Wright vs. Right... has America really been so terrible to black folks?

I've been meaning to post this for some time. It was forwarded to me from a friend, and at the very least it's a much-needed counterpoint to the white-guilt narrative that is so pervasive in our society.

Pat Buchanan wrote A Brief for Whitey back in March. It's part of a politically incorrect dialog that is long overdue in this country. Let me know what you think:

... Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Barack talks about new “ladders of opportunity” for blacks.

Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids.

Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.

I'm not always with Pat, but I am here. He's an impressive individual, whatever you think about him. Frankly, I'd vote for him before McCain at this point... easy. I guess I'm a racist for even posting this!

On a much lighter note... "My Dad's not a racist, he's just stupid":

Rudy Giuliani, and the ebbing of conservatism... (updated)

Pat Buchanan discusses the eroding soul of the conservative movement in his latest:

Sixty years ago, Robert A. Taft was the gold standard. Forty years ago, it was Barry Goldwater, who backed Bob Taft against Ike at the 1952 convention. Twenty years ago, it was Ronald Reagan, who backed Barry in 1964. Reagan remains the paragon – for the consistency of his convictions, the success of his presidency and the character he exhibited to the end of his life. About Reagan the cliché was true: The greatness of the office found out the greatness in the man.

Reagan defined conservatism for his time. And the issues upon which we agreed were anti-communism, a national defense second to none, lower tax rates to unleash the engines of economic progress, fiscal responsibility, a strict-constructionist Supreme Court, law and order, the right-to-life from conception on and a resolute defense of family values under assault from the cultural revolution that hit America with hurricane force in the 1960s.

With the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the breakup of the Soviet Union, anti-communism as the defining and unifying issue of the right was gone. The conservative crack-up commenced.

...

Gravitating now to Rudy's camp are those inveterate opportunists, the neocons, who see in Giuliani their last hope of redemption for their cakewalk war and their best hope for a "Long War" against "Islamo-fascism."

I will, Rudy promises, nominate Scalias. Only one more may be needed to overturn Roe. And I will keep Hillary out of the White House.

A Giuliani presidency would represent the return and final triumph of the Republicanism that conservatives went into politics to purge from power. A Giuliani presidency would represent repudiation by the party of the moral, social and cultural content that, with anti-communism, once separated it from liberal Democrats and defined it as an institution.

Rudy offers the right the ultimate Faustian bargain: retention of power at the price of one's soul.

Do you agree? I'm with Duncan Hunter in the primaries. We'll see from there. It'll likely be back to the same question that faced conservatives back in 2006... do you vote the lesser of two evils to defeat liberal socialism, or do you stand on conservative principle and either not vote (as many conservatives did in 2006) or vote for someone you know can't win to try and send a message to the failing GOP even though it will hurt big time in the short term?

Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters
sing "You Belong to Me" in The Jerk... just because:

And the following scene is worth watching too...

Bill Murchison discusses the Fall of the Religious Right?:

I don't see glee oozing from between every comma in David Kirkpatrick's New York Times magazine article this past weekend on the "evangelical crackup." He's a good reporter, whose coverage of conservatives I regard as generally well balanced. On the other hand, it isn't hard to visualize street dancing and fireworks displays outside Clinton headquarters. Kirkpatrick's focus is on the glug-glug sound as evangelical enthusiasm for conservatives and Republicans drains from the tub.

No one can predict, for certain, the speed or volume of the drainage. It suffices momentarily to note the potential effects of this once-unlooked-for phenomenon. Didn't Republicans used to own the religious right? They sure did.

...

The evangelical miscalculation, in my judgment, wasn't getting into politics. It was expecting that the practitioners of politics -- yea, from George W. Bush on down -- had the power to scourge the devil from his fortification in the human heart. For the harder task of cultural transformation and the spreading of Truth many evangelicals have shown scant appetite. They'd rather sign petitions and pass out campaign literature.

Sorry. The Good Book contradicts that notion. Hearken, brethren, to Psalm 146: "O put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man; for there is no help in them. Blessed is the God of Jacob for his help; and whose hope is in the Lord his God."

Pat Buchanan on Global Warming...

I agree with Pat, and he's a slightly better writer than I am. He's also a global warming disbeliever:

Like the panics of bygone eras, this one has the aspect of yet another re-enactment of the Big Con. The huckster arrives in town, tells all the rubes that disaster impends for them and their families, but says there may be one last chance they can be saved – but it will take a lot of money. And the folks should go about collecting it, right now.

This, it seems to me, is what the global-warming scare and scam are all about – frightening Americans into transferring sovereignty, power and wealth to a global political elite that claims it alone understands the crisis and it alone can save us from impending disaster.

...

While modest warming has taken place, there is no conclusive evidence human beings are responsible, no conclusive evidence Earth's temperature is rising dangerously or will reach intolerable levels and no conclusive evidence that warming will do more harm than good.

The glaciers may be receding, but the polar bear population is growing, alarmingly in some Canadian Indian villages. Though more people on our planet of 6 billion may die of heat, estimates are that many more may be spared death from the cold. The Arctic ice cap may be shrinking, but that may mean year-round passage through northern Canadian waters from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the immense resources of the Arctic made more accessible to man. Why else did Vladimir Putin's boys make their dash to claim the pole?

The mammoth government we have today is a result of politicians rushing to solve "crises" by creating and empowering new federal agencies.

Whether it's hunger, poverty or homelessness, in the end, the poor are always with us, but now we have something else always with us: scores of thousands of federal bureaucrats and armies of academics to study the problem and assess the progress, with all their pay and benefits provided by our tax dollars.

Cal Coolidge said that when you see 10 troubles coming up the road toward you, sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, because nine of them will fall into the ditch before they get to you. And so it will be with global warming, if we don't sell out America to the hucksters who would save us.

Spot on Pat. Thanks.

Immigration 'compromise legislation': a bitter pill with a very thin sugar coating of promises...

Mark Alexander is spot-on again when he says that immigration reform starts at the border:

... As I outlined last year in an essay entitled “Insanity on bordering,” immigration legislation must first address national security issues, meaning border security and enforcement are paramount.

Once border security has been established, the following priorities must be authorized and funded: immediate detention and deportation of those crossing our borders illegally; deportation of any foreign national convicted of a serious crime or seditious activity; a guest-worker program (with reliable documentation as prerequisite) to meet the current demand for unskilled labor; penalties against employers who hire undocumented workers; no extension of blanket amnesty or fast-track citizenship (new citizenship applicants to the back of the line); the preservation and provision of tax-subsidized medical, educational and social services for American citizens and immigrants here legally, and the Americanization of new legal immigrants, including a national mandate for English as the official language and an end to bilingual education.

Additionally, the Supreme Court must affirm that there is no constitutional birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens. The 14th Amendment’s relevant clause reads “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Children born to those who have entered the U.S. illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” (More on that subject next week.)

If immigration policy does not start at the border, our national heritage will end there. Please support the national campaign to stop the compromise and secure our borders.

That was just the conclusion. Read it all.

Related:
Immigration: Why Aren't Republicans Crying? by David Limbaugh
Why Congress Caved to Bush by Patrick J. Buchanan
Republican Immigrant Rage by Robert Novak
Senate Immigration Bill is a Sellout, Not Reform By Phyllis Schlafly
First a Fence (radio podcast) By Dennis Prager
A Christian View on Illegal Immigration By Frank Pastore
The Great Lie At The Heart Of The Senate Amnesty Bill By Mac Johnson
Why Don’t We Just Bring Back Slavery? By Phillip Ellis Jackson

Lou Dobbs is right:


Comedy Update: And I've heard that Mexicans are good at catapult engineering:


In The Know: The U.S. Moat

Immigration and the Environment...

Don't blame immigrants, blame self-absorbed politicians:



Thomas Sowell from April of this year:

The same man said all of the following things. Can you guess who it was?

"Our borders have overflowed with illegal immigrants placing tremendous burdens on our criminal justice system, schools and social programs."

"Our federal wallet is stretched to the limit by illegal aliens getting welfare, food stamps, medical care and other benefits, often without paying taxes."

"Safeguards like welfare and free medical care are in place to boost Americans in need of short-term assistance. These programs were not meant to entice freeloaders and scam artists from around the world."

"Even worse, Americans have seen heinous crimes committed by individuals who are here illegally."

Who said all these things? Pat Buchanan? Bill O'Reilly? Lou Dobbs?

Not even close. These statements were all made by Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, and currently Senate Minority Leader fighting fiercely to protect illegal immigrants from the restrictions proposed in Republican bills in Congress.

When Senator Reid said all those other things, it was 1993. There was no congressional or presidential election that year and it was not the Republicans who were trying to pass an immigration bill. It was Senator Reid who introduced his own immigration bill.

In short, the immigration bill is not just about immigration. It is about politics -- and the stakes are high. Under such conditions, it is not unusual for a politician to rise above principles.

Immigration represents a golden political opportunity for the Democrats to regain power. It is an ideal issue for the Democrats because it unites them and divides the Republicans.

The Republican majority in Congress is split between supporters of President Bush's "guest worker" proposal and those who are serious about controlling our borders and upholding our laws. Meanwhile, the Democrats are united for legalizing illegality.

Under these conditions, the chances that Congress will solve the nation's problem, rather than the politicians' problem, seem slight -- unless the voting public's anger is expressed so clearly and so massively as to outweigh the political intimidation of the pro-illegal immigrant marches.

If the Republicans wimp out, that could so demoralize their base that Republican turnout in the fall elections could decline to the point where Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives.

With California's ultra-liberal Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi as the new Speaker of the House, Democrats would be in hog heaven. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, so even the wild Republican spending of the past few years could be escalated to new heights with Democrats in the majority.

Impeachment charges also originate in the House of Representatives, so Democrats could deal the Republicans another blow by impeaching President Bush. It doesn't matter that he would never be convicted in the Senate.

What matters is that the Republicans would be forced on the defensive and bogged down politically.

Even if a bill of impeachment did not get a majority vote in the House of Representatives, it would get major coverage in the media, which would accomplish the same purpose of damaging the Republicans before the 2008 presidential elections.

In short, the Democrats' goal is not immigration reform but recapturing the White House in 2008. This is clearly demonstrated by the way Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has gone all-out in opposing the kinds of immigration crackdowns that he himself advocated back in 1993, when the political situation was different.

It is all a political charade. At the heart of this charade is a package deal that will allow Washington politicians to be on both sides of the issue -- in favor of the appearance of border control, while making it easier than ever for existing illegal aliens to stay and get citizenship, and allowing more people to cross our borders for their own benefit, rather than ours.

Agonizing.

A stupid, losing war...

Pat Buchanan on Olmert's failure:

... Ehud Olmert, who gave Chief of Staff Dan Halutz the green light to launch the shock-and-awe air campaign, cannot survive the moral, political and strategic disaster his country has suffered.

While the Israeli Air Force was hammering Lebanon, Hezbollah rained down 3,000 rockets on Israel and fought off pinprick raids. When the Israeli army, after a month, moved in force against the real enemy, Hezbollah, Israel had already suffered irreparable damage to its reputation as a fighting nation and a moral country.

As the war began, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain all condemned Hezbollah, as did the Beirut government, for inciting the war. But with Hezbollah's defiant resistance, as Israel smashed up Lebanon, the Arab street rallied to Nasrallah. Arab regimes followed.

The losers?

Lebanon, which suffered 800 dead, thousands injured and 1 million made refugees, saw its infrastructure destroyed and nation set back 20 years. If the government falls or Lebanon becomes a failed state, it will be an even greater calamity for the Lebanese, and for Israel and the Middle East. For the mightiest political and military force in Lebanon, and likely heir apparent to power slipping away from Prime Minister Siniora, is now Hezbollah and Hassan Nasrallah.

Says Walid Jumblatt, savage critic of Hezbollah and its Syrian alliance, "Hassan Nasrallah has won militarily and politically, and has become a new leader like Nasser."

Another loser is Israel, and Olmert, who seized on the border skirmish to launch his Lebanon war. Writes Ari Shavit of Ha'aretz:

"Chutzpah has its limits. You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeats and remain in power. You cannot bury 120 Israelis in cemeteries, keep a million Israelis in shelters for a month, wear down deterrent power, bring the next war very close and then say, oops, I made a mistake."

Olmert and Halutz are history. The Kadima Party regime will fall. Left and right are already tearing at its flanks. ...

Read the entire article... here.

More on Pat Buchanan being right from Tony Blankley:

Buchanan quotes the French poet Charles Peguy: "It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive."

By that standard, Buchanan, in this book, is positively fearless. He is also right. Americans, from whatever nation or ethnicity we originated, have formed a common culture worth preserving and a common history worth continuing.

I am convinced a large majority of Americans agree. This book, "State of Emergency," will give its readers both the facts and the backbone to powerfully make that case.

Rush doesn't think we should run away from Bush...

It's a tough sell, but Rush had some advice today for those of us who are fed up with George Bush specifically, and Republicans in general: (listen here)

...Fred Barnes, who at the time was a senior editor of the New Republic, posted a piece in the LA Times December 9th, 1986, Ronald Reagan's sixth year. Conservatives in '86 were abandoning Reagan, the most important conservative in the history of the movement in America.

"A dozen or so conservative leaders met privately at a Washington hotel last week to discuss the future of their political movement. Edward Feulner of the Heritage Foundation was there. So were New Right strategist Paul Weyrich, several fund-raisers, two officials of the Reagan Administration and a few Capitol Hill aides. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to President Reagan and the Iran arms scandal. Forget Reagan, they agreed. The President's a goner, his influence shattered forever. We've got to decide how to press our agenda without him. Only William Kristol, a top official of the Department of Education, dissented, insisting that Reagan should be defended.

"Thus, the Iran scandal has achieved what Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, the 1981-82 recession and the Marines debacle in Lebanon couldn't. It has caused the disintegration of the Reagan coalition, that blend of conservatives from fundamentalist Christians to libertarians that held together as the most unified single bloc in American politics for a decade. And even if the coalition is revived on an issue or two -- aid to the Nicaraguan contras, say, or funding the Strategic Defense Initiative -- as Reagan serves out his final two years in the White House, it won't be the dominant political force anymore.

"The matter can be put quite succinctly: Without Reagan the conservatives lack a popular leader, and without the conservatives Reagan lacks a broad ideological base. Both wind up losers, and the political balance of power tilts away from them. Sure, the conservatives are still sentimentally attached to Reagan, but he's no longer the same rallying point. Worse, there's no replacement in sight. Conservatives are fragmented on who should be the Republican presidential nominee in 1988. The gravity of the split is only now dawning on Reagan and his allies. Last Tuesday, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett denounced conservatives for ingratitude and political stupidity in abandoning Reagan.

"'There is no conservative agenda without Ronald Reagan,' Bennett said. 'He is the man who made whatever good has happened to this Administration happen, and people should be mindful of that.' Patrick J. Buchanan, the White House communications director, is even more blunt. 'There's an old saying that the major failing of American conservatives is they don't retrieve their wounded,' he said. 'Now's the time you take an inventory of your friends.' Not too many friends are turning up, however. Human Events, the weekly conservative publication that Reagan reads faithfully, has only half-heartedly defended him on the Iran arms deal.

"Linda Chavez, a White House aide until last winter, published a column in the Washington Post denouncing Lt. Col. Oliver North, the ousted National Security Council official blamed for diverting profits from the Iranian arms sales to the contras; she said that he was not a 'true conservative.' Bennett, who got Chavez her first job in the Administration, was so mad about this that he quickly spread the word that he was sorry he'd ever sponsored her. Why are conservatives so wary of supporting Reagan in his moment of greatest need?

"'Nobody believes in the issue, giving arms to Iran,' says Allan Ryskind, the editor of Human Events. 'Nobody's persuaded by the arguments. And while conservatives love the contras, they think that aiding them has now been jeopardized.' (Military aid was only narrowly approved by Congress this year, and the scandal over diverted funds makes renewal of aid less than likely.) Another source of wariness by most conservatives was the firing of North. 'Was North scapegoated or did he deserve to be fired?' asks Jeffrey Bell, an adviser to Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.). 'Until conservatives know that, they'll be on hold. They love North.' And though many conservatives may be inclined to stand with Reagan, they're unsure where to do that. With new revelations in the Iran scandal occurring daily, 'they don't know what ground to stand on,' says Bell.

"Complains Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus: 'The nature of the issue keeps changing.' Finally, there are conservatives like Phillips who always regarded Reagan as too moderate for their taste. 'We wish the best for him, but we're going to focus more on the 1988 presidential race than on helping his cause,' Phillips says. 'Reagan has turned over the substance of policy to people in fundamental disagreement with the policies he's rhetorically espoused.' Phillips is resistant to lobbying. His friend Buchanan pleaded with him over dinner last Wednesday to come to the President's defense. Afterwards, Phillips went on ABC-TV's 'Nightline' and trashed Reagan."

Is it not interesting? It seems like history is repeating. Now, I know Bush is no Reagan (don't misunderstand) in the sense of leading a movement, and I've been the first to say this. But what's interesting is they just want to abandon him, and I'll tell you, there is something in here that's really true: Conservatives do not retrieve their "wounded" from the battlefield; they abandon them. There is so much -- especially more so today than ever before, there's so much -- competition out there. Conservatism has gotten so big; it has so many people who want to claim to be the leader, claim to be the definers, that if anybody takes a hit, they're happy to let them fade away because of the competition. (huh?)

You know, conservatives do have competitors within the ranks. When the competitors bite the bullet, bite the dust, they're only too willing to let them, some of them them are, just fade away. There is not a whole lot of public defense, including of the president. Now, it's true the president is not defending himself, either. But I'll tell you something, I remember this period. I was working in Sacramento at the time, and I was wondering during this whole Iran Contra stuff, where's Reagan? He was being trashed every day in the media. "Where's Reagan? Why didn't he get up there and answer this stuff?"

Some people were saying, "Because he can't! Because he can't. Because it's true," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They say the same thing about Bush. "Why doesn't he go out there and defend himself?" Well Bush's answer is he doesn't care. He's got his job to do and he doesn't think it's PR spin. It's the same thing with Cheney. Cheney's got a piece coming out in Vanity Fair, I guess, or an interview with him, and they ask him (summarized): "What about your horrible public image?" He said, "I'm not in the public image business. I guess I could improve it if I went out there and tried to improve it, but that's not what my job is. My job is not public spin. My job is not my public image," and so it's amazing, these parallels.

Yet when Ronald Reagan died, all these people who abandoned him (those still around) were muscling trying to get in the front row, trying to make sure they were all over the place to be seen as loyal, never-wavering supporters. The '86 midterm elections, you know, these defections, and people who said, "We can't run with Reagan! Why, Reagan is destroying us." There's always been this tendency on the conservative side to, when there's trouble, split the scene and run away -- and, you know, Reagan did some things to irritate conservatives. While he cut taxes he also raised them at times. You know, abandoning Lebanon after the Marine barracks was hit, that wasn't popular with people. But look how time changes things. When you go back and you look at the totality of a period of time, I don't remember during the funeral week of Ronald Reagan, other than his son and maybe a couple Democrats, but even they were pretty quiet. I don't remember any of these conservatives stepping forward to remind everybody how effectiveless and worthless and pointless the last two or three years of Reagan's term were, do you?

Background material here.

Some political Top 10's from Human Events:

These folks want to cut taxes. These folks do not.

Best Conservative Senators. Up-and-coming House Conservatives.

Worst Liberal Senators.

-Home-