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

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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. Generally, I didn’t expect the comments to turn into “What a Horrible RINO Ann Althouse Is.” If you were a law professor living in Madison, Wisconsin — a community slightly less liberal than Pyongyang, but perhaps a bit to the left of Havana — you might be willing to cede more ground to organized liberalism.

    This is a problem I’ve talked about before: Conservatives have trouble thinking clearly about principles and messaging because the information stream is so polluted by liberal media distortions.

    Republicans have a horrible “flinch” reaction to any accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, et cetera, and often couch their rhetoric in terms deliberately crafted as a defense against such accusations, with the result that they constantly telegraph FEAR.

    I prefer to send another signal: FUCK YOU. WAR.

    Your mileage may vary.

  5. Althouse herself is a perfect example of the victimhood strategy. She practically brags about the fact that she allows emotion to cloud her reason, and that Democratic appeals to her emotions were and are successful.

  6. Professor Althouse voted for Obama. She works in academia. Now she advocates surrendering the initiative and taking a high ground that doesn’t exist. She is wrong.
    Because Democrat lies do not receive violently loud push-back, those lies thrive. The latest lie is Conservative as Confederate (read “Slave-owner”). Perhaps Professor Althouse should familiarize herself with Jeff Jacoby’s essay. Never again means NEVER again.

  7. There were more than enough instances of voter fraud on a mass scale to give rise to President Asterisk. There was no ‘mopping the floor.”

  8. Althouse just isn’t a serious thinker. Well, her blogging hasn’t evidenced any serious thinking. She rarely comments on the links she reposts and when she does, she routinely fails to offer anything insightful or thought provoking.

    Her commentariat was far superior and often took her to task. I stopped reading when she started implementing ever-increasingly restrictive and bizarre commenting rules.
    She strangled the best part of her blog.

  11. What do we call someone who votes Democrat and espouses leftwing mantras? She’s not even a RINO. She’s an out and proud Democrat who likes to pretend to be conservativ-ish just to get hits.

  15. I quit “flinching” at accusations of “racism” because, 1) I know my own mind, and 2) it’s clearly just a gambit to change the subject.

    I’m as likely to shove their bigotry in their faces.

  17. That’s Democrat Party SOP since the Eighteenth Century.

    The smart ones gotta be assigned a position in the Massa’s house. Lest they get all uppity and start riling up the ones down in the quarters who do all the heavy lifting and dirty work.

  18. Althouse isn’t a RINO, horrible, mediocre, or otherwise. You have to profess some sort of allegiance to the party in order to qualify for that sobriquet. Althouse is mainly a law professor, and a blogger. If it advances her blog, and does not jeopardize her academic status, it is a position she will – at least – entertain.

    Maybe not as bad as being a RINO, but it ain’t exactly admirable either.

  19. IMO, often when she admits such, it’s an act. A willful pose designed to allow her a certain form of provocation without attendant consequences.

    It’s when she not acting (like this particular topic) where the true nature of her reflexive views get revealed.

  21. Also true. There are others here who are of a different strain of the conservative tradition. Some are more Burkean than others. Some here might even have fallen onto the loyalist side of things back in 1776.

  22. Zimmerman was defending himself from Trayvon’s violent assault.

    Delbert Belton never even had the chance to defend himself against his assault and subsequent murder.

    Oh, yeah. And Zimmerman is Hispanic (Brown), not White.

    So there is no Trayvon/Counter-Trayvon argument to be made. In both cases Black “kids” perpetrated the crime against non-Blacks. Did Althouse pay any attention at all to facts? No? Sorta? Well then any argument based on not-facts is mere babble. There is no higher argument to pursue. She did not establish a foundation. You know who’s exploiting the crimes? Althouse. So she can lecture.

    Professor of law, huh?

  24. So, “Fuck you. War. But…don’t be mean to Ann Althouse”? If Ann had a problem with The People’s Republic of Madison, perhaps she shouldn’t have voted lefty.

  25. Althouse is nuts when it comes to racial issues. The Republicans having the high ground on race did not stop her from voting for Obama — twice! I remember when Obama did something particularly outrageous with regards to race during his last election campaign — it was some sort of pandering where he affected an accent and told blatant lies to an audience of black people. She was less concerned about the lies and minstrel show than she was about some bit of esoterica in how the right took exception to it.

    She simply will not hold both races and both parties to the same standard which makes her a racist. I don’t patronize blogs run by racists so I gave her up a few years back. Insty likes to link to her so you have to hover your cursor over the link just to make sure you don’t end up there.

  27. The Democrats were on the pro-slavery side but Neo-confederate now means anyone the Democrats oppose. WTH?

  30. Worse, still, is how easily the non-liberal academics slip their minds into the glove of language thoughtfully provided by the left. This eventually leads to so-called conservative leaders debating “immigration reform” when the problem is illegal aliens; “healthcare solutions” when they should be saying that the Constitution leaves that up to the states.

    And so on.

  31. Some lawyerly types seem to think overmuch on what the law lets people get away with, and less on what it is intended to limit.

    When it’s done as an academic exercise, it seems like an honorable thing. Even by people who are really nice (which, judging by her friendship with others I respect, must be the case with Prof. A).

    But constantly eroding the styrofoam on the bottom of the raft–just because you can–leaves a helluva mess, and tends to limit the carrying capacity.

  32. Most of us were gaffed.

    A few were simply conked with oars.

    I was told by a smartly dressed fellow at a bar that it was going to be a splendid voyage to Vanuatu, and all I needed to join was to agree to take turns with the chores, and buy the first round.

  33. You’re just in it for the curmudgeony.

    (I coined that word many years ago. It’s the art and practice of being a curmudgeon, which is not the same thing at all as “being curmudgeonly.”)

  35. A conservative in Soviet Canuckistan is not a conservative in the US. The supposed “center-right” in Canada is much different than what passes as a moderate in the Dim party. Same with the UK bunch. The PM might as well call himself a member of the insane left because he certainly is no conservative.

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