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Roger Simon, who was on the left and then found the error of his ways, posts on where he has experienced the most racism.
… The left is vastly more racist than the right. It’s not even close. Since I was publicly identified with the right, roughly from when I started blogging in 2003 (although it was actually several years earlier in private), I have personally witnessed not a single incident of racism from anyone who could be considered a right winger and heard only one racial slur — and that was from a Frenchman. In the seven years I was CEO of PJ Media, I came to know or meet literally dozens of people who identified with the Tea Party. I did not hear one word of anything close to racism from any of them even once. Not one, ever. This despite their being accused of racism constantly.
The left, on the other hand, is filled with racism of all sorts, much, but not all, of it projected. I used to hear racist comments all the time during the seventies and eighties when almost all my friends were leftist or liberals. During that time black racism was pretty much continuously on the rise, aided and abetted by whites.
It had been going on for a while. I first encountered black racism from the person of none other than Julian Bond (later the president of the NAACP), who treated me, a civil rights worker involved in voter registration, in a racist, anti-white manner in the SNCC offices in Atlanta in 1966. Stokely Carmichael treated me that way also. That was at the beginning of the Black Power movement and I excused it then as “a phase” that had to be gone through. I was mistaken and naive. It was racism pure and simple. I, and others, never confronted or named it then.
Now we live in culture where there is considerably more black racism than white racism. Someone like Al Sharpton, clearly the equivalent of David Duke, is far more powerful than Duke ever was. No one pays attention to the execrable Duke, as they shouldn’t. But they shouldn’t pay attention to Sharpton either.
But he’s only a part of the problem. …
Charles Cooke says now, all of a sudden, liberals are learning you should not collectivize guilt. Joan Walsh’s hypocrisy is on display; Eugene Robinson’s too.
… Consider, if you will, the recent behavior of Salon’s Joan Walsh, who yesterday suggested in earnest that the conservative-led condemnation of the “climate” that supposedly provoked the shootings in New York City represented the unconscionable “politicization” of murder. “To blame the peaceful movement against police brutality that’s emerged nationwide,” Walsh wrote, is “the worst in demagoguery.” “Right wingers,” she added, “are using a terrible tragedy to make sure that no one can find middle ground.” Prima facie, I concur with Walsh, of course. But what, we might ask, has finally led her to this conclusion? After the shooting of Gabby Giffords in 2011, Walsh fretted dramatically about “the rhetoric of violence”; asked aloud, “Will any prominent conservatives denounce ‘reload’ and ‘crosshairs’ imagery?”; inquired dishonestly, “Is it really controversial to suggest that the overheated anti-government rhetoric of the last two years, with its often violent imagery, ought to be toned down?”; described Sarah Palin’s pretty standard political-campaign map as “unconscionable”; hoped that Republicans would find it in their hearts to “listen to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who denounced ‘the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about the government’ at a Saturday night press conference”; played a remarkably dishonest game of “But Anyway . . . ,” repeatedly noting that there was “no evidence” that Jared Loughner had reacted to any right-wing rhetoric before insinuating in the next breath that he must have; and, when her well was running dry, went so far as to suggest without any attestation at all that the shooter was a registered Republican.
Later, talking characteristically out of both sides of her mouth, Walsh proposed that “even if Tuscon exists in a vacuum,” it would still be the case that the “Tea Party’s violent rhetoric is dangerous.” Naturally, these accusations were part of a trend. Two years earlier, Walsh had cynically blamed conservative talk-radio for a shooting at the NationalHolocaustMuseum in Washington, D.C. The perpetrator turned out to be a neo-Nazi. …
… Walsh is alone only in the sheer scale of her audacity. In a column bluntly titled, “protesters aren’t to blame for NYPD officers’ execution,” the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson yesterday confirmed his own evolution on the question of what constitutes verbal instigation. “It is absurd to have to say this,” Robinson lamented, “but New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, activist Al Sharpton and President Obama are in no way responsible for the coldblooded assassination of two police officers in Brooklyn on Saturday. Nor do the tens of thousands of Americans who have demonstrated against police brutality in recent weeks bear any measure of blame.” Rather, Robinson proposed, “a disturbed career criminal named Ismaaiyl Brinsley committed this unspeakable atrocity by himself, amid a spree of insane mayhem.” “Reasonable people,” Robinson explained, “understand this, of course.” “But,” he sighed knowingly, “we live in unreasonable times.” …
… “Delusional right-wing crazy talk,” Robinson suggested in 2012, “is a special kind of poison that cannot be safely ignored.” Lest he be misunderstood, he spelled it out for all to see: “I’m saying that the extreme language we hear from the far right is qualitatively different from the extreme language we hear from the far left — and far more damaging to the ties that bind us as a nation.” …
NY Post reports on calls for violence from CUNY grad students newspaper.
A disturbing editorial in a CUNY grad-student newspaper calls for rioters protesting the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown to arm themselves and wage violent war with cops.
“The time for peace has passed,” says a revolutionary editorial titled “In Support of Violence” that was penned by editor-in-chief Gordon Barnes in the Dec. 3 issue of The Advocate.
‘“The problem with the protesters’ violence in Ferguson is that it is unorganized. If the violence was to be organized, and the protesters armed — more so than the few that sparingly are — then the brunt of social pressures would not be laid onto middling proprietors [of looted small businesses], but unto those deserving the most virulent response of an enraged populace,” Barnes writes in the CUNY Grad Center’s publication.
“The acts of looting, destruction of property and violence directed towards state representatives is not only warranted, it is necessary,” says Barnes, a doctoral student in history who once studied in Cuba. …
Noemie Emery says it’s been a bad year for liberal story-tellers.
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the liberals’ narrative outlook on life. One after another of their favorite genres has blown up in their faces as they have been caught telling and promoting stories that were too good to be true.
There was the gender-based theme, as the Rolling Stone tale of the horrendous gang rape at the University of Virginia went the way of the Duke lacrosse story — an elaborate hoax put on by the self-styled victim with no connection whatever to fact. A feminist student complained that “to let fact-checking define the narrative” would be a “mistake.” But a narrative without facts is simply a fiction and a lie that does damage to innocent people. …
… There was no fact-checking around Ferguson, Mo., in August, because the story itself was so good. A 300-pound thief who picked a fight with a cop was turned into a “child” who was cruelly gunned down by a Bull Connor cutout. …
You think it’s just the IRS that’s stonewalling investigators? Kevin Williamson writes that the federal government is starting to look like a criminal enterprise all the way down.
… Earlier this year, 47 inspectors general — the officials charged with fighting corruption, waste, and wrongdoing in federal agencies — sent a letter to Issa’s committee complaining that organizations ranging from the EPA to the Justice Department were impeding their investigations by withholding information — despite the fact that federal law specifically forbids withholding that information. These are not a bunch of Republican operatives trying to score a few political points: Those 47 inspectors general comprise more than half of all such officials, and many who signed the letter were appointed by President Barack Obama. Their complaint is that the federal agencies treat them more or less like they do . . . members of Congress: thwarting them, withholding documents, obstruction investigations.
Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the Justice Department, came to the Oversight Committee practically begging them for a means by which the DOJ – the federal law-enforcement department — might be forced to follow the laws that it is supposed to be enforcing. “It is very clear to me,” he testified, “just as it is to the Inspectors General community, that the Inspector General Act of 1978 entitles inspectors general to access all documents and records within the agency’s possession. Each of us firmly believes that Congress meant what it said in Section 6(a) of the IG Act: that Inspectors General must be given complete, timely, and unfiltered access to agency records.” But under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, the DOJ did no such thing. Horowitz notes that the DOJ specifically tried to withhold information related to the investigation of Operation Fast and Furious. …
Joe Nocera has more on fracking and the falling price of oil.
… “The worst thing from the Saudi point of view would be to announce a production cut, and the prices keep falling,” said Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at ColumbiaUniversity. It doesn’t want to be seen as the emperor with no clothes.
And then, of course, there is the effect of the shale revolution in the United States, where oil production has nearly doubled, to nine million barrels a day from five million a day, in the space of six years. The conventional wisdom holds that the Saudis “fear” the influx of shale oil onto the market — as The Wall Street Journal put it on Monday — and that they want to see the price go down in order to drive out some of that shale production.
But the Saudis don’t really fear shale oil. “I’ve heard officials in Saudi Arabia call shale a blessing,” said Robert McNally, the founder and president of The Rapidan Group, who is also affiliated with the Center on Global Energy Policy. “Shale oil is light,” he added. “Saudi oil is medium and heavy, and their real competitors are the Iraqis and the Iranians.” The Saudis can adjust to shale oil more easily than many other countries.
In effect, shale has the potential to play the role of the “swing supplier,” which is the role the Saudis used to play. At a certain price, it will be uneconomical to drill for shale oil, at which point the price will stabilize. But the shale revolution is still too new for anybody to know what that price is. In a sense, what is going on now is an effort to discover how low oil has to go before shale production declines and the floor is found for the price of oil. …
Just in time for the holidays, The Wall Street Journal has some good news about auto fatalities.
Deaths in car crashes have fallen by about a quarter in the last decade, new federal data released on Friday show, as safety features built into the latest models have powered a drop in fatalities even as auto-safety recalls have surged.
The fall in deaths in newer cars has been especially sharp, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data shows. The number of fatalities in the latest model released each year has fallen by nearly two-thirds in the past decade. In 2013, new cars had a lower fatality rate than cars fresh off the line did just a few years earlier.
Overall, auto deaths fell 3.1% last year over the prior year and the number of people injured in auto crashes fell 2.1%, according to figures released Friday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Safety improvements, in particular electronic stability control systems that make vehicles less likely to flip, are responsible for at least part of the drop in deaths, according to auto-safety and industry experts. …
For a Christmas special we have a link to a video about ship-breakers in Bangladesh. Click here to be happy you’re not there.
For another special, here’s the Air Force Band flash mobbing at the Smithsonian.