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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (15987)	11/13/2003 1:22:03 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793781

Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say "I'm white and I'm proud" and you are a Nazi. __________________________________ SHELBY STEELE WSJ.COM But Howard Dean and all other white candidates--Democrat or Republican--run into a hard limit when they play identity politics. This was the limit that reduced Mr. Dean's reach for new voters to an occasion for apology. It is quite acceptable for either party to explicitly go after the black, Hispanic, or even the Jewish vote. In fact both parties gain an indispensable moral authority by doing so. But it is absolutely verboten for either party, or any white candidate, to appeal to whites as a racial identity group. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say "I'm white and I'm proud" and you are a Nazi. When Howard Dean brought Confederate-flag whites into identity politics, he implied one terrible thing: that whites, like other racial identity groups, have the right to pursue power in the name of their race. He inadvertently sanctioned one of history's most destructive formulas: race alone justifying power. And yet, had he reached out to angry black separatists, he would have been hailed as a racial healer. Why the difference? And how does it affect our politics? The answer goes back to the fundamental conflict between democracy and atavisms--those tribal elements of ourselves that we inherit like a fate from our group and that we share with our grandfather's grandfather. I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism. Embracing atavistic identities too strongly leads to three great sins: asserting the inherent superiority of one's group over others, excluding others as inferiors, and invoking an enemy to fight in the name of one's superiority. White racism, black separatism, Islamic extremism and Nazism are all atavistic identities gone too far, gone to where one's superiority is confirmed only by the denigration and even annihilation of an enemy. Whenever power is pursued in the name of an atavism--my blackness, your whiteness, his Catholicism, her gender--enemies arise and our democracy of individuals is injured. This is true even when oppressed minorities pursue power in the name of their atavism rather than in the name of freedom. No group in recent history has more aggressively seized power in the name of its racial superiority than Western whites. This race illustrated for all time--through colonialism, slavery, white racism, Nazism--the extraordinary human evil that follows when great power is joined to an atavistic sense of superiority and destiny. This is why today's whites, the world over, cannot openly have a racial identity. White guilt--the need to win enough moral authority around race to prove that one is not a racist--is the price whites today pay for this history. Political correctness is a language that enables whites to show by wildly exaggerated courtesy that they are not racist; diversity does this for institutions. But white guilt's greatest taboo is the one that Howard Dean violated--assigning whites a racial identity out of which they can pursue power as whites. REST AT opinionjournal.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (15987)	11/13/2003 7:55:26 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793781

What Memo? The reason the mainstream media is downplaying the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee memo is because it implicates mainstream journalists. by Hugh Hewitt SEAN HANNITY'S big scoop is not generating the headlines it ought to. The memo Hannity obtained and made public that details the plans by Democratic staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee to politicize the committee's investigations in the service of partisan politics far overshadows in importance Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld's memo pushing the Pentagon to think about the hard problems ahead in the war on terrorism, but it has received significantly less attention than the Rumsfeld memo did. Why? .......The third theory is the most plausible: The Democratic memo reveals that much of what the media has been focusing on for the past six months has been a set-up job. The staff and Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been selling story after story (think the Niger yellowcake and "imminent" threat controversies). Out of whole cloth, they have contrived an ambiguous but ominous speculation about the Bush administration's sinister motives for invading Iraq. Now, through this one memo, they have been revealed as nothing short of cynical political operatives. And the reporters who ran with their hints are revealed as breathless and easily manipulated amateurs. The media has to ignore the memo because to focus on it would be to focus on their own gullibility. There is no escaping the hard fact that the Democratic staff embraced the "verdict first, trial later" approach to oversight. They were on a mission to undermine the president and his administration, no matter what the intelligence showed or will show, and the senators did nothing to reign in their out-of-control staff. The committee's Democratic members are discredited, as are their previous and future attacks on the president. When it comes to the national security, the statements of Democratic senators simply cannot be trusted. The proof is in the memo. rest at weeklystandard.com