When commentating on a public figure it’s important to judge him by what makes him different instead of by what he shares with everyone else in society.  If there was a Saudi Arabian talk show host, and I told you he glorified the Prophet Muhammad, it wouldn’t tell you much.  I may criticize the society as a whole for following the founder of their faith, but it would make little sense to get after the individual talk show host for being a Muslim.

This is leading into what I find strange about Paul Gottfried’s criticisms of Glenn Beck. Yes, he reveres Martin Luther King, Jr.  And though I’m no King scholar, I would bet that if the man were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today?  I'm guess he'd be so fascinated by computers, TV, running water and how tall everyone's gotten that he wouldn't have time to think too much about politics.  As a beloved public figure with vague political views, he'd be recruited by both the Republicans and Democrats to be their next presidential candidate, the way Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s after winning WWII.  The point is it doesn't matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

With MLK, we can better guess how he'd feel on contemporary issues.  But this still shouldn't matter.  Leave it to sites like this one to deconstruct Martin Luther King and what's he done from a historical/philosophical perspective and Glenn Beck to convince the rubes that the man would oppose affirmative action, socialized medicine and the entire Obama agenda. 

The other day, Beck "set the record" straight on King by "showing" that he rejected social justice and collective salvation, which the Fox host sees as staples of the left. As his witnesses Beck brought on a black preacher and a niece of King.

 Things get weirder in the second segment, when the two black guests start demanding reparations from Planned Parenthood and decry the "eugenics movement" still operating in America!  But even this has its uses.  Seeing that abortion is in the hands of the Supreme Court, convincing black people that liberals want to kill them off may get them to vote for pro-life anti-redistributionist Republicans who can't do anything about abortion anyway.  We'd then have smaller government while the purifying of the gene pool that the legality of the procedure entails would go on unabetted.   This kind of paranoid and faith based pandering would probably work much better than the Bushian/Rovian attempts at getting blacks to develop the right "values" and become economic conservatives.  One can use the values, prejudices and fears that African-Americans already have instead of inventing new ones for them.  It doesn't have to be honest and it doesn't have to be in their real interests.  And all the while, no matter what you're advocating, tell them that Martin Luther King, Jr. would've supported it. And Jesus too.  This is precisely what liberals do when they try to use the words of the Founding Fathers to justify homosexual marriage or race replacement immigration, and it works.  

This is politics.  Leave more honest discussions about the "real Martin Luther King" to the historians.

 

I think there's little question now that he's more of a rightist libertarian than a leftist one.

U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul is stirring it up again, this time by saying he opposes citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are illegal immigrants. 

Paul, who a week ago won the GOP primary, told a Russian TV station in a clip circulating on political Web sites Friday that he wants to block citizenship to those children.

"We're the only country I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen," Paul told RT, an English-language station, shortly after his win over GOP establishment candidate Trey Grayson. "And I think that should stop also."

Legislation dubbed the Birthright Citizenship Act was introduced in the House last year seeking to prevent citizenship to babies born to illegal immigrants even though the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the U.S. More than 90 lawmakers signed on as co-sponsors.

Paul told the TV station that partisan politics may be at play in not stopping illegal immigration.

"I'm not opposed to letting people come in and work and labor in our country," Paul said. "But I think what we should do is we shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship. A lot of this is about demographics. If you look at new immigrants from Mexico, they register three to one Democrat, so the Democratic Party is for easy citizenship and allowing them to vote. I think we need to address that."

The media is acting like this is a really big deal, though as this paper points out more than a fifth of sitting congressmen agree with him.  Unfortunately they seem to be the ones with the least power (Neither Boehner nor Cantor appears on the co-sponsors list).  Will Mitch McConnell run from this position too?

In two articles I could’ve predicted were coming this week Frum Forum worries that Rand Paul will turn minorities away from the Republican Party while Paul Gottfried denounces Republicans for worrying about such a possibility and kissing up to Martin Luther King.

This got me to wondering if pandering to nonwhites on a large scale ever works.  I checked the state by state exit polls of 2008 Senate races to see whether any Republicans were able to capture the all elusive black vote.  Using Senate races is better than presidential election data, where it’s the same person in each state.  Having a wide variety of characters helps us determine whether there’s any candidate or election strategy out there which can cross the racial divide.  Here are the results, going from most to least popular GOP candidates among African-Americans.

Tennessee-Alexander 26%
Kentucky- McConnell 13%
South Carolina-Graham 13% 
New Jersey-Zimmer 13%
Iowa-Reed 10% 
Alabama-Sessions 8%
Texas-Cornyn 8%
Virginia-Gilmore 7%
Mississippi-Cochran 6%
Michigan- Hoogendyk 5%
Georgia-Chambliss 4%
Delaware-O’Donnell 3%
Illinois-Sauerberg 2%
Louisiana-Kennedy 2%
North Carolina-Dole 1%

The first and most obvious question we have to ask is, what did Lamar Alexander do?  His popularity is based on his winning over black women, who were nine percent of the electorate in his state and gave him 30% support.  Black males were only two percent of the Tennessee voting public, and a little algebra tells us that they probably voted around eight percent for Alexander, though CNN apparently didn’t think the sample was big enough to give us any numbers for them.

The New York Times noted Alexander’s success about a week after the 2008 election, telling us that the Senator “had a record of appointing blacks to government and education positions.”  He wasn’t shy in letting the voters know it either, as this ad demonstrates.

One local blogger called the message “After You Vote For Barack Obama, Vote Lamar.”  Alexander also secured the endorsement of the black mayor of Memphis.  It’s worth pointing out too that the Republican was a two term governor and incumbent, giving him all the name recognition one could hope for.

So if a Republican can somehow get liberal black Democrats to vouch for him, appoint a lot of blacks to high places, be the most well known state politician and run against a weak opponent he can sometimes get a massive quarter of the African-American vote.  The question is whether they can do that without demoralizing significant parts of the much larger white electorate.

Update: A commentator writes "May I point out that 'Lamar Alexander' sounds very plausibly like a typical black name?"

I hadn't thought of this.  Imagine the typical Memphis voter hearing all these black voices on the radio praising "our boy Lamar" and all he's done for the community.  It's certainly plausible that many of them thought that he might be "one of us," and not just politically.  I must confess that this certainly works against my name recognition theory, but polls tell us that more than half of Americans can't name their Senators.  I suspect governors are better known, but Alexander was in that position a long time ago.

I'm shocked to hear about Rand Paul's recent caving-in to the liberal-neocon establishment. From the evidence it would seem that our minimal-government senatorial candidate from Kentucky regrets he could not have marched with MLK during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Never mind the fact that vocal opposition to King and to both his tactics and rhetoric extended from National Review (when it was still a recognizably conservative publication) to the New York Times, and from WFB to Will Herberg, and Harry Jaffa. We are now supposed to bow down before all the authorized Civil Rights Icons, and this is especially true for Republicans, whose electoral support among blacks since they began their ritualistic groveling has shrunk from about 10 to two percent. With a little more kowtowing, the GOP and Rand Paul may succeed in driving the numbers even lower.

As for Rand Paul's comment that set off the media hysteria, it was bland enough to have been ignored, if GOP magnates and civil rights leaders had not weighed in. Does Congressman (and House Minority Leader) John Boehner honestly believe that Paul's failure to back every jot in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including the enforcement of non-discrimination in accommodations in Title I, would cause a mass defection of his otherwise likely voters to the opposition? Will Paul's share of the black vote now shrink because of his seemingly tactless reservation about one title in the Civil Rights Act? How the hell can the GOP get "government off our backs," if Title I and the agency it requires for its enforcement legitimate constant government incursions into the workplace?

It's been repeated so many times and it appears to be true. That is, conservatives take longer to internalize and promote the politically correct dictates that liberals concoct. In other words, liberals invent some platitude or piece of dogma that becomes standardized in the public mind. Conservatives initially fight the new mandate, but then, before you know it, they have joined the liberal bandwagon. They then set about denouncing others for a lack of enlightenment, as they help to disseminate the very terminology or social trend they once sensibly scorned and ridiculed.

Think of just about any exaggerated and over-abused expression. We all know how the "racist" tag has been done to death. Conservatives used to denounce libs for making a fetish of this term. Not any longer. Conservatives now can hardly wait to punish an opponent with the "racist" smear, just as heartily as a die-hard Democrat. The word is now as much a part of the conservative lexicon as are the smears "un-American" and "unpatriotic." In fact, many of these so-called independent thinkers on the right appear to equate a person who harbors sentiments that "exclude" others as un-American. "Inclusion" is the order of the day – because liberals taught them so. Now that Sarah Palin is on the scene, conservatives are warming to the task of smearing opponents as "sexist." Yet another victory for their liberal mentors.

If a "racist" is someone who prefers the company of members of his own ethnic group as opposed to others, why isn't this an individual choice that a true conservative would endorse? Apparently it is not, for such a person, no matter how benignly he expresses his preference, is generally attacked by conservatives just as belligerently as liberals. After all, doesn't he understand that rejection of others might result in "hurt" feelings? And isn't it "feelings" that count over individual rights?