Of all the poisonous, ugly, and intellectually vapid controversies ginned up in my lifetime, the current breakout of St. Vitus' Dance over the "racist" opposition to Barack Obama may be the most egregious.
Al Sharpton tells CNN's Larry King that decent and racially sensitive Americans shouldn't let a small minority make health care into a "racial issue."
Someone in the control room surely yelled, "Cue the laugh track!"
In case you don't get the joke, this entire "debate" over whether opposition to Obama's health care reform is racist is totally, completely, and in every way conceivable an invention of the Left.
Oh, sure, there are some racists who oppose Obama. Shocking news, that.
And, yes, a tiny, tiny fraction of the signs at the Tea Party protests last weekend were racially insensitive. But if that's how we're going to score, then opposition to the Iraq War is anti-Semitic. After all, I saw a bunch of signs at antiwar protests that said bigoted things about Jews.
Meanwhile, no significant conservative politician, pundit, or intellectual has said that they object to Obama's agenda because he's black. Rather, they've said they oppose his agenda for precisely the same reasons they oppose Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's and Barney Frank's agendas. They stand athwart Obama yelling "Stop!" just as they did with Clinton and Democratic presidents before him.
Such self-absolutions don't work quite as well when racist National Review writers helpfully prove to the world that they hate and despise African-Americans.
Dissolve the McDonald’s Workforce and Elect a New One
September 5, 2011 2:30 P.M. By Mark Krikorian
The cover story in Sunday’s WaPo magazine was a profile of a McDonald’s store just south of the House office buildings in Washington, one of the busiest in the whole metro area, focusing on the manager, Raul Reyes, and his rise from a teenager selling coconuts on buses in Guatemala to running a busy and successful fast-food restaurant.
How heartwarming. We suppose Mr. Krikorian is going to laud the glories of Capitalism while patting Hard Work on the head.
The guy seems like a real go-getter who delights in his job, though is it really possible that the manager of a $5.2 million business makes only $39,000 a year?
Yes, it is. Unfortunately workers sometimes get the short end of the stick in capitalism. They don't call it workism, you know. People can work hard for a living and achieve success and still not receive commensurate rewards. Those high corporate productivity levels didn't occur by paying people what they are worth.
So how will Krikorian process this discrepancy? Will he attempt to discover the reason? Will he be moved to empathize with the plight of the working man? Or will he deny and make up a bullshit reason to ignore facts?
It seems like there’d have to be bonuses and incentives and the like that the reporter was too incurious to ask about.Denial it is. But denial isn't always enough. There must be someone to blame for the ills of the world, someone...different.
But in a profile of this particular dot on the fast-food map you have to read carefully to discern what happened when the store was purchased in 2003 by Cuban-born Carlos Mateos — namely, that the black Americans were fired and replaced with Hispanic immigrant workers, virtually of them originally illegal aliens now claiming to have temporary status[.]
[snipped quote]
[snipped boilerplate liberal sniping]
Finally, I know some readers will draw immigration-policy lessons from Reyes’s having to fire the American workers who were “giving away free food” and “taking money from the cash register” — namely, that we need the infusion of values that mass immigration brings because our own people (and let’s face it, it’s our black people everyone’s thinking of when they say this) are irredeemably indolent and depraved.
"Our" black people are "irredeemably indolent and depraved." Nice. You have wonder what kind of loathsome need is satisfied by such ugly hatred and contempt.
Mark Krikorian is a racist pig. He fits right in at The Corner as part of National Review's long, long history of blatant racist piggery.
"The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.National Review is still publishing the work of racist pigs such as Krikorian and John Derbyshire, who said:
Our species separated into two parts 50, 60, or 70 thousand years ago, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask. One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split, and re-split, until there were human populations living in near-total reproductive isolation from each other in all parts of the world. This went on for hundreds of generations, causing the divergences we see today. Different physical types, as well as differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality, are exactly what one would expect to observe when scrutinizing these divergent populations.
Now, the empirical grounds. We all notice the different physical specialties of the different races in the Olympic Games. There was a run of, I think, seven Olympics in which every one of the finalists in the men’s 100 meters sprint was of West African ancestry — 56 out of 56 finalists. You get less pronounced but similar patterns in other sports — East African distance runners, Northeast Asian divers, and so on. These differences even show up within sports, where a team sport calls for highly differentiated abilities in team members — football being the obvious example.
...
We see the same differences in traits that we don’t think of as directly physical, what evolutionary psychologists sometimes refer to as the “BIP” traits — behavior, intelligence, and personality. Two of the hardest-to-ignore manifestations here are the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans, and the persistent gaps in scores when tests of cognitive ability are given to large population samples.
The National Review is filled with the mentally indolent and the morally vacuous, all brought together to persuade the world that conservatism is a respectable political party instead of a grab-bag of losers united by their fantasies of racial and cultural superiority. They want total control over their fellow man because that is the only way to force everyone else to acknowledge their superiority and give them the extreme deference and respect that their thwarted souls crave.
From Wikipedia:
Krikorian frequently testifies before Congress and has published articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Commentary, National Review, and elsewhere.[vague] He has appeared on 60 Minutes, Nightline, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, National Public Radio and many other television and radio programs.Our liberal media, ladies and gentlemen.
spelling corrected
Rather sad that the awfulness of McDonalds corporate practice is left to klowns like Krikorian to sling mud at the workers rather than decent people to organize the workers.
ReplyDelete(commiserate s/b commensurate, no)
Thanks, Downpuppy.
ReplyDeleteKrikorian is shocked that a McDonald's manager makes "only" $39,000 a year? I'm shocked that they make over $30k.
ReplyDeleteI always hated that, "How much does a gallon of milk cost?" test that smug entertainment journalists would give to celebrities, but I'm fascinated by what numbers the middle/upper classes have in their minds when they think about working class wages.
Well, it's possible that Goldberg & his ilk don't hate Obama because they're racists...they may simply think that it's a violation of God's laws that a Democrat should EVER be President of the United States...I mean, God is a Republican, right....?
ReplyDeleteAs for Krikorian, he sounds like the kind of nut who would have been busy in Nazi Germany writing "scientific treatises" "proving" the obvious superiority of Aryans over Jews and suchlike....
Off topic. In the end, there really is very little difference between Michelle Malkin and McArdle:
ReplyDeletehttp://michellemalkin.com/2011/09/05/another-obamacare-fable-no-lack-of-insurance-didnt-kill-jobless-dad-with-tooth-infection/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/what-a-toothache-says-about-national-healthcare/244624/
I would like to suggest that Krikorian, Goldberg and the like be paid $39,000 per year, because they damned sure don't create $5.2 million worth of value for their pushing electrons.
ReplyDelete-AWS
From today's McGalt post http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/whither-the-post-office/244633/:
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm thick, but I don't really see what problem this solves. Most of the Post Office workforce is people who sort, process, or deliver mail, which does not map very well onto what a bank workforce does; moving the physical pieces of paper is hardly the mainstay of their job.
"Maybe I'm thick..." Now that is the truest thing she has ever said.
She's reacting to the idea of a post office/bank as if she's unaware that they exist in other countries. I'm not saying that it's a good idea or a bad idea (I wouldn't know), but it's not something that was pulled out of thin air, as she suggests.
ReplyDeleteLike so many Gov't services, the Post Office isn't supposed to make money or even "break even. It's a tax-funded service for All Americans. But now international Mega-corporations own several "mail services", they want to privatize the PO and squeeze all the billions out of it they can, then throw it back to the American People to rebuild.
ReplyDeleteThe only Government Program I know of that ever made money (I'm not talking jobs, but cash-creation) is NASA.
And that's been semi-privatized .... in other countries! Here, its just being allowed to slowly wither away.
I would like to complain about your description of the staff of National Review as "mouth-breathers". That is grossly unfair to those of us with broken noses.
ReplyDelete