groups that compose the Democrat constituency. Because the liberal media enthusiastically promote the Democrat Party’s agitprop campaigns, however, it is very difficult to persuade the targets of such appeals that these partisan lies are not simply “the news.”

For crying out loud, no Republican could get elected in the South for an entire century because Democrats had folks convinced that voting Republican would be a disgrace to the Heroic Cause of the Glorious Dead. (BTW, “Confederate” is the new talking point.)

Go ask any Democrat voter — black, white, male, female, whatever — why they voted to re-elect Obama. And good luck getting any rational explanation of how voting Democrat has actually made life better for themselves or their community.

(Has anybody heard from Peggy Joseph lately?)

It is an undeniable fact of American political life that any precinct that votes overwhelmingly Democrat is typically composed of either (a) affluent white elites, or (b) the most wretchedly poor minority populations in the nation. Somebody’s getting screwed over in that deal, and I’m pretty sure it ain’t the rich white folks.

Whatever your problem is, “vote Democrat” is never the solution.

If you suffer from such low self-esteem that it makes you feel better to have a bunch of rich white liberals throw a year-round pity party for you, you’re going to get just about as much actual help as you deserve, which is to say, none at all.

So I’ll leave Professor Althouse to worry about whether those white supremacists are getting “air” from the daily news. Instead I’m going to focus on the goddamned Democrats and their hired liars in the media who have never said an honest word in their lives.

 

Category: Ann Althouse, Crime, Democrats, Media Bias, Racism

Comments

109 Responses to “Hmm. @JamesTaranto Mildly Disagrees With @AnnAlthouse? Let Me Try That.”

  1. Friday: Bad Girlfriends Edition | Regular Right Guy
    August 30th, 2013 @ 2:56 pm

    […] Hmm. @JamesTaranto Mildly Disagrees With @AnnAlthouse? Let Me Try That. […]

  2. hermit_wizard
    August 30th, 2013 @ 4:33 pm

    @rsmccain, you’re being too vague in this piece. Please, be less circumspect in the future. #Awesome http://t.co/tKUPPxz6lq @instapundit

  3. instapundit
    August 30th, 2013 @ 5:41 pm

    RT @hermit_wizard: @rsmccain, you’re being too vague in this piece. Please, be less circumspect in the future. #Awesome http://t.co/tKUPPxz…

  4. rsmccain
    August 30th, 2013 @ 5:49 pm

    RT @hermit_wizard: @rsmccain, you’re being too vague in this piece. Please, be less circumspect in the future. #Awesome http://t.co/tKUPPxz…

  5. DocWashburn
    August 30th, 2013 @ 5:54 pm

    RT @hermit_wizard: @rsmccain, you’re being too vague in this piece. Please, be less circumspect in the future. #Awesome http://t.co/tKUPPxz…

  6. Quartermaster
    August 30th, 2013 @ 10:15 pm

    If you really want to learn the reason for Confeds fought, watch the opening scene of “The Undefeated.” The Major’s last line encapsulates the entire war.

  7. Quartermaster
    August 30th, 2013 @ 10:16 pm

    Not with me. I did it to myself.

  8. MadMichael
    September 3rd, 2013 @ 11:09 am

    I have no idea what you’re typing about.

  9. Quartermaster
    September 3rd, 2013 @ 11:24 am

    The dead guy is right above you. LOL!