Category Archives: Affirmative Action

UPDATED: Snarling Sister Is Back, In Time for Halloween (Winnie Mandela/Madam Obama)

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Conflict, Critique, Politics, Racism

Michelle Obama has managed to lie low since the times I described her as “Militant Mama Obama” (February 22, 2008). In that column, I ventured that, “If anything, her charmed life has made Michelle Obama more racially militant.” As the woman complained in a blatantly banal university thesis, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before.”

But she’s back!

The Washington Times has details of the strategy undergirding M’s latest moaning:

… She will go to the opulent homes of rich people across the country to tell them how rich people are to blame for America’s woes and guilt them into giving millions for her husband’s campaign. … [How] rich people (white, of course) certainly don’t want black people to succeed. They want to squelch success based on what people look like, how much money they have. … And the Princeton graduate will tell supporters they simply can’t comprehend the significance of what’s occurring today in America. ‘It can be hard to see clearly what’s at stake – because these issues are so complicated …’

MORE.

Michelle Obama’s sentiments seep out from that festering reservoir of racial animosity—the same cesspool wherefrom the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson launch their perennial strikes.

UPDATE (Oct. 1): WINNIE MANDELA/MADAM OBAMA. Robert, there is a similarity in anger levels between the two women, although Winnie Madikizela-Mandela had considerable cause for anger. The woman had it tough. I mention Winnie in the book you just reviewed on Amazon. Winnie, moreover, was a looker, unlike MO. I saw Winnie in person when I attended Tutu’s inaugural with my dad. She was then drop-dead (if deadly) gorgeous. But I mean Beyonce beautiful.

Those Darn Differences

Affirmative Action, Debt, Economy, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Political Correctness, Regulation

“Parity in prosperity and performance can be achieved only playing socialist leveler” (Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. page 127). And even then, leveling legislation, such as compulsory preferential hiring or money lending, will eventually fail. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

The wealth gap between whites and each of the nation’s two largest minorities—Hispanics and blacks—has widened to unprecedented levels amid the housing crisis and the recession, according to new research.
The median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than that of Hispanic households, according to an analysis of newly available 2009 government data by the Pew Research Center, an independent think tank.
The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago, with the gulf separating whites from other groups twice as wide as it was in the two decades prior to the recession and 2008 financial crisis, according to the study.

Darker Clouds On the Horizon

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Economy, Race, Taxation, Welfare

The dynamics Pat Buchanan describes in his latest column, “Black America vs. Obama?,” might very well be borne out: African-Americans will likely turn on the black president who was forced to slash the oink sector in which they are overrepresented.

Though 10 percent of the U.S. civilian labor force, African-Americans are 18 percent of U.S. government workers. They are 25 percent of the employees at Treasury and Veterans Affairs, 31 percent of the State Department, 37 percent of Department of Education employees and 38 percent of Housing and Urban Development. They are 42 percent of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., 55 percent of the employees at the Government Printing Office and 82 percent at the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.
When the Obama administration suggested shutting down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants whose losses of $150 billion have had to be made up by taxpayers, The Washington Post warned, in a story headlined, “Winding Down Fannie and Freddie Could Put Minority Careers at Risk,” that 44 percent of Fannie employees and 50 percent of Freddie’s were persons of color.
In Washington, D.C., we have also seen the result of government cuts on African-American leaders who had to approve those cuts.
When Mayor Adrian Fenty stood behind schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who fired hundreds of teachers, most of them African-American, the wards east of the Anacostia cut him dead. In 2010, Fenty was thrown out by many of the black voters who elected him

Is this is a welcome development? Hardly. (And I fully understand that Mr. Buchanan is hardly making such a claim.)

While coalitions of the aggrieved are good, where here is there a coalition for freedom-loving Americans to pursue? Fifty percent or so of Americans—those who pay the taxes—want the excesses of the oink sector curtailed. The African-American cohort Buchanan cites wants these programs to carry on in perpetuity.

It’s possible that Mr. Buchanan is simply warning that African-Americans are just going to get angrier and angrier.

Revere Paul Revere the Pioneering Metallurgist

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Capitalism, Founding Fathers, Free Markets, History

Our president (Barack Hussein Obama) and his predecessor (George Bush), ponces both, could learn a thing or two from Paul Revere, not least about industry, inventiveness, and the source of prosperity.

The success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, in 1860, about “the story of ‘the midnight ride of Paul Revere,’ erased from popular [Palinist] memory not only other riders who had warned that General Thomas Gage was on his way, but also Revere’s extraordinary career as a gifted artist, brilliant entrepreneur and pioneering metallurgist.” (TLS June 17, 2011, p. 30.)

The excerpt is from The Times Literary Supplement review of Robert Martello’s MIDNIGHT RIDE, INDUSTRIAL DAWN: Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise.

In chronicling the life of Revere, a craftsman and an extraordinary artist who became an industrialist and a tycoon, the author concludes that Revere was,

an example of Benjamin Franklin’s conclusion that men who invent “new Trades, Arts, or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may properly be called Fathers of their Nation”.

To listen to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wax prolix about the object of his carnal excitement (Barack Obama), this president is the embodiment of American achievement. However, Obama, like his predecessor, was admitted to the country’s finest institutions based, in all likelihood, on a preferential system. BHO has only ever lived off the parasitical avails of the political process. George Bush, of course, was the recipient of opportunities and privileges rooted in his being born to one of America’s inherited dynasties.