During the Punic Wars Cato and other notable Romans argued that Carthago Delenda Est, that is, Carthage must be destroyed. Substitute sympathetic ordinary Americans, like Cliven Bundy, Joe the Plumber, and the superbly talented Sarah Palin for Carthage, and you have the rallying cry of the Democrats and their media enablers who will use any pretext to demonize those who dare to challenge their power.

Devoid of positions that can survive reasoned debate, the Democrats and the media who sustain them have determined that balkanizing the country along lines of race, ethnicity, and sexual preferences may yet provide enough votes to keep the party in power. This week the domestic focus was on race. The Supreme Court in Schuette v. BAMN determined that the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment does not ban states from enacting legislation that bars unequal treatment by government financed institutions.

The New York Times immediately ran a front-page article advising college admissions officers how to circumvent the ruling. But elsewhere the counter-push to end this odious scheme continues.

Much as the media bien pensants might wish it otherwise, the Court decision reflects a widespread and growing disaffection for the notion of affirmative action, a policy, which has, in fact, been injurious to those it is intended to help, is demonstrably unfair to others, and creates national disharmony. Thus, California’s Senate, which passed a bill to eliminate the state’s ban on racial preferences, tabled it after Asian groups (finally) mounted a protest to what surely was discrimination against them.

In a similar vein, The Project on Fair Representation is seeking plaintiffs -- Asian students -- to file race-based anti-discrimination cases against Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of North Carolina. It should be amusing to watch the statistical legerdemain the admissions offices of these schools will concoct to defend their actions once suit is brought.

Elsewhere, what Justice Roberts in 2006 called this “sordid business, this divvying us up by race” continues under the table in the demand by many companies and states that service providers -- lawyers, consultants and such -- document their diverse employment picture, regardless that the provider may be located in an area of the country or perform a service in which such a requirement is almost impossible to meet without hiring less qualified people to do the work, further burdening their operations and raising their costs. Still, it seems obvious that despite people like Attorney General Holder and Justice Sotomayor who think race preferences should exist forever, the sun is setting on them here. And that is a very good thing for everyone.

On the other hand, the effort to tag sympathetic ordinary people at odds with big government and the Democrats as racist, sexist, or homophobic continues. This week’s victim was a nice rancher, Cliven Bundy, who got the sort of isolate and target Alinsky-style treatment we’ve seen others get. His opponents hurl a false charge against him, rely on doctored quotes from an unsophisticated speaker and people who should know better run away from the forum for fear their sparkling white togas might get spattered with mud. They still don’t get it. Wait to see what the person actually said, instead of taking the word of Media Matters or the New York Times. Think about why the person is being attacked and by whom before you hoof it away.

Here is the black intellectual Thomas Sowell on the effect of the welfare state on black families:

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.

Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count.

The two most recent books that show this with hard facts are “Mismatch” by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., and “Wounds That Will Not Heal” by Russell K. Nieli. My own book “Affirmative Action Around the World” shows the same thing with different evidence.

In all these cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good -- and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.[/quote]

E.W. Jackson, speaking last year as candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia: “I am a direct descendent of slaves. My grandfather was born there to a father and a mother who had been slaves. And by the way, their family was more intact than the black family is today,” Jackson said.

“I’m telling you that slavery did not destroy the black family, even though it certainly was an attack on the black family. It made it difficult,” he said.

[snip]

The program that began to tell women, ‘You don’t need a man in the home, the government will take care of you,’ (and) that began to tell men, ‘You don’t need to be in the home, the government will take care of this woman and will take care of these children,’ he said.

Jackson was referring to the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which attempted to address the nation’s problem of hunger by providing another means-tested program for the poor, the disabled and single-parent households, in the form of food stamps.

“In 1960, most black children were raised in two-parent, monogamous families,” Jackson said. “By now, by this time, we only have 20 percent of black children being raised in two-parent, monogamous families with a married man and woman raising those children. It wasn’t slavery that did that, it was government that did that, trying to solve problems that only God can solve, and that only we as human beings can solve.”

There is no doubt that the media has treated Bundy different than it does black Democrats. Whistle to get my attention when armed marshals show up at the next Obama-Sharpton love-in with guns drawn to arrest America’s most notorious pogramist for back taxes. Or when the media reminds us of the racist remarks of Jackson, Sharpton,  or Obama’s Reverend Wright.

Here is what Cliven Bundy whose presumed debt to the government is less than Al Sharpton owes in back taxes and whom the federal government tried to run off his ranch and destroy with  a frightening show of armed and brutal forces said:

... and so what I've testified to you -- I was in the Watts riot, I seen the beginning fire and I seen that last fire. What I seen is civil disturbance. People are not happy, people are thinking they don't have their freedoms, they didn't have these things, and they didn't have them.

We've progressed quite a bit from that day until now, and we sure don't want to go back. We sure don't want the colored people to go back to that point. We sure don't want these Mexican people to go back to that point. And we can make a difference right now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies, and do it in a peaceful way.

Here are the heavily quoted comments from Bundy that followed the above section edited out by most news organizations.

Let me tell, talk to you about the Mexicans, and these are just things I know about the negroes. I want to tell you one more thing I know about the negro. When I go, went, go to Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and I would see these little government houses, and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids -- and there's always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch. They didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

And because they were basically on government subsidy -- so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never, they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered are they were better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things? Or are they better off under government subsidy?

You know they didn’t get more freedom, they got less freedom -- they got less family life, and their happiness -- you could see it in their faces -- they wasn't happy sitting on that concrete sidewalk. Down there they was probably growing their turnips -- so that’s all government, that’s not freedom.

But Bundy went on after saying that -- and again, his comments were edited out of most reports.

Now, let me talk about the Spanish people. You know, I understand that they come over here against our Constitution and cross our borders. But they’re here and they’re people -- and I’ve worked side by side a lot of them.

Don’t tell me they don’t work, and don’t tell me they don’t pay taxes. And don’t tell me they don’t have better family structures than most of us white people. When you see those Mexican families, they’re together, they picnic together, they’re spending their time together, and I’ll tell you in my way of thinking they’re awful nice people. And we need to have those people join us and be with us not, not come to our party.

He is no more a racist than is E.W. Jackson, Thomas Sowell, or honest observers like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Government welfare programs have destroyed the black family with horrible consequences. And the blacks who support Bundy and protect him have defended him against these spurious charges of racism.

But Bundy must be tarred because this latest government action against him exposes the corruption of Majority Senate Leader Reid, brings into question the continued control of such vast stretches of the West by the federal government and shows horrified Americans the brutal tactics, lies, and objectives of the Bureau of Land Management. It’s race used as a “look, squirrel” distraction from the obvious. Don’t be like the white toga ninnies. Do not flee from the forum.