One of the effects of Administration’s implicit endorsement of the marginalization of half the country is that it not only legitimizes the far left fringe, but it emoboldens the weak-minded, intellectually lazy bullies who can't come up with legitimate, logical arguments for their positions and conveniently resort to character attacks on their opponents as a means to "win" an argument. See this enlightening thread for a vivid illustration of this dynamic on a local level and how it turns neighbor against neighbor.
On a broader local level, the race card has, perhaps inevitably, been played in the Philly DA race. The article is worth quoting at length so you can judge for yourself whether charges of racism are warranted or are just another attempt to smear a white Republican for the very great crime of being a white politician running against a black politician in a heavily Democratic city:
Three prominent African American supporters of Seth Williams, the Democratic candidate for Philadelphia District Attorney, today accused his Republican opponent, Michael Untermeyer, of "lacking the racial sensitivity" required of a top prosecutor "in an ethnically diverse city."
Untermeyer, who is white, immediately branded the charge "ludicrous" and "a smokescreen" meant to obscure examination of the campaign's substantive issues.
"This election isn't about race ... What's important is that we have the third highest homicide rate of any big city" in the nation, and a bail system that is broken, he said.
Untermeyer showed up uninvited, unannounced and unwelcome at a news conference called by State Sen. Anthony Williams, NAACP President J. Whyatt Mondesire and Rev. Audrey Brunson, president of Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity.
The GOP candidate said he was there only to defend himself, but his presence in the meeting room at the National Constitution Center led to a brief flaring of tempers over whether he had a right to speak at an event planned and paid for by his opponent's supporters.
The allegations leveled today by Anthony Williams, Mondesire and Brunson stemmed from a comment Untermeyer made two weeks ago in a televised debate. The moderator cited what appeared to be a statistically disproportionate number of blacks from Philadelphia on Pennsylvania's death row, and asked if "racial profiling" figures into the D.A.'s decisions to seek the death penalty.
"The question is, is there racial profiling, and the answer is no, there is no racial profiling," Untermeyer had answered.
Williams, the senator, quoted today from a 2003 Pennsylvania Supreme Court study of racial and gender disparities in the criminal justice system. The high court, he said, had found "strong indications that Pennsylvania's capital justice system does not operate in an evenhanded manner."
Labeling someone a racist is a terrible smear, and the cavalier way it has been done in the last ten months is criminal. Obama’s insertion of himself into the heart of the Skip Gates vs. the Cambridge police matter, despite his "not having all of the facts" and his subsequent and continued silence on all matters racial, speaks volumes; for Obama, and quite possibly Obama alone at this point, has it within his power to put an end to this this harmful, divisive and inappropriate tactic. And yet he chooses not to. And by choosing not to address inappropriate charges of racism, the first “post-racial” President implicitly endorses them. I have no doubts that this is an intentional strategy on behalf of the administration, especially in the wake of Cambridge.
Commenting on the Barack Obama who addresses the nation as a whole versus the Barack Obama who addresses his wealthy, liberal elite fundraisers (video posted By John Lewandowski on PAWatercooler, here) Jay Nordlinger explores this divisiveness a little further in this post, wherin he dismisses the idea that Democrats all think for themselves:
O’s New York commentary reminded me of the notorious Washington Post line, that conservative Christians are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” When you think about it, Obama has a pretty easy time commanding people — millions of them, including important people in media and academia. Including, almost, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee! But some of us, he cannot command — and he seems not to like or respect us all that much.
Long ago, I grew tired of the conceit that Democrats think for themselves, while the rest of us just take orders from some politburo: composed of Rush, Fox, and whoever. All my life, I’ve heard Democrats quote an old Will Rogers line: “I belong to no organized party, I’m a Democrat.” Ha, ha, ha! Oh, aren’t we grand, we Democrats? We beautiful, smart, unorganizable Democrats! Well, Rogers may have had it right at one time; but in my own time, the Democrats have been a pretty disciplined bunch — and pretty ruthless, when it comes to dissent. When it comes to odd-men-out.
I have 30 more things to say, of course, but here’s one more: Do you recall President Bush insulting Democrats, as Obama has insulted us, explicitly? Sometimes our post-partisan president can be a rather nasty piece of work.
Nordlinger continues with a follow up post, further making the case for a bigger sheeple population on the left:
I think about what I call the “shaping institutions.” For the last several decades, virtually all of them have been controlled or dominated by the Left — meaning, education, K through grad school; the movies; entertainment television; popular music; the big newspapers; the small newspapers (!); television news; etc.
Conservatives have to swim against a pretty strong stream. And we’re the ones who are supposed to drift along? I don’t think so.
And then there's this delicious anecdote:
Sometime in the late ’70s, Norman Mailer came to Zellerbach Hall at UC-Berkeley to give a talk. The place was sold out. This was during the period when he was writing pieces refuting Germaine Greer. He walked onstage wearing cowboy boots, Levis, and a shirt and jacket . . . and he had a rolling sort of John Wayne gait.
As he stepped up to the microphone, he said approximately the following: “I know that about half of you here tonight hate my guts because of my stand on feminism. So let’s get that out of the way. I want you to hiss me. I want you to let all of your feelings toward me out. Come on, hiss me!”
And the most spine-chilling hiss arose from the audience. It lasted ten seconds. I’d never heard anything like it before, and I haven’t since. It was authentic and deeply felt. And when it subsided, Mailer leaned into the microphone and said, softly, “Obedient bitches.”
The grim reality is that we are a deeply divided nation, and that we are divided on the very question of what our nation should be. We have drifted far from the pure representative republic our founding fathers originally envisioned. As congress has repeatedly overstepped it's constitutional limits over the years, conservatives should find themselves just as guilty of this big government creep as liberals, since conservatives have only been successful (when they HAVE been successful) at slowing the encroachment of big government rather than stopping it or reversing it.
What exists in this country today is a fundamental difference of opinion on the role of government in American life. About half of the country seems to be in favor of government solutions to just about every problem; the other half seems to be adamantly opposed to more government intrusion in their lives.
Conservatives have what’s left of the Constitution on our side while Liberals are engaging in a fundamentally dishonest campaign. If they want to change the foundations of our country, if they want to toss out, en mass, the limits that the Constitution places on government power, they should be forthright in their campaign. But this is not what they are doing. They claim that the changes they are seeking will leave America intact but this is an outright falsehood. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that what the liberals in power are proposing is a paradigm shift tantamount to a bloodless revolution. And they are counting on the majority of people to be the weak-minded, unthinking sheep that has allowed this big government creep to advance this far. Instead of engaging debate on their agenda, the Administration and liberals in congress are resorting to an organized campaign of bully tactics: silencing their opposition with charges of racism or marginalizing the opposition. In case you didn’t recognize it, this is Chicagoland politics on a national scale.
Here's Andy McCarthy on the Corner discussing the outrageous existence of a "Pay Czar" (A "Pay Czar"! In America! Who would have ever thought it???):
What they're trying to establish is the power to control compensation levels, period. In fact, more and more Democrats are making the insane argument that doing this, and much, much more, is within Congress's purportedly limitless constitutional power to "promote the general welfare." This is really scary stuff, and I'm afraid I don't see a silver lining.
I'm gonna plagiarize Mark Levin here. Mark has been recounting how, when FDR foisted social security on the country, his administration told the public it was an insurance program. This was legally dubious — the government has no constitutional authority to force people to buy insurance — so his Solicitor General told the Supreme Court it was a tax, an argument the justices bought.
The moral of the story is that the public pretty quickly loses track of the legal niceties involved when government power expands. They just get used to the idea that this is something government does, and they accept it. That, I think, is what's going on with the pay czar . . . and health-care "reform" . . . and auto-company takeovers . . . and government taking equity positions in banks . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .
Thinking people of all ideologies should be asking themselves why this Administration needs to silence the opinions of the right instead of engaging them.
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