Starting in 2010, if Obama wins, watch for jokes about Hindu shopkeepers to become as politically correct as jokes about uppity conservative women have become in the past eight weeks.

On Saturday’s NARN show, Ed and I spent a segment talking about the Catholic Church’s relative silence (at least in America) on abortion in politics (a conversation Ed continued at Hot Air this morning).

I’m a Protestant, of course, and mildly peeved that the state of discourse is now such that I have to painstakingly disclaim “I’m not anti-Catholic”. 

But I’ve had a few questions for American Catholics for a very, very long time.

Catholic doctrine – to this goy, who had exactly a semester in Catholic school, and that only because my elementary school had to be torn down, so we rented a room at Saint John’s Academy – has always seemed like a bit of a paper tiger among American Catholics.  Catholics in the US seem scarcely less willing than us goyim to do all the stuff the priests and nuns told ’em not to way back when – use birth control, get divorced, knock back a couple of Big Macs on Friday, what have you.  As to being pro-life?  Many of America’s most-Catholic cities – Boston, New York, Philly, Saint Paul, New Orleans – are also the most left-leaning, ergo most pro-“choice”.  And that’s not a demographic accident; generations of American bishops, archbishops and (I dunno) flying-buttressbishops, like Minneapolis/Saint Paul’s former Archbiship Flynn, were scarcely farther to the right than Barack Obama on any issue, and seemed conveniently and consistently silent as re politicians’ stances (especially those of “Catholic” pols, like Joe Biden, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and, lest we forget, pro-“choice” congresswomen Betty McCollum, not merely Catholic but graduate of Catholic women’s college and pristinely-liberal hothouse Saint Catherine’s, in Saint Paul which, like neighboring Saint Thomas, seems to find Catholic doctrine more a matter of fund-raising than a moral foundation.

So when I see this story, about Denver’s archbishop questioning Biden and Obama on “choice”, and lighting a figurative fire under his followers’ (parishioners?  Archbishopricticioners? Prelatistas?) figurative feet over “choice”…:

Denver Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput labeled Barack Obama the “most committed” abortion-rights candidate from a major party in 35 years while accusing a Catholic Obama ally and other Democratic-friendly Catholic groups of doing a “disservice to the church.”

Chaput, one of the nation’s most politically outspoken Catholic prelates, delivered the remarks Friday night at a dinner of a Catholic women’s group.
His comments were among the sharpest in a debate over abortion and Catholic political responsibility in a campaign in which Catholics represent a key swing vote.

…my response wasn’t so much “there y’go” as “why is this news?” 

Of course, it is news; of America’s bajillion archbishops, Chaput would seem to be one of very, very few actually telling Catholic politicians to reckon with Catholic doctrine in adopting their positions.

And, possible Reaganesque flight to the right notwithstanding, an awful lot of Catholics will be voting for The One next month. 

Compare and contrast; when evangelical Protestants don’t vote their faith, it makes the news; when the Catholic hierarchy asks Catholics not even to vote their faith, but for Catholic pols to be aware of the rules, regs and beliefs of that faith, it’s newsworthy.

Where is the Catholic hierarchy?

In an un-linked sidebar to a Strib editorial full of platitudes about stomping out hate in the presidential campaign (which mentions the incidents involving a few overexcited people at the Lakeville rally last week, although nothing about the physical attacks, sexist defamation and economic threats  against Mac, Sarah and their supporters, and the media lynching of any who dare question The One, not that we expected the Strib to have an especially ecumenical definition of “hate”), the Strib runs this bit by “political media expert” Kathleen Hall Jamieson about Mac’s response in Lakeville:

 “The audience that expressed that needs to be told that’s not the way we campaign and treat the opposing candidate … McCain was slow to respond. He should be applauded for doing so, but he should have done it more quickly.”

“More quickly?”

Perhaps someone needs to do some metrics on the exact delay threshold between “treating the opponent well” and “condoning hatred”.  It’s not a picayune point, as anyone who’s had to “think on their feet” in front of a crowd can tell you.

Oh, yeah – the Strib didn’t see fit to tell anyone that Kathleen Hall Jamieson is “Policy Director” at the Annenberg Foundation.

Does that ring a bell with anyone?

What’s the difference between a rabid, senselessly-violent pit bull and a hockey mom?

The pit bull is most likely a Democrat who will try to commit his/her outrages behind the cover of a fraudulent (or just-plain risible) claim of equivalence.

Not as snappy as “lipstick?”  Sorry.  I don’t have a speechwriter.

I remember reading a book about thirty years ago – The Social History Of The Machine Gun, or something like that.  It was a pseudo-academic treatise, adapted for some shred of popular market appeal, that talked about the social roots of fully-automatic weapons.

In one of the first chapters, they included the plans for an early, rudimentary multi-chambered cannon.  It dated back to the 16th or 17th century, and had five or six chambers attached to a circular plate; the plate could be rotated to push the chambers up against the barrel for firing – sort of the anscestor of the Gatling Gun (or, for serious gun geeks, the multi-chambered Aden gun).

It had one extra feature noted in the plans; it used a traditional round chamber to fire round bullets “for use against Christians”, the plans noted (I’m paraphrasing).  But if the troops were facing Moslem troops, the plate could be swapped out for one with chambers bored for square bullets (and no, I don’t recall any plans for square barrel bores), on the theory that square bullets would cause grislier wounds and do more damage.  Of course, being Mohammedans, the extra cruelty was justified, at least to the inventor.

There’s nothing new, there, of course.  A teacher of mine in high school – a Vietnam-era veteran who served in the US or Germany, if memory serves – recalled that one of the first things that the drill instructors did in basic training in wartime was to dehumanize the enemy; Vietnamese and Japanese and German humans became “Gooks” and “Japs” and “Krauts” and what-have-you.  Because killing humans is hard – but pushing a bayonet into a hateful caricature is easy.

Of course, German society (like much of Europe) had a solid head-start in dehumanizing Jews.  Hitler pushed things over the edge – but when it came to reducing a class of humans to untermenschen, he stood on the shoulders of giants.  Hateful, loathsome giants.

For most people – normal, decent people, at any rate – the first step on the road to unspeakable hatred is the belief that somehow, your opponent is less worthy of the decency most of us afford to actual humans.  And once you get past that, really, it’s a hop skip and jump to any ghastly horror you can imagine.

Emily from X Perspective is, by the way, a normal, decent person.  But a recent posts shows some of the dehumanization that is swallowing the left in re Sarah Palin.

[Not following politics this week? GOP VP Candidate Sarah Palin’s 17-yr old daughter is pregnant. Which we’d ignore if Palin wasn’t adamantly anti-sex-ed and anti-abortion.]

I admit to a small amount of hypocrisy of my own here: in general, I believe we should leave the kids out of this election – it’s not the girl’s fault her mother is running for office. But this was just too spot-on not to share.

“We should leave kids out of politics – unless we really hate what their parents [supposedly] stand for?”

And then, all bets are off?  Because decency is only for people who believe as “we” do?

And where’s Palin’s “hypocrisy?”  She – and, we presume, her daughter and future son-in-law – are pro-life.  And they’re following through on that belief.  Perhaps that’s a form of logic impermeable by conservatives; either way, I’m just not seeing it. 

Leave aside that the Juno analogy is completely off.  It supports Palin’s, and the pro-lifers’, stances; the Juno character had the baby, which, by the way, pissed off the pro-abortion crowd to no end – especially here in the Twin Cities, from whence Juno screenwriter and last year’s Hottest Writer Ever, Diablo Cody, sprang a few years back; local “feminists” were in a aorta-busting froth that Ms. Cody didn’t have young Juno abort her “oops”, more or less as they are with Bristol and, for that matter, Sarah Palin.  On whom, by the way, “feminists” have also bestowed dictatorial power over her daughter and her “reproductive choices”.  But that’s just a sign of a photoshopper with no command of metaphor.

On the other hand, every time the left slags Palin and her family, there’s another struggling middle-class-or-lower family who realizes there’s somebody running for the White House who just plain gets it.  And that translates into votes.

So by all means, photoshoppers; photoshop on!

Mary Mitchell at the Chicago Sun-Times makes the by-now ever-more-obligatory nod to the power of Sarah Palin’s speech last night…

…but calls it “mean-spirited”.

“I love those hockey moms. You know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull — lipstick,” Palin said.

And then she showed us what she means:

“In small towns, we don’t heap praise on working people when they are listening and talk about how bitter they are and they cling to their religions and guns when those people aren’t listening,” she said.

“We prefer candidates who don’t talk to us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.”

Those are the kinds of jabs the Obama campaign will have a difficult time dealing with simply because Palin is a female, and the campaign will not want to appear to be sexist.

No, Mary Mitchell.  The Obama campaign will have a difficult time dealing with those jabs because they use Barack Obama’s own words against him. 

Which, I suspect, will soon be called “racist”.

“Diversity Lane” is a new-ish conservative comic-blog.

And when I read the piece below, I couldn’t help but replace “Jayson” with Georgia, and “LaDuane” with Russia.

It fits!

Kudos to Zack, the proprietor.  When it’s good, it’s very good.  And we need to support conservatives in these kinds of areas.

Can’t shut ’em up with reason, or in the marketplace?

Sic the government on ’em!

The speaker of the House made it clear to me and more than forty of my colleagues yesterday that a bill by Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) to outlaw the “Fairness Doctrine” (which a liberal administration could use to silence Rush Limbaugh, other radio talk show hosts and much of the new alternative media) would not see the light of day in Congress during ’08. In ruling out a vote on Pence’s proposed Broadcaster’s Freedom Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-CA.) also signaled her strong support for revival of the “Fairness Doctrine” — which would require radio station owners to provide equal time to radio commentary when it is requested.

And that?  That was the good news!

“Do you personally support revival of the ‘Fairness Doctrine?’” I asked.

“Yes,” the speaker replied, without hesitation

Let’s dispense with a myth here:  “The Fairness Doctrine” is about making the public airwaves public again”: Oh, goody.  Then we’ll also bring federal sanctions against the imbalances in the print media?  Academia (especially public academia)?

It’s a simple lie:

Experts say that the “Fairness Doctrine,” which was ended under the Reagan Administration, would put a major burden on small radio stations in providing equal time to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative broadcasters, who are a potent political force. Rather than engage in the costly practice of providing that time, the experts conclude, many stations would simply not carry Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other talk show hosts who are likely to generate demands for equal time.

Let’s remember a couple of things:

1. Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Ingraham, Medved, Bennett and Savage are free to radio stations.  No radio station pays a nickel to carry their programs.
2. If  they are forced  by law to “balance”  the likes of Limbaugh and company, most stations will do what they did before 1987:  punt.  They’ll avoid politics altogether; they’ll broadcast the bland teleshrink or blander, crypto-liberal MPR-Lite pap like Owen Span and Larry King.  Or they’ll pick up on the biggest trend in talk radio in 1985-86 – “Brokered Talk”, selling airtime to real estate agents and investment advisors and nutrition supplement dealers.  That’s the way talk was headed up until the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.
3. Or they can look for successful free “liberal” talk to fill out their requirements under the Fairness Doctrine.Um, yeah.  Good luck with that.

This is a coup against the First Amendment.  There is no other explanation.

(Which isn’t to say that I don’t want my left-of-center readers to try to provide one.  Expect a spirited response).

George Soros is apparently paying people to snift through Republicans’ personal websites:

Romping with kids, picnicking with the kids, wrasslin’ with the dog — just the kind of activities you’d expect on the ubiquitous “family” page on a candidate’s website. But for one campaign website, that of Sauk Rapids Republican Rep. Dan Severson, there’s a surprise addition — a guy blowing himself up.

Uh, yeah – that video made the rounds a while ago. Perhaps Birkey remembers it?

While the notion of carnage is distasteful to most people, it was hugely popular because – I might need to type this slowly for the Minnesoros Independent’s staff – most people don’t like the suicide bombers who’ve been killing our troops, and thousands of innocent civilians, all over the world. We kind of like the idea, however abstract and crude, of at least one of them dying for bupkes, even if only in a josh video. We don’t like them. So while (unlike them) we do not celebrate death – even theirs – it doesn’t exactly bring a lump to the throat to see that those who murder innocent women and children meet a grisly, risible end.
Indeed, seeing terrorists get killed off for real is something of a hot item on Youtube.

“As you can see, my family enjoys spending time together and having fun,” reads Severson’s site. “I appreciate a good smile. Click on the link below to view a movie that will hopefully put a smile on your face.”

Wow. Guess that totally belies all that fun family stuff on the website, huh? I guess it means Severson is a HYPOCRITE HYPOCRITE HYPOCRITE, huh?

Minnesota Independent has contacted Severson, and we’ll publish his reply when we receive one.

Rep. Severson; before replying, please consult my friends Learned Foot, Yossarian and Swiftee on the finer points of telling people to pound sand with style.

Or, y’know, don’t. Like most of the rest of the Minndependent’s targets.

…when I read headlines like this…:

SUV rolls over, kills woman at southern Minnesota state park

…along with copy like this…:

A camping trip ended in tragedy Monday morning for a woman from Savage when she was pinned under a vehicle…Samantha Binetti, 40, and a female friend were hitching a camper to an SUV that they had borrowed…Binetti ended up trapped under the SUV and died at the scene…

…if perhaps the woman would have been alive if a Ford Focus or a Toyota Prius had run the woman over?

Not saying that substituting “SUV” to imply an active, malevolent presence in the story, or even just to differentiate it from, say, cars, trucks, minivans ans what-not is a way of skewing the coverage of this story toward a political end…

…although I’m at a loss for any other motivation to ascribe to myself.

Thirty-odd years ago, the movie A Bridge Too Far generated a movie-ratings controversy; a character, a 101st Airborne lieutenant, gets shot in the head by a German sniper.  James Caan picks up the lieutenant and loads him into the jeep, appearing lifeless; the audience briefly saw a smear of blood covering half the looey’s face. 

“Too gory”, was the response from many not-that-far-off-the-mainstream groups.

Today?  Leave aside the gore of everything from Alien Versus Predator and Saving Private Ryan; a “PG13” movie will include drinking, drug references, and the sort of peek-a-boo, almost-sex references that would have gotten a movie a serious “R” when I was a kid, and furthermore all you little bastards get off my lawn.

But just when you wonder if there’s any point to having standards at all anymore, we see that someone is drawing that line in the sand and taking a stand:

The cigar-puffing General Thaddeus Ross is a bad guy, all right. So bad that leading medical organizations think that the Incredible Hulk should be rated “R.”

No, it’s not the violence and mayhem Gen. Ross inspires in his quest to capture Hulk that draws objections. It’s his cigar.

Rumors that the filmmakers tried to defuse the controversy by having a stripper use the cigar for something else – safeguarding the PG13 – are reported to be unfounded.

As P.J. O’Rourke once said, life is full of ironies, if you’re stupid.

So let’s look beyond a few ironies:

• That someone who writes for the Huffington Post can call someone – anyone – a “political mercenary”.
• That someone writing on the Huffpo can yap about “orchestrated smear campaigns”.
• That same person can call anyone – in this case Fox News – a “mouthpiece” for…well, anything.
• That anyone on the left – the group that seethes with condescension and much worse for any ethnic or social minority that doesn’t hew to the lefty path – can call anyone a racist with a straight face.

Again – we’re looking beyond each of these. Andy Ostroy is…well, like most everyone who writes for the HuffPo – some level of lefty apparatchik or another.

But – assuming he’s not yanking something or another from whole cloth – he might have a point:

Have the right-wing media mercenaries over at Fox News lost their fucking minds?

[Did I mention Ostroy is a classy lad?  No?  Good].

During a discussion Wednesday between commentators Michelle Malkin and Megyn Kelly on whether Republican attacks on Michelle Obama have been too harsh, the following banner ran across the bottom of the screen:

OUTRAGED LIBERALS: STOP PICKING ON OBAMA’S BABY MAMA!

This blatantly racist, unconscionable remark is an outrage.

If that is indeed what happened, then it is an outrage.  And incredibly stupid.  Michele Obama is a prickly woman with a millenarian streak about her – and we’ve talked about this and the dangers it provides democracy in the past.

But “Babymama?”

Bad network.  Bad.  No donut.

Sheesh.

and is part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to incite America’s bigoted dumbasses

Hm.  Carefully orchestrated?

Leaving aside the very high likelihood that it was just some overworked, underpaid, twentysomething numbnuts working the Chyron who wrote the offending crawler (anyone who’s ever worked in a newsroom, can I get an amen?) – does anyone seriously think that any such “careful orchestration” would escape serious inquiry (meaning:  other than Andy Ostroy or Grace Kelly)?

Fox is nothing more than a shameless, unapologetic mouthpiece for the ruthless Republican attack-machine

He must be an “investigative journalist”, too.

At any rate – there are so many things to criticize Michele Obama over.  This is not one of them.

I went to a fairly obscure college in rural North Dakota.  But you can’t always judge a book by its cover.

My obscure little college had hellacious recruiting chops in foreign places, like Europe, the Middle East and Chicago.  At one point, the little school of (then) 600-odd students had fifty Iranians (the hostage crisis turned into an enrollment crisis, as they all pretty much left when the crisis started).  My freshman year, we had Germans, a Kuwaiti, thirty-odd scholarship athletes from Chicago – you get the picture.

The small campus had three dorms (four if you count the one that was just for married students).  In one, four Jordanians shared a suite. 

In another dorm, a couple of Palestinian kids shared a room.

And over in the dorm I lived in my last three years of school, there were seven or eight Lebanese – Christians, in this case.  (Rumor had it that a number of Israeli kids were on the brink of attending, but there was no way to make the cafeteria kitchen kosher).

So you had in microcosm the entire Middle East problem; Arab Christians (who were allied with and supported by the Jewish Israelis), Jordanians (who had fought the Israelis and expelled the Palestinians ten short years earlier), and Palestinians.

Somehow they managed to get along with each other, even sitting in classes together without killing each other (or the poor Kuwaiti kid, a nice guy who got a stipend from the Kuwaiti government that put him in the top 5% of incomes in the city of Jamestown).  I’m willing to chalk that up to equal parts “oh, crap, if we get in trouble here we’re 4,000  miles from home” and, I’d like to think, “this is not why we’re here”.

The story is apropos not much – except that I thought about it when I read Ella Taylor’s passable City Pages review of what is apparently a passable movie (You Don’t Mess With Zohan).  The story (do I need to say it?), of a Mossad agent who retires from the business and comes to New York to work as a hair stylist, and manages to solve a microcosmic Arab/Israeli conflict in a Gotham neighborhood is…well, an Adam Sandler movie.  I’m not a movieblogger, as a rule. 

But this bit here jumped out at me:

With the Middle East returned to Hollywood’s table (albeit mostly in thrillers), Zohan is back…Score one for freedom of expression, I suppose, and pushed far enough into outrage the movie might have had something pungent to say about the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. As it is, the American way rides to the rescue: Even sworn enemies get along nicely living side by side in New York, no?

Does Ella Taylor a problem with this?

I mean, since it’s been pretty much a reality for most of the past 200 years?

Poles, Germans and Russians have not killed each other off for almost two centuries in America.  Russians have refrained from anti-Jewish pogroms; Irish and Brits have mostly stayed away from each others’ throats (except in Nick Coleman’s fervid delusions); Norwegians have largely refrained from kicking Swedish and German ass; Germans haven’t stomped on French; Hindi and Pakistanis work together; Turks go to Greek restaurants, and Japanese and Chinese generally co-exist in America; even Moslems and Jews rub elbows in most major cities.  They’ve all mostly had the good common sense to leave their squalid anscestral squabbles in the old country.

Of course we have our own to fill in the blanks; some blacks hate whitey for slavery; some whites return the favor; natives have a beef with us; Italians mix it up with blacks in Brooklyn; some Latino gangs practice ethnic cleansing against blacks in LA, where blacks and Koreans in turn mix it up. 

Maybe that’s the moral of the story; most ethnic groups come to America to forget their old anscestral squabbles, and adopt our new ones. 

God Bless America!

I read this bit here in yesterday’s Strib, about a mother’s reaction to racist grafitti in a north suburban high school:

St. Francis High School students reportedly discovered a racial slur scrawled on the wall of a bathroom stall more than a week ago, but many parents didn’t hear about it until Friday.

The message included the slur and incited students to hang three specific male students before the school year ends on Wednesday.

“It said they’re going to kill all of the N-words at the school and listed me and two of my friends,” said 17-year-old Anthony Stringer.

Stringer’s mother responded:

“What I really want out of this is for people to realize there are racial issues at the school. You don’t expect it to happen in 2008, but if it does happen, you expect the school to address it properly.”

And I started thinking:  do we?

No, it’s not a slap at schools; indeed, they’re in an almost impossible position.

Bear with me for a moment.

When I was a kid in elementary and high schools, in the seventies, in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement, I remember everyone – schools, parents, the  media, everyone – working overtime to beat into our heads that racism was a Bad Thing.  The n-word was bad; skin color is not a person’s measure; don’t discriminate.

And although I grew up in one of the whitest places in the country (or at least one of the least Afro-American; while I grew up around a few Native Americans, Asians and Latinos, I didn’t actually meet an Afro-American person face-to-face until I was 16, and didn’t actually engage in a conversation with an black guy until I went to college), I think it largely worked; while I remember the odd racist joke when I was a kid, I think most people of my generation got conditioned to be very uncomfortable around the whole thing. 

So I remember how uncomfortable it made me when I was working as a nightclub DJ, hearing the “N” word popping up in music.

And then as a pervasive element in urban pop culture – first in bits and pieces (the rap group “NWA” had to put the “N” word in code, abreviating it in their name, naming an album “Efil4zaggin”) and then more and more, bit by bit, until it rates just the most cursory “bleep” on MTV.  If that.

And then as a part of fairly normal conversation in urban culture – in the store, on the bus, wherever.

And then to become an element of conversation – albeit carefully coded – in “polite” conversation; “the N Word” is virtually a word in its own right; white kids who try to act like gangsters are routinely (derisively?) called “W**gers”; some black people (including a caller to an internet talk show on which I’m an occasional guest) refer to Condi Rice or Colin Powell or other blacks who work within the conventional system as “HNs” in polite company, “House N****rs” elsewhere.

And then as an element of satire in a classic South Park episode.

Which leads us back to the Strib article. 

Here’s the paradox:  I’ve noticed that teenagers today are much more comfortable around racial diversity than when I was a kid (or so I presume).  They’re also more aware of the effects of identity politics (consciously or not).  And they’re also more comfortable with using the sort of language that makes a lot of people of my generation (of all races) blanche with discomfort, for the pure teenagery joy of…well, making people of their parents’ generation blanche with discomfort.   

I see and hear teenagers of all races, in racially mixed company, blurting out “N***a” – just like DMX does on his records – for pure “comic” effect.  It is brash, garish, naughty, makes people uncomfortable – everything a teenager could want in a word. Probably not much different than me singing “Anarchy in the UK” was for me in high school – “I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist, I know what I want and I know how to get it, I wanna destroy, multiply…” – a perfectly fine way to show the adults how much I wasn’t like them.

With teenagers – so many of whom are focused on getting attention, good or bad – it’s hard to tell what exactly is the right approach to take.  Do you raise a huge stink and make your displeasure known – and, inevitably, give the act the attention that was the motivation for it in the first place?  Or do you downplay its importance (and quietly and subtly punish it) to refuse to dignify it with the attention that the perps want so badly in the first place?

On the one hand, I think (and admit I could be very very wrong) that teenagers today are a lot more likely to “joke”, inappropriately or not, about race than I would ever have been comfortable doing.  On the other hand, I think they’re vastly less likely to act on anything of the sort than the language might make one think.

Which, if I’m right (who knows?) is either a very good thing, or a very bad one.

Or both.

I have no idea.

And either, I suspect, do the schools, with their principals and teachers and superintendents who are more or less my age, who have kids with more or less the same pathologies, and run buildings full of kids with all of them and much much more.

Conclusion?  I have no idea.

Molly Priesmeyer in the Minnesoros Monitor today:

What if Hillary Clinton said, ‘I don’t want your racist votes?’  In CNN exit polls conducting last night in Kentucky, about 21 percent of voters said race played a factor in their decision. Nine out of 10 of those voted for Clinton, according to the exit polls….David Gergen discusses the data…and  begs an important question: “What if Hillary Clinton were to say, ‘If you want to vote against him because he’s black, I don’t want your vote?'”…now would be a time to address the fact that, if anything, the contentious campaigns have served to make obvious the country’s long-suffering ills caused by racism and sexism.

Wow.  Molly Priesmeyer opposes racism…

…after she wallowed in it!   Ms. Priesmeyer in the City Pages, 2005:

Is it really white in here, or is it just me?…En route to the Power Line/Center of the American Experiment Dan Rather retirement party, I rode in an elevator filled with white men in suits…These were received with hale-fellow-well-met white-guy laughter that abruptly stopped when the elevator doors opened to reveal a group of young black men in Roc-A-Wear gear who were apparently not attending the same event. Then the elevator doors closed and took the bunch of us back to 1952 for an event that felt like a dinner at a segregated country club in the days when Perry Como ruled the airwaves…That’s not exactly correct: Inside, I spotted a total of three non-caucasians, and one of them was hunched behind a television camera recording the event for history’s sake.

Wow.  What if all three candidates said “we don’t want your racist votes?”   

In the mania of this week, I’ve not been able to devote the full breadth I’ve wanted to to the “Empty Holsters” protest by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus – the group that’s protesting against the forced disarmament of law-abiding, carry-permit-holding college students and staff while on most American college campuses.

There’s an active protest going on at Saint Cloud State, though, and King Banaian covers not only it, but some of the deeply-deranged response from part of the SCSU community. 

These were before the President’s letter, and all were thinking that somehow it could and should be stopped. Afterwards, the comments turned to:

• It is unfortunate that people believe simple slogans like “Guns don’t’ kill people–People do” to answer complex questions about guns, freedom, and safety!
• the fact that there are people who are lobbying for the right to bring guns to a university campus — into classrooms and university buildings, no less — fills me with extreme terror.
• Nothing about these arguments so far even acknowledges that the tragedies at Virginia tech, Recori, columbine, and numerous others ever happened.
• I know that the opposition would say that “dangerous criminals and armed killers” would still be armed, but I like the odds better if fewer students are “carrying”–especially those young people whose good judgment is not yet in full blossom.
• I can just see it now: a grading complaint. Both the professor and the student put their guns on the table, and then begin the conversation.
• I accept the rights of the holster wearers to illustrate their opinions, but I hope our elected officials have the good sense to not change the laws to their liking. I’d be more comfortable if the holstered protestors also wore their marksmanship merit badges, military sharpshooter rankings, or any other evidence of requisite skill and composure.

I did not participate much in this discussion, as I realized how little I knew, but one would have to say that if the purpose of an Empty Holster Protest was to start a dialogue, they certainly got that. The question is, what happens after starting it?

That’s always a good question.  I’ve felt for years that post-secondary academics are particularly ill-suited to “dialog”; too many of them are used to carrying on extended monologues; for too many, it seems, “dialog” and its requisite “listening” (even to those who are not academic peers!) stopped about the time they had to defend their PhD.

“The University of Saint Thomas took the correct approach in resolving the Desmond Tutu flap, safeguarding academic and intellectual freedom while preventing Tutu from insulting Jews. The school has an obligation to protect students from inflammatory speech”.

The Strib stirred up a hornet’s next of controversy last fall when they put a period on the end of the Desmond Tutu controversy by endorsing a paternalistic, authoritarian approach to the controversial event.

OK. No, they didn’t. They reconsidered and re-invited the Bishop.  The Strib wrote no such thing.  Indeed, it’d be tough to imagine any such thing coming from the Strib’s editorial board if a left-of-center icon’s appearance at a campus were diverted in any way.

But can you imagine how the local media and Sorosphere would have reacted if they had?
No, it was the fairly affable conservative, pro-life, pro-self-reliance speaker Star Parker that gets the special treatment – and the Strib, predictably, backs the authoritarian approach to (conservative) free speech

In the Parker case, a compromise was struck and the university ultimately made the best decision. She will speak at the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul on April 21. As a Catholic college, St. Thomas had come under fire for denying space for someone who agrees with the church’s position on abortion.

The Strib dignifies Saint Thomas’ position by omission. Oh, it’s true – but they also banned Star Parker because the Young Americas Foundation had booked Ann Coulter. Jane Canney’s objections – as I noted yesterday from Katherine Kersten’s piece…

Katie Kieffer, an alumna who helped plan Parker’s visit, says that Vice President for Student Affairs Jane Canney, who oversees the committee, blocked the way. “She told me, ‘As long as I’m a vice president at St. Thomas, we will not deal with Young America’s Foundation,’” said Kieffer.

Which goes a lot deeper than just “not booking a pro-life speaker”. It means Saint Thomas indulges in institutional bigotry against conservative thought on its campus.  Speakers booked by the Young Americas Foundation – one of very few conservative student outreach groups in the country – are non grata.

Yet the university’s speaker missteps offer guidance about how private and religious colleges can balance institutional core values with respect for free speech and the duty to expose students to a variety of points of view.

Let’s come back to that last statement in a bit.

St. Thomas officials said that Coulter’s appearance was paid for by an external organization and that the same arrangement was originally made with Parker. But that arrangement gives the college little say in the event.

Of course, the University had no problem bringing Al Franken and transgender activist Debra Davis to campus – and, let’s be clear, I don’t want them to have a problem with it, since I’m a conservative and therefore value genuine intellectual freedom – even though both of their messages are, unlike Parker’s, fundamentally anti-Catholic.

What “control” is it that the Strib thinks Saint Thomas needs?

The university decided to pay for Parker’s appearance, which means she must agree to guidelines set out by the college. That contract does not censor speech. Rather, it says that speakers must engage in civil discourse and handle controversial issues in a responsible, respectful manner.

Except liberal groups’ speakers are not subjected to this paternalistic, discriminatory guilt by less-than-association!

As St. Thomas Vice President Mark Dienhart said in a statement, regardless of who pays, the university is ultimately responsible for the impact of speakers on the community and should be a primary party in agreements with speakers. That’s wise advice for any college or university.

It might be, perhaps, if it were consistently applied.

As it is, it’s merely further evidence of Saint Thomas’ intellectual cowardice – and the Star/Tribune’s hypocrisy.

UPDATE:  Scott Johnson updates this story with the latest from Katie Kieffer, whom he quotes at length (with emphasis added by me):

What exactly are the terms of this speaker’s contract? My sister Amie and I pressed Jane Canney to show us the University’s process for bringing conservative speakers to campus, and she refused to show this to us. Again, what is there to hide?

Why does the University feel such a need to properly “manage” events sponsored by conservative students? Who was monitoring the students or groups who brought Barbara Davis and Al Franken to ensure that they did not offend the St. Thomas community?

That’s the bit that gets me; the assumption, on the part of UST and the Strib, that the institution needs to “Manage” conservative events, to feel “comfortable” with the message its students get.

Would anyone in the Twin Cities’ leftymedia tolerate this if it were aimed at, say, Michael Moore?

You’ve got to do a “Bride of Indoctrinate U“. The University of Saint Thomas’ shenanigans could make a dandy centerpiece to your next installment on PC run amok on campus.

Katherine Kersten covered a lot of the same territory in her column today that Ed and I went over with Katie Kieffer on the NARN show on Saturday (check out the audio here):

For almost two months, St. Thomas’ Students for Human Life organization looked forward to sponsoring Parker’s planned appearance on campus April 21. Her fee was to be split by the St. Thomas Standard, a conservative student newspaper, and the Young America’s Foundation, a Herndon, Va., group that brings conservative speakers and ideas to college campuses.

YAF is, of course, overtly conservative.

Students for Human Life applied to the university’s Student Life Committee for a campus site where Parker could speak. But the committee turned thumbs down. Star Parker, it seems, was not welcome at St. Thomas.

Katie Kieffer, an alumna who helped plan Parker’s visit, says that Vice President for Student Affairs Jane Canney, who oversees the committee, blocked the way. “She told me, ‘As long as I’m a vice president at St. Thomas, we will not deal with Young America’s Foundation,'” said Kieffer.

Let’s back up a bit. A couple of years ago, Young America’s Foundation (YAF) brought Ann Coulter to speak at Saint Thomas. It was controversial; there was a lot of foul, inappropriate language.

On the part of lefty hecklers. Coulter may shoot off her mouth (frequently to conservatives’ chagrin, including my own) at times, but she was on excellent behavior at St. Thomas – and pretty well stuck the landing by all accounts. The only embarassment to Saint Thomas came – by all accounts – from the lefties.

But fine – Coulter’s too hot for the University of Saint Thomas to handle. Fair enough.

Star Parker?

Ann Coulter is a well-known firebrand. But Star Parker? What’s the university afraid of if she speaks?

On Friday morning, Hennes did not elaborate on the statement that St. Thomas would refuse to permit any YAF-affiliated speaker to set foot on campus. “We’re not comfortable. It’s that simple,” he said.

Got that? At the U of St. Thomas, speech can be free – as long as the administration is comfortable.

Mr. Hennes? Jane Canney? Father Dennis “Hanoi Denny” Dease? Free speech is supposed to be uncomfortable!

Now – this next bit was the part that made my jaw drop when interviewing Ms.Kieffer last weekend. Hennes (with emphasis added):

“We’re always willing to look at the possibility of collaborating with outside organizations, including YAF,” he said. “If they approach us with another speaker in the future, we’d consider it, but the speaker must be willing to conform with all the things in our contract, including the behavior or ‘subject matter’ clause,” which bars obscenities, racial slurs and other derogatory language.

Pro-life activism on the part of a Afro-American woman “violates the behavior/’subject matter’ clause?”

If it seems like you’ve let slip the surly bonds of reason – well, welcome to Saint Thomas. More in a bit.

Ms. Parker responds:

Parker — president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education and a regular commentator on CNN, Fox News and the BBC — was incredulous at St. Thomas’ initial decision to ban YAF.

“I’ve spoken on over 150 campuses,” she said. “I’ve never been treated like this. Is St. Thomas saying that all conservative speakers are alike? Are they saying that because one conservative speaker said things they don’t like, they won’t deal with any speaker sponsored by YAF?”

“We’ve got to move away from that kind of prejudice and stereotyping,” she said.

Of course, prejudice and stereotyping are part and parcel of life at Saint Thomas.

You might recall last fall, when St. Thomas disinvited Bishop Desmond Tutu from a speech on campus because he “might offend Jews”. (And the reason you might recall it is that the local leftymedia actually deemed it worth covering (prompting cries of “intimidation of liberals” on the relentlessly left-of-center campus). Of course, the school’s president, Father Deese, has shown his commitment to freedom to be even more craven that this in the past; in 2002, when St. Thomas hosted a Cuban baseball team for an exhibition game, Manuel Chaoui defected, Father Dease forbade any Saint Thomas student from helping the young athlete in his sprint for freedom, making fairly ominous threats about what’d happen to any students caught harboring the fugitive from Castro’s worker’s paradise; Dease took the opportunity to shamelessly beg the Cuban government’s forgiveness for the fact that one of their slaves slipped away on his watch.

Ah, but that’s just liberty. When it comes to one of the Catholic Church’s ostensibly-key tenets – the sanctity of life? Ms. Parker’s main topic?

Ed Ed writes over at Hot Air:

Universities used to value intellectual diversity and debate. Catholic universities have a centuries-long tradition of this, in and out of the US, a diversity that includes staging “The Vagina Monologues” at Notre Dame, for example. Dease’s actions to stifle dissent at St. Thomas — and to demand the equivalent of a loyalty oath as a prerequisite to speak one’s mind — are not only un-Catholic, but also un-American and un-academic.

I’d have to wonder what a lefty publication would say if a conservative-leaning university – say, Hillsdale College – were to demand such a speech code of those wanting to speak to their students? (And wonder we must; Hillsdale, like most of the tiny coterie of conservative-leaning college, is much gutsier about free speech than most of American academia today.

He has turned St. Thomas into the Zimbabwe of American universities, most of which have already succumbed to a lesser extent to the stultifying grasp of political correctness.

I thought for a moment about Ed’s statement. Zimbabwe?

And then I thought about the reams of examples from Indoctrinate U – conservative newspapers vandalized; conservative faculty ostracized, denied tenure, and forced to defend their existence; students caught espousing conservative values accused of “threatening” other students (with actual intellectual diversity, apparently)…

…and I have to agree. The deep stupidity of this incident not only stands side by side with the Hall of Fame of academic cowardice in Maloney’s film – but it’s merely the latest of many different but utterly similar lapses in academic integrity and moral courage.

The Twin Cities have much to be ashamed of. And while I’m a Protestant and less familiar with this angle, Ed notes that Catholics have even more reason to be outraged:

If Dease and Canney truly believe that, then both need to find new careers, and the Catholic Church needs to reconsider St. Thomas and its entire administration.

Scott Johnson at Powerline adds:

Dease and Canney are tyrants of the petty bureaucratic variety, but they seem to have inspired a rebellion at St. Thomas:

“I’ve got St. Thomas on my calendar, and I plan to come on April 21,” [Parker] said. “If they won’t let me on campus, I’m willing to talk out on the street.”

Let’s just hope Father Dease and his apparatchiks don’t call in the tanks.

If Star Parker is there, I’ll be there. And I hope you will be, too; updates as the situation warrants.

Bring on the tanks, Dease.

NOT VERY TANGENTIAL TANGENT:  Last fall, when Saint Thomas when through their extended tete-a-tete with Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Minnesota Monitor – Minnesota’s official George Soros news outlet – demonstrated their commitment to free speech and intellectual inquiry by devoting no less than eight articles to the subject (and, being a supporter of real free speech, I largely agreed).

And when it’s a conservative speaker – as usual – being banned from campus?

It’s hard to hear the tanks over the crickets.

Steve “Mister Furious” Perry – former journalist, now Soros minion and “editor” of the Minnesota Monitor, is sad.

He and his minions – in this case, Karl Bremer – tried to play the “public activism” game earlier this week (or, to be accurate, continued his decade-long obession with sliming his bete noire, Rep. Michele Bachmann). And as we all know, one of the wages of public activism is that the public gets their cut at you.

And Perry is trying to cut back. But now that he’s dealing with people who play the game better than he does, it’s just…not…working:

After a scheduled appearance by the pro-war veterans’ group Vets for Freedom

Well, there’s a gutless little slur for ya, right outta the gate!

“Pro-war?” Guess Perry hasn’t read David Bellavia’s book, or heard the guy speak. Simple fact; there’s nobody on earth more anti-war, as a concept and as a fact, than someone who’s spent time in combat. Bellavia is no GOP stooge; his book is pretty forthright about his own beliefs, as well as those of his fellow grunts (he talks with admiration about one of his squad’s fire-team leaders, a Polish-American who hated Bush and Rumsfeld with a passion that might yet land him a Soros stipend of his own).

Pro-war? Tell it to Bellavia’s face.

The websites Look True North and Minnesota Majority posted letter generators for writing to Bremer that include his photograph and, for a time, included his home addresses and home and work phone numbers as well. (Cached screen grab with personal data removed here.)

And True North removed that information almost immediately.

(And yeah, I condemn anyone who threatened Karl Bremer, assuming it happened – which is a hell of a lot more than Bremer would do for me or anyone who’d ever spoken out against him, I guarantee you.  I believe that people should be able to separate their activism and their private life; I’ve respected people on that count pretty religiously; Karl Bremer’s associates have not).

On Tuesday evening, right-wing KTLK-FM talk host Jason Lewis had the following exchange with a caller (emphasis added):…

Jason Lewis: I don’t lead a jihad against individuals unless they happen to be in the public arena. Of course, you could make the argument this guy’s now in the public arena. But if citizens are truly fed up with a small minority of socialist kooks in Stillwater, led by this Karl Bremer character who’s got a bizarre obsession with Michele Bachmann, I can’t be held accountable for what citizens might come up with. If you want to let this guy know you think he’s a bum, that’s up to you. I’m just saying that people ought to know his name, because he’s the guy, the ringleader, in Veterans for Peace and all this, that literally are censoring veterans.

Yep.

So – so what?

We continue the transcription:

Lewis: Yeah, right. Well, the problem with these protesters–the problem they’ve got is, they entered the public arena…Karl Bremer has been out there putting his name in the papers in his letters to the editor bashing Michele Bachmann. So he is now a public person, and hence he’s going to take the slings and arrows just like he hands them out. Long overdue, to be sure.

And again – so what?

Mr. Perry: Is Jason wrong?

Is Karl Bremer – a very frequent source and sometime contributor to Perry’s propaganda mill, as well as a high-profile contrib to Perry’s ex-gig, the Daily Mole – not a public figure? Is his public involvement in the stifling of Vets for Freedom’s appearance somehow off-limits?

Why? (Preferably in terms other than “because we really really want it to be”?

I mean, Bremer likes to dish out the abuse. Not that I advocate abuse (to say nothing of Bremer’s brand of context-mangling hackery), but can’t he take it?

If so, then why is he mixing it up in public? And why is Steve Perry breathlessly repeating his “reporting” as fact?

I phoned KTLK, a Clear Channel station, intending to ask program director Steve Versnick if this harangue fits the station’s programming policies. He has not yet returned the call. If and when he does, I’ll update with his response.

Well, I can’t speak for Steve Versnick. If I were Jason Lewis’ boss (and Clear Channel could do, and has done, worse), though, my response might be something like…:

Mitch Berg, Program Director: Steve? Bubbie? What’s the matter? You and your little website and its little clacque of hangers-on wanna be activists! You’re all fair game! I mean, if someone threatens you, call the friggin’ cops, and I’ll have your back! But if you think that the rules change just because your pal wants to do his sliming under cover of the Democrat Underground hive, you’re sadly mistaken.

Have a nice day!

Which is a lot nicer than my first draft, “If you find something here that isn’t strictly covered by the First Amendment, then go pound sand up your ass, crybaby”.

Here’s hoping.

Jason Lewis had/has a liner in his promo reel. It goes a little something like…:

“Let’s have an intelligent conversation; Jason will talk, you listen”.

That’s what I think about when I hear most people who are calling for a “dialog about race” in this county.

Dialog.

I don’t know that that word means what they think it means.

———-

I don’t go to Jeff Fecke to take the cultural barometer of this nation. I go to Jeff Fecke for howlingly overwrought conclusions; I go looking for checks that his logic and knowledge can’t cash.

And he wrote a doozy the other day:

In general, if you ever find yourself saying, “I’m not a racist,” you’re a racist.

I rubbed my eyes, thinking perhaps it was the fatigue playing tricks on my eyes.

Alas, no:

The same holds true for a variety of hatreds, of course. “I’m not a sexist” is evidence one is sexist; “I’m not homophobic” proof that one hates gays. Those people who truly have no internalized misogyny, racism, or homophobia are few and far between, and those most likely to be good allies to those groups are also the most likely to be aware of their own shortcomings.

Apparently I’m a purple female rhinoceros who walks along the ceiling, having dislaimed each of those as well as affirming the power of gravity.

It’s easy to bag on Jeff Fecke for these kinds of “conclusions” – and it deserves bagging; it’s a simplistic, hamfisted answer to a very complex question. The problem is, this is a symptom (albeit a not-very-challenging one) of something that plagues nearly every attempt to have a “dialog” across ideological lines with the left, whether the issue is man-made global warming, gender, or race.

They frame the argument to not merely favor their side, but to paint disagreement as base, benighted and depraved.

Which makes for a fun rhetorical game (Fecke was reportedly a college-level debater, so one might suspect that’s the goal), but – and I say this as someone who’s been cut down to size for substituting “rhetorical games” for “communication” enough times to know better – it makes for lousy dialog, if indeed “dialog” is what you want.

And of course, “dialog” is not what most of the parties to this “discussion” want. They want it no more than Jason Lewis wants an even conversation – and at least Lewis’ liner is funny.

There’s nothing funny about the way the “dialog on race” is being framed.  No “dialog” exists while one side assumes the other is depraved until proven depraved.
———-

I’m going to start out with a very broad statement: “Isms” are part of the human condition. All people are conditioned to favor people who are like them, and to suspect people who are different from them, whether tangibly (skin color, language, accent, smell, dress) or subtly (class, education, geography). Many white people get uneasy around many black people, sure, but that’s an easy one. Middle-class white people get uneasy around mullet-headed bikers; New Yorkers sneer down their noses at Arklahoma accents; light-skinned blacks disdain darker blacks (or so said Spike Lee); farmers roll their eyes at people in suits and ties and clipped city accents and manners.

This is true across every culture on this planet.

In many of those cultures, that suspicion is codified in the language. In many languages, the word for “Human” varies, depending on how closely-related or situated the subject is to the speaker; for “humans” whose tribe is closer to that of the speaker, it’s a fairly benign or amiable term; the farther afield the subject, the less-benign and more derogatory the term will get.

To say “everyone’s a racist” is itself simplistic; it would be fairer and more accurate to say “we are all we-ists”; all of us, black or female or suburban or mentally ill or urban or atheist, are more comfortable around people who are like us.  And every single one of us practices “profiling”, whether you’re a black couple “profiling” some agressive drunk rednecks, or a Xhosa turning on a Bantu in anger, or Molly Priesmeyer “profiling” white males, or even the stereotypical white middle-class guy sizing up…anyone else.

What matters, of course, is how we deal with this bit of human programming.

So far, so good?

———-

Let’s take a moment and launch a pre-emptive strike on a liberal cliche or two. I’ll ask my conservative homies to indulge what might sound to some of them (mistakenly) like heresy.

The effects of racism didn’t end in 1865 – or 1964, for that matter.

And I’m not just talking about the racism of low expectations that is inherent in the welfare system to which so many Americans have been induced to addiction, a system that’s perpetuated any number of “isms” by making something that is completely counterintuitive to most humans – subsidizing poverty, in order to make misery and disenfranchisement a viable lifestyle. By subsidizing poverty to enable people to say in it for generation after generation, racism and classism and dozens of other corrosive “isms” are given an environment to see to their own permanence.

But most of us – the conservatives, at least – know about both of those already. But that’s a post-1964 mistake.

There’s one bit of racism that’s gone back 400 years, and is alive and well today – the devaluation of the black male. Black males – fathers – were sold off pretty much at will, as befitted what what considered property at the time. They were shipped around like cattle, worked to death, killed without the benefit of legal protection – it’s not a new story to anyone, is it? African-American society built on the matriarchal nature of many African societies, and became even more so; fathers were a transient thing.

During the Jim Crow years, of course, black men could be discriminated against, attacked, lynched with impunity. Worst of all,  we really haven’t learned much since the end of Jim Crow. Black men, to the welfare system, are pretty much expendable; “families” without fathers get better benefits. Add to that an educational system that systematically fails blacks, a welfare system more concerned with its own self-perpetuation than in helping people find the self-respect (as opposed to “self-esteem”) that it takes to break the cycle, and an urban popular culture that plays into the nihilistic devaluation of the African-American male…

…between all that, America doesn’t need to “invent HIV”, as Jeremiah Wright famously claimed, to screw up African-Americans. 

So we’ve established in advance; racism exists, and it’s a pretty normal, albeit lamentable, human condition.

———-

So you want a dialog about race?

OK. So in the next installment, let’s talk. Or at least I’ll give you, the audience, my monologue. You can respond any way you’d like.

Oh, yeah – Fecke’s wrong. If you say you’re not a racist, it means you’re not. Or you are. Or somewhere in between – somewhere in that immense continuum between “hating people who are different than you” and “not really recognizing differences at all”. All generalizations are false.

Except that one.

A Philadelphia restauranteur enforces an “English Only” rule in his establishment – and, against all odds, isn’t in jail!

The owner of a famous cheesesteak shop did not discriminate when he posted signs asking customers to speak English, a city panel ruled Wednesday.In a 2-1 vote, a Commission on Human Relations panel found that two signs at Geno’s Steaks telling customers, “This is America: WHEN ORDERING ‘PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH,'” do not violate the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance.

Is it because it’s the right thing, or because English speakers are a protected minority?

Shop owner Joe Vento has said he posted the signs in October 2005 because of concerns over immigration reform and an increasing number of people in the area who could not order in English.

Go read it.

The times were dire.

The good people were dispirited.

Evil silliness seemed to reign supreme, and threatened to overwhelm the good people and their lives.

The people cried out for a hero.

And from the east southwest, to the skirl of a plastic Viking horn, one arose:

Join me and other Freedom Loving Americans who stand in support of our Troops at the Lake Street/Marshall Ave. Bridge on the 5th Anniversary of the Liberation of Iraq. The Anti-war Kooks will be there. Let’s show ’em that they do NOT hold the majority opinion.

Bring signs, American Flags, Bells, Horns,

Enge – the irrepressible one-man conservative counterprotest movement – will be gadflying the “peace” protest at the Marshall-Lake Bridge from 5-6 tonight.

Enge was responsible for one of my favorite moments in my radio career. Four years ago, at the helm of the Engemobile (a stake-bed pickup festooned with right-leaning banners and flags, and a big honking sound system), Enge was gadflying one of the Smugosphere’s “peace” protests at Summit and Snelling. He called in to the NARN broadcast, then in progress.

I asked him to turn the Engemobile’s sound system over to AM1280, and drive through the intersection slow down in the middle of the crowd of “peace” demonstrators.

He flipped the station on, cranked the speakers, and maneuvered into the crowd.
“Grow up, take a bath, and get a job!

Great to have ya back, Enge. 5PM is a byatch, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Barack Obama’s association with his long-time minister and spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright, has dealt him the first genuine challenge of his heretofore substance-free campaign. How will Obama get away from his twenty-year association with a conspiracy theorist and racist?

Just like Ringo Starr got through lesser troubles; with a little help from his friends. In this case, friends in the Democrats’ bought-and-paid-for cottage industry in propaganda mills.

Like Steve Perry at the MNMon:

Like any spiritual adviser worth his or her keep, Jeremiah Wright Jr. has led Barack Obama to a place he did not want to go but needed to go

That’s right. It was Wright’s “leadership”! Wright and Obama intended for things to come to this pass!
Perry sniffs at Obama’s previous un-PC badthink on race:

Back in March 2007, Obama delivered a speech (full text) on the legacy of the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama, in which he claimed that the efforts of the 1950s and ’60s “took us 90 percent of the way there. We still got that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.”

Really? 90 percent? Most of black America likely would not agree.

Don’t you just love it when upper-middle-class white boys put on their “Guilty White Liberal” badge and speak for Black America? What would Barack Obama know about it, anyway?

Thus Obama faces peril on both sides on both sides of the racial divide that white America by and large believes to be a thing of the past.

Actually, the answer is most likely somewhere well between that of the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton poverty-pimp line, and the pollyannaish view that many in “White America” (as if there is such a thing) would like to take. Finding that answer would likely involve doing something that Perry and his lily-white, liberal-guilt-wracked little rag are ill-equipped to do; listen to actual black people that aren’t spoon-fed to him by those who stand to benefit from a few more generations of black misery – the ones that are pulling Perry’s strings.

Either way, the question deserves better attention than it gets from either side.

I may be the only person in the western world who can say this truthfully:  I was converted to conservatism while an English major in college.

My major advisor – Dr. James Blake (easily the finest among many, many fine professors I had at my obscure but talent-rich little college in the middle of nowhere) was so far to the right, he described himself as a “monarchist”, with a straight face; he also introduced me to a series of writers that helped push me along on my journey from left to right; Dostoevski, Solzhenitzyn, Tolstoii, Paul Johnson, and even P.J. O’Rourke. 

Dr. Blake and I weren’t entirely alone; the other upper-division major at the time was a guy named Scott.  We’d been friends since high school; a year older than me, we’d played guitar together in any number of abortive bands; he wrote a column under the pseudonym “Madagascar Red” in the college paper that I edited which, with the hindsight and gauzy soft focus that two decades’ remove grants all things, was as funny as anything in The Onion.  Honest.

Anyway, Scott was another conservative in the English department.  And as my own journey to the right coalesced, the three of us became something of a conservative brickbat-throwing machine at Jamestown.

The school’s library was run by quite a different specimen – a woman who was, in addition to the wife of my History minor advisor, a bit to the left of even the academic norm.  A well-meaning sort, but…well…

She had a “suggestion book” at the entrance to the stacks; if someone wanted to see a book or other resource, they could write it into the book.  There was a column for the librarian’s response. 

One chilly October morning, Scott and I walked into the library.  He looked around, grabbed a pen, and wrote down “Please get a copy of God And Man At Yale“. 

The response took a week or two; finally, the librarian wrote something snarky and dismissive.

Wrong move.

In an exchange that resembled a blog comment section, fifteen years before blogs were invented, Scott and the librarian mixed it up – he making the case for including this key, vital book in the collection, she backpedalling and trying to justify (eventually) its exclusion.

I think Scott graduated without seeing the issue resolved. 

The long and short of it being that the whole fracas was my introduction to the pure, simple joy of being a conservative underdog, duking it out with the leaden, lumpen establishment.

Just saying; without that dust-up on William F. Buckley’s behalf, this blog might never have existed.

The source is lost to history – perhaps the National Lampoon back when it was remotely funny – but one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, a spoof of Blackwell’s “Worst Dressed” list from almost 30 years ago went a little something like this…:

I’ve just discovered the REAL worst-dressed people! Those “boat people” – why, it looks like they’re wearing RAGS! And the people in trailer courts in the Appalachians – who dresses these people?

I thought of that when I read Laura McKenna on the Times’ latest “Green Mom Trend” puff piece/paeon-to-product-placement. She notes quite sensibly…:

The greenest people are totally unhip and unlikely to be photographed for the Times or a glossy magazine. They’re still wearing their clothes from twenty years ago. They aren’t keeping their home spa-worthy clean. No need to worry about polluting the air with chemicals, if you aren’t dusting every five minutes. They aren’t constantly renovating their kitchens and bathrooms, all of which uses enormous amounts of energy and resources; they are still living with the Formica numbers from the 70s. They aren’t jetting off to Europe to browse the Paris markets; they go bowling in the next town over. They aren’t constantly shopping for new things and tossing out the old things.

This is some poetry in all of this. Grandma with the Hummels has a smaller carbon footprint by doing absolutely nothing than the wealthy do-gooder in the Range Rover attending the NRDC fundraiser.

Finally, I can feel good about my own kitchen, a fairly depressing seventies relic. “It’s ugly, but it’s green!”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make a dent in global warming. But to do it, you need a serious, non-cosmetic, un-cool, and un-trendy change in lifestyle and habits. And frankly there’s no need to make a big fuss about it, get preachy or show off to others how environmentally correct you are. Excessive non-consumption aimed at impressing one’s friends and neighbors is just as annoying – and as conspicuous – as consumption.

As McKenna points out – to the Times, two of their friend’s neighbors seem to make a “trend” – but she’s right.