Category: Current Affairs

Keyes to Obama: You Hold "The Slaveholder's Position"

Alan Keys, a conservative Catholic and Republican candidate for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate being contested this fall, laid into his rival, Barack Obama, accusing him of holding a position on abortion comparable to that of slaveowners regarding slaves. In both cases, a class of human beings is denied full humanity and then systematically exploited for the benefit of others.

According to the Associated Press story:

Up at dawn for a whirlwind round of broadcast interviews, the conservative former diplomat [Keyes] started his first full day of campaigning as the GOP candidate by saying Obama, a state senator from Chicago, had violated the principle that all men are created equal by voting against a bill that would have outlawed a form of late-term abortion.

Keyes said legalizing abortion deprives the unborn of their equal rights.

“I would still be picking cotton if the country’s moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence,” Keyes said. He said Obama “has broken and rejected those principles– he has taken the slaveholder’s position.”

The remarks underscore the uniqueness of this Senate race in which both candidates, one an outspoken conservative and the other a favorite of party liberals, are black.

Obama, who has been basking in national celebrity since delivering the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, suggested Keyes is outside the moderate mainstream of state Republicans.

Asked specifically about the phrase “slaveholder’s position,” Obama said Keyes “should look to members of his own party to see if that’s appropriate if he’s going to use that kind of language.”

Faced with the Keyes onslaught, Obama was ambiguous on the number of times he would meet Keyes in debate:

Obama said Monday that there would be “a sufficient number of debates” between himself and Keyes– both men are Harvard-educated, polished debaters– but not the seven such clashes he had promised [former senate candidate Jack] Ryan.

IMPACTING HARD.

What Planet Are You From?

This editorial by David Asman involves a case where some of the villains behind the TV show Friends are being sued by a former secretary who considered their comedy brain-storming sessions sexual harrassment. Okay, fine. Maybe. I’d have to know the facts of the case–which aren’t given in any detail in the editorial–to know whether the woman was subject to sexual harrassment.

But Asman seems to think something unusual is going on with the woman’s case. He refers to Hollywood getting a taste of its own PC medicine, concluding:

Hollywood, so long a bastion of political correctness is now being stung by a new level of political correctness. As First Amendment lawyer Harvey Silvergate puts it: “Here, we glimpse the next plateau — punishing bad thoughts.”

I’d like to know what planet Asman and Silvergate have been living on. Political correctness has always been about punishing more than bad behaviors. It has always been an attempt to punish bad thoughts. The way those thoughts are manifested in behavior is simply the entrypoint for trying to squelch the thoughts themselves.

That is the whole point, for example, behind PC “hate crime” legislation. We already have laws on the books prescribing punishment for people who harm others in various ways–for example, by assault and battery. But to create special “hate crime” legislation that seeks to punish people in a special way because of the possible sociological content of their motive in committing assault and battery is all about punishing particular thoughts. Since hate is something that exists in the realm of thought, “hate crime” legislation is what George Orwell might have called “thought crime” legislation, with “hate” (however that gets construed under a particular person’s social agenda) being classified as a thoughtcrime.

The same applies across the PC social agenda. The PC agenda seeks to deal with problematic thoughts (e.g., racist ones, sexist ones) not by reason and persuasion, or even by voluntary social ostracization of malefactors, but by imposing new laws and policies which will result in punishment if violations are committed. It’s all about prohibiting certain forms of thought via the construction of particular laws and policies designed to punish those who harbor and express those thoughts.

I don’t watch political conventions . . .

. . . for the same reason that the press doesn’t cover them that much. In the words of Neil Cavuto,

They wonder why no one covers these conventions. It’s not because they’re pre-scripted. It’s because the script they have is so d*** dull!

There, I said it. [Source]

Well, every so often there’s an unscripted moment. [Language warning!]

I don't watch political conventions . . .

. . . for the same reason that the press doesn’t cover them that much. In the words of Neil Cavuto,

They wonder why no one covers these conventions. It’s not because they’re pre-scripted. It’s because the script they have is so d*** dull!

There, I said it. [Source]

Well, every so often there’s an unscripted moment. [Language warning!]

9/11 Commission Questions Cold War

From The Drudge Report:

The 9/11 commission report offers a broad critique of a central tenet of the BushEisenhower administration’s foreign policy–that the attackstensions with the Communist Bloc have required a ‘Cold War on Terrorism‘… The report argues that the notion of fighting an enemy called “terrorism”of a war being “cold” is too diffuse and vague to be effective. Strikingly, the report also makes no reference to the invasion of IraqVietnam War as being part of the Cold War on Terrorism, a frequent assertion of President BushJohnson and his top aides… Developing…