Month: October 2011

Talk about cliches! Talk about racial stereotypes!

Where have we heard this before? A self-made black man with a conservative bent is being considered for high public office.  What’s a liberal mainstream media to do?

Play the sexual harassment card of course!

Today it was revealed by the one-percenter-George-Soros-funded Politico.com that there had been sexual harassment charges against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain when he was president of the National Restaurant Association back in the 90’s.  The whole thing had a vaguely familiar ring to it.

Then I remembered.  Back in the early 90’s, when George Bush 41 nominated Clarence Thomas, coincidentally also a black conservative from Georgia, to the Supreme Court, the left-wing media and political establishment had a cow and that cow’s name was Anita Hill.  She made a series of increasingly unbelievable claims of sexual harassment which ultimately no one could take seriously. Thomas was confirmed and still sits on the Supreme Court today.

The accusations in the Politico article are laughably vague, but will probably get more shrill as time goes by.   For his part, Cain can only remember one of the women making a formal accusation and cannot remember ever being alone with either one.  The one who made the formal charge of sexual harassment left the employ of the Restaurant Association with only a small severance payment, not a big payday of hush money.

This all just goes to show that Thomas and Cain are among a few African Americans (may their tribe increase!) who have committed the unpardonable sin of escaping the Democrat plantation, or, if you can relate to this metaphor better, they have not only refused to sit in the back of the White Guilt Democrat bus, they have gotten off the bus at the Republican bus stop!

And so they trot out the old sexual harassment charge again.  Seriously? Don’t they see how that perpetuates a racial stereotype?  But that’s the problem.  All African Americans are two-dimensional stereotypes to white Democrats.  African Americans are just a dependable, monolithic voting bloc and it’s really inconvenient when they begin to think for themselves and get out of line.

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There were high fives all around at the White House at the news that Moammar Qaddafi had been finally caught and killed, so Libya followed Egypt in toppling a long-standing dictatorship (Mubarak was technically President), which itself followed Iraq and the deposition of Saddam Hussein through more direct American intervention.

President Barak Obama, who is a “Christian( ! )”, has celebrated the “Arab Spring”, the apparently spontaneous uprising of people in several countries of the Middle East as a new birth of democratic freedom.  However the facts are much different.

In Iraq, the Assyrian Christian minority (about 3% of the population) traced its roots back to Apostolic times, possibly after Thomas’ missionary journeys, and had enjoyed relative protection and freedom for centuries, even under Saddam Hussein.  Since Saddam’s ouster however, as many as half a million have left the country because of radical Islamic persecution, including orchestrated car bomb attacks on multiple churches and slayings by radical Islamists.  Those who haven’t left the country are displaced refugees near the remote old city of Nineveh.

Meanwhile, a similar persecution has begun in Egypt, since the removal of Mubarak.  The Coptic Christians of Egypt, which also trace their history back to the first century, had also been protected under Mubarak.  While they couldn’t proselytize, they at least were able to coexist with Muslims as about 10% of the population.

Now however, with the relatively pro-US, relatively pro-Israel Mubarak gone, the anti-Christian violence has begun, with a series of church burnings and then killings of Christians who protested.  It can only be a matter of time before the historic Coptic church is exiled if not wiped out.

Meanwhile the White House and the “Lame Stream Media” celebrates the “Arab Spring” while ignoring the plight of these historic Christian communions. “Arab Spring” is apparently Winter for Christians.

John Adams said “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In the “Arab Spring” we are seeing what happens when what we are told is democracy is implemented without a moral commitment to freedom of religion.

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Liberals don’t seem to want to be called “Liberals” and Leftists don’t ever want to be known as “Leftists”.  Socialists and Communists never seem to want to be called what they are either.   “Progressive” is the term they all seem to prefer, in America at least.

That sounds good, doesn’t it?  It evokes “The Carousel of Progress” at Disney; everything always getting better and better.  Who could be against Progress?

But there is another side to the story.  When you are “progressing” in your car, that’s generally a good thing.  Cars are meant to move you from point A to point B.  When you go out to go to work and your car won’t start that’s not good.  However, when your car is “progressing” toward at cliff or a brick wall at 80 miles an hour, that’s not so good either.

One of the objections to any change in the Federal tax code, from Steve Forbes’ Flat Tax to Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan is that they are “Regressive”, which is the opposite of “Progressive”.  When it comes to taxes, shifting more and more of the tax burden away from the lower income people and onto the upper income people is considered “Progressive”, but a tax system where everyone pays the same percentage of their income is considered moving backward — “Regressive”.

But currently, the bottom 50% of wage earners pays no income tax, and the top 5% pays more in income taxes than the other 95% (link).  It’s hard to see how that can be good for the economy, much less “Progress”.  But, the “Progressives” say, “the rich” can afford it, which of course is just an echo of the Marxist “From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.”

We’ve been “progressing” from the flat 3% with no deductions when the income tax was instituted almost 100 years ago (America survived for 135 years without an income tax) until now the tax burden is so lopsided that it’s difficult to see how anyone can regard it as fair.  As depicted in “Atlas Shrugged”, there may come a time when the “rich” will decide it’s not worth it any more and simply quit.

This is not a good time for that to happen.  President Obama and the Democrat majority in Congress from 2006 to 2010 has doubled the national debt.  Every man, woman and child in America is responsible for $80,000 worth, but only the “rich” are expected to pay.

Sometimes forward progress isn’t good at all.  If forward progress was always good, cars wouldn’t need brakes or reverse gears.

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The surprising ascendancy of Herman Cain to the top of the Republican presidential hopeful heap has been interesting, but since we have 13 months before the presidential election, it may or may not make any difference.

However, the prospect of an election featuring Obama vs. Cain is VERY interesting, since the standard charge against Republicans and the Tea Party has been that they are racists.  That’s ridiculous of course, since Republicans freed the slaves and voted as a bloc for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whereas Democrats brought about the deaths of 400,000 Americans rather than give Blacks full citizenship and stood in schoolhouse doors rather than let them be educated.

Obama was elected president at least partially because a lot of white people were ready to vote for an African American for president and they vaguely (or consciously) believed it would be racist NOT to vote for him.

The polls would indicate those white-guilt-afflicted people are over it.

Joseph Lowry, the grand old man of the Civil Rights movement, famously said that Obama was not an “authentic” American-American  because he didn’t have “slave blood”.

It’s true that Obama is African-American; in fact, his father was African and not an American citizen at all.  However, Obama’s American half was as white as I am.  And he was raised by his white grandparents.

Herman Cain, on the other hand, can hearken back to  great-grandparents who were slaves here in Georgia, and grandparents who were sharecroppers.  It doesn’t get more “authentic” African American than that.

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“Ask five economists and you’ll get five different explanations — six if one went to Harvard.”

Edgar Fiedler’s quote came to mind as I was thinking about the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors.  It seems if you ask five of them what they are protesting you’ll get six answers.

Putting aside the vague unhappiness expressed by the “Occupiers” in the motley hobo camps, there are things to be unhappy about, but Wall Street and the rest of Corporate America are not the total cause or solution of the problems.  The president and Congressional Democrats gush about the protests being a spontaneous answer to the Tea Party organizations, but it’s difficult to nail down a one-to-one list of opposing ideas.

In fact, one of the many things mentioned by members of the “Flea Party” is the National Debt, followed quickly by references to their own student loans.  Many Tea Party members would agree with the protesters about that, although they probably wouldn’t be able to stand the stench long enough to stand too close to them.

I remember the protests of the 1960s, and even then I thought they were stupid.  We live in a country where we don’t need to demonstrate and riot to throw off an iron-heeled dictator (so far), but we can achieve change through the ballot box.

Probably 99.9% of the protestors voted for “Hope and Change” (if they voted at all), but the change they voted for was like the woman who rejoiced when Obama won because he was going to pay her mortgage(!)

It turns out that even President Obama, who has gotten everything he wanted all the while castigating Republicans for opposing him, can’t change the forces of nature, like economics, the weather and human nature.  Apparently the protestors believed him when he said, “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

Or not.

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I left work early today, which allowed me to hear an exchange on the Michael Medved radio show that I would have missed otherwise.  I must say, I have never heard the mild-mannered Medved as exercised as he was with this caller.

The discussion was about the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs.  The caller, whom, since I came in late, don’t know who he was or what his credentials, was saying that it was “immoral” for Steve Jobs to be “allowed” to have all that money when people are starving in the world (Jobs had a net worth of more than $8 billion when he passed away yesterday).  Medved went ballistic at that.  “It’s called freedom!” he asserted.  “In a free society, people get to work hard and keep the fruits of their labors!”

My comment to my wife who was listening with me in the car, was that it was immoral for the government to take so much of the fruits of his labor away from Jobs!

Then the caller said what made ME go ballistic.  “After all,” he said, “There’s only so much money in the world.”  Michael Medved really went off on him then, but I didn’t hear most of it because I unloaded with both barrels myself.  Sorry that my wife had to listen to both of us.

The caller voiced the Big Economic Lie of the left, that economics is a “Zero-Sum Game”, which means if one person has a dollar, it’s because they have deprived another person of having enough.  Anyone with a brain who takes the time to think about it knows that is the furthest thing from the truth.  It’s not as if Steve Jobs was sitting on a pile of wrapped $100 bills that added up to $8 billion while people around him were hungry.

You can be sure that Steve Jobs, savvy business man that he obviously was, had put that money to work in a variety of ways.  Here are just a few possibilities:

Obviously a lot of his wealth was probably in Apple stock, which is not really money at all until you sell it, but think of the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people who put food on their families’ tables because of the value of that company and the products it produces!  And, note to the caller: that value was not stolen from anybody; before Steve Jobs and Apple, that value, those salaries, those retirees’ investments, didn’t exist.  It’s NEW value added to the economic mix as a result, not just of hard work, but of creative genius.

There is NOT a static amount of money.  Entrepreneurs and dreamers like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many more going back to Andrew Carnegie and beyond CREATE wealth that didn’t exist before.  And in the process they create prosperity for many, many people.

Besides the thousands who have worked for Apple, there are thousands more who have started businesses to provide software and “apps” for Apple products and to piggyback on the technology with their own innovations; activities which the bitter, petty caller has no clue about.

But even if Steve Jobs did have $8 billion dollars sitting there, what was he likely to do with it?  You can be sure he wouldn’t have stuffed it into his mattress.  He would have at least put it into a bank, where it could be loaned out to thousands who dream of owning a home, a new car, starting a family, etc.

But Jobs probably also invested in other companies, which enabled them to hire people, build facilities, expand operations into new regions, etc.; each company creating NEW wealth of its own.

But some of his money Jobs certainly spent on high-dollar toys, like cars, boats, vacation homes, etc.  All of which, might inspire jealousy and covetousness in the caller, but created jobs for countless factory workers, truck drivers, construction workers and salespersons.

But the caller would have none of that.  He would prefer all those truck drivers, construction workers, car salesmen and real estate agents not have work, if it requires that someone be rich.  Oh, and by the way, I’ll bet Steve Jobs gave more to charity than the caller will earn in his lifetime.

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