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  • A Beating and Racial Slurs – but No Hate-crime Charges

    By Selwyn Duke

    Ah, the left-wing capacity for rationalization knows no bounds.  While we’re told that even substantive criticism of Barack Obama is driven by the hatefulness the left has dubbed “racism,” a racial attack by three black teenagers on two white men in Philadelphia a couple of Mondays ago is , somehow, not.

    Consider the scenario, and then tell me why we even have “hate-crime” laws.  Wrote Stephanie Farr at Philly.com:

    About 8:25 p.m., a cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.

    The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door, pulled the passenger out and started to pummel him, police said.

    The cab driver, Brian Goldman, then exited his vehicle, perhaps to lend assistance, at which point the passenger ran off and the thugs turned their racial wrath on the cabbie.  Despite the three-on-one odds and having suffered some physical injuries, Goldman was able to retrieve a tire iron from his trunk, at which point the brave lads ran off.  They were later apprehended by the police.

    (more…)

  • Obama the Polarizer: The Most Divisive President Ever?

    By Selwyn Duke

    President G.W. Bush might very well have been sincere when he proclaimed, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” but it nevertheless was boilerplate political rhetoric. Barack Obama, too, campaigned on the idea of uniting our nation. It’s an interesting fantasy.

    But the reality is quite different. Recent polls show that if we’re to measure a President’s unitive capacity based on how divided opinion on him is, Obama is the most polarizing Commander-in-Chief in history. Writes The Washington Post, “For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever.” The President also registered the highest partisan gaps on record for his first and second years in office, 65 and 68 percent, respectively.

    Adding perspective, however, the Post points out how this simply hews to recent divided-electorate trends, with seven of the 10 years with the largest presidential approval gaps having occurred since 2004. Writes the paper, “Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.”

    Of course, it should be noted that Bush and Obama weren’t operating on the same playing field. You’re going to seem a lot more divisive when the whole of the mainstream media — from which liberals generally draw their (mis)information — agitates against you 24/7/365, as was Bush’s fate. As for Obama, his definition of unity may be a bit different from everyone else’s. This is the man who said that middle-American voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment…,” who thumbed his nose at the Senate and made recess appointments when that body wasn’t actually in recess, who used underhanded tactics to buy passage of unconstitutional ObamaCare and who appointed avowed communists to office. He also essentially said that Latinos should view other Americans as enemies and imprudently took the side of black college professor Henry Louis Gates against white Cambridge police officers. In the same vein, when he could have stood up and shown that he really was President of all the people and enjoyed a political win-win situation in the process, he instead dropped a voting-rights case against Black Panthers who were brazenly intimidating white Philadelphia voters in 2008.

    Read the rest here.

  • Watching Our Language: The Left-Right Language Barrier

    By Selwyn Duke

    Language barriers are obviously an impediment to communication. If one man speaks Chinese and another Swedish, it may be hard for them to settle even simple matters, let alone the deep issues of the day. Yet there can be language barriers even within a language, such as when people use ill-defined terminology. In fact, some debates rage on endlessly partially because people who have the same tongue are, sometimes unknowingly, speaking a different language.

    This occurs to me when I hear many arguments about Left versus Right. For example, it’s not uncommon for conservatives and liberals to debate whether groups such as the Nazis and Italian fascists were of the Left or Right. Of course, it’s not hard to figure out who takes what position! What, however, is the truth?

    Some will say that you can recognize the “Right” based on racial and nationalistic ideology, but the fact is that there simply is no unique correlation between groups which textbooks have labeled as rightist and such beliefs. For example, Italian fascism — and the ideology was born in Italy — never had a racial or ethnic component. And this changed only a few decades after its birth when, pandering to Hitler, Benito Mussolini enacted some anti-Jewish laws during the waning days of his regime. Even so, these measures were condemned at the time as un-fascist.

    Read the rest here.

  • “Gender-neutral” Childrearing: When a Sexual Hang-up Leads to Child Abuse

    By Selwyn Duke

    First there was “Pop” in Sweden, then “Storm” in Canada. Now out of Britain comes Sasha, a boy, we hear, who is being raised by his parents in a “sex-neutral” fashion. And this isn’t just your modernistic grandmother’s neutrality, where she didn’t want to push toy guns and trucks on her son. Sasha’s parents, Beck Laxton and “partner,” as he’s described, Kieran Cooper, are going the full feminist monty. 

    On Sasha’s birth announcement, there was no indication of sex; and for years Laxton wouldn’t use the pronoun “he” when referring to him on her blog, but instead just indentified him as “the infant.” She explained why in an interview with the Cambridge News, stating, “I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping. Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Therefore, writes Piper Weiss at Shine:

    Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs [sic] from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

    Laxton clearly doesn’t know — and doesn’t seem to care. After all, writes Weiss, “[Laxton is] open to her son pursing any career or sexual preference he chooses….” Yes, well, as long as, I suppose, it’s not “hyper-masculine.” This brings me to my first point.

    Read the rest here.

  • Liberal Greed: Barack Obama and the Real One Percent

    By Selwyn Duke

    Forget Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. If you want to find the real greedy one percent, you need look no further than Barack Obama.

    According to tax returns released yesterday, Barack and Michelle Obama earned $1.2 million from 2000 through 2004 yet managed no more than $10,772 in charitable donations. This amounts to less than one percent of their income. Upon becoming public figures, there was hope and some (spare) change, as they did a lot better in earning and a little better in giving. In 2005 and 2006, they donated $137,622, which was just over 5 percent of the $2.6 million that free enterprise distributed their way.

    In contrast, Romney appears the Santa Claus to Obama’s Scrooge. According to the former Massachusetts Governor’s tax returns, he donated almost $3 million to charity in 2010, just under 14 percent of his $21.7 million income; he did even better in 2011, donating $4 million to charity — almost 20 percent of his $20.9 million income.

    In other words, while Obama talks a good game about redistributing wealth, he seems to want his to stay right where it is.

    Read the rest here.

  • In Praise of a Do-nothing Congress

    By Selwyn Duke

    Here's a question: how can we expect to have small government if we condemn Congress for not growing it?

    It's always a disturbing experience when you're accosted with a picture of Harry Reid, as I was upon logging on to Drudge last Monday afternoon.  But at least his image bore a fitting caption: "MOST FUTILE EVER."  I then clicked the link and found myself at The Washington Times – normally a quite sane organ of the media – and learned the meaning of the caption: the Times was lamenting a do-nothing Congress and presented Reid as its poster boy.  Writes the paper, "It's official: Congress ended its least-productive year in modern history after passing 80 bills – fewer than during any other session since year-end records began being kept in 1947."  

    Writes Duke, "It's official: conservatives are completely confused about what begets big government."

    (more…)

  • How You Can Tell if a Candidate Is Serious About Ending Illegal Migration

    By Selwyn Duke

    Imagine that your son has a habit of sprinkling copious amounts of bird seed and setting up impromptu birdbaths in your yard. You then notice that your property is starting to seem like an aviary, and, as beautiful as the birds are, they’re becoming bothersome. So you approach your husband and ask him to remedy the problem. He then promises to build a scarecrow, but doesn’t complete the job.

    And, when the situation persists and you again ask him to help, he simply scratches his head and replies, “You know, it’s just not realistic to remove all these birds from our property; it’s time-consuming, expensive, and uncompassionate to boot. Besides, every time I chase a few away, more come a little while later.” Now, given that he’s not even hinting at the obvious solution, let alone addressing it, would you think he was very serious about remedying the problem?

    On illegal migration, our politicians are for the birds. When pressed on it, the best of them will talk about building fences, beefing up the border patrol, and, sometimes even, militarizing our southern border. And these measures are all well and good. But when asked what we should do about the 12 to 25 million illegals already on our shores, the issue suddenly becomes more complex than high-temperature superconductivity. The politicians will scratch their heads and then utter something to the effect of, “Well, we can’t deport 12 million people.” It’s a response that some say is a reason and others call an excuse. But I say that, in certain cases at least, it’s something else: a dodge. How do I know? Because obvious solutions can’t elude everyone.

    Read the rest here.

  • Romney’s Whiteness and the Times’ Lightness: Both a Liability

    By Selwyn Duke

    It’s interesting that liberals accuse traditionalists of wanting to turn back the clock. For they themselves live in 1952. To be precise, where those on the right want to resurrect the virtues of ages past, leftists think that vices long buried never died. It’s enough to make me want to bang my head against a wall; only, neurological damage has bad effects like uncontrollable drooling and a desire to read The New York Times.

    Speaking of which, the Old Gay Lady recently published an opinion piece by one Lee Siegel titled "What's Race Got to Do With It?” Discussing the presidential campaign, Mr. Siegel advances the thesis that far from Mitt Romney being at a disadvantage because of what he is (a Mormon), he has an advantage because of what he is: “the whitest white man” running for the presidency. Writes Siegel:

    [T]here has yet to be any discussion over the one quality that has subtly fueled his [Romney’s] candidacy thus far and could well put him over the top in the fall: his race. The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.

    Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

    Read the rest here.

  • If Republicans Want to Win, They Must Shed the Communist-inspired Word “Capitalism”

    Communist FlagBy Selwyn Duke

    One of the simplest rhetorical truths is that the side that defines the vocabulary of a debate wins the debate.  Yet, amazingly, we still see experienced conservative politicians with access to advanced polling operations and an array of advisors use the Lexicon of the Left.  And this election cycle is no exception.

    I could almost cringe when I hear – as I did repeatedly during Monday’s South Carolina GOP debate – Republicans talk about “capitalism.”  “I believe in capitalism….”  “Barack Obama doesn’t believe in capitalism…..”  Capitalism this and capitalism that – look at me with my plump wallet, walking stick and tony top hat.  Oh, it’s not that I don’t believe in free enterprise; it’s that we shouldn’t use words that conjure up sentiments akin to the preceding rhyme.

    (more…)

  • The Hypocrisy and Foolishness of Warren Buffett

    Greedy ManBy Selwyn Duke

    Despite his advanced age, it appears Warren Buffett has never heard the admonition, “Practice what you preach.” And it seems that some of his apologists haven’t, either.

    As you may know, Buffett has long been urging the government to seize more money from the rich, with the rationale that they have an obligation to pay more. In response, many traditionalists have told him to put up or shut up: If he truly believes in what he says, there’s nothing stopping him from writing a check to Big Brother as large as his socialism-espousing mouth.  And now Buffett has a response:

    He will if his critics will.

    Read the rest here.

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