Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Victor Davis Hanson in an essay points out the politics and hypocrisy of the left’s charges of racism and sexism.
… Certainly, few on the left worried much about the slurs against Sarah Palin during and after her vice-presidential run. America’s overclass in the media and leftist politics constructed a sexist portrait of a clueless white-trash mom in Wasilla, Alaska, mindlessly having lots of kids after barely graduating from the University of Idaho. …
… The Black Caucus rarely if ever comes to the defense of Justice Clarence Thomas when, periodically, liberal commentators suggest that he was and is unqualified, and is largely a token black conservative. No one suggests that the New York Times is on an anti-Latino crusade against Marco Rubio in trying to fashion a story of recklessness from the paltry evidence of his receiving one traffic ticket every four years. …
… Would Elizabeth Warren really have become a Harvard law professor had she not, during her long years of academic ascent, identified herself (at least privately, on universities’ pedigree forms) as a Native American? Ward Churchill, with his beads and Indian get-up, won a university career that otherwise might have been scuttled by his mediocrity, his pathological untruths, and his aberrant behavior. Why would the current head of the NAACP in Spokane, Wash., a white middle-class woman named Rachel Dolezal, go to the trouble of faking a genealogy, using skin cosmetics and hair styling, and constructing false racist enemies to ensure that she was accepted as a victimized black woman?
The obvious inference is that Ms. Dolezal assumed that being a liberal black woman brought with it career opportunities in activist groups and academia otherwise beyond her reach as a middle-class white female of so-so talent. …
… Poor George Zimmerman. His last name stereotyped him as some sort of Germanic gun nut. But had he just ethnicized his maternal half-Afro Peruvian identity and reemerged as Jorgé Mesa, Zimmerman would have largely escaped charges of racism. He should have taken a cue from Barack Obama, who sometime in his late teens at OccidentalCollege discovered that the exotic nomenclature of Barack Obama radiated a minority edge, in a way that the name of his alter ego, Barry Soetoro, apparently never quite had. …
… Fourth, sexism and racism are abstractions of the liberal elite that rarely translate into praxis. Barack Obama could have done symbolic wonders for the public schools by taking his kids out of Sidwell Friends and putting them into the D.C. school system. Elizabeth Warren could have cemented her feminist populist fides by vowing to stop flipping houses. Feminist Bill Clinton could have renounced all affairs with female subordinates. Eric Holder could have vowed never to use government jets to take his kids to horse races. In solidarity with co-eds struggling with student loans, Hillary Clinton could have promised to limit her university speaking fees to a thousand dollars per minute rather than the ten thousand dollars for each 60 seconds of chatting that she actually gets, and she might have prefaced her public attacks on hedge funds by dressing down her son-in-law. …
Some of our favorites have comments on Rachel Dolezal – the fake black. Peter Wehner is first.
There is something comedic and pathetic about the story of Rachel Dolezal. Ms. Dolezal, 37, is the president of the NAACP local chapter in Spokane, Washington and a part-time Africana Studies professor at EasternWashingtonUniversity. It turns out that after claiming for years that she was black – including on applications, posting pictures on a Facebook page of an African-American man she falsely claimed was her father, and insisting that her adopted brother (who is black) was her child – Ms. Dolezal is actually white. Her birth certificate proves it. And her biological parents, Ruthanne and Lawrence Dolezal, have confirmed it.
“Rachel has wanted to be somebody she’s not. She’s chosen not to just be herself but to represent herself as an African American woman or a biracial person. And that’s simply not true,” Ruthanne Dolezal said. Her mother said Rachel began to “disguise herself” in 2006 or 2007.
This interview shows Dolezal being caught in her lie. It also seems quite likely that her claim that she’s received racially motivated hate letters and pictures was a ruse. (Police are still investigating, but say that whoever placed the mail must have had access to the mailbox, as it was not processed through the regular mail.) …
Jonathan Tobin is next.
… it is precisely the sort of race-baiting activism that Dolezal (who was an active participant in the Baltimore protests over the killing of a black man by the police) has engaged in that makes such a goal unattainable. Ironically, rather than working to create a post-racial society in which the barriers between the races are demolished, Dolezal and many of her adopted comrades in what now styles itself the civil rights movement seek to entrench the divides between us and even to enshrine them in law. It is the advocates of affirmative action and other counter-productive race entitlements that hold onto the notion that America is a country primarily motivated by old hatreds long after such notions have become marginal or altogether discarded. Rather than the virtually non-existent supporters of Jim Crow being the problem, it is the Al Sharptons and their lesser-known acolytes such as Dolezal who do the most to render us a nation divided by race in 2015. …
John Hinderaker quotes a comment to one his Power Line posts.
… Maybe there is a silver lining to the Rachel Dolezal / Sen. Elizabeth Warren race frauds. If racial identity and gender identity have become matters of personal preference, i.e., how you choose to identify yourself is how the world should treat you, then the entire race-based / gender-based affirmative action apparatus could be brought to its knees. Suppose all the Asian students denied admission to Harvard decided to check the “African-American” box on their applications, instead of the “Asian” box? When challenged, they would simply say, “Well, I always felt more African-American than Asian; heck, I’ve never even been to Asia.” Suppose every single “White” or “Asian” student randomly checked a “Latino,” “African-American” or “Native-American” box on their applications? How would the affirmative-action apparatus sort out what the applicant’s “real” races are? Would they administer blood tests? Demand photographs (which would be far from conclusive)? How would they deal with the ever-increasing numbers of applicants with mixed racial origins?
If self-declaration is all that’s necessary, then why shouldn’t all students declare the “race” that maximizes their chances of admission? A mass protest of this nature would expose the affirmative-action apparatus for what it is: a quota system based upon self-proclaimed ethnic origin. What if an entire class of high-school seniors all agreed to check the same box, as a form of protest? “We’re all Native Americans, here!” What would the race-baiters do? …
Kevin Williamson writes on the Trump entrance in a piece titled “Witless Ape Rides Escalator.”
… Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy at TrumpPlaza, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see the peerless sign of our times?
On the substance, Trump is — how to put it gently? Oh, why bother! — an ass. Not just an ass, but an ass of exceptionally intense asininity. China? “China’s leaders are like Tom Brady, and the U.S. is like a high-school football team,” Trump says. And so, we should do what? …
… We’ve been to this corner of Crazytown before. If we’re going to have a billionaire dope running for the presidency, I prefer Ross Perot and his cracked tales of Vietnamese hit squads dispatched to take him out while Lee Atwater plotted to crash his daughter’s wedding with phonied-up lesbian sex pictures. …
Speaking of crackpots, Bjørn Lomborg has ideas about how Pope Ignoramus could really help the poor.
Pope Francis’s concern for the poor is clear, so it is understandable that climate change is the topic of his forthcoming Encyclical — a Papal letter that is sent out to the world. Climate change will hit the most destitute people first and worst.
But the Pope after his letter is officially published, he should tread carefully. The climate policies of today will do little for the poor.
A cruel truth is that almost every significant challenge on Earth hits the poor more than the wealthy: hunger, a lack of clean drinking water, malaria, indoor air pollution. The question then is how we make the most difference for the most vulnerable.
A reasonable starting point is to listen to the world’s citizens. A United Nations survey of 7.5 million people found that many other issues are deemed more urgent. The top priorities were education, health, jobs, corruption and nutrition. Of 16 problems, the climate was rated the lowest priority.
One reason may be that today’s climate policies themselves have a cost, which predominantly hits the poor.
Cuts in electricity consumption require price hikes that hurt the worst-off and elderly. Relying on expensive green energy sources like wind and solar power makes electricity pricier and less available for those who desperately need it.
The biggest problem with today’s climate change policies is that they will cost a fortune for very little good. …
The cartoonists have fun with the two frauds – Rachel Dolezal and Donald.