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

Posted on 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.

 

109 comments

  1. Wait. Did I miss a memo? I thought Willy Horton taught us it’s not proper to use people of color to elevate voter turnout.
    As for Althouse, she’s being deliberately disingenous. She knows the reason for the alleged “tit for tat.” She also knows the grievance mongers will continue. She’s merely arguing for the rest of society to give up the field.

  2. The Leftist media and the race pimps spent months fabricating a false narrative of white racism and white on black violence from the case of a mixed race Hispanic defending himself from the assault of a young black man.

    The “backlash” consists of reporting true cases of black on white assaults with no element of self -defense, just senseless violence and murder.

    Somehow, some people conclude that reporting these truths is wrong, inappropriate, counter-productive, or even racist. It isn’t.

    We have a rare opportunity to do real damage to one of the Left’s favorite and most destructive false narratives. We should seize it.

  3. I made my comment over at Insty — these people are objecting to reporting the truth. They would prefer comfortable lies and ever-increasing violence to the truth.

  5. If the Republicans have the “High Ground” vis a vis colorblindedness, then what does that make of the Democrats position?

  7. Althouse would make a terrific establishment Republican strategist. As a strategist all she needs to do is advise her “clients” to never fight when the Democrats and their media allies completely steamroll you with false rhetoric for four or five years. Then go deposit her check for providing that sound advise.

  10. When she was still in the “undecided” column in the Mitt v. barack contest late in the year in 2012, I thought she pretty much fell off the end of the right-side blogosphere.

    Did she land in the grey goo of the pseudo-left where Charles Johnson oozes and writhes?

  11. “The fact remains that Democrats mopped the floor with the GOP last year.”

    Really? It was a split decision as I remember it. The fact is that several factions in the Republican Party spent 42 months campaigning against Mitt Romney and then 6 months tepidly pretending to support him.

    Now those factions need an excuse as to why they didn’t deliver their supposed voters. Media bias (from the media no one watches or listens to anymore), low information voters (who voted against conservatives because their sound bites sounded crazier than the alternatives), and now this.

    I had an awakening during a visit to British Columbia this spring. There the BC Liberal party is the center-right party with a majority in the BC legislature. Their opposition is the left-wing BC New Democratic Party.

    There is a liberal-conservative coalition ruling in the United Kingdom these days too. But American conservatives continue with their liberal-bashing when their real beef should be with the socialist left, who they’ve essentially managed to empower.

    It’s time to wake up. The two great conservative leaders of the 20th century, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan were both in fact liberals. You can add Margaret Thatcher, according to Milton Friedman.

  13. The Left is serially incapable of considering that voting Democrat has any connection at all to results like Detroit. They’re too busy patting themselves on the back for their open mindedness to engage in critical thinking.

  15. Those countries have Westminster-style parliaments, which is how they end up with odd ruling coalitions (Australia has [or did have] one too: Labor and the Greens). It’s called a “minority government” when that happens, because no party won enough seats to govern outright.

    The British Tories, for instance, did not DELIBERATELY form a “coalition” with the Lib-Dems. No one VOTED for a “Tory-LibDem Coalition Government”. They just ended up with an odd-bod minority government because no-one liked ANY of the parties enough to get them into power on their own right.

    And the only way you could call Churchill, Reagan or Thatcher a Liberal is in the accurate sense of the word (before the American Left bastardized it): i.e., they could be considered Classical Liberals (Australians do still call their conservatives Liberals).

    But American government is not run under the Westminster system; and we have let the Left so bastardize the term “liberal” that it doesn’t mean what it used to mean (and what it still means in some Commonwealth countries). It’s time to wake up: this is America, not the UK or Canada.

  16. I guess it’s a-okay with Ann that reporting white on black crime (even if the “white” guy isn’t really white. It’s funny how “brown” people are only considered white when there’s a specific axe to grind, no?) gives air to the black supremacists among us.

    In fact, not just reporting but, out and out sensationalizing!

    There are almost daily examples of blacks attacking whites for no reason whatsoever. Could that not be expressions of black supremacist actions? Apparently when whites attack blacks it is instantly recognized as a white supremacist act.

    I had to wonder, during the circus show that was the Zimmerman case, how come they couldn’t find an actual, honest to God, white person that killed a black man to use as an example. Better still, a registered Republican ’cause Republicans are all racists, right?
    One would think you could find a myriad of examples to choose from the way they describe this white on black crime wave.
    Yet, all they could find was a half white, Skeeter voting registered Dim who mentors black kids and stands up for homeless black men beaten up by a police officer’s kid to bring the wrath of God down upon.
    It’s just plain weird, huh?

  17. ‘Tis a sad condition. Most of us are still alive, but there is a dead guy that still can’t shake the sad habit of TOM. It’s looking like it will take a very loooooong stay in Purgatory before it’s burnt out of him.

  18. While not an out-and-proud advocate of the left Althouse is often reflexively sympathetic to their appeals, or at least favors positions that do not oppose them. It seems to be something in the nature of her emotion rather than her rational analytic being. Or maybe it’s just a byproduct of being immersed in a hard left pressure cooker.

    That, and as noted above, she’s quite comfortable being rather less than entirely straightforward in her blog postings. She likes to pretend that they are crypto-ambiguous, FWIW.

  21. Thank you. Althouse is interesting but the animating principles of the 60s lib, especially the need to identify, codify and shield the oppressed classes, often rear their outdated heads in her analysis. With her latest foray into advising the GOP, this time against “giving air to the white supremacists among us (us?), I kept picturing zombie hordes of white supremacists spreading out across the land, revivified by the fact that someone somewhere was providing equal coverage of racial hate killings. To balance out the non-stop dishonest coverage of non-racial non-hate killings posing as racial hate killings. I guess. Wait, ahm so kihnfuzed; the logic got away from me again. Althouse would probably attribute this to oxygen deprivation but she would be wrong.

  22. Many people here are liberals.

    Liberals in the tradition of Locke, Hume, and Mill. But, sadly, the word no longer carries that connotation.

    Attempts to reclaim it – to point out the decidedly illiberal aspects of the modern progressive left, and all the other assorted statists that populate the Federal government – go largely unheeded.

    As written, and plainly read the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are tremendously liberal documents.

    So, while I am sympathetic to your words, my advice to you is to spend more time describing precisely why certain people are not liberal.

    But you might also wish to consider that ‘center-right’ in Canada is, often in particulars, lock-step Democrat party/Left in practice.

  23. Funny, no one ever mentions a Civil War fought largely over slavery. You’d think hundreds of thousands of White dead would earn a little slack.

  24. There’s no way Ann Althouse knows any rightwing white supremacists. Simply not done in the faculty lounge. Of course the respectable, acceptable leftist white supremacists are found there aplenty, but they’re busy conjuring up nonsensical “ethnic” and :”gender” studies departments to siphon off all the ambitious young persons of color and womyn who would otherwise be hunting them down on the tenure track in the humanities.

  25. Professer Althouse doesn’t have conservative views. She just accessorizes her liberal views with conservative ideas.

    Sometimes I think she gets up in the morning and looks at herself in the mirror and decides what would look good with her liberalism:

    “This 2nd Amendment brooch will look stunning with these prolife earrings.”

    As she philosophically meanders when discussing issues of the day, she hopes no one notices she is a creature of the left.

Comments are closed.