It’s Monday, July 22nd, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the week, we continue our coverage of Der Obafuhrer’s latest attempt to hijack American law with one of the more insightful tweets we’ve seen, particularly from a celebrity:
Turning from the brilliant to the boneheaded…
Two thoughts: (1) we believe the AP meant “broader” rather than “border”; (2) what’s the goal here? That Floridians hand over Zimmerman to the New Black Panthers for punishment? Perhaps they expect Governor Rick Scott to imitate The Dear Misleader by overturning the rule of law and unilaterally declaring Zimmerman guilty? Or do they really believe a boycott primarily composed of Blacks will somehow force the citizens of Florida to beg The Obamao to initiate a federal civil rights case?
Initial reports the Congressional White Caucus was contemplating a retaliatory boycott of America’s inner cities were apparently unfounded. Such a caucus, of course, doesn’t exist; and the policies promulgated over the last half-century by America’s Progressives having rendered our inner cities essentially unlivable make any boycott moot.
Meanwhile, courtesy of Speed Mach and the Chicago Tribune, John Kass offers his assessment of The Great Divider’s homage to the Trayvon Martin. We’ll note in advance though Kass makes some good points, we find him somewhat off the mark on a number of others:
President’s Trayvon speech worthy of maestro
Watching President Barack Obama play the race card late last week in the matter of the Zimmerman trial reminded me that the guy from Chicago has truly amazing powers. He stood in the White House briefing room, and through the magic of his own silky rhetoric and skill with metaphor, he was able animate the body of a slain African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin.
Obama pronounced the killing as racially motivated, though he didn’t use the words. He didn’t have to, such is his prowess. It was so smooth that few noticed. He put the killing in a racial context, and that was enough. “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago,” Obama told reporters at the White House on Friday, addressing last weekend’s acquittal of Martin’s shooter, George Zimmerman.
Could Obama have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago? Perhaps. If so, then any of us could have been Trayvon Martin. And I could have been Trayvon Martin. Racial motives weren’t established at trial. And reportedly, the FBI still hasn’t found racial motives in George Zimmerman, who is Hispanic.
Race was established by the president of the United States, and by other political and media actors. It’s a cynical business, about money and power, about keeping divisions between American tribes. There are the black tribes that see Martin in the context of the old civil rights struggles and leverage, and white tribes that see Martin being used to pummel them with racial guilt.
The algebra of all of this is as old as some musty textbook in your uncle’s garage. We’ve seen it before. We’ve heard the lines, the formulations, the slogans, and some of us recite them the way we recite phrases from television commercials. We’re given just enough evidence and we’re told we must choose a side.
Yet none of this tribalism has anything to do with what happened the night Martin was killed. Politicians don’t worry about that. They’re experts at the game of tribes, and a tribal America is what nourishes them. Americanism should be about something more than tribes and groups. Americanism should instead be about individuals, about individual promise, individual accomplishment. Only an individual can give another respect. Tribes can’t. What tribes do is battle other tribes over the spoils of government. This has nothing to do with individual respect. It has everything to do with group leverage.
Clearly, Martin and Zimmerman didn’t give each other respect. Each one could and should have walked away, and didn’t. Many homicides happen that way, with bad choices and stupidity and anger. Homicides are never political at the beginning. They become so only after the body is cold, when the political actors approach and heat things up.
The rest of the president’s commentary was quite touching, describing how young African-American men are followed in department stores, and how he was one of those followed, or how motorists lock their doors, how women clutch their purses when a black man enters an elevator. It was compelling talk for a president who avoids discussing race almost as much as he avoids discussing all those young African-American men shot down in Chicago every year in the street gang wars. (Particularly one who has been shown to have repeatedly lied about his personal history and experiences.)
But first came the sound bite in which he became Trayvon Martin. He knew what he was delivering. It was no accident. The rest of it was the cover. Many will applaud him for initiating sensitive discussion about race in America, and many will miss completely what he did. He played the race card and they didn’t see it coming. He attributed racial motive to a homicide even though the race angle was never established in court. (Or indicated by any investigation or evidence!) And he’ll be praised. That’s skill. That’s power.
Despite Obama’s assertion that he could have been Martin, the jury did not believe that the teenager was killed because he was black. Many in the news media clearly believed the race angle, which reinforces American tribalism. Perhaps the worst of many violators was NBC News. That network’s cynical editing of Zimmerman’s 911 emergency call should cost them millions in damages.
By saying he could have been Trayvon Martin, President Obama bypassed the evidence and established his own motive. Only a maestro could accomplish this. “I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul searching,” Obama said, and I hope he included himself in the search.
“There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race,” he continued. “I haven’t seen that to be particularly productive. When politicians try to organize conversations they end up being stilted and politicized, when folks are locked into the positions they already have.” They get locked into positions with help from those who would ostensibly lead them away from ignorance and anger and fear. No one wins the game of tribes but the leaders.
Or in this case, the tribe’s…
…misleader!
As stated previously, Kass’ commentary certainly makes sense, particularly as regards the only real winners in what is unquestionably the national game of tribes being played by Progressives. But we disagree with several of his conclusions.
First, far from any artfulness, Obama’s interjection of race had all the subtlety of a jack hammer; it was obvious as the ears on his head. Only those blinded by devotion to the myth of Hope & Change (your average Liberal), self-interest (the “Reverends” or partisan politics could fail to note the rank opportunism so obvious in his words.
Second, assuming for the moment a “White” tribe actually existed (a postulation with which we beg to differ), a significant portion would hardly be in competition with darker tribes for government spoils they, desiring as they do nothing from their government but to be left alone.
Lastly, though we agree both Zimmerman and Martin should have walked away, there’s compelling evidence Martin wouldn’t, and Zimmerman likely couldn’t, as evidenced by the latest, and perhaps greatest, installment of Bill Whittle’s Afterburner. The facts not only strongly support our contention George Zimmerman was fundamentally framed, but offer additional insight into the frame of mind of the young Mr. Martin you’ll never get from the MSM:
Seriously, folks; Der Obafuhrer isn’t stupid; so is it really possible for Charles Barkley…
…to grasp the reality of an issue and it possibly escape the comprehension of the President of the United States?!?
In a related item, courtesy of the WSJ, the great Shelby Steele details…
The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment
Black leaders weren’t so much outraged at injustice as they were by the disregard of their own authority.
The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America’s civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like “diversity” and “inclusiveness” simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.
On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren’t so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, “You won’t call the tune here. We will work within the law.”
Today’s black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and ’60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager.
This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today’s civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).
The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman. (Particularly when one is cursed with the innumerable character flaws of Jackson and Sharpton!)
Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.
The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.
The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a “poetic truth.” Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one’s cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: “America is a racist nation”; “the immigration debate is driven by racism”; “Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon.” And we say, “Yes, of course,” lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.
In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.
The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean—the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.
And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment’s mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.
One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?
There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today’s civil-rights leadership.
Wow; talk about calling a spade a spade!
In a related development brought to our attention by Balls Cotton…
Next up, it’s today’s Money Quote, courtesy of Hairplug Joe, who recently noted:
“I can die a happy man never having been president.“
Not as happy as the rest of us, Joe…not as happy as the rest of us!
Moving on, as this next item from MilitaryTimes.com via The New Media Journal confirms, the Chicago-style corruption which permeates the Executive Branch has passed over the Potomac to the Pentagon:
Pentagon Misleads on Commander’s Availability to Testify on Benghazi
When insurgents attacked the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, last fall, Col. George Bristol held a key post in the region. As commander of Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara, he was in a position to know what options the US had to protect Americans under fire.
US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in the Sept. 11 attacks, sparking national outcry and a congressional investigation examining the lack of protection. Several US officials have testified before Congress since — but not Bristol, a salty Marine whose task force was responsible for special operations in northern and western Africa.
Defense Department officials have told members of Congress that Bristol cannot be forced to testify because he retired after stepping down during a March change of command ceremony, according to several media reports. The Pentagon reinforced that point of view to Marine Corps Times on Tuesday. “Col. Bristol was not invited by Congress to testify before he retired,” said Air Force Maj. Robert Firman, a spokesman with the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “The DoD has cooperated fully with Congress and the Accountability Review Board since the beginning of this investigation, and we will continue to do so.”
That isn’t the case, however. While Bristol is preparing for retirement, he is on active duty through the end of July, said Maj. Shawn Haney, a Marine spokeswoman, on Wednesday. He will be placed on the inactive list on Aug. 1, she said. That contradicts statements that Pentagon officials have issued to both Congress and the media.
Pentagon officials said Wednesday that they were looking into the case. (Undoubtedly with the same zeal and laser-like focus this Administration has shown in its response to every other inquiry.) The situation will likely frustrate congressional critics, primarily Republicans, who say the Obama administration has not been truthful about the Benghazi attack and the US response to it. (Now why would they think that?!?) They have repeatedly said the White House is guilty of a cover-up, despite an independent report that blamed the State Department for inadequate security at the compound in Benghazi.
Marine Corps Times sought comment Wednesday from Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), both of whom have sought Pentagon assistance in finding Bristol. Neither office had an immediate response. In a CBS News report earlier this month, however, Chaffetz questioned why the Pentagon couldn’t find Bristol. “They say he’s retired and they can’t reach out to him,” Chaffetz said. “That’s hogwash.”
“Hogwash” is, to say the least, putting it mildly. Outside of the Vietnam War, can anyone ever remember another time in recent memory the Pentagon played a similar game of hide-the-ball with Congress? It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that like a fish, an organization…
…rots from the head!
But as this next item courtesy of Balls Cotton and the Los Angeles Times details, what can one expect from an organization that maintains the privilege of rank…
…in the face of sequestration?!? One would have thought Admiral Clingan in particular, having cost the taxpayers $35M during carrier qualifications in the F-14 RAG, would have a better appreciation of the value of the public’s buck!
But wait; haven’t we heard this tune before?!? Oh…yeah…
First family returns to Martha’s Vineyard for summer vacation, while furloughs kick in
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s this bit of pointed humor from Carl Polizzi…
…along with this from our confidential source at the U.S. Naval Academy; check out the last Plebe Sunday seminar offered:
We agree with our source, who noted they looked for the “It’s Tough Being a Man” seminar, but couldn’t find one. What inquiring minds want to know is whether the “Holy Hip Hop Bible Study” is only for Blacks?!?
And in what we’ll describe as a cross between the Crime Blotter and the Physics segment, we present a brilliant bit of detective work from Houston law enforcement, as…
Rumors Houston police were still investigating whether it might in fact have been the sudden stop which killed her remain unconfirmed.
Finally, in the Entertainment Section, based on the coming attractions we saw previewed last evening…
Hollywood facing summer crisis with multiple big budget flops
…this headline comes as no surprise. Given the nature of the fare we were forced to endure, we can only hope Hollywood crashes and burns like Detroit.
Magoo
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