Saturday, July 26, 2008

A Staggering Injustice (by Phila)

Having started the day by deciphering the Voynich Manuscript, hoisting a crate of doubloons from the Oak Island Money Pit, and solving the riddle of the Delhi Iron Pillar, I'm ready to tackle Mona Charen's article on George W. Bush's "unrequited love for blacks and other minorities."

Bush, she says, has an "unwavering interest" in the poor, which reminds me of J.B.S. Haldane's gag about the Creator's inordinate fondness for beetles. But despite this interest, the poor, the downtrodden, and the oppressed have so far refused to come down from their ivory tower and humble themselves in the dust at his feet.

Which the Dear knows is bad enough. It gets worse, though. Blacks became frustrated when Bush did absolutely nothing to live up to their image of him as an archetypal White Devil, and so they took yet another page out of Tawana Brawley's book and falsified the evidence against him:
When no other opportunity for tarring President Bush presented itself, his detractors seized upon Hurricane Katrina as the catch basin for all the free-floating bile against the president.
Some people might find it somewhat...inelegant to use metaphors like "catch basin" and "free-floating" in regards to an event that left the corpses of black men, women, and children floating through the flooded streets of their city (especially while suggesting that the president was the real victim of that tragedy). But in my view, the fact that Charen has forgotten human decency to this extent shows how deeply she's been touched by the plight of this misunderstood man.

Know what else Bush did for these goddamn nappy-headed ingrates? He "practically bankrupted the treasury by spending on AIDS treatment in Africa," that's what. And what did he get for his trouble?
[T]he normally voluble African-American community has been virtually silent on the matter.
And as everyone knows, it's when the drumming and chanting stops that it's time to worry.

Charen complains that a liberal magazine says "Bush's AIDS Program is Failing Africans." This seems like a perfect occasion for her to ascertain whether there's any truth to the charge. But she can't be bothered. Which means that for the first time in the history of this troubled globe, a policy of "bankrupting the treasury" in order to help blacks has received no skeptical conservative scrutiny.

Just for the record, the "liberal magazine" in question notes that "the White House's AIDS prevention mantra...prescribes abstinence and marital fidelity, with condoms only for 'high risk' groups like prostitutes and truck drivers":
"We are now seeing a shift in recent years to abstinence only," [Beatrice Were] said. "We are expected to abstain when we are young girls and to be faithful when we are married to men who rape us, who are not necessarily faithful to us, who batter us."
Such ingratitude, after all that "AIDS treatment" we gave these bloody heathens. It makes you wonder why "we" bother.

Minorities (you know who you are) should also be grateful to Bush for the No Child Left Behind Act...which may or may not have worked, but it's the thought that counts!
It's impossible to gauge how much, if any, of this measured success is due to NCLB...But this much is certain: If scores had not improved or had declined, NCLB would be universally blamed.
In other words, if American test scores had gone down, certain irrational people might've questioned the efficacy of a program that was intended to make them go up. Behold the prospective intolerance of the voluble African-American community! (You can behold it here, too.)

In summation:
The excitement at the prospect of the first African-American president is natural and understandable. But the total contempt shown by the African-American community toward this president is a staggering injustice.
Although conservatives like Charen have taught me to distrust the "culture of victimhood," the evidence here is overwhelming: black Americans have unconscionably oppressed the President over the last eight years.

I say we give him forty acres and a mule, just as soon as his shackles are struck loose, and he's freed at last from the long nightmare of executive power.