Jack & Jill Politics

This column was sent to me in the mail by a regular poster:

P.M. Carpenter
The Fifth Columnist

How perfectly demagogic, which is so typically democratic.

Barack Obama utters a less than attractive truth about the American working class which historians, sociopsychologists, anthropologists, theologians, economists and political scientists have been writing for decades and his opponent pounces with feigned outrage and panders with saccharine homilies.

Should Sen. Obama fail to make it to the White House, it will only be by virtue of his being too damned dumb to know he’s too damned smart for the Reagan Democrat crowd.

His heresy? By now, I’m sure, you know it well. Obama was being honestly, historically analytical:

In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it….

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I defy any self-respecting social or economic or political historian to find one dram of intellectual fault with any part of that passage. Obama, they would all tell you, nailed in a few sentences the industrial and postindustrial socio-political history of working-class Americans. They are bitter because they have indeed been “beaten down” for generations and in response they do cling to comforting irrelevancies and scapegoats.

That’s what keeps them beaten down. And when they aren’t distracting themselves by their own devices they’ve always had mawkish demagogues to distract them further and tell them that the harm they’ve been doing to themselves has been just the right medicine.

I give you, in spades, the prodigiously mawkish and Yale-educated demagogue Hillary Clinton, who finds Obama’s intellectual truth to be “elitist”:

It’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who’ve faced hard times are bitter. Well, that’s not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They’re working hard every day for a better future for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them …

… and who feeds their self-defeating prejudices and who perpetuates the comforting irrelevancies and who yearns to extol at the anti-intellectual drop of an opportunistic hat the uncommon brilliance of the common man, whose very brilliance has kept him wretchedly disadvantaged for generation upon generation.

But Hillary wasn’t through. There was more humbug to come — parts of which Hillary may actually believe, but it’s all too maudlin to distinguish the opportunism from the genuine appraisal:

I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith. The people of faith I know don’t “cling to” religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.

Well, isn’t that precious. I am positively weepy eyed.

Hillary, the people I know cling to their religion because a) their parents did; b) they’ve never examined other faiths or the liberating merits of agnosticism or deistic secularism; and c) above all it gives them some slim hope of eternal justice in the celestial aftermath of disingenuous politicians who have cheated them out of social justice on Earth and, when convenient, propelled unprovoked wars.

And still she wasn’t through. As the NY Times reports this morning: “Although she has been a strong supporter of gun control in the past, urging Congress to ‘buck the gun lobby’ as first lady, Mrs. Clinton said, ‘Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a constitutional right.’”

It really is true. If we didn’t know it before we now have transcribed proof supporting the unambiguous knowledge that there is absolutely nothing this woman won’t say to finagle a vote.

This will all pass, of course, since the demands of electoral ignorance and blind outrage already have Obama backpedaling: “I didn’t say it as well as I should have…. The truth is that these traditions that are passed on from generation to generation, those are important. That’s what sustains us” — which was delivered with all the heartfelt conviction of Paul Newman in the quasi-election knife-fight scene in “Butch Cassidy.”

But not before Hillary does indeed get a bump by bamboozling a few more voters.

How perfectly demagogic, and so sadly democratic.

Please respond to the commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact P.M. at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

Thanks for the column.

Meanwhile hillary has serious problems with men, serious problems with black folk and serious problems with all people of conscience.

goodbye democratic party

Poor Thinking
The poverty of progressivism.

By Thomas Sowell

People in the media, in academia, and among the intelligentsia in general who are obsessed with “disparities” in income and wealth usually show not the slightest interest in how that income and wealth were produced in the first place.

They are hot to redistribute the existing income and wealth but seem wholly unaware that how you do that today can affect how much income and wealth will be produced tomorrow. Any number of schemes for redistributing wealth have ended up redistributing poverty in a number of countries.

“Progressives” in the media and among academics and intellectuals claim to be interested in ending poverty but the production of more output is the only way to end poverty for millions of people.

It not only can be done, it has already been done in many countries, for all countries were once very poor by today’s standards. But most self-styled “progressives” show virtually zero interest in economic history or in economics in general.

Even in the United States, most people did not have a telephone or a refrigerator as late as 1930. Today, most Americans living below the official poverty level have not only these things but also color television, air-conditioning, a microwave oven, and a motor vehicle.

How did this happen? The progressive intelligentsia show no interest in that question.

Even such historically poverty-stricken countries as India and China, repeatedly struck by massive famines, have within the past two decades adopted changed economic policies that have raised vast numbers of people out of desperate poverty.

An estimated 20 million people in India rose out of destitution in just one decade and more than a million Chinese per month have risen out of poverty. But have you heard any progressive intellectuals explaining how such a dramatic change for the better came about?

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing — as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society.

The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people’s lives.

Poverty and economic disparities are the raw materials from which the political left manufactures a sense of moral superiority, self-importance and political power.

Against that background, it is understandable how they strive to keep poverty alive as an issue, even as they claim to want to end poverty, by playing lady bountiful to the poor.

Even as they define deviancy downward, many of the progressive intelligentsia define poverty upward, so that people with amenities that even the middle class could only strive for, two generations ago, are still called “the poor” or the “have-nots.”

Except for people who can’t work or won’t work, there is very little real poverty in the United States today, except among people who come from poverty-stricken countries and bring their poverty with them.

Talk about “the working poor” still resonates in politics, but most of the people in the bottom 20 percent of American households are not working full-time and year-round. There are more heads of household who work year-round and full-time among the top 5 percent of American heads of households than among the bottom 20 percent.

The Left has striven mightily to make working no longer necessary for having a claim to a share of what others have produced — whether a share of “the nation’s” wealth or “the world’s” wealth.

They have also striven mightily to inflate the number of people who look poor by counting young people with entry-level jobs, who are passing through lower income brackets at the beginning of their careers, among “the poor,” even though most of these young people have incomes above the national average when they are older.

The real obsession of the Left is in gaining power or, at the very least, engaging in moral exhibitionism.

Not political, per se, but am I the ONLY one who believes we haven’t even gotten the tip of the REAL story about these airplane inspections?

Call me suspicious, but my tinfoil hat wearing radar has been consistently humming ever since the first stories of these inspections came out.

This is an industry that is NOT in good shape, so explain to me why they’d do this on such a major scale if it’s not way more serious than we’ve been led to believe?

But, maybe I’m just being too suspicious.

rikyah,

What are you getting at? Terrorism?

rikyah,

What are you getting at? Terrorism?

No, I’m getting at that the airlines fleet is probably in worse shape than we thought. That the FAA has probably been letting them slide on safety inspections – choosing profits over people – and only when it got to the point where the planes could be falling apart, as we getting these ‘ inspections’. I just have no faith in Bush’s Government to EVER look out for ‘ the little person’.

Are middle class voters resentful? So says Bill Clinton:

“If [Republicans] could cut funding for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment, middle-class Americans would see fewer benefits from their tax dollars, feel more resentful paying taxes, and become even more receptive to their appeals for tax cuts and their strategy of waging campaigns on divisive social and cultural issues like abortion, gay rights, and guns.” – Bill Clinton, saying pretty much exactly what Barack Obama’s been saying (and Sen. Clinton’s been attacking Obama for) in his 2004 memoirs, My Life

You want folks to let go of the so-called elitist comment diversion…even folks on this blog are commenting on it.

Perhaps we should re-direct focus on some concrete issues and not the pissing contest. The Alfonso Jackson thing exposes salient themes on race, the economy, greed and the Bush Administration, as an example. The post on China while yes it’s a great vehicle for attacking the Clintons, it should be a wedge into our general problem of CEOs and Wall Street mortgaging this country to a nation that likely bears a bigger threat to us in the long run than jihadis. Likewise, where do the candidates stand on Darfur, on Tibet? On the neo-colonial push of China into Africa, with African govts all too willing to take the cash and turn over their already suffering populaces (after a century of racist imperialist followed by decades of similiarly vampiric rule by their own people) to the whim of China?

If you wish to be the antidote to Kos fine. if you want to battle the right wing blogs, fine. But mix in the more mundane–and critical–matters of life and death and our future as well as the horserace/gladiator carnival of this election and the diversion bullshit issues it has come to embody. I’m not attacking this blog. Quite the contrary. I think it’s a beacon in the fog–but not always. I’m just saying we all need to be a little more Edward R Murrow and a little less O’Reilley or Jay Leno or Michael Moore. Given the monster that weve created, it might be impossible…but there’s nobility and posterity in the fight.

Thanks,NattheDem

The hypocrisy of the Clintons is classic.

Nichelle:

Thanks for the interesting article.

This reinforces my position that America knows better than blacks that they were and are prejudice.

I think its laughable that the mother, Brown, agrees with Cosby that blacks are lazy and need to get off their buts and work and educate themselves, but didn’t want her daughter in school with someone who was doing just that.

I hope this story makes it further than the AJC. I know what Michelle Obama experienced and wrote about was real and true and America knows it too. I would just like to see it discussed in realistic terms and not used as a tool to say she was ungrateful for a right that should have been hers all along.

I completed understood and agreed with her statement about being proud of America, she surely had no reason to be proud of an America that included many people like Brown who hated her for her skin.

Nichelle,

yeah, that was a good article. It galled me when people suggested Michelle was ungrateful to America. What do they know what she went through? I – like every other Black person – knew the instant she said she went to Princeton and Harvard, the kinds of things she went through. Suggesting Michelle has no right to be critical seems an acknowledgment of the rarity of her experience.

Brownsuga -

I know – right? That’s another blog!

Ta-Nehisi Coates has an interesting story on his site about Cosby that reveals some interesting facts.

I have no respect for Cosby.

Of course he and Alvin Poussant will be speakers at the Essence Fest CNN sponsored forum on Black in America.

I just know I’m going to be embarrassed and pissed off!

Hillary brought that fake ass “elitism”"condescending” speak to the Compassion Forum shown on CNN.

He of course rocked it and served it up to her. He almost laughed at her.

He was clearly more comfortable speaking about his faith and how that guides him through his life and politics.

I am so proud of him and the more I see him the more proud I am. The audience received him well and clapped almost every time he answered a questions.

I keep thinking about how they can call him “elite” and what they are basing that on given his history.

I have come to the conclusion that they believe because he has achieved the success that he has being black – he is then elite in the category of black in America.

Rikyrah -

With all respect due to you, I disagree.

I believe that he has been irresponsible in his representation of the black community in the public arena. I really feel that having this open conversation about blacks in mixed-company so-to-speak, he lends to a dangerous practice of feeding prejudices and thereby giving a pass to and providing a false sense of security in superiority for both whites and successful blacks.

I would appreciate him more if his advice were given where it is most needed and not where it draws the most amens!

Also, he wants to teach young black men something, he could start with teaching them how to be monogamous and faithful to their wives and/or mates.

There is no wrong greater than any other.