Choosing Policies Based On Character, Or Color: Please Choose Wisely

It was the late 1980s, and I experienced something that will probably puzzle me for the rest of my life on this earth.

I had ordered “Blazer Cable” so that I could see the Portland Trailblazer home games.  And in order to help pay for it – and to make it more fun to watch – I got a few friends to go in on it with me.

One night, one of my friends brought one of his friends over on a night when the Blazers were playing the Chicago Bulls.  I thought the guy had some faulty wiring from about the moment I met him, but, what they hey.

In any event, to get to the point, at some point during the game my friend’s friend was sitting on the couch alone with me (everybody else was either in the kitchen or in the bathroom, as it was halftime).  They were interviewing Michael Jordan.  And he looked over at me and said, “Would you trade places with Michael Jordan?”

This was like the stupidest questions I had ever heard, and I’ve heard quite a few stupid questions.

“Of course I would,” I said.  I mean, duh.  Michael Jordan was strikingly handsome, he was filthy rich, he was incredibly successful, and he was one of the best athletes in the history of the human race.  And I wouldn’t want to trade places with him why, exactly?

Then came the only possible answer.

My friend’s friend starting giggling.  I can’t really call it laughing.

“What the hell is so funny?” I asked.

“You’d trade places with a black guy,” he said, still giggling.

Well, yeah.  I waited to hear the cross-eyed albino boy start playing a banjo.

At the time, I was too astonished to be angry at the guy.  It was like encountering someone who – in spite of massive evidence to the contrary – believed he was invisible to the human eye.

I’ve thought about that few second encounter a number of times since.  It still amazes me to this very day.  How can somebody possibly get that stupid?

In the years before that moment, and since then, I had known some black men who were total turds.  And I have known some black men whom I regarded as having superior character to my own.

Lumping people into racial groups and then judging people on the basis of the color of their skin is every bit as stupid as not wanting to change places with Michael Jordan simply “because he’s black.”  But I see it being done all the time these days.  By the left.

I was raised to regard character, intelligence, virtue, attitude and attractiveness of personality as the qualities that determined the value of a person.  It had never even occurred to me to think that the color of one’s skin made on more or less valuable.

I was also raised to want to continue to improve myself.  I was raised to want to become a better human being, to improve my station in, and my quality of, life.

I think that’s why I react so viscerally to the racial attitude inherent in modern liberalism.  To pit people against each other on the basis of color and bigotry, and to label white people as being evil and somehow complicit in some kind of white power structure is bad enough.  But it goes beyond that.

It’s self-taught, self-limiting perpetual victimhood.  It’s providing a class of people with a ready-made excuse for failure; it’s discouraging them from even really bothering to try, and rewarding them for not trying; it’s an evil exchange in which one accepts all kinds of control over their lives in exchange for destructive and cancerous welfare; it’s wallowing in an attitude of bitterness and even self-loathing that dooms one to a life of misery.  It is a guaranteed perpetuation of failure.

It is a completely alien worldview to me.  Every bit as much as that idiot who wouldn’t trade places with Michael Jordan “because he’s black.”

I made the earlier comment that I’ve met black men whom I regarded as being superior to me in the thing that I value most – character.  They were examples to me, and as a result of their friendship, I became a better person.  I’ve also known a number of white men whose superior character helped me advance in my own life.  The point is that you desire excellence, and you take it wherever you can find it.

I have a feeling that Pastor C.L. Bryant would be one of those men, were I fortunate enough to know him.

From ScottFactor.com:

Slavery, Courtesy Of Liberals Everywhere
July 27th, 2010

Comedian Eddie Murphy once joked that Lincoln forgot to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and that people should go out and claim their slaves. I’m here to tell you that the Democratic Party took that request seriously and have claimed their slaves.
When 98 percent of African-Americans vote Democrat, that tells me that they are psychological and economic slaves to a Party that structures its fiscal policy to keep the black man down.

Welfare policy, government-forced affirmative action, reduced testing requirements for minorities…these are all things that don’t serve to elevate people to greatness, rather, they keep people down.

This video is a movie trailer about a man who proposes that these slaves to the liberals run away from the slave plantation that liberals have created. Its creator, Pastor C.L. Bryant, holds an honest discussion about black conservatives in America. Quote the man, “Run away from the slavery of tyranny toward the blessings of liberty!” Check it out:

David Horowitz rightly calls African-Americans “the human shields of the Democrat Party.”  It simply a fact of history that modern African-Americans have come hat-in-hand to the Party of Slavery, and the Party of the Ku Klux Klan.

That analogy illustrates a simple fact that was well-known only a couple years after the Civil War ended:

And the above isn’t a cartoon from some “right wing” loon, but from the venerable and quite left-leaning Harper’s Magazine.

Even the left-leaning historian Eric Foner observed that:

“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life” (Foner 1989, p. 425–426).

I wrote the following as part of a comment a few weeks ago to point how how shockingly far black Americans have gone from what should have been their core:

Let us never forget that Democrats were the party of slavery. And that Democrats were the creators of the Ku Klux Klan. It literally took a war in which Democrats had to be militarily crushed to keep them from enslaving people based on the color of their skin. And thank God for the Republican Party and a Republican president for freeing the slaves from Democrats. Let’s not forget that Woodrow Wilson – Democrat president and the father of the progressive movement – RE-segregated the military after Republicans had DE-segregated it. Let us not forget that Wilson cheered the racist propaganda film “Birth of a Nation.” Let us never forget that the national party convention that was so directly tied to the Ku Klux Klan that it was called the “Klanbake” was the 1924 DEMOCRAT convention. Let’s not forget that FDR’s New Deal directly attacked blacks and kept them from getting jobs.

Few know about the incredibly racist history of pro-Democrat labor unions (see also here), but it is both very real and very ugly.  And progressive Democrats were at the very core of it.

Few have bothered to learn the Democrat Party’s profound legacy of racism.  Or the Republican Party’s history of standing up to protect the rights, freedoms and dignities of black Americans.

As we move into the 1950s we find that a Democrat Governor, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard in 1957 to prevent black children being integrated into white schools. And again, a Republican president had to rise to the occasion, with Dwight D. Eisenhower sending in US Army airborne troops to enforce racial equality that had once again been opposed by Democrats. And of course Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace would fight for racist segregation all over again in 1963. It was Democrat John F. Kennedy who sent in the troops this time. But few are aware that that same John Kennedy had previously voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act.

And let us not forget that both the famous Martin Luther King, Sr. and his even more famous son were both registered Republicans. It’s a shame that the pseudo civil rights leaders of today aren’t fit to carry Martin Luther King’s shoes, much less criticize his party affiliation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas BOTH fundamentally opposed the quotas and preferential treatment that liberals have employed to create the equivalent of the Democrat “house negro.” Jack Greenberg of the NAACP said in the 1950s that “The chief problem with quotas is that they introduce a potentially retrogressive concept into the cherished notion of individual equality.”  But it is readily obvious today that the NAACP has fallen far from it’s roots.

Let’s listen to Frederick Douglas, escaped slave and greatest of all champions of civil rights, has to say:

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”77 On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So now conservatives are suddenly racists for agreeing with Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. and against liberals and the vile pseudo values that the greatest civil rights leaders in history condemned?

Richard Nixon, whom Democrats love to make the poster boy for “Republican racism,” was in fact the first president to introduce the racial quotas that Democrats have been trying to implement and expand ever since.  Which is to say that, if you want to argue that Nixon was a racist, Democrats have been baptizing themselves in Nixon’s racism ever since.  And if Nixon employed a racially immoral strategy to win whites, the Democrat Party has employed the flip-side of that same immoral strategy to win blacks.

Liberals are biblical – and never in a good way:

PSA 52:3 You love evil more than good, Falsehood more than speaking what is right.
MIC 3:2 “You who hate good and love evil, Who tear off their skin from them And their flesh from their bones

History proves again and again that DEMOCRATS are the racists, and conservatives have stood for genuine equality again and again.

There are men and women of basic virtue in every race, and even every creed.  The problem is that there are fewer and fewer of these, while the men and women of apathy, degeneration and self-centeredness abound.

Slavery is a terrible thing.  But it is even worse when one willingly applies the shackles to his or her own wrists and ankles and demands the right to a government-imposed easy way out, in pathetic contrast to the principle from an Aesop fable, “Better to starve free than be a fat slave.”

Watch the video.  One of the amazing and tragic facts that emerge is that, with liberal ideology and Democrat policies paving the way, blacks have instituted their own self-genocide, murdering more than one-third of their very own children.

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s Mentor In Marxist Racism

From the family photo album: you can call it “Obama with his uncle,” or “Obama with his spiritual mentor,” or “Obama with his pastor for more than 20 years.”  I prefer to title it, “Racist-in-Chief Poses With His Guru.”

Jeremiah Wright is Barack Obama’s guru in Marxism and racism.

No human being of principle or virtue would have spent 20 seconds in Jeremiah Wright’s demonic cesspool.  Barack Obama spent 20 years there.  He asked Jeremiah Wright to marry him to Michelle.  He raised his children under this evil man.

From the New York Post:

Obama’s race-rant Rev. rages on
‘White folk done took this country’
By MAUREEN CALLAHAN
Last Updated: 5:00 PM, June 27, 2010

CHICAGO — He’s been keeping such a low profile since nearly derailing Barack Obama’s campaign for president in 2008 — is it possible that the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright has mellowed?

Hardly.

During a five-day seminar Wright taught last week in Chicago, he was back at it, claiming that whites and Jews are controlling the flow of worldwide information and oppressing blacks in Israel and America.

“White folk done took this country,” Wright said. “You’re in their home, and they’re gonna let you know it.”

The course, advertised as focusing on politics and public policy in South Africa and America, was taught in a small, ground-floor room at the Chicago Theological Seminary, where Wright’s voice echoed out an open window. The class was composed of about 15 to 20 students, mainly older African-American women who would arrive early and giddily linger during lunch breaks and after class, looking for the reverend’s attention. (The course cost a little over $1,000 if taken for college credit and $300 if taken without.)

The absence of young people was telling: The lectures seemed ossified, relics of a pre-civil-rights America — a point that Obama himself made during his famous speech on race in March 2008, prompted by the incendiary comments (“God damn America!”) made by his former pastor and mentor.

“Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect,” Obama said.

Yet during this course — which was described as asking, “What is the response and public witness of persons of faith to ongoing developments in both countries?” — Wright made many statements about what he believes are the true aims of whites and Jews.

“You are not now, nor have you ever been, nor will you ever be a brother to white folk,” he said. “And if you do not realize that, you are in serious trouble.”

He cited the writings of Bill Jones — author of the book “Is God a White Racist?” — as proof that white people cannot be trusted. “Bill said, ‘They just killed four of their own at Kent State. They’ll step on you like a cockroach and keep on movin’, cause you not a brother to them.’ ”

Wright referred to Italians as “Mamma Luigi” and “pizzeria.” He said the educational system in America is designed by whites to miseducate blacks “not by benign neglect but by malignant intent.”

He said Ethiopian Jews are despised by white Jews: “And now the Knesset [Israeli parliament] is meeting with European Jews, voting on whether or not these African Jews can get into [Israel].”

The civil-rights movement, Wright said, was never about racial equality: “It was always about becoming white . . . to master what [they] do.” Martin Luther King, he said, was misguided for advocating nonviolence among his people, “born in the oven of America.”

“We probably have more African-Americans who’ve been brainwashed than we have South Africans who’ve been brainwashed,” he said, and seemed to allude to President Obama twice: “Unfortunately, I got in trouble with a fella for saying this . . . All your commentaries are written by oppressors.” At the mention of Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan — whom Obama disavowed during the campaign — black leaders “go cuttin’ and duckin’,” he said.

In March, Wright told The Washington Post that he expects to speak to Obama again, when “he is out of the White House.” Last June, he told a Virginia newspaper that the only reason he and the president were not speaking at the moment is that “them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me.”

From 1972 until May 2008, Wright served as pastor of Trinity United Church of Chicago, located in a rough area of the city’s South Side. Today, he is “pastor emeritus” and identified as such on the rugs that line the doorways at Trinity.

Until very recently, Wright lived with his wife and children in a nearby two-story house, in a more affluent subdivision surrounded by roadblocks; the line between rich and poor is literal. His former neighbors all say he kept to himself.

A few months ago, Wright and his family moved into a brand-new million-dollar home located near a golf course and made of stone with a recessed doorway surrounded by pillars. It’s the only house on a cul-de-sac. Records show it was sold by Trinity United Church to a company called ATG Trust and paid for in cash.

Since leaving Trinity, Wright has traveled the country, preaching and lecturing. He said he’s been working “all year long” with Trinity’s preschool program and called US Education Secretary Arne Duncan a disaster. Duncan, a former college basketball star, was given the job only because Obama enjoys his “good jump shot in the back yard,” Wright said.

Wright gives interviews intermittently but declined to speak to The Post. He recently headlined a two-day “men’s empowerment revival” in Florida but in mixed company is careful not to say anything racist or inflammatory.

The most he had to say about the African-American experience that day was “God is working on your behalf.”

You look at the anti-Semitic race hatred of Barack Obama, as epitomized in the words of his mentor and spiritual leader for over 20 years, and then you have this result in Obama’s policy:

Israel-US relations suffering ‘tectonic rift’
Israel’s ambassador to US says Washington-Tel Aviv ties worse than a crisis under Obama.

TEL AVIV – Israeli-US relations have undergone a huge shift amounting to what Israel’s ambassador to Washington has termed “a genuine tectonic rift,” media reports said on Sunday.

Briefing officials at the foreign ministry last week, ambassador Michael Oren described the state of ties between Israel and its closest ally as worse than a crisis, something akin to that of two continents drifting apart.

According to one diplomat quoted by the Haaretz daily, Oren used bleak terms to explain the changes which have taken place under the administration of US President Barack Obama.

“Relations are in the state of a tectonic rift in which continents are drifting apart,” Oren was quoted as saying by the diplomat.

Another diplomat who spoke to the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily said there had been an historic change in Washington’s approach to Israel.

“There is no crisis in Israel-US relations because in a crisis there are ups and downs,” he quoted Oren as saying.

Both papers quoted Oren as attributing the shift in sentiment to “interests and cold considerations” by Obama who did not have the same historical-ideological bent towards Israel as his predecessors.

We’ve got a crystal clear trend emerging from Jeremiah Wright to the coldest and most hostile relationship with Israel in the history of US-Israeli relations consisting of both Democrat and Republican administrations.

Obama promised he would transcend racial and political divides.  He lied.

Liberals looked at Obama and saw nothing but whatever the lying rhetoric of the moment was, but this is what I saw: Barack Obama’s “value system” from his church of 23 years:
1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.

I would have similarly boldfaced the word “white,” but alas, it never managed to appear as a group that Obama’s church of 23 years gave a damn about. No Asians, Indians, Arabs, etc either, I couldn’t help but notice.

It’s an ugly thing to look at the Democrat Party’s vile history of racism.  Then or now.

During the election, New Black Panther thugs brandished weapons and directly threatened people who were trying to vote.  Obama’s response was that no charges would be filed if the intimidator were black and the voter was white.  It’s fine to violate a white man’s civil rights, as long as a black man is doing it.  Why?  For the same reason he assumed “the police acted stupidly” without knowing any of the facts simply because the cop was white and the man breaking into his own home happened to be black.

Mind you, Barrack Obama is a man who has told so many lies in his brief career as president that it would be a shorter endeavor to list the truths he’s told.

Black civil right leaders of today despise the movement that registered Republican Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned.  They pay lip service to it, of course, because they have to, but in their heart of hearts, it’s all about “becoming white” to them.

Men like this talk about racism, when they themselves are racist to their very cores.

I wrote the following as part of a comment less than two weeks ago.  Tell me how true it sounds in light of Obama’s pastor:

Let us never forget that Democrats were the party of slavery. And that Democrats were the creators of the Ku Klux Klan. It literally took a war in which Democrats had to be militarily crushed to keep them from enslaving people based on the color of their skin. And thank God for the Republican Party and a Republican president for freeing the slaves from Democrats. Let’s not forget that Woodrow Wilson – Democrat president and the father of the progressive movement – RE-segregated the military after Republicans had DE-segregated it. Let us not forget that Wilson cheered the racist propaganda film “Birth of a Nation.” Let us never forget that the national party convention that was so directly tied to the Ku Klux Klan that it was called the “Klanbake” was the 1924 DEMOCRAT convention. Let’s not forget that FDR’s New Deal directly attacked blacks and kept them from getting jobs.

Few know about the incredibly racist history of pro-Democrat labor unions (see also here), but it is both very real and very ugly.  And progressive Democrats were at the very core of it.

As we move into the 1950s we find that a Democrat Governor, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard in 1957 to prevent black children being integrated into white schools. And again, a Republican president had to rise to the occasion, with Dwight D. Eisenhower sending in US Army airborne troops to enforce racial equality that had once again been opposed by Democrats. And of course Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace would fight for racist segregation all over again in 1963. It was Democrat John F. Kennedy who sent in the troops this time. But that same John Kennedy had previously voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act.

And let us not forget that both the famous Martin Luther King, Sr. and his even more famous son were both registered Republicans. It’s a shame that the pseudo civil rights leaders of today aren’t fit to carry Martin Luther King’s shoes, much less criticize his party affiliation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas BOTH fundamentally opposed the quotas and preferential treatment that Democrats have employed to create the equivalent of the “house negro.” Jack Greenberg of the NAACP said in the 1950s that “The chief problem with quotas is that they introduce a potentially retrogressive concept into the cherished notion of individual equality.”

Let’s listen to Frederick Douglas, escaped slave and greatest of all champions of civil rights, has to say:

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”77 On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So now conservatives are suddenly racists for agreeing with Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. and against liberals and the vile pseudo values that the greatest civil rights leaders in history condemned?

Richard Nixon, whom Democrats love to make the poster boy for Republican racism, was the first president to introduce the racial quotas that Democrats have been trying to implement and expand ever since. Democrats have been swimming in Nixon’s racism ever since.

Liberals are biblical – and never in a good way:

PSA 52:3 You love evil more than good, Falsehood more than speaking what is right.
MIC 3:2 “You who hate good and love evil, Who tear off their skin from them And their flesh from their bones

History proves again and again that DEMOCRATS are the racists, and conservatives have stood for genuine equality again and again.

Barack Obama chose as his spiritual mentor a man who is every bit as racist as any Exalted Cyclops or Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan.  You don’t willingly place yourself in the hard-core racist environment of a Jeremiah Wright unless you are pretty damn racist yourself.