The Foundation

“It is not honorable to take mere legal advantage, when it happens to be contrary to justice.” –Thomas Jefferson

Opinion in Brief

Editor’s Note: Barack Hussein Obama walked into a White House press briefing Friday afternoon, unannounced. He used the briefing to deliver his political assessment of the Zimmerman/Martin case. Mark Alexander rebuts Obama’s key points, then asks a more relevant question about the racial motivation behind the attack – Martin’s attack on Zimmerman, that is. Read Alexander’s rebuttal here.

“What did President Obama intend when he surprised the White House press corps on Friday with a statement on the not-guilty verdict in the murder trial of George Zimmerman? … Reports of protests, small-scale breakaway riots, vengeful attacks by young rioters on passers-by, were rife in the media. His Justice Department had gone out on a limb half-promising a civil-rights prosecution against Zimmerman. If violence had then become widespread, the administration would likely have been held responsible. … His starting point was that he wanted black America to understand he shared at least some of their disquiet about the trial without improperly challenging the not-guilty verdict. … If [Obama] respects the jury verdict as he says … then he must realize that Zimmerman’s life has been turned upside down for months and is under serious threat today for actions that were at worst foolish and/or reckless. … The second weakness of the president’s appeal for empathy is that it is too indulgent. Putting yourself in someone else’s place – which is the classic definition of empathy – means helping that person to deal realistically with his problems more than it means hugging him. It means tough love and honest talk. It means not endorsing someone’s comforting delusions out of politeness. … In the current context it means politely but firmly correcting the malicious fiction that a major threat to young black men – and a major anxiety for their parents – is murder at the hands of white racists. That fiction is itself a racist one.” –National Review’s John O'Sullivan

Reader Comments

“In his rebuttal to Obama’s race-bait remarks Friday afternoon, Mark Alexander’s analysis is the most cogent anywhere. But I had to get to the last paragraph for the most challenging question I have heard anyone ask about this case. Alexander wrote, ‘Race hustlers across the nation are calling for a civil rights investigation into Zimmerman’s motives for shooting Martin. However, during Zimmerman’s trial, it was clear that none of his actions were motivated by race. In fact, Rachel Jeantel, who was on the phone with Martin just prior to the altercation, testified that Martin described Zimmerman as a "creepy-ass white cracker.” Seems a more pertinent question would be: Was Martin’s assault on Zimmerman racially motivated?’ Outstanding question, Alexander!“ –Semper Fi! Kalifornia

"Responding to Alexander’s essay, What Democrats Won’t Say About Race, the sad thing is that while we readily acknowledge the ‘poverty plantations’ that hold Blacks in continued servitude, we fail to admit that the rest of us are, at best, sharecroppers on the same plantation, ever subject to the whims of our government overseers. How long will we toil, however light our chains, before we rise and throw off this Socialist tyranny?” –Dennis in Montana

“Trayvon Martin is repeatedly referred to as a ‘child.’ But in my 34 years in the Marine Corps I worked with hundreds of 17-year-old male Marines. Not one of them would ever consider himself a ‘child.’” –George in Rockport, Texas

Culture

“Eric Holder dismissed America as a ‘nation of cowards’ because we wouldn’t, he argued, have a ‘national conversation’ about race. … The slander is hydra-headed. No honest conversation about race is possible when accusations of racism replace reasoned arguments. … Look around you. The violence and bitterness that have followed the Zimmerman verdict were virtually ordered up by convicted slanderer Al Sharpton and his many imitators. The Zimmerman case was complicated. Any fair-minded person could see that it was difficult to conclude that Zimmerman was not acting in self-defense (however unwise his initial actions may have been). But the racial-grievance industrial complex doesn’t permit complexity. Racial enmity is their living. Stirring feelings of victimization and injustice among blacks and, to a lesser extent, among other designated minorities is their delight.” –columnist Mona Charen

Insight

“There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.” –former slave, educator, author and orator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

Government

“It is really amazing to behold the persistence of the Left’s economic narratives. In every case where government interferes with a market to create cartels, misallocations of resources, and stifling fiscal burdens, the resulting social losses get blamed on … the market! And the solution is … more government interference! … Back in 2011, I wrote [an article] comparing the history of Detroit and Houston over the last century. The Left’s narrative now has it that the market favored Houston (oil) and not Detroit (cars). That totally ignores the acute oil glut of the 1980s, which sent Texas and Houston into a regional depression. The companies in Houston cried out for protection – but instead of getting government help, they were allowed to go into bankruptcy. As a result, I wrote, Houston ‘bounced back as if suspended from a bungee cord – even though the oil bust lasted nearly two decades.’ Houston followed the conservative vision of government, which is to get the government off the people’s back and let them find their own way to prosperity. … The cause of Detroit’s epic fall from grandeur is not the market, but government interference in the market – from crony capitalism to labor-union laws to welfare. … In the case of Detroit, what government policies have done amounts to a crime against humanity.” –National Review’s Mario Loyola

For the Record

“I stay in a small hotel in Dallas that used to have three people behind the registration desk. Some time ago the hotel put in kiosks into which you put your credit card and voila out came your room keycard with a printed folder telling you the room number. There remained only one person behind the registration desk to handle people who hadn’t made a reservation in advance. Assuming there were two fully-staffed shifts a day that means four people per day were no longer needed. … The hotel is more profitable because, through technology, it has reduced its workforce by four-or-so people every day. Public unions would never let that happen. If that hotel were a city like Detroit, the American Federation of Municipal Kiosk Workers would have demanded that every kiosk have an attendant. And the National Association of County Hotel Bill Sliders (AFL-CIO) would have demanded that at least two people remain on the payroll to change the paper in the room-bill printer, even if no room bills are being printed any more. The United Auto Workers based in Detroit has, for decades, had basically the same outlook as public unions. … Fewer people paying less taxes to support more people doing less work. Hey. Wait a minute. That sounds very familiar.” –columnist Rich Galen

The Gipper

“The finger-pointers and handwringers of today were the policy makers of yesterday, and they gave us economic stagflation and double digit inflation. There was only one thing fair about their policies: They didn’t discriminate, they made everyone miserable.” –Ronald Reagan

Essential Liberty

“[T]here are many definitions of insanity. Take the one offered by ‘Prozac Nation’ author Elizabeth Wurtzel: ‘Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it.’ That brings me to President Barack Obama’s Thursday speech kicking off yet another campaign to persuade the public to ignore all available evidence about the Affordable Care Act. … ‘You’re going to see competition in ways that we haven’t seen before,’ says the president, mimicking the language of his opponents, because ‘market forces’ are pushing prices down. We have the ability to buy TVs in this manner, Obama says, so why not health care? Guess what. My television was made in South Korea, and no one forced me to buy one. If we believed that market forces cut prices, the sane thing to do would be to open competition up nationally (even internationally), allowing consumers to buy any kind of plan they want, from anyone they want, rather than have a fabricated, closed, price-controlled exchange. Obama reiterated that the law will help many people who don’t have health care, and that’s true. Republicans have to confront the reality of that situation. But the evidence also shows that the Affordable Care Act, as it stands, does little for the majority of Americans. So how is moving forward with a massive government overhaul an act of sanity?” –columnist David Harsanyi

Political Futures

“Samantha Power has for decades found fault with America and its historical role in the world. … It is no exaggeration to observe that Samantha Power would make a perfect representative of the United Nations to the United States, but not the other way around. Entrusting the job of standing up for America at the UN to someone … so ill-disposed for that task will be tantamount to unilaterally disarming in not just the war of ideas. It will embolden our adversaries to redouble their efforts to use the United Nations as a vehicle for hamstringing this country, like the fictional Lilliputians did with Gulliver. The last thing we can afford at a moment when the world needs strong and effective leadership from the United States, both in the UN and elsewhere, is to entrust the duty of providing it at Turtle Bay to someone who has spent her professional career deriding this country, defaming it and seeking to circumscribe its power wherever possible.” –Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, U.S. Navy (Ret.) and columnist Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

Faith and Family

“The dwindling number of people still reading Rolling Stone knows that just as MTV no longer is a music station, this is not just a music magazine. Nevertheless, the magazine’s covers are almost always rock and pop stars, and sometimes movie and TV actors. … When the editors decided to put Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover, they knew they were courting controversy. They must have known they were chasing notoriety by insulting people who lost relatives or their own limbs in Dzhokhar’s terrorist attack. What must have been the reaction of the parents who lost 8-year-old Martin Richard? The victims and their families surely choked when the magazine responded to the furor by claiming, ‘Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, our thoughts are always with them and their families.’ What arrogant nonsense. … The text of the cover doesn’t glorify the killer. It reads: ‘The Bomber: How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam, and Became a Monster.’ But that glimmer of sadness for the bomber’s lost childhood, the disappearance of a ‘charming kid with a bright future,’ shows more effort to find a terrorist’s moral center than the magazine showed any of the last three Republican presidential nominees.” –columnist L. Brent Bozell

Re: The Left

“It is virtually inconceivable that Rolling Stone publisher Jan Wenner would be oblivious to the obvious connection most people would make with regard to giving a jihadist bomber the ‘star treatment.’ More likely it was precisely the point. For some time, Tsarnaev has been the subject of conspicuous fascination, and not just by deranged college co-eds. For the Left, Tsarnaev is exotic and, most importantly, at war with America, which leftists also despise. This is why, since the time Tsarnaev’s identity was uncovered, the Left has been consumed with offering bogus motivations for the atrocity, such as the Iraq War, poverty and the sorrows of being an immigrant – the point of which is to use our crimes to account for his crimes. Most of these grievances, of course, leftists share. In all of this soul-searching and sympathy, it is no surprise that they have to some extent fallen in love with Tsarnaev in the process.” –columnist Arnold Ahlert

The Last Word

“[I]f 14-year-old girls are considered old enough to buy the morning-after pill off the shelf and have abortions without their parents’ knowledge, it’s difficult to listen to a 17-year-old six-footer being eulogized as an innocent child. What I don’t get is how it is that in addition to the usual race hustlers who pass themselves off as ministers, every black in the House, the NFL and the NBA, have been demanding that Zimmerman be lynched, but I don’t hear about anybody in the Latino community defending the man. I can’t help wondering if the House Hispanics who spend most of their time demanding open borders would have rallied to his side if his last name were Perez, Gomez or Gonzales. Racism comes in many different forms, after all. For my part, I would like to see Tea Party patriots and the politicians beholden to them demonstrating outside the Justice Department, carrying placards demanding justice for Zimmerman. … Finally, I can’t help thinking that if Marco Rubio had a younger brother, he would look a lot like George Zimmerman.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team