Reflections From a Murky Pond

According to Fox News’ commentator Juan Williams, Americans and American values are just racist and every single one of the GOP candidates is using dog-whistle for racist epithets.

Race Is Always A Trigger In Politics

This is an odd attitude for a man who lost his job for speaking honestly when that honesty didn’t align with his previous Liberal masters’ anti-American agenda.

It’s an even odder attitude for the man who authored Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It

In Enough he wrote that too many black Americans are in crisis – caught in a twisted hip-hop culture, dropping out of school, ending up in jail, having babies when they are not ready to be parents, and falling to the bottom in twenty-first-century global economic competition.

Yet, despite his previous run in with political correctness and his previous written work, Williams’ response to Americans’ indignation at how he misconducted the Fox News/Wall Street Journal GOP Primary debate in Myrtle Beach, SC was:

Race is always a trigger in politics, but now a third of the nation are people of color — and their numbers are growing. With those minorities solidly in the Democratic camp and behind the first black president, the scene is set for a bonanza of racial politics.

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

– Juan Williams

This from a man who spent 233 pages in Enough bluntly and forthrightly – not a dog-whistle to be heard – lambasting and execrating Black Leaders and the entirety of the “Black Community” as being perversions and debasements of Black Culture and as having squandered every civil rights gain since the Civil War?

Then again, perhaps Williams’ attitude isn’t odd at all. Williams is one of those “people of color” and, if he’s also one of the majority of them who is “behind the first black president,” what  better way to undermine the entire opposition to his boy, Obama getting handed a second term as POTUS than to decry anything and everything they say as somehow being “code words” or “dog-whistles” for racist sentiments.

Or maybe Williams is just trying to get his old job at NPR back, who knows?

Related Reading:

As several people including Jennifer at Order in the Quart! have informed me, it took under a week for Komen For The Cure to capitulate to the baby killers’ screaming and reinstate funding to America’s number one abortion mill, Planned Parenthood. So the abortionists won this round and proved to themselves that they had enough useful idiots to enforce their anti-life agenda.

One the brighter side, approx. 1500 poor women per year will be able to be referred by Planned Parenthood to breast cancer screaming service providers.

For those Americans who understand that abortion is the murder of the most helpless and only guaranteed innocents in the world – and who are actually against it even if childbearing inconveniences some females, Komen’s rapid capitulation to the abortionists in painful and maddening. There are, however, other points to consider in this matter.

Do Not Act As They Do

Komen For The Cure’s mission is stated as the eradication of breast cancer, not the ending of on-demand abortions in America.  The two things are not related beyond the simple fact that both are “women’s issues.” It just doesn’t make sense for Komen not to reverse their decision in the wake of the Feminists’ shrill and strident objections because not doing so could jeopardize the success of their mission.

Anger should be directed at those Feminists who placed on-demand abortion above women’s health, not at Komen.  Remember always that it was exactly these Feminists who called for Komen’s destruction for not supporting abortion. Americans should not sink to their antisocial level and similarly put the fight against breast cancer in jeopardy.

Market Forces In Action

Utterly irrespective of whether we, as Americans, like Komen’s giving in to the abortionists, this was a direct case of free market forces in full operation. It was empirical proof that, in the absence of governmental intervention and meddling, people can directly impact and change the course of business. Certainly, we don’t have to like this specific occurrence but we must respect it for what it was.

Enough of Komen’s consumers were against the new funding policy to potentially negatively impact Komen’s revenues enough to make a difference. Komen responded as is required by the free market and, unless we’re willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we have to understand and accept that.

~*~

Many of us donated to Komen For The Cure when they donated approximately 0.17% of their annual outlays to Planned Parenthood, which funded only 4% the breast cancer screenings Planned Parenthood provided, and I can’t see the point in turning away from them just because they tried to change that and failed due to market pressures.

Our domestic enemies might be comfortable behaving that way, but we should be better and more intelligent than that.

Related Reading:

Much like the cries of racism and complaints about ad hominem attacks, recently we’ve been hearing a lot of cries for civility in political discourse. There’s a certain subset of the residents within America’s borders who want a more polite and staid approach to deciding the course of America.

It seems that politics has gotten too raw and real for some people.

This, of course, begs three related questions: who are these people crying for increased civility, what is it that they actually want, and why do they want it so much?

Who’s Crying For Civility

I see two disparate and unrelated general segments of America’s population crying out for an increase in civility in political speech and argument. They are respectively the apolitical drones and the Leftists, the Liberals and Progressives. Each makes similar outcries but for seemingly different reasons and with different real goals.

What Do They Really Want And Why?

The apolitical people just want things to go quietly. They’re uninvolved in politics, fervently wish to stay that way, and are both bothered and scared by the passion that is being shown by many others. Whether from cynicism or self-centeredness, they do not want to pull their heads out the oh-so-comfortable sand and become involved and the fire of current political discourse is preventing them from doing this.

The staid, stuffy, and easily ignored ways are what these drones want to return to because they don’t want to open their eyes and choose a side.

The Leftists, these Liberals and Progressives, are quite different.  They are awake, aware, involved in the political process, and they have a definite direction that they want to take America in. Their cries for civility are really two things: cynical attempts to silent their enemies and cries for validation and acceptance.

The willfully uninvolved will just have to stop their ears better and learn to keep their heads down.

For many of the Left, their cries are just dog-whistles for censoring the American people. They don’t really want civility, as their very cries for it often show, so much as they want to stop any dissent against their foundations of their agenda.

For others on the left it is a matter of crying out for acceptance and validation. They’re looking for some affirmation that, even though their enemies disagree with their core ethos, they are still respected and approved of.

~*~

Sadly for those who’re crying out for increased civility, I don’t see much chance of- or value in its return any time in the near future. The divide in America is not too deep; it’s to fundamental. It doesn’t allow for the luxury of civility anymore. It’s not a political divide; it’s an ethical and moral divide.

We’re not going to be silenced. We’re not going to engage in carefully managed debates over minutiae of methodology when we want to change the goals and systems. And we’re very much not going to respect our enemies when we find the core beliefs that underpin their goals and actions to be utterly abominable and abhorrent.

Related Reading: