PrintJanuary 28, 2010
The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President
You don't pick brain surgeons by the color of their skin. You pick them by competence only. Same thing with airplane pilots. But we have allowed the profoundly irrational liberal media to persuade the American public that we are supposed to pick a U.S. president by affirmative action. Obama was elected to universal Hosannas because he is black. It wasn't a secret. That's why the Left around the world went into ecstasies when Obama ran and got elected.
We've been using affirmative action to hire and promote teachers and cops and to popularize movie stars and media heroes. We've had a generation of affirmative action agitprop, 24/7/365. Hillary Clinton was going to dictate racial and gender preferences for medical school admissions under HillaryCare. You can bet that reverse-racism is all over the 2,200 pages of ObamaCare. It's reverse-racism forever!
In America today, competence is suspect, and incompetence gets all the attention. Yet competence is what keeps us alive.
Affirmative action was allowed by the Supreme Court as a temporary exception to the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution until blacks had the same opportunities others did. It has now been about forty years, and the goal posts have just moved farther and farther Left. Today it's not just blacks -- it's women, homosexuals, and illegal aliens. And it's no longer equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which was the goal of Communism for seventy years in the Soviet Union, until the whole Soviet Empire crumbled as a result.
In the Soviet Union, everything was politicized. Incompetent people ran agriculture along Stalinist lines. Everything turned into a lie, and lies accelerated as they propagated through the system, in exactly the way the Climategate lies get worse and worse as they get passed along by politically correct bureaucrats and scientists. When political loyalty controls the outcomes, honesty and competence are driven out at every level of society. Nobody can point to Obama's anti-terrorist policies and say that's wildly incompetent -- without fearing they will be accused of racism.
From a temporary policy to give black people a better chance in life, we have now arrived at a Marxist goal of universal equality for everyone -- except for white, male, heterosexual, and excessively normal people. We have reversed racism, but guess what? Reverse-racism is still racism. As a direct result, corruption now pervades the big cities and Washington, D.C. That's because race, gender, and victim status have taken over as the criteria for all the benefits society has to offer.
Obama's election to the nation's most powerful office is the direct outcome of racial reasoning. It was race that put him over the top against Hillary, in a thousand media endorsements, and finally, against John McCain, who was old, male and white. Three strikes against McCain, who for all his faults is vastly more experienced and knowledgeable than the Obamessiah.
Meanwhile, blacks are still suffering from the pervasive social pathology of the inner city -- almost all self-inflicted, with the help of the welfare state. Europe shows exactly the same results, except that the victims of welfarism aren't black, but mostly white and Muslim immigrants. American blacks today are more bitter and more racially enraged than ever before, after forty years of affirmative action. Affirmative action hasn't helped women, who now have to work two jobs, one at home and one for income, especially because so many men have walked away from their families under liberal cultural values. Reverse-racism has actively hurt generations of children, who have grown up in broken homes as a direct result of pernicious social policies which Obama has actually tried to make worse. One of the first things he did was to reverse Clinton's welfare reform so that social pathology in the black community can spread its poison even wider and deeper. Obama isn't good for black people -- but then, blacks consistently vote for those who do them the most harm.
Reverse-racism has hurt Asian-Americans, who don't usually count as disadvantaged non-whites, but who by dint of talent and hard work are now among the largest ethnic groups in many colleges and universities and a majority at Berkeley and UCLA, where race engineering is banned by a California law passed by voters over the objection of the political establishment.
Any time a Muslim tries to explode a bomb on an airplane, Obama sticks his nose in the air and pretends he doesn't know what's up. But he knows, he knows. The next time an airplane blows up in flight, Obama will be history, but he will never blame himself for his own truly stupid and perverse policies. On the contrary, Obama will be around for the next forty years blaming White America for his own folly.
We've now been taught by the media to hire and elect people by the color of their skin, or by gender, or by sexual preferences -- including, in the case of Kevin Jenkins, their ability to peddle gay sexuality to kids and teachers for the Queering of the Elementary Schools.
Is it any surprise that a president who ran as the historic first black -- that is, on affirmative action grounds -- is not just incompetent, but perverse, so that we deliberately don't check the passenger lists for young Muslim males who were brought up in radicalized cultures, even if they are already in the terror database, even if they buy a one-way ticket with untraceable cash and don't check any luggage at all on their one-way flights from Nigeria to Detroit?
Obama's anti-terror policies are not just incompetent. They are suicidal.
They are exactly like all the other social policies that are supposed to help the poor, the disadvantaged, the black, females, homosexuals -- all of which invariably end up punishing and degrading the very people they are supposed to help. Who do you suppose is in the teachers' unions that are keeping black kids from escaping the inner city ghettos? Yes, it's black and liberal teachers. Who do you suppose is actively importing Muslim radicals into Europe and the United States? Who do you suppose has done more to spread HIV? Yes, it is the very Leftists who are always telling us how much compassion they feel for those very people.
The vote in 2008 was even crazier than picking your brain surgeon by the color of his skin. If the knife slips in the surgeon's hand, you might die, but the nation as a whole doesn't. But if the president has a nervous breakdown in the Oval Office, the whole world is at risk. It's a mad, mad, mad idea to elect people on the basis of race or gender.
We have been so PC-whipped as a nation that Obama's election as a black man -- not as a competent black man, not as an experienced and well-qualified black man -- was celebrated by liberals and Leftists around the world. It is the victory of brain-dead ideology over common sense. The guy in the White House today is potentially the most dangerous, mentally fixated, and irresponsible demagogue we have ever known. Those wacky ideas are once again on the rise, not just in the schools and colleges, but even at the very centers of power. The election of Obama was by far the screwiest thing American voters have ever done. It throws doubt on the whole American experiment, because we have inflicted this disaster on ourselves.
The lesson of the Obama presidency is exactly the opposite of what our stuck-on-stupid media are telling us. It is that we must never, ever hire, promote, or elect somebody to a position of power and responsibility merely because of his race. Abraham Lincoln would not have been surprised. Neither would Martin Luther King, Jr. Even the editors of the New York Times choose schools for their kids not by race, but by educational competence. Somehow the American people have forgotten their common sense while Obama was rifling their wallets.
The captain is drunk in the deckhouse, and the ship of state is heading for the rocks. Our enemies are trying to take advantage of our failure to elect even sensible leadership. If you don't think al-Qaeda, Ahmadinejad, and the Russians will try to screw us royally under this perverse and incompetent leadership, just wait a month or two. The Chinese have taken the measure of this guy. So have the other jackals prowling around the small campfire of civilization. They know he's a pushover, and they will act accordingly. The only question is how badly we'll get burned.
The Left have advocated suicidal policies, and now they have found their way to power. But ultimately this is a failure of the American people, of our pathetic excuse for a media, and of the anti-American hatred that pervades the Left.
Yes, God protects orphans, widows, and the United States. But you can rely on pure dumb luck for only a little while before the ship of state comes to grief on that unforgiving iceberg.
