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« on: July 14, 2015, 06:23:39 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Digest 7-13-2015
From The Federalist Patriot
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Daily Digest
Jul. 13, 2015
THE FOUNDATION
“It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.” —Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, part 2, 1792
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Greece Gets Another Handout With a Bailout1
For the third time since 2010, Greece may be spared the full-blown consequences of an economic tailspin of its own making2, at least for now. Over the weekend, negotiators reached a tentative bailout agreement that, if implemented, would infuse upward of $96 billion (€86 billion) into the country’s floundering economy. Greece would retain its membership with the Eurozone in return for additional, albeit stricter, austerity measures. However, the deal hinges on the approval of Athens' Parliament, and a history of broken promises have fostered a pessimistic outlook. Entitled and disgruntled Greek citizens recently voted against a referendum, the terms of which, ironically, are an integral part of the new bailout. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “Athens’s Parliament has to pass pension overhauls and sales tax increases that voters overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum just one week ago.” Will that stop lawmakers, who face voters' contempt, from approving the bailout? “Before the country can get better, it will have to get a lot worse,” notes Investor’s Business Daily. Greece’s GDP has dropped roughly 33% since 2009, yet time and again Greeks have demonstrated how reluctant they are to abandon socialist enslavement. “To grow again, Greece will need to make deeper spending cuts, reduce public pensions, introduce free-market reforms, lighten regulations and tackle endemic political corruption,” IBD adds. That will be a tough sell, but it’s the only way forward.
There’s No ‘Loophole’ in the Background Check System3
The New York Times breathlessly reports4 that Dylan Roof could have been stopped from murdering nine people in Charleston were it not for a flaw in the background check. “A loophole in the check system allowed [Roof] to buy the .45-caliber handgun despite his having previously admitted to drug possession,” the Times reports the FBI to have admitted. (The Times story has since been corrected without notation.) The FBI operates the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, though, listening to Democrats, we know it may be shocking to learn that a nearly universal background check system already exists. What may be even more shocking to the Times is that it wasn’t a “loophole.” It was human error, plain and simple. Someone at the FBI failed to update the system.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, laments5, “The disclosure amounts to a heartbreaking admission by the FBI director that the attack on members of a Bible study group at Emanuel AME might have been averted.” Perhaps, but perhaps not. Roof was an alleged druggie who killed nine people. Does anyone think there aren’t other ways of obtaining firearms than passing a background check? Clearly, the lesson here is twofold: First, enforce the law. Second, there are still times the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Unsportsmanlike Conduct Against the Redskins6
The Washington Redskins lost more yardage in their drive to protect their name7 from perpetually aggrieved leftist busybodies. On Wednesday, a judge canceled the NFL franchise’s federal trademark registrations. U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee’s ruling upheld a previous decision8 by the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. But the clock hasn’t run out yet, and Redskins President Bruce Allen promised an appeal. “We are convinced that we will win on appeal as the facts and the law are on the side of our franchise that has proudly used the name Washington Redskins for more than 80 years,” Allen said in a statement. But Lee’s ruling presented an opportunity for the Redskins' hometown paper, The Washington Post, to give a full hands-on-hips editorial lecture9 to the team. “The name is going to have to change,” the paper finger-wagged, “and the sooner team owner Dan Snyder puts himself on the right side of history, the better it will be for everyone.” That “right side of history” blather is what leftists always use when they have no other argument for their policy preference. But the Post also issued what we view as a veiled threat: “No matter what a court eventually determines about the ability of the team to peddle its gear, the damage caused by using a hurtful name will continue.” Because they and their fellow race-baiting travelers will never shut up about it. It’s the same with the Confederate flag and those who oppose same-sex marriage — the beatings will continue until you submit.
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
If You’re White, Shame on You10
By Arnold Ahlert
The leftist-inspired deconstruction of traditional America — and by extension, the dominant white Judeo-Christian culture that formed the basis of it — continues apace. MTV has produced “White People,” a documentary in which five young white people are made to feel uncomfortable about their inherently “privileged” position in society. This claptrap is narrated by Jose Antonio Vargas, an openly gay Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose coming out11 as an illegal alien in a 2011 New York Times column has earned him celebrity status — and apparently, legal immunity.
As the trailer12 indicates, the documentary aims to “change the way you think about white history” and urges its audience to “all get uncomfortable together” when dealing with racial issues. In a Facebook post13 accompanied by the picture of the same young white man apparently reduced to tears in the trailer, Vargas spells out his objective: “We cannot have an honest conversation about race in America until we explore and unpack what ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’ mean in America.”
MTV President Stephen Friedman doubles down on this invidious nonsense in a press release14. “Whiteness often remains unexamined in conversations about race in this country, even as it acts as the implicit norm against which other racial identities are judged,” he insists. “By shining a spotlight on whiteness, we hope ‘White People’ will serve as a powerful conversation starter that encourages our audience to address racial bias through honest, judgment-free dialogue.”
That would be honest, judgment-free dialogue as long as one concedes white privilege is the baseline from which any conversation about race can proceed. Thus it is completely unsurprising that one of the documentary’s cast members, 21-year-old “Lucas,” is channeling his inner useful idiot, and became, as the press release puts it, “passionate about the topic of race and began teaching white privilege workshops.”
If enough guilty white people visit the film’s website, such workshops may no longer be necessary. It is there they can access15 the seven-day “bias cleanse” provided by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity16. It promises to “provide you with the daily tasks that will help you begin to de-bias yourself.”
Thankfully, following the trailer’s posting on YouTube, “White People” received the barrage of negative comments it so richly deserves. “I’m Asian, and I am offended for white people by this show,” said one person. Another got to the meat of the issue. “What it means to be white? Well for starters that I am somehow a terrible racist by default, simply because I am white. That I should feel bad/guilty/apologetic about issues that happened over 100 years ago to people that I have nothing to do with. That somehow everything is magically in my favor, which it is not. Yep. That’s how it feels.”
What happened — exactly — over 100 years ago? America became one of the first nations on earth to eliminate slavery.
“Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race,” black economist extraordinaire Thomas Sowell explains17. “Even the leading moral and religious thinkers in different societies accepted slavery as just a fact of life. No one wanted to be a slave. But their rejection of slavery as a fate for themselves in no way meant that they were unwilling to enslave others. It was just not an issue — until the 18th century, and then it became an issue only in Western civilization.”
It is precisely this part of American history the white privilege hucksters choose to ignore, because the redemptive part of America’s historical legacy is inimical to the America-damning agenda promulgated by the Left. It is an agenda that can only thrive in the atmosphere of ginned up racial divisiveness that has become the Left’s calling card.
But not just divisiveness. We are in the midst of “the therapeutic culture’s hostile takeover of the culture,” explains18 The American Spectator’s Daniel Flynn. “We go for the gut or tug at the heart. Stimulating the mental circuitry strikes as a non sequitur to a generation trained to emote rather than think. The Thought Police put themselves out of business and created a more ominously Orwellian control apparatus: the Feelings Police.” |
