6 Responses to “‘Greeted As Liberators’”

1. Alix says:

   February 19, 2009 at 2:25 pm

   Well, I can tell you that in the public schools here in Los Angeles talk about race all the time. This is Black History month and my middle school daughter (who’s school is approx 60% hispanic) is studying every “first” acheivement of famous blacks. I think it can be a good idea — but it is way overdone! Most of the historical figures that they focus on in the public schools are some kind of minority.

   My kids are taught, in school, much more about Harriett Tubman than George Washington. I try to remedy that at home.
2. Trent says:

   February 19, 2009 at 2:30 pm

   The progress we’ve made thus far toward racial equality was made in spite of conservatives. They want to stop the progress here, saying “we’ve come far enough,” just as they’ve wanted to stop the progress at every step along the way.

   Too bad, Peter Wehner. Progress toward racial equality will continue, no matter how desperately you want it to stop. Tremendous disparities between races still exist, in education, income, employment and healthcare. Conservatism may not believe in equality of outcomes for all, but it is supposed to value equality of opportunity. No rational person can say blacks have the same opportunities that whites do in today’s America.

   Once again, Republicans are determined to reinforce their image as the party of racists. Well, your base is dying off, Peter. Bigots may be the past and present of the GOP, but they will not be its future.
3. RoyE says:

   February 19, 2009 at 2:38 pm

   Why do I get the feeling that justice is not blind with this AG?
4. SukieTawdry says:

   February 19, 2009 at 2:39 pm

   This sounds like a typical rant from a typical race baiting hustler until you remember who Holder is and the power inherent in his position. The money paragraph:

   “But we must do more, and we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must — and will — lead the nation to the “new birth of freedom” so long ago promised by our greatest president. This is our duty and our solemn obligation.”

   Makes you wonder just what he has in mind for the DOJ as regards this “new birth of freedom.”
5. Maureen Martin says:

   February 19, 2009 at 2:39 pm

   [If this is the kind of “new” and “post-racial” politics Barack Obama promised, it makes one long for the days before he made his entrance on the national stage.]

   Thank you, Peter Wehner, for this posting, for those words. Buried within Holder’s comment is his own racism. The fashionable notion that only whites can be racist is worse than surreal. It is a sin against
   the very nation that just raised Holder and Obama to high power.
6. Diane says:

   February 19, 2009 at 3:12 pm

   What does it mean “to have a forthright national conversation between blacks and whites to discuss aspects of race which are ignored because they are uncomfortable”?

   I wondered at the time Obama made his famous race speech defending Rev. Wright. I’m wondering again. I can’t believe Holder and Obama are really asking for the kind of dialogue that honestly examines how black culture is premised on hatred of whites, how absurd it is that everything bad that ever happens to any black, even if it’s OJ Simpson, must ipso facto be the result of white racism. How racial preferences systematically advantage one group over another. Or how it feels to see someone of lesser talents and shorter experience promoted ahead of you because of race. Look at how absurd it is that Obama’s vacated senate seat was universally understood to be reserved for a black sucesssor, and how Burris’s blackness made it politically impossible for Democrats to deny him the appointment.

   If that’s the “forthright national conversation on race” that they want, I’m all for it. Shelby Steele can be the moderator.

   But I think the “conversation” Holder and Obama want to have is more like the one that drew shudders a few months back when it was revealed that the University of Delaware’s student housing orientation program required all new students to undergo a sensitivity training session that required whites to acknowledge in public that they are inherently racist. In other words, I think what Holder and Obama are talking about here is an organized “two-minute hate” complete with staged mea culpas, to cleanse our sick white souls of the deep=seated, unacknowledged evils lurking therein.

   Thanks, but no thanks.
7. marybel says:

   February 19, 2009 at 3:29 pm

   Personally, I wonder how Holder, dressed in his fine designer suit, stepping out of a gleaming stretch limo, albeit without a security detail, would feel taking a three or four block leisurely stroll alone, without any protection, in a really bad area in the dead of night…or even in the daytime?

   Maybe he’d be scared poopless, like Jesse Jackson was? Jackson has confessed to crossing the street to avoid the group and then being relieved to see that the lingering, loitering group of “hoodlums” were…(Paul Harvey pregnant pause here)…. white.

   I say to Eric Holder – as my teenage clients would say, “Bite me.”
8. g says:

   February 19, 2009 at 3:34 pm

   Right, Diane. Of course they don’t want a forthright conversation about race relations in all their complexity–lingering racism, racial differences, the merits/demerits of affirmative action, and the strictures of political correctness that make it impossible to discuss such matters. Rather, they want a one-way conversation about/apology for white racism.
9. ploome says:

   February 19, 2009 at 3:43 pm

   I am under the impression that a pradon is just that…not determined by merit

   a pardon is given at the pleasure of the President for whatever reason, or lack of reason

   Am I wrong?
10. Oldflyer says:

    February 19, 2009 at 3:58 pm

    Trent, when you talk about disparities between races you are, of course, talking about Black and White. It is always Black and white, isn’t it? Never Black and Asian. Never Black and Hispanic. Nor for that matter White and Asian. White and Hispanic–a different story.

    You and Holder seemingly have not noticed that there are an abundance of races in this country. Each has a story to tell. Each has progressed, often in fits and starts, but progressed nonetheless. But, it seems that only one really matters. Only one has suffered. Only one is owed in perpetuity.

    My ancestors came here as indentured servants. While not slavery, it was about one step removed. No one cared much about their plight; and no one considers the practice. common at the time, to be a stain on America’s history. No war was fought to free them; and their descendants received no preferences. Nor should we. That was a long time ago, and this country has provided ample opportunity for anyone who takes advantage of it.
11. Joe NS says:

    February 19, 2009 at 4:00 pm

    Where does this 24-carat race-baiting nitwit Trent, who evidently cannot read English, get off accusing Peter Wehner of “desperately” wanting to stop progress in race relations?

    It is as plain as anything mght be that Wehner is taking Holder to task for making the contemptible observation that this “country does not differ significantly” from 50 years ago “when segregation was the law of the land in many states.” Asehner rightly points out, “. . . the United States has traveled an enormous and admirable distance on the subject of race, which had been America’s besetting sin.”

    Does Trent disagree? Well then say so, fool, without making a cheap and imaginary foray into unfounded speculations about what Conservatives want, “desperately” or otherwise.
12. Richard says:

    February 19, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    A liberal without a greivance is like a fish without water. It simply can’t survive.

    With blacks in prominent positions in the Bush Administration, and the election of of a black president, liberals are gasping for air. America……… is………. racist…….! It……. has…… to…….. be……..!

    So when the argument can no longer be based on fact, fiction will do. Anything to maintain victimhood.
13. Les Grossman says:

    February 19, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    Wow, it took the leftist troll who patrols this board for Axelrod only 18 minutes to call the blogger a racist. What took you so long Trent, or Ben or whatever sockpuppet you are using today?
14. miniDitka says:

    February 19, 2009 at 4:44 pm

    How can anyone be surprised by this?

    First, this is of a piece with with Obama’s foreign and domestic policy, which is predicated on the notion that America needs to own up to its sins and change its ways. It’s all about saying your sorry for someone else.

    Second, this sort of self-congratulatory self-righteousness is the cocktail party Kool Aide served in the salons of Hyde Park and other right-thinking enclaves. Real courage is not risking your life fighting for the flag, or even admitting your faults and quietly trying to do something about them — it’s being bold enough to allow your tender sensibilities to be ruffled by thought and speach about America’s many failings.
15. CFB says:

    February 19, 2009 at 4:52 pm

    Sorry, Trent. It’s not conservatives who prolonged institutions that oppressed blacks. It was, and is, the Democrats. Black power now rests in the racist institution of affirmative action that produced our president and attorney general. The notion that blacks are inherently inferior and need a handout from the white powers-that-be. Could there be anything more racist than that?

    PS, Trent, your boorishness is topped only by your historical illiteracy. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and a conservative. Nice try, though.
16. Anthony says:

    February 19, 2009 at 5:02 pm

    Experience tells me Sukie and Diane are right.

    Trent has some reading to do.

    It will be progress when we stop boring ourselves stupid with talk about race.
17. ziggy Zoggy says:

    February 19, 2009 at 5:16 pm

    “New birth of freedom?” Sounds like a code phrase for “reparations” or something equally bigoted.
18. Trent says:

    February 19, 2009 at 6:37 pm

    “Trent, your boorishness is topped only by your historical illiteracy. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and a conservative. Nice try, though.”

    Sure, let’s compare history degrees CFB.

    Lincoln was a moderate, not a conservative. He was elected president because it was hoped that his position on slavery — he believed that the Constitution precluded him from eliminating slavery in the South — was moderate enough that the Southern states would not secede if he were elected.

    Lincoln wanted to gradually eliminate slavery by keeping it from expanding into new US territories and by paying the Southern states to stop the practice over time. He thought that he could shrink it to the point were it was uneconomical.

    During the civil war he used the issue of slavery to rescue his war effort and make the horrible, unpopular carnage about something bigger than secession — to his great credit. He freed the slaves because he felt he could not win without doing so. It was most certainly not the platform he ran on.

    Today, Lincoln would be a Democrat. He certainly bore no resemblance to a modern conservative Republican. He was a religious skeptic. He was essentially a Whig — opposed to free trade, believing that the declaration of independence took precedence over the Constitution, and that the Congress was more powerful than the Executive branch.

    It’s telling that you have to go back to Lincoln, a man whose party shared only a name with yours, to find someone who took a stand against racism.
19. Gord says:

    February 19, 2009 at 6:58 pm

    Trent:

    I don’t know about CFB’s history degree, but I wlll take Professor Allen C. Guelzo’s knowldege of Lincoln over yours any day.

    Professor Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era, Director of Civil War Era Studies, and Associate Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania.
    Professor Guelzo is the author of numerous books on American intellectual history, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War era. His publication awards include the Lincoln Prize as well as the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize for two of his books—Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America—making him the first double Lincoln laureate in the history of both prizes. His critically acclaimed book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.

    Professor Guelzo argues in the cover piece for National Review thatLincoln was a “torchbearer for free markets, individual liberty and economic mobility, the rule of law, natural rights, and prudence in governing.” In other words, he was a conservative. Read it. You might learn something, depsite the history degree that you possess.

    BTW, since you obviously read the posts here, why don’t yourself against the critiques of your nasty, ad hominem attack on Peter Wehner, which badly distorted his post. Or are you much more comfortabl eon the attack?
20. ziggy Zoggy says:

    February 19, 2009 at 7:21 pm

    Trent,

    nobody is interested in your plagiarized nonsense about Lincoln not being conservative. Every conservative prior to Reagan was actually more like a modern Democrat than a Republican according to moronic trolls like you. That’s like claiming Thomas Jefferson was an atheist and Hitler was a right-winger–asinine claims moonbats like you also make on a regular basis. From slavery, to Jim Crow, to Affirmative Action, all the worst racist policies enacted against Black Americans have been championed by Democrats.

    Can you tell me which Democrat today is taking a stand against racism? Holder? Obama? Rangel? Reid? Pelosi? Murtha? Don’t make me laugh. The democrat party pushes anti-White racism even harder than the Republican party does.
21. J.E. Dyer says:

    February 19, 2009 at 8:12 pm

    Let’s not get sucked into playground dares, shall we? The flaming “coward” dart is exactly like little boys calling each other “coward” to provoke each other.

    This should be kept in mind as a good guide to the kind of “justice” Holder will labor to implement.. Seventh graders who are made “teacher for a day” do better at showing maturity and perspective.
22. Hurf says:

    February 19, 2009 at 11:05 pm

    “It’s not conservatives who prolonged institutions that oppressed blacks. It was, and is, the Democrats.”

    Hahaha. The racist Southern Democrats were overwhelmingly on the conservative wing of the party, which is why their collective oscillation into the Republican camp was so seamless.
23. Jeff Bargholz says:

    February 21, 2009 at 12:31 am

    Hurl,

    you moonbats never get tired of spewing the canard that Jim Crow Democrats were conservatives who later morphed into Republicans, but it’s as big a load of bull$hit now as it was the day some left-wing spin doctor came up with it.

    The Southern Dems have always been social Democrats with a capital S, and the number of them who crossed the isle is close to nil.

    “Hahaha” cretin.