Showing posts with label race relations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race relations. Show all posts

LTC Allen West Discusses Obama, MLK, Race Relations & Other Issues

    LTC Allen West, US Army (Ret) discusses many issues surrounding the Obama presidency.  He is a great patriot.  This is an interesting interview.






    This is an interesting article on how Obama has confused and endangered our military's lives due to his lackadasical policies on terrorism.

    Thanks Obama: U.S. Commanders in Afghanistan ‘Confused’ about How To Handle Captured Terrorists

    Washington (CNSNews.com) – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), just back from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said he and other senators found operational “confusion” among U.S. military officials on how to handle detained enemy combatants.


    “From the top to the bottom, the military, the American military people that we talked to, indicated some confusion, operationally, about what you do when you detain a terrorist,” McConnell said at a press conference on Tuesday.

    The Republican delegation, which McConnell led, included Republican Sens. Mike Crapo (Idaho), Roger Wicker (Miss.), and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), the Senate GOP Conference vice-chairwoman

    After pointing out that a U.S. military general declined to answer questions about the handling of insurgent detainees without the presence of his lawyer, the minority leader said: “This operational confusion has . . . been created, it strikes me, unnecessarily and, frankly, dangerously, by the administration.”

    McConnell criticized the administration, in particular, for recently handing over the so-called underwear bomber, Nigerian terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to criminal courts rather than to the military.

    “This sort of preoccupation, if you will, that we see on full display here in the U.S., with the example of the Christmas would-be bomber being turned over — not to the military for interrogation, but to criminal courts — and told he is entitled to a lawyer, is a mentality that I think is very dangerous in the war on terror,” the minority leader said.

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The Democratic Party's Legacy of Racism: Interested in a Discussion on Racism?

    Would anyone be interested in a discussion on race relations within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party?  Earlier this week, I posted this article called,  The Democratic Party, Racism, & The Inferiority Complex and Malcolm from Diversity Ink offered to repost my article since he and other blogsters look for viewpoints that differ from his.  I think understanding why others have differing viewpoints is a great idea! Please go over to Macolm's site and join in the discussion. Malcolm has a very reasonable comment policy. Please view it here.  I am very excited to join in on the discussion!!!

    I recently discovered another article on the Democratic Party and racism, written in 2002. The article is called:
     The Democratic Party's legacy of racism:

    Under pressure from fellow Republicans, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott recently stepped down from his post as Senate Majority Leader because of racially offensive comments he made earlier in the month. He was persuaded to take this step by Republicans who believed that his comments were at odds with the principles of their party.

    Of course, Democrats have used the Lott affair to pillory the Republicans as racists. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who had first dismissed the idea that Sen. Lott was a racist, later claimed that his stepping down did not really address the Republican Party’s inherent racism. "Republicans have to prove, not only to us, of course, but to the American people that they are as sensitive to this question of racism, this question of civil rights, this question of equal opportunity, as they say they are," Senator Daschle told CNN. Among high-profile Democrats, Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer offered similar comments.

    It’s about time that Republicans quit pussy-footing around on the issue of race. They need to point out that in both principle and practice, the Republican Party has a far better record than the Democrats on race. Even more importantly, they need to stress that on the issues that most affect African-Americans today, the Democratic position represents racism of the most offensive sort—a patronizing racism that denigrates Blacks every bit as badly as the old racism of Jim Crow and segregation.

    Republicans can begin by observing that their Party was founded on the basis of principles invoked by Abraham Lincoln. He himself recurred to the principles of the American Founding, specifically the Declaration of Independence, so we can say that the principles of the Republican Party are the principles of the nation. In essence these principles hold that the only purpose of government is to protect the equal natural rights of individual citizens. These rights inhere in individuals, not groups, and are antecedent to the creation of government. They are the rights invoked by the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness.

    We should remember that the Republican Party was created in response to a crisis arising from the fact that American public opinion on the issue of slavery had drifted away from the principles of the Founding. While the Founders had tolerated slavery out of necessity, many Americans, especially within the Democratic Party, had come to accept the idea that slavery was a "positive good." While Thomas Jefferson, the founder of what evolved into the Democratic Party, had argued that slavery was bad not only for the slave but also for the slave owner, John C. Calhoun, had turned this principle on its head: slavery was good not only for the slave holder, but also for the slave.

    Calhoun’s fundamental enterprise was to defend the institution of slavery. To do so, he first had to overturn the principles of the American Founding. He started with the Declaration of Independence, arguing that "[the proposition ’all men are created equal’] as now understood, has become the most false and dangerous of all political errors....We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the declaration of independence." Thus Calhoun transformed the Democratic Party of Jefferson into the Party of Slavery.

    The most liberal position among ante-bellum Democrats regarding slavery was that slavery was an issue that should be decided by popular vote. For example, Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in the 1858 Illinois senate race and the 1860 presidential campaign, advocated "popular sovereignty." He defended the right of the people in the territories to outlaw slavery, but also defended the right of Southerners to own slaves and transport them to the new territories.

    The Democratic Party’s war against African-Americans continued after the Civil War (which many Democrats in fact opposed, often working actively to undercut the Union war effort). Democrats, both north and south fought the attempt to implement the equality for African-Americans gained at such a high cost. This opposition was often violent. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan operated as the de facto terrorist arm of the national Democratic Party during Reconstruction.

    Democrats defeated Reconstruction in the end and on its ruins created Jim Crow. Democratic liberalism did not extend to issue of race. Woodrow Wilson was the quintessential "liberal racist," a species of Democrat that later included the likes of William Fulbright of Arkansas, Sam Ervin of North Carolina, and Albert Gore, father of Al, of Tennessee.

    In the 1920s, the Republican Party platform routinely called for anti-lynching legislation. The Democrats rejected such calls in their own platforms. When FDR forged the New Deal, he was able to pry Blacks away from their traditional attachment to the Party of Lincoln. But they remained in their dependent status, Democrats by virtue of political expediency, not principle.

    As the incomparable Ann Coulter has observed, when Strom Thurmond, the praise of whom landed Sen. Lott in hot water, ran a segregationist campaign in 1948, he ran as a Dixie-CRAT, not a Dixie-CAN. When he lost, he went back to being a Democrat. He only repudiated his segregationist views when he later became a Republican.

    Even the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly established the Democrats’ bona fides on race, was passed in spite of the Democrats rather than because of them. Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen pushed the bill through the Senate, despite the no-votes of 21 Democrats, including Gore Sr. and Robert Byrd, who remains a powerful force in the Senate today. In contrast, only four Republicans opposed the bill, mostly like Barry Goldwater on libertarian principles, not segregationist ones.

    Indeed, the case of Sen. Byrd is instructive when it comes to the double standard applied to the two parties when it comes to race. Even those Democrats who have exploited the Lott affair acknowledge that he is no racist. Can the same be said about Sen. Byrd, who was a member of the KKK and who recently used the "n" word on national TV?

    "Ah, but this is all in the past," say the Democrats. "Now we push a pro-African-American agenda." But the reality differs significantly from the claim.

    Take the issue of education. The single biggest obstacle to the achievement of true equality in the United States is not poverty, but education. If Democrats sincerely wished to help the minority children on whose behalf they claim to labor, they would embrace school choice to help such children escape the trap of sub-standard schools. But that would offend the teachers’ unions upon which the Democrats depend for financial and "in-kind" support. So as has often been the case with the group politics of the Democratic party, African-American interests are sacrificed to other groups who have more pull.

    "Affirmative action" has become the touchstone of Democratic racial politics. Democrats portray anyone who opposes affirmative action as racist. But affirmative action, as currently practiced, is racist to the core. It is based on the assumption that African-Americans are incapable of competing with whites. It represents the kind of paternalistic racism that would have done honor to Calhoun. For the modern liberal Democratic racist as for the old-fashioned one, blacks are simply incapable of freedom. They will always need Ol’ Massa’s help. And woe be to any African-American who wanders off of the Democratic plantation. Ask Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, or Ward Connerly. Although they echo the call for a "color-blind society" that once characterized the vision of Martin Luther King Jr., they are pilloried as "Uncle Toms" of "Oreos" by such enforcers of the Democratic plantation system as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.

    If we need the perfect symbol for the true character of the Democratic Party when it comes to race, we need look no farther than Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy. Rep. Kennedy portrays himself as a friend of African-Americans. But his touching solicitude for African-Americans as a group is gross hypocrisy. When inconvenienced by a real African-American woman trying to do her job, Rep. Kennedy shoved her out of his way, giving her arm a yank for good measure. In practice, the Democratic Party as a whole cares as much about real African-Americans as Rep. Kennedy does.




    H/T goes to Mackubin  T. Owens at the Ashbrook Center Source URL: http://outlawrepublican.blogspot.com/search/label/race%20relations
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Liberals, Race Baiting and Ugly Politics

    Alright, here it is. I am so sick of the liberals resorting to the mantra, you are a racist if you disagree with Obama. Jimmy Carter, Maureen Dowd, and Bill Cosby accused people who disagree with Obama and his policies, as being racists. I think that the nut, Jimmy Carter needs to join all the nuts at his peanut farm. I believe he'll be in good company. Dowd makes words up to incite racial tensions. Bill Cosby is usually above the fray with regard to race baited politics, but for some reason he decided to cash in on the stupidity of falsely accusing those of us who are against Obama's political policies as being racist, or being racially motivated. If you go by what liberals refer to as racism, then you could conclude that every black person who disagreed with George Bush was a racist as well. Now, I don't believe that. It seems to me that liberals are coming unraveled due to Obama's policies being dead in the water. We are all Americans. Conservatives disagree with liberals and vice versa, but none of this involves racism. This has nothing to do with race. These prominent liberals must stop this race baiting. This encouragement of devisiveness must stop!! Americans are created equal.

    Here is an article by Gil Troy: Playing The Race Card Makes for Ugly Politics

    Barack Obama's election to the presidency was supposed to usher in a new, more mature era of race relations, but it could not evoke nirvana. There's a growing chorus complaining that this summer's hostility to his stimulus package, to his health-care reform and to Mr. Obama himself is racist.

    I think it's based on racism. There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president,” former president Jimmy Carter said, clearly forgetting the euphoria when Americans elected a black president.

    New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said she heard “an unspoken word in the air” when Republican Representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” during the President's speech to Congress last week: “You lie, boy!” She also located Mr. Obama “at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension.” In fact, Mr. Obama is at the center of a political storm sparked by his leadership – as all presidents have been.

    American politics is a contact sport. The long, rich tradition of American centrism does not negate the equally long colorful tradition of American mudslinging and partisanship. It is unfair and itself divisive to impute racial motives to Mr. Obama's opponents without evidence. The shrill opposition reflects the high stakes surrounding the current debate, Americans' enduring ambivalence about big government and the ugly way modern politics plays out in the media, within the blogosphere and on the streets.

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