The Black Republican

Like Democrats tearing one another apart in an orgasm of fratricide.

That's what's wonderful about libs - it's all about the love, man.

Cox & Forkum

A commenter to our previous post, Falcon, had this to say about Thomas Sowell and the state of things in general:

I just listened to Thomas Sowell talk about his article on the Laura Ingraham Show. You're right, he's simply brilliant.

Off topic - Here's another article that may interest you. Let me know what you think.

I dare anyone, of any political persuasion, to peruse the liberal and conservative blogs (or, to use Ace's terms, the sinistrosphere and dextrosphere) and see which of those sites have more snarling hatred, more venom, more intolerance, segregation, divisiveness, and racism. See which site has commenters and supporters (and even posters) that actually use terms like Hymie, compare people to Hitler, Nazis and Ava Braun, pillory their own candidates who dare to think for themselves or stray from the script, photoshop people to be in Minstrel blackface, or call a Black political candidate an Oreo or Uncle Tom.

They scream that we on the right are intolerant, divisive, and racist. But, to paraphrase William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "The liberal protests too much, methinks."

* Projection: Projection is one of the defense mechanisms identified by Freud and still acknowledged today. According to Freud, projection is when someone is threatened by or afraid of their own impulses so they attribute these impulses to someone else. For example, a person in psychoanalysis may insist to the therapist that he knows the therapist wants to rape some women, when in fact the client has these awful feelings to rape the woman.

I strongly suggest this piece by Arthur C. Brooks as "Recommended Reading".

As usual, Thomas Sowell is brilliant and unabashedly blunt.

It is hard to think of a time when a nation -- and a whole civilization -- has drifted more futilely toward a bigger catastrophe than that looming over the United States and western civilization today.

This evening, I happened to stumble on a 2006 Election Guide Calculator at The New York Times. Expecting to see an example of the Doomsday scenario we've been hearing about all year from the likes of prospective House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it was a bit of a surprise when I set the calculator to display the likely results as divined by The Times' prognosticators.

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Even assuming a sweep in their favor of all the closest races (marked in yellow as toss-ups by The Times), the Democrats get no closer than 216 seats in the House - two seats short of the 218 needed to assume the majority.

Things don't look much better for Majority Leader wannabe Harry Reid in the Senate.

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The Times assumes Republicans already hold or have the edge in enough 2006 races to account for all 51 Senate seats they need to keep conrol in the next Congress. Three Republican incumbents (Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Talent of Missouri, and Conrad Burns of Montana) are in toss-ups, and Rick Santorum is expected to lose his seat in Pennsylvania. But losing these four seats just reduces Republicans to the bare majority of 51, since we now hold 55 seats.

If even The New York Times expects the best the Democrats can do is come tantalizingly close, and only if they sweep ALL the available toss-ups, why have we been subjected to such intense rhetoric from the MSM to the contrary?

Dean is watching movies and invites us along for the ride.

I used the opportunity to comment on a masterpiece of satire. While I was there, I thought I'd post this, just to set the mood before you follow the links:

Speaking of the fair sex... I received this in the mail yesterday, obviously in reference to our About Us page:

Subject: poor thing!!!

While the photo is in itself quite telling, your views are probably the primary reason you seek cyber-love. I am a life long Republican. You neo-cons are a pathetic toy soldier imitation. OUT OUT DAMN SPOT!!!!!!!!

Later, though, the burden of Lady Macbeth's conscience becomes too great for her and her mental and physical condition deteriorates. A gentlewoman observes her sleepwalking and consults a doctor. The doctor and the lady observe Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, madly trying to cleanse her hands of the blood of Duncan and Macduff's family. Still in her sleep, Lady Macbeth asks, "what, will these hands ne're be clean?" foreseeing that she will never have peace of mind.

There's a word with much baggage in American history and culture: lynching. The act of publicly murdering someone "(as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction". A despicable atrocity, casually practiced by despicable and atrocious people. Unfortunately - though you may not hear it said very often - lynching is not a concept confined by skin color as much as it is defined by it.

Or is it?

Today, we learn that it need not be defined by skin color at all. It can be practiced by some people upon others within their own ethnicity. For what? For daring to stand up to despicable and atrocious people, of course.

Where have I read this before?

In the early 1900’s Mary Turner was upset about the lynching of her husband. Mary was eight months pregnant and made a comment that she would get even with those who hung her husband and would sign arrest warrants against the killers. The white residents of Valdosta, Georgia decided to teach her a lesson for being uppity enough to be vocal about her pain. A mob found her tied her upside down to a tree, doused her with gasoline and burned her alive. One of the crowd members took a knife and split her belly open letting the baby fall out. Another member of the crowd smashed the baby’s head with his foot. Then the crowd took out their guns and filled the burning body of Mary Turner with bullets. The Associated Press wrote that Mary Turner had made unwise remarks about the execution of her husband.

The bad news: it's possible that Castro still lives, after all.

The good news: Joe Lieberman can at least be grateful that Uncle Fidel filled out his Connecticut absentee ballot correctly.

LGF

UPDATE: Sean Gleeson makes a convincing argument that the photo was staged some time ago for release now. IMHO, a badly failed attempt to dissuade us from believing in Fidel's present or near-future demise may backfire on the dictatorship-in-hellfireabsentia, and prove even more perilous for Raul.

As I've written about before, one of my guilty pleasures - okay, it's really a bad habit - is skipping from page to page across the Internet. The worst single site to undulge myself this way, without a doubt, is Wikipedia, where I can refresh my memory of things I know, and learn new things about what I don't. I used to do this for hours when I was a kid using a standard encyclopedia, following the "see also" references at the end of the articles to related articles in other books. Wikipedia's constant hyperlinking throughout an article make this a perpetual pastime if you allow it to burn through your day. Unfortunately, it's quite easy for me to lose track of hours this way, especially in the biographical and history-related articles. Since anyone (with any agenda) can edit articles, it's information is always suspect (such as this manufactured twisting of a simple misstatement by Bill O'Reilly), but damn it's way too interesting, and in my own perverted mind quite fun.

Today's argument at Ace of Spades over the revelation by Nobel prize-winning German author Guenter Grass that he once served in the Waffen-SS, led me to look up the organization's entry. I then clicked the link to compare it to the entry for Wehrmacht. I perused a few of the listings for prominent members of the German military, and found out that while Erich von Manstein eventually reached the rank of Generalfeldmarschall, he was fired by Hitler for insubordination, and sat out the end of the war. I contrasted his refusal to join in the assassination attempt on his boss with the suicide of Erwin Rommel. Rommel (I hadn't known) was a recipient of the Pour le Mérite, an old Prussian military award I've always had a fascination with. Established by Frederick the Great, during WWI it was famously awarded to Max Immelmann, where it got the nickname "The Blue Max". Other recipients included Manfred von Richthofen (the infamous "Red Baron"), and Hermann Göring.

One man also attributed by Wikipedia to be a recipient was Felix von Luckner, but it is doubtful he was, since he was not repatriated to Germany until after the downfall of the Empire.

That should not detract from von Luckner's accomplishments, however. If even half of what Wikipedia says about him is true, he was a remarkable man. Most notably, he captured and sunk a dozen ships during the war, while only losing a single life - on either side - and that death was apparently from a secondary explosion, not from direct fire. At one point, his ship was wrecked on a reef, and he sailed thousands of miles in an open boat in an attempt to capture a new vessel. He was taken prisoner, but tried to escape. After the war, he was awarded honorary citizenship by several American cities. A dedicated Freemason, he would not cooperate with Hitler's Nazi party, and in 1943 he saved the life of a Jewish woman. He negotiated the surrender of the city of Halle, and in 1959 was featured in an episode of This Is Your Life.

Read von Luckner's whole entry and you're left wondering how much of it must be embellished, it reads so much like a tacky novel. But quite often, truth is stranger than fiction, so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't.

IMRA reports that a group of young Israeli citizens have written a letter to Minister of Defense Amir Peretz asking to be drafted to fight in the war against Hizballah.

"We are proud of Israel, and its just struggle," the letter reads, "and are prepared to carry out any mission that the IDF gives us."

Nasrallah apparently doesn't know what it means to be a citizen of a free country, but Mr. Nasser does. We pray that God continues to bless Israel with courageous young patriots like him.

Kim du Toit had a lovely idea to oppose McCain-Feingold with some good old-fashioned civil disobedience this year.

Here’s my promise: If a conservative organization wants to run a political ad criticizing any Congressman up for re-election during that 60-day window, I’ll let them run one on this website, for free, right up until Election Day.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I heartily encourage Project 21, the NBRA, and all black conservative candidates to use the services of The Black Republican as they see fit during the coming election season. We will not sit out this election, but we very much intend to sit in for it.

Dean

But sometimes you just gotta respect the art.

Robert at Dean's World

If you're familiar with the hilarious work of Despair, Inc., and you've long been a fan of Trekdom, have I got a website for you: Star Trek Inspirational Posters.

You'll need a few minutes in the neural neutralizer before you're done.

Ace (again, again... bastard)

Comes Green Helmet Man.

Expectedly, he has a girlfriend.

Ace (again)

It seems that the Dean, the Kosacks, and soon the remainder of the Democratic party have begun eating their own!

I swear it's true! See, I even have a picture to prove it!

(Photo Courtesy of Adnan Hajj/al-Reuters) al-Reuters - Aug 09 1:32 PM

Hat tip to Ace

I strongly suggest this piece by David Sifry as "Recommended Reading".

A scant three years after I first saw a PDA version of a blog and thought I should create one for TBR, and just two years after PDAs ceased to be really relevant, The Black Republican - PDA version is born.

Well, at least I'm persistent.

NOTE TO CONTRIBUTORS: Please avoid posting BMPs to your entries. Not only is the format a waste of server space, it can't be processed by some PDA browsers. Most images convert well to either JPG (if you need lots of colors, like a photo) or GIF (if you don't), but PNG is a good compromise if you want lossless compression. Thanks.

While trolling at AoSHQ on Saturday night (heh, yes, I'm ashamed to admit I wrote that) someone anonymously posted a link to this thread at israelmilitary.net.

Where's the relevance to TBR? None, really. I just HAD to post that link.

Though, stretching for relevance, I could admit I'm prejudiced. Putting aside the mild PG-rated erotica of hot women with guns, my chauvinistic side says that young ladies - especially ones this good looking - should never be put in harm's way during wartime. Where are your priorities, Israeli men?

WARNING UPDATE: They get a little older and doggish at the bottom. I don't want anyone coming back at me for those, asking for damages.

We may soon stop our scouring of the Internet for mentions of our patron, provided Brian Dirck maintains his blog regularly with that new notebook of his. As a bona fide Lincoln scholar, he should be more "plugged in" to what folks are saying about Abe than my news feed ever could be. He also maintains a neat blogroll of historians and Civil War re-enactors.

I've already had an opportunity to comment on a post he put up today discussing habeus corpus and the other civil rights controversies of Lincoln's day. While Professor Dirck seems to suggest he differs with us at least on some issues politically, he also defends Lincoln's interpretations of the constitution - something even I haven't always been inclined to do. I'm very interested in reading more of Brian's blog and discussing The Black Republican with him.

Via Yahoo! News, AP reports that "a bill fusing the cut in estate taxes with a $2.10 increase over three years in the $5.15 minimum wage" was rejected by the Senate 56-42 yesterday. This has been an ingenious strategy by Senate Republicans (finally! getting some brains) to offer a bold compromise to the Democrats on two wedge issues, and see who would be unable to give the other party what they want most. It's very close to a total win-win: if the bill was accepted, the Republicans would look like bipartisan statesmen willing to compromise, we'd get rid of the vile Death Tax for all but the wealthiest Americans, and we'd prove to those so often swayed by the Democrats' class warfare that Republicans aren't "mean", taking the issue away from Democrats going into the fall elections. If it failed, we get to blame the failure to pass both measures on the Dems. The only problem (if you're a supply-sider without any doubts about the evils of a minimum wage) is that it would increase the minimum wage by a sizable margin.

Ever since the last increase failed to tank the economy the way I thought it might, I'm not convinced the minimum wage is all that very dangerous. I still think it's ethically vile, and certainly unconstitutional, but the best part of our argument is that the minimum wage stifles jobs for young people, and I don't know any business that can afford to pay even the dumbest high-schooler $5.15. Maybe in other parts of the country where the job market is worse, they can get away with it, but not here in Florida. As long as most businesses willingly paying more anyway, a moderate increase is just a pander to the class warfare junkies, and the effect on the economy is negligible - so I'm willing to put our cards on the table and tell the Democrats the decision is up to them. Do they hate George Bush and "the rich" more than they love their constituents?

Democrats took a lot of the fun out of the offer, and never even attempted to relent to the compromise. Meanwhile, Republicans never blinked. At least not until....

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said the idea had always been a risky.

"The bottom line is that we bet on the wrong horses. Maybe we should've taken a bet that was more likely to pay off," he said.

Way to go, Senator Putz. Why don't you give them a few more sound bites for the election, and maybe your "Greatest Hits" can star in your very own Democratic campaign commercial.

UPDATE: Well, whattya know. I'm still mad at Grassley for such a stupid comment, but look again at my quote of the AP story. It wasn't Grassley that used the word "risky", and it seems apparent that the reporter tried used the Democrats' catchphrase "...a risky scheme" but her editor had to pull out the last word because it crossed the line into commentary. Unfortunately for her, the editor left the "a" still there, creating a grammatic mistake and leaving it to the reader's imagination that it's "a risky something". I guess I've heard the phrase so often myself I thought it said what the reporter had wanted to say.

My "Lincoln" search feed found this article at RedBlueChristian linking to two posts that score high on our Lincoln-mention-meter: a series of essays discussing our patron and his Second Inaugural Address, and another entitled When Presidents Theologize.

I haven't had a chance to read any of them yet, but I'm certain Steve will explain why Mark Daniels deserves linkage (in laborious detail, I'm sure).

Apparently, Jane Hamsher and the pseudonymous "DarkBlack" think that the way to fight race-bating is with stereotypical racial imagery. Tom Maguire quotes DarkBlack's defense of his "art".

Lieberman has attempted to activate a voting demographic that his strategists believe will aid him in his quest.

To this end, he has imported a figure, Bill Clinton, who has standing with the American black community, and has repeatedly asserted his personal credentials as one who has worked on behalf of that community.

Yet Lieberman has engaged in race baiting (with the Lamont flyer) as a cynical attempt to game this demographic, and he has engaged in other activities which cast doubtful shadows upon this allegiance.

Thus, in my opinion, Lieberman is pretending to be something that he is not for personal gain, exactly like the vile caucasian minstrel show performers of Vaudeville.

And so my artist's impression stands.

LGF

UPDATE: One of the commenters at the ConnecticutBLOG article links to this:

The act of accusing others, particularly white Americans, of racist behavior typically does not entail racially divisive language, unless it features talk about honkies and crackers and white-hooded Klansmen. It doesn't disparage white people generally, but, if it is disparaging, it tends to be disparaging of behavior that is racist.

This is only "race baiting" if you believe that exposing bigotry by whites somehow inflicts harm upon them; if you believe that whites are themselves the victims of systematic, oppressive, and widespread "reverse racism" in America -- a notion that enjoys considerable support among the angry white men of the right, but for which the evidence is scant indeed; and that suggesting at times that their behavior might be motivated by racism is itself a degrading racial stereotype.

This may be true in a handful of instances, but more often the charge is raised in instances where there is no derisive language, only serious questions. Indeed, compared to the real history of oppression and racism in this country, both in the past and present, such claims appear, more than anything, to be little more than the bathetic [sic] whining of the privileged.

Reformulating "race baiting" to include raising concerns about racism is a form of Newspeak: it inverts the actual meaning of the phrase to suggest its nearly polar opposite, thereby rendering it meaningless.

It seems even more appropriate now than ever who we named The Black Republican of the Year.

UPDATE II: A "compassionate progressive" at Ned Lamont's campaign blog delivers this hilarious whopper:

This is obviously a fake. Progressives are the pinnacle of tolerance. Why would one of us do something like this?

When I got up this morning, Chris Muir's cartoon made me scratch my head, trying to remember who Mary Catherine Ham was. Like any good geek, I googled. Okay, so apparently this is leading to an Inside-the-Punditry joke. (And no, I generally don't read Townhall.com. I've already got too much to read in my feedreader, they got cut long ago. Generally, when something is really worthwhile, I see someone refer to it somewhere else and I follow the link.)

Anyway, while I was looking at the search results, the first link I actually clicked was.... well, let me not spoil it for you. First, read this column of Ham's from 2004 (which someone thankfully has stolen, because Townhall's most recent revamp obliterated their archives). Personally, I thouhgt it might be a bit pedantic, but that's a columnist's job - tell us why the little things mean something. And bloggers do that up to 366 days a year. Pedantic is what we do.

Now, the first link I really followed led me to this fisking, and "pedantic" would be the least of the criticisms you see there and in the comments. But apparently, Ham successfully proved her point.

I strongly suggest this piece by Kathryn Jean Lopez as "Recommended Reading".