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Posts Tagged ‘Daniel Greenfield’

Forward with Obama, Mao and Lenin

by Mojambo ( 102 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Politics, Progressives, Socialism at May 3rd, 2012 - 11:30 am

The Knish puts into historical context the term “Forward” and analyzes the left-wing roots of the use of  the term that Obama has been using as a 2012 campaign slogan which means that we should not look back at his failures (of which there are plenty) but think of the ultimate goal of changing America into the socialist workers “paradise” that he  so much admires. “Forward” or “Hope & Change” – all the same socialist pablum.

In Maryland, Governor Martin O’Malley, a liberal Democrat, turned a billion dollar surplus into a two billion dollar deficit, and then ran for reelection on what other slogan but, “Moving Maryland Forward”.

 

by Daniel Greenfield

The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it’s “Forward”, which is a compact version of that old classic, “Don’t change horses in the middle of a stream” that every incumbent is forced to run on sooner or later. Forward implies that there’s no alternative but to go backward, which is a place that no right-thinking person wants to go.

The left has always been enamored of “Forwardism” or “Progressivism” which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had Lean Forward, Mao had the Great Leap Forward which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs.

When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, “Vperod” or Forward. The name still lingers on among the left and appears on the mastheads of newspapers across the world. It’s Vorwarts in Germany, Voorwarts in the Netherlands and Ila al-Amam in the Arab world. Back in New York it’s The Forward, the venerable blotting paper of the Jewish left.

There are any number of left-wing political parties who have already named themselves “Forward”, including the Forward Communist Party of India, Kadima, the left-wing opposition party in Israel, and Vperod, a Russian political party that split off from the Socialist Resistance on account of the latter not being radical enough.

Picking “Forward” as his campaign slogan puts Obama in good company with the likes of Lenin and Mao, and it sounds positive until you stop and realize that it’s meant more as an order than a suggestion. There’s a reason most leftist newspapers with that name add an exclamation mark at the end of it. It’s not a proposal, it’s a command. Lean forward, march forward, live forward and then die forward. We’ve burned the bridges, run up the deficit and trashed the economy so there’s no going back.

[……]

That may be why it remains a popular campaign slogan among desperate left of center candidates. When Adlai Stevenson, dean of the liberal eggheads, ran in 1952, the campaign buttons read, “Forward with Stevenson”. The country chose to go backward instead with Eisenhower winning by a landslide.

Tony Blair ran for his third term under the slogan, “Britain, forward, not back”, which despite its clumsiness did conclusively explain that”Forward” as a campaign slogan means there’s no going back. However, Blair forgot to tell voters that this referred to his immigration policy which helped create Broken Britain.

[………]

Had Blair been a touch more honest, the slogan would have been, “Britain, so forward, it’s backward.” Much like having a mind so open your brains fall out, that is one of the dangers of being so forward, going so far ahead you end up in the middle of the Arabian desert praising absolute monarchies and slave states like Qatar as beacons of freedom and democracy, while your police hunt witchhunters and the mutilators of little girls.

In Australia, Julia Gillard rolled out “Moving Forward”, explaining that the slogan fit because Australians are an optimistic forward-looking people. Which they had to be as their country had suffered the worst economic decline in twenty years. When things are that bad, you might as well look forward and find something to be optimistic about.

The Grenadan Revolution had its own forward thinking slogans like “Who Controls the Minds of the People Have the Power” and “Forward Ever, Backward Never”. Sadly the revolution ended up going backward when the reactionary running dog capitalists overthrew the Cuban-backed revolutionaries and robbed them of control over the minds of the people.

[……..]

Romney might ask you if you are better off now than you were four years ago, but Obama will tell you to forget the past and look forward to the eternal future that is always peeking over the horizon. The mirage of the progressive world of tomorrow which we can reach over a pile of dead senior citizens, energy saving lightbulbs and multicultural coloring books.

The very use of “Forward” as a slogan summons up a century’s worth of socialist ghosts that they are blind to. But recognizing that would require looking backward, which forward thinking people do not do.

In Maryland, Governor Martin O’Malley, a liberal Democrat, turned a billion dollar surplus into a two billion dollar deficit, and then ran for reelection on what other slogan but, “Moving Maryland Forward”. The people of Maryland have moved on to what else but more billion dollar deficits. That is what you get when you move “Forward”, deficit spending today that will reap dividends in tomorrow’s utopias, economics by officials who can’t be bothered to count how much money they have because they’re too busy looking forward to the future.

Forwardistan is not some enigmatic place, it’s Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China, O’Malley’s Maryland and Obama’s America

Forwardistan is not some enigmatic place, it’s Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China, O’Malley’s Maryland and Obama’s America. It’s what happens when you drive leaning forward, because maps and rear view mirrors are for backward thinking people who lack the courage to take the great leap of faith forward into the economic dead zone of uncontrolled spending and crude control of the economy.

Progressives do not like looking backward in the rearview mirror, there’s too many things there that they would rather not see, like the Great Leap Forward, the Gulags, the ghosts of Five Year Plans and a thousand failed ideologies and dead philosophies taunting them. Forwardism frees them from having to contemplate the unemployment figures or the deficit, there is no past, only the eternal future. Forget your troubles and groove to a new hopeful slogan that promises a better world tomorrow for a hamburger today.

In 1887, Edward Bellamy published the classic socialist tract, “Looking Backward” that imagined a Socialist America in the year 2000 where all industries had been nationalized, the economy had been militarized into an industrial army and retirement age was set at forty-five. Though Bellamy named his book, “Looking Backward”, he actually meant looking forward to the wonders of a new age that would apply progressive ideals and industrialization to every sphere of human affairs.

Bellamy’s utopia never quite came about, except in parts of Europe, which are swiftly going down the economic tubes, and the Soviet Union, which imploded in failed production quotas, debt and senseless tyranny. But there is one brief excerpt from “Looking Backward” that amply sums up the wrongness of Forwardism.

[…….]

Bellamy was fifteen when the Civil War ended and he died without ever seeing his country fight another major war. Had he lived to the Great War, he might have understood something of the wisdom of sergeants and the folly of generals. Perhaps he would have even realized that while generals can see farther than sergeants, they don’t know the terrain or what it takes to hold it.

After a century of Bellamy’s scientific generals of industry losing the battle on every front, his successors are still moving backward by looking forward, not to the year 2000, but perhaps to 3000, or at least 2100. Some year in the distant future when mankind will finally be run by a machine state that will run everything fairly and rationally under the guidance of the generals of the state.

That is what “Forward” really means. The “Forwardism” of that future which never seems to work, but is on the edge of working, with enough money, enough laws and enough marching orders, mankind will finally set foot into that mechanical state where leaders look upon us from their balloons and tell us how to live and how to die.

On college campuses, Obama stretches out his hand, urging students to take it and make that great leap forward with him into the future. That is what this election is really about and that is what this year will decide. Do we leap forward with him off the cliff or do we turn back and try to find a better way ahead?

Read the rest – The Forwardism disease

In this Kafkaesque world, we are all George Zimmerman

by Mojambo ( 91 Comments › )
Filed under Crime, History at April 19th, 2012 - 8:00 am

The Knish emulates Emile Zola in his famous J’accuse  broadside of January 13, 1898  during the Dreyfus Affair.  We have seen this movie before, for myself  this is a throwback to the  Bernhard Goetz incident of 1984 where a younger Al Sharpton played the race hustler role.

by Daniel Greenfield

Andy Warhol predicted that in the future everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. What he neglected to mention was that they were just as likely to be infamous.

Zimmerman had decorated his flyers and website with the famous quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is that good men do nothing.” His activities reveal a man who took those words to heart, who put his time, money and safety on the line to become one of those good men who do something. But the problem was that Zimmerman had been reading Burke, when he should have been reading Kafka.

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” That is the famous opening sentence to Kafka’s novel, “The Trial”, words that have far more to do with the way we live now.

George Zimmerman is not on trial because he shot a black teenager during a scuffle. It’s not the facts of the case that brought him here. It’s his name. Had his last name been Pereira, none of this would have gone anywhere. And it’s not the name alone, it’s that in this time and place lynching him will help make the political fortunes of everyone from the man in the White House to his cheerful smiling prosecutor who is already counting her campaign cash and book deals.

Zimmerman with his book of quotations from the great thinkers of history, a man who clearly believes in the old fashioned virtues, is particularly ill-equipped to understand what is being done to him and why. The quotation that he plastered on flyers while investigating the beating of a homeless black man and on his own website, is more apt than he realizes.

[…….]

We aspire to behave the way that George Zimmerman did, to contribute to our communities, to defy the conventional wisdom and speak out when we see wrongdoing. We believe that all that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. And we are only a misstep away from being George Zimmerman, from doing the wrong thing, from intervening in the wrong fight, drawing the wrong cartoon or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, a heartbeat away from appearing at the bar of the kangaroo court of stage managed public opinion.

In our own way we are all George Zimmerman. We think that society should be moral and rational, and that people should do the right thing. But that’s not what it is. It’s an insane braying donkey’s laugh as the thieves, large and small, rob the people blind and then muscle them into a lynch mob to go after some handy victim. It’s George today, it will be someone else tomorrow. Maybe someone who even deserves it. But it won’t be the people destroying the country, because they’re the ones leading the mob.

George Zimmerman has been chosen to serve as a gladiator in the circus that distracts a bankrupt nation from the criminal folly of its leaders, large and small. He has been assigned white team colors, had an NRA badge pinned to his lapel, and is being shoved out into the stadium while the lunatic mob howls for blood. The Emperor of Hope and Change has already made the thumbs down gesture, the courtiers are rushing out to fix the match.

Like Kafka’s protagonist, Zimmerman has been protesting all along that this is some sort of mistake. And he’s right. It is a mistake. Had the engineers behind the lynch mob gotten a good look at his photo, they might have pulled back and looked for a better victim. Someone who more properly fit their bicoastal idea of a “cracker” to string up on the crooked scales of Lady Justice. But once a mob has gotten started, it’s hard to shut it down. And there’s no real need to stop.

In the past, a media organ that reported a blatant lie might have at least paused on getting caught, but we live in a post-fact society now. The only thing that happens is that the media shrugs and doubles down on the narrative. George Zimmerman isn’t white? Just call him a white-hispanic. Insist that Latinos are really white even though your entire practice has been to loudly scream the opposite. Accuse anyone who points out that Zimmerman doesn’t look much like Larry the Cable Guy of being a racist. Problem solved.

Zimmerman thinks it’s a mistake because he’s not guilty. But as Kafka might have told him, guilt or innocence has little to do with it. Zimmerman wasn’t indicted on charges of shooting a man, but of being a racist, of being the living embodiment of American inequality, NRA lawmaking and a dozen other sins. These are not charges that he can ever shake, because they are not legal crimes, they are political crimes.

[…….]

The original title of “The Trial” was “The Process” and we are always in the middle of a process. The process begins before we are born and ends only when our bodies and estates are disposed of to the complete satisfaction of the system. The point of Kafka’s book was not whether the defendant was innocent or guilty. The point of the process was the process. The purpose of the trial was the trial.

We are all on trial under the system. That is the nightmare that Kafka anticipated. It is a reality that was already taking hold in the Soviet Union even while he was writing. The purpose of the trial is the absolute power of the system and its ability to snatch up anyone, examine them and then dispose of them. The theater of the trial informs everyone who lives under the system that they are at its mercy.

The very randomness of choosing Zimmerman, the contempt for the basic facts of the case, has become part of the message. The message is the same. The facts don’t matter. The decision making process doesn’t matter. Leave your evidence and your Burke quotations at home and watch how the wheels spin, the gears grind and the blood flows. The message is that the system is absolute and there is no escape.

This is evil. It is the very essence of evil. It is an evil that Zimmerman could not have seen coming or understood when he was out patrolling his community. It’s an evil that is all around us. We can catch glimpses of it on the evening news, in the sneers of anchormen, the practiced smiles of politicians, it’s there in Angela Corey’s helpless grin, it’s there in the mountains of paperwork, the lines of tiny print, the lines of people waiting at bulletproof windows, the morality mobs forming up digitally for the next victim to string up, the next popular opinion to enforce, the next skull to crush.

[…….]

For all that the beast seems terrible to Zimmerman now, it is no larger than Obama’s water dog, it is one of a thousand such animals wandering through studios, courtrooms, legislative offices, chambers and all the corridors of power. If it should fail, it will break up into a thousand pieces, the reporters will go back home, the racial hucksters will head to the next trouble spot, the protesters will go back to hanging out on street corners, the cops will ride past them, the prosecutor will treat it as a learning experience, the lawyers will add it to their calling card, and the politicians will sniff the air waiting to see which way the wind blows.

In movies trials end in some larger conclusion, some lesson learned, some principle defended. That will not happen here. The people who run our system no longer believe in those things. They don’t read Burke, they don’t even hang Andy Warhol on their walls, he has become too structured for them. There are no more lessons except the lesson of power, the grand game of guilt and terror, the spectators crowding the bars to see the tigers roar, the blood flow and the knowledge that they could be down there.

[………]

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough people who say things like that and mean it to be fed to lions. Not even on purpose, but because they stuck their head up at the wrong time, they caught the eye of the insect eyed Big Brother collective of critical racial theory thinkers and gender role debunkers, of sensitivity counselors and nightly news provocateurs, of politicians running on race and running away from race, of the rich playing class warfare against themselves and the poor who know that money comes from the government, and the uniformed and pantsuit clad minions who oversees the circus that keeps the system going a little longer.

We are all Zimmerman. One of us might be next. One of us will be next. The system is always hungry and the beasts must be fed.

Read the rest – We are all George Zimmerman

The Liberal Jewish Eunuch

by Mojambo ( 138 Comments › )
Filed under Ahmadinejad, Dhimmitude, France, Israel, Judaism, Leftist-Islamic Alliance at April 4th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

The Knish examines the phenomena of liberal Judaism and its current dhimmi like attitudes. All of a sudden Jewish “values” become things that have nothing to do with Judaism i.e. gay rights, environmentalism, affirmative action, abortion rights, etc. The end result of all this multi-cultural liberalism is the  liberal Jewish eunuch – as helpless and useless as the eunuchs that used to attend to the Byzantine court.

by Daniel Greenfield

The verdict is in on the Toulouse killings of Jewish children and the villain is that old standby, “Failure to Integrate”. What it comes down to is that Mohammed Merah did not kill Jewish children because he hated Jews, because he had breathed in the foul poisonous vapors of a creed which believes Jews to be subhuman devils whose destruction must come to pass before the golden age of Islam finally arrives. Mohammed Merah killed Jews because he was unhappy and it was France that made him unhappy.

Murder across religious and ethnic boundaries in Europe is inevitably a crime against multiculturalism. If someone kills a Muslim, it’s an assault on multiculturalism. If a Muslim kills someone, it’s also an assault on multiculturalism. Whoever ends up in the morgue, the incident becomes a clarion call for recommitting ourselves to more multiculturalism.

It’s unsurprising then that the real villains of the Tolouse killings are Sarkozy for banning burqas, Marine LePen for being critical of Islam and anyone who employs words or images which make Muslims feel unwelcome in France. Alienate a Muslim from French society and before you know it he’s shooting up some children in order to express his grievances about integration. Fail to make him happy and the blood of his victims is on your hands.

Tariq Ramadan, the epitome of the modern moderate Muslim thinker, explained that Mohammed Merah was only a bit confused and “soft-hearted”. Ramadan does have a point. When Mohammed Merah grabbed a little girl, put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger, he was being soft-hearted by the standards of the Muslim Jihadis back in Afghanistan or Iraq. After all he didn’t torture or rape her first. By Islamic mores that is soft-hearted.

[……]

Jewish suffering has been universalized into multicultural pablum that has nothing to do with Jews anymore. The hijacking of Jewish history has been so comprehensive that Jews have become the new Nazis in the mythology of multiculturalism. They wear uniforms, don’t they. They have a state that they’re proud of. And they’re fighting against all the Mohammed Merahs who only kill because they haven’t gotten their fill of tolerance. Clearly Jews are the new Nazis.

No other ethno-religious group has been subject to the same vile mockery from the left, the complete disregard for their history and civil rights as the Jews. To mention the Holocaust in the context of a potential Jewish genocide is an invitation to being ridiculed or accused of exploiting history, by the same people who shamelessly exploit it when they want to bomb Yugoslavia or protest against budget cuts for minority studies programs.

The left can call anyone and everyone Hitler, but when the Jews point to an actual short dark haired world leader who keeps talking about wiping out Israel, it’s just more irrational alarmism. The left imagines that it has acquired the Holocaust by virtue of its moral power and that any effort by the Jews to lay claim to their own history is vile theft. Jewish history, along with black history and Native-American history were acquired by the left when it anointed itself as the defender of the multi-cultural society. And like most copyright owners, it has a limited tolerance for violations of its intellectual property.

If Muslims suffer from a failure to integrate, Jews for the most part have been integrated quite well. They have taken on the habits of the liberal upper classes, copied their politics, their despite for the traditional and the original, and their fetishism of anything different and exotic. There are occasional separatist communities which right-thinking liberal Jews sneer at for their backwardness, but they are for the most part the rare success story of multiculturalism. They became exactly what their hosts wanted them to be.

The trouble though is that their hosts didn’t really want to create more Unitarians and Presbyterians with last names like Goldberg or Cohen. Sure they taught them the phrases, created the educational systems and rewarded them for jumping through the right intellectual hoops. But the liberals never really wanted integration to succeed.In their secret hearts, they wanted it to fail. Not just fail, but fail spectacularly in blames and riots so the whole system would come toppling down.

[……….]

That contempt isn’t limited to Jews. Asians, who insist on studying, striving and succeeding, are held in similar distaste for working, instead of venting their outrage against the system. Anyone who wants to be part of the system, even if it the liberal system, is a toady and not worth bothering with. Unlike the defiant revolutionaries of La Raza or the New Black Panther Party.

Liberal Jews have absorbed that contempt and piled it on their self-hatred, ridiculing Jews for not living up to liberal standards and for trying to live up to them. Even as they pay lip service to liberal verities and the upward march to a progressive world, there is a part of them that that knows there is no escape from their own paradox but disintegration, no way out but the absurd madness that lies at the heart of their work.

Trendy black writers talk about black oppression. Trendy Jewish writers ridicule Jews

Trendy black writers talk about black oppression. Trendy Jewish writers ridicule Jews. Fictional depictions of Holocaust survivors must show twisted people who were warped by their experiences. And the persecution of Jews can never be written about unless the oppressors are safely white and protestant types. And even that is frowned upon. American Jewish literature is a litany of the twisted hatred of Jews from Philip Roth to Nathan Englander. Even John Updike got it on the fun.

How does one talk of Antisemitism in the face of a rigid insistence that Jews are to be the comic sidekick to the Unitarian liberal. Funny people with large noses who occasionally mutter something about the Holocaust, but can be counted on to show up at civil rights rallies, donate to the cause and run some organizations. Not fully trustworthy, but useful except for when they start going on about their own selfish concerns and insist on having their own country just because an old book that most modern people no longer take seriously anymore says they used to have one there.

[……]

Liberal Jews have become the eunuchs in the modern Byzantiums, trusted to administer the system because they have no interests of their own. When Jewish groups are asked to define Jewish interests they inevitably reel off a series of liberal platitudes about immigration, abortion, tolerance and gay rights. It’s not that Jewish interests don’t exists, it’s that they have been steadily excluded from the dialogue space and liberal policies have been treated as their equivalent. Israel is the last stand. It’s the last Jewish interest that is specifically ethnic and religious, rather than some vague nostrum about Tikkun Olam and what Jewish values have to say about importing HIV positive Peruvians. And it’s no wonder that it’s so fiercely under attack.

The eunuchs can be trusted because they have no families and no children. They have no future and so they have no outside interests. They are contemptible for those reasons, but also useful for those reasons. You can trust a eunuch to see to things without worrying that he will selfishly help his own, because he has no ‘own’, he is an isolate, a dead end, a withered branch. The liberal Jew has the same role and for the same reason. His identity is a transitory thing on the path to integration. He has a future, but not a Jewish future. Like the eunuch, he is a dead branch of the tree.

Everyone knows Jews are clannish. It’s one of the stereotypes, right up there with cheap. But the Jewish eunuch can’t be clannish, not really, because the eunuch has no clan except his own kind and they aren’t much of a worry because eunuchs don’t reproduce. They may form their own groups and chatter on about whatever it is eunuchs care about, but everyone knows they have no future. Wait a few generations and they’ll be gone.

And that is the trouble with Israel, it is much too alive. It is a Jewish country swarming with Jews. It actually calls on ethnic and religious allegiances. It is the last Jewish interest there is. It is the dream muddying the waters of the eunuch’s loyalties. And it has to be destroyed for the liberals eunuchs to keep their place in the bureaucracy of the postmodern borderless state.

The liberal Jewish eunuch hates Israel with a desperate passion that even few Muslims can equal because his entire credibility rests on its destruction or on presenting it as no threat to the beliefs of his liberal masters. Israel has made him seem unreliable and untrustworthy. It emphasizes his impotence and his cowardice. He flies into fits of anxiety over its every move, he tries to reconcile his contradictory roles without being able to fully articulate what is wrong because he has been a eunuch for so long that he no longer remembers that he doesn’t have to be one anymore. That he can stop integrating, stop disintegrating and stop universalizing everything and just be himself again.

That is the great crisis of the liberal Jewish eunuch, his history has been castrated and his identity is a comical thing that even he finds absurd. There is no such crisis on the other side of the fence. The Mohammed Merahs and Tariq Ramadans know exactly who they are. They have no identity crisis and no confusing mass of half-formed identities to choose from. They are a knife at the throat and they know it.

The liberal Jewish eunuch may have tried to forget who he is, but the Muslim has not forgotten him. That is the true meaning of Antisemitism,  even when Jews forget who they are, the people who hate them still remember. The blood spilled by that knife is accounted by the modernists as part of the sacrifice of multiculturalism. But as the blood spills, even the liberal eunuchs remember that they are not being killed because someone hates multiculturalism, but because someone hates Jews.

Jewish experience has been universalized by the liberal eunuch so as not to be particular or individual, but there is no escaping that particular and individual history because the past is the present and the future. The progressive march to tomorrow is not a golden door to a better world, it is a mirage and behind the mirage is a savage with a knife who has not integrated, who does not believe in all the liberal pieties and has no mercy.

The eunuch can easily become a Dhimmi. The difference between the two is not particularly great. Once again all that stands in the way is Israel. And it is Israel that shows him what he is giving up, that inspires him and infuriates him, that unsettles him with its flavor of old dreams and tales, of wars and heroism, and of a different notion of history than the one that he is used to. And what weighs most heavily on him is that even underneath the liberal pieties, he senses that there is a choice to be made here that will define who he is.

The eunuch let himself be drawn away from his deepest self and that betrayal has long since been forgotten, but the betrayal of Israel will not be as easy as turning away. There will be blood, fire and there will be death. And he will be asked to take a hand in it. But worst of all is his faint suspicious that he will have done it all for nothing. That Israel will survive despite him and having betrayed his past, present and future, he will be left with nothing at all. Not even the satisfaction of having been right all along.

Read the rest – The Liberal Jewish Eunuch

 

Grievance theater isn’t about race, it’s about power and money

by Mojambo ( 63 Comments › )
Filed under Crime at March 30th, 2012 - 8:00 am

The Knish brilliantly dissects  the Trayvon Martin case and writes that we have seen this movie (actually theater) before in the Jena 6, Howard Beach and  Bensonhurst  cases and so many others. The same actors – Sharpton,  Jackson,  Spike Lee aided by wannabes such as Jazzy X and the whole MSNBC crew i.e.  the whole plethora of race hustlers and baiters – have the drill down pat. It is not “justice” that they want (that is a concept they have no idea about), but power and money.

by Daniel Greenfield

The Trayvon Martin case is a wholly familiar one to residents of any major urban city. If you live in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, then it’s only a matter of time until an incident between a law enforcement officer, or more rarely a civilian defending himself, and a member of a minority group flares up into a citywide grievance theater complete with angry reverends on the steps of City Hall, women with stony faces holding up banners calling for justice and a media-driven debate about police tactics and racism.

This sort of thing happens with depressing regularity in cities where even the most liberal residents have to choose between police overreach and being murdered. It never leads to meaningful debate or a resolution.  Instead it peters out with the best actors in the grievance theater picking up money and influence, the media selling a few more papers or ads for nasal polyp relief on the drive time news and everything going back to the way it was.

The grievance theater is never really about the specific case, the specific shooting, it’s about the links between the social problems of the black community, the compromises of civil liberties necessary to keep entire cities from turning into Detroit, and the inability of the media to address the sources of crime as anything but the phantoms of white racism. It’s about a black leadership that is more interested in posturing as angry activists and shaking loose some money, than in healing their own community’s problems. And so the same story repeats itself again and again without an honest dialogue or anything meaningful coming out of it.

But grievance theater has been going national. It’s no longer just extraordinary cases like Bernie Goetz’s Death Wish moment on the number 2 train that briefly catch hold of the national conversation. The obsessive coverage of the so-called Jena 6 case, an incident of so little internal meaning, signaled that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would no longer just be able to drive a local controversy, they now had the freedom to drive national controversies any time they wanted to.

Trayvon Martin is their big moment. It’s no longer just grievance theater being used to influence the political fortunes of a municipal election, the way that Howard Beach was used to bring down Mayor Koch and replace him with the execrable David Dinkins. Now it’s being used as part of a presidential campaign on a national level.

The fortunes of too many black politicians have been tied to white guilt and black rage

The fortunes of too many black politicians have been tied to white guilt and black rage. The worst sort of black politician channels black rage to score points with black supporters while playing on the guilt of white voters, promising to heal the social conditions that bring about that anger and protect them from its ravages. But never before has that game been played out of the Oval Office.

The last two Democratic presidents were Southern governors, but the current occupant is a veteran of the corrupt urban political machine where there are only two games in town and when the money runs out, this is the one you play. The money is running out, the polls are running down and accordingly we have been treated to an episode of grievance theater, with our beloved leader in the role of healer and inciter.

[…….]

It’s Community Activism 101 to divide and conquer the electorate by breaking them down and feeding local anxieties

It’s Community Activism 101 to divide and conquer the electorate by breaking them down and feeding local anxieties, whether it’s about birth control or racial injustice. And it’s a win-win for Obama, who at worst gains a distraction from economic turmoil and a few thousand guilty voters and at best, upends the national dialogue by asserting the dominance of the racial narrative. While his associates wield the bullhorns, he carefully plays healer and if there is violence, then his currency as racial healer increases.

[…….]

Our racial dysfunction has always been secondary to our political dysfunction, and now our political dysfunction is second to none

Our racial dysfunction has always been secondary to our political dysfunction, and now our political dysfunction is second to none. We have the best government that Warren Buffett’s money could buy and that ACORN’s election fraud can achieve. And we have a national government that is starting to look like the dysfunctional urban governments at the center of the grievance theaters.

Chicago nearly went bankrupt in 1930. New York nearly went bankrupt in 1975. But states have bailed out cities and the federal government has bailed out states. When there isn’t enough money to keep the dysfunctional political machine built on corruption and subsidies going, there’s always some larger entity to foot the bill.

[……..]

That is the lesson that has yet to be learned from the cities whose dysfunctional politics have been transplanted to the national government. Along with the politics has come the grievance mob, the outrage machine, the outpourings of self-righteousness, the class warfare fought by corrupt pols and the rest of the bread-and-circuses show that have blighted the American city for a century and a half.

Grievance theater isn’t about race, it’s not about slavery, police brutality or separate lunch counters, it’s about power and money. Black politicians are not fundamentally different from white ones. They have more in common with their white colleagues than they do with their own communities. The only difference is that they are playing with the race cards they have been dealt.

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The ghetto farms black communities for votes and more importantly for subsidies

When you look closely at where the school property tax money goes, why health care is so expensive, and why so much money has to be spent on housing, a big chunk of it goes here. It’s the hole in our budget ozone layer and it can never be filled, because it is designed never to be filled. For a sizable number of influential people, both black and white, the black community’s social problems are a cash cow. The grievance theater is their way of collecting protection money and making sure that no one pays too much attention to what’s really wrong.

The problem isn’t limited to the black community. The same phenomenon crosses over different minority communities and some white ones as well, but the race card is still the best card in the deck. It carries too many emotional triggers, too much guilt and too much hope not to use it over and over again. The moral power of the civil rights movement still isn’t exhausted as long as hopeful white people smile at the sight of a black man in the White House as if his political power testified to their innocence.

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Grievance theater, like light-hearted musicals, is one of those forms that works best when the economy is bad and everyone has trouble making ends meet. But while people voluntarily go to see musicals, or at least they used to, they have to be dragged to attend the latest grievance theater, the production numbers broadcast live on CNN and MSNBC, the programs printed in every paper that still hasn’t gone out of business, and breathless announcements of the latest developments broadcast in between Dunkin Donuts commercials.

The local productions of grievance theater have gone national and we are all compelled to watch it play out. No matter what happens to George Zimmerman or what we learn about Trayvon Martin, the country has been turned into unwilling participants in a national drama that places a distorted idea of race at the center of our identity for the benefit of the same hucksters and politicians who have destroyed the city and are hard at work destroying the country.

Read the rest –  The Bankrupt Race Card