Herbert
of the NYT takes a Whiz on the New Obama
Team of Whizzes.
Herbert of the NYT takes a Whiz on the New Obama
Team of Whizzes.
We are
always privileged to study and digest the frenetic political theorizing that is proffered as thinking at the New
York Times —aka the Walter Duranty Papers. When certain
events threaten the intended outcome for one of their precious leftist political
themes the public must be reeducated and encouraged to howl accordingly for
whatever new taxes and oppressive government will favor the minority causes. Herbert,
in today’s article in the soon-t0-be-bankrupt Times wanders in with the usual
stack of soiled clichés and ‘teaches’ us all about equality and fairness and
calls for money to be shoveled into the inner cities, as usual.
An echo from the past is needed to
juxtapose the current message into the current context:
”Ignorance must really be bliss. How else,
over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing
all things liberal?”-- Hold Your Heads Up by Bob Herbert
Op-Ed Columnist Published: September 8, 2008 Emphasis is mine in
all quotes.
So, what about the reverse of this nostrum?
There is no ridicule for Pelosi or Reid or Frank? Herbert can ridicule all
things conservative and not be questioned. That is liberalism.
“Barack
Obama appears to have put together an extraordinarily competent team to cope with the
crises abroad and at home — and to begin cleaning up the mess of the past eight
years.--
“So why
do I have this uneasy feeling?”
“Hillary
Clinton, Robert Gates, Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers ...”-- A Team of Whizzes By Bob Herbert Op-Ed Columnist Published: December 1, 2008 [Emphasis is mine in
all quotes. This link references quotes in this essay unless otherwise indicated.]
This uncomfortable
feeling is justified in that the situation is absolutely hopeless for Bob Herbert’s constituents.
Bob is a form of crusty street sage who honks and whines and begs for money on
the sidewalks of metropolitan America. But, Bob cannot address any obvious deficiencies in his racial
cadres. He blames things, outcomes and events on the G.O.P that they had no
control over. He cannot lay any blame on liberalism.
“Competence is clearly
trumping ideology in the next administration,…”
Does this call for ideology first in
government? This may be the solution to the
minority ‘problem’ in the US. It seems that for them the situation is less than hopeless when
the word competency is interjected
into the discussion. When we look at the poor education, high crime, sloth, AIDS, drug addiction and other
societal factors in places like Washington, D.C., Baltimore City, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Oakland [or most places in California]and Detroit we notice numerous things that are common in all these locations.
The Republicans would fix such problems but the left-liberals do not want
either the advice or the law enforcement or any fix. Clearly, the inner city-elected
bosses in troubled states are happy with their negative societal attributes or they
might attempt to change things themselves. The phony anti-crime antics in major
cities were interrupted by Rudolph Giuliani in the case of New York when he reduced crime 60% across the board in all police
precincts. The left did not like his stop and frisk policy. They would
rather tolerate the crime and benefit from the tax money spent on apprehending
and ‘rehabilitating’ the miscreants. If crime stopped abruptly in places like Detroit and Atlanta they would have to fire thousands of cops, social workers and
hospitals. Crime is big money for cities.
Here is
liberal politics in action:
Here is the crime
scene for the top 10 worst places to live in the US by the number murdered.
|
City
|
Population
|
Murders in 2007
|
Murder Rate [per 100,000]
|
|
Detroit
|
1,900,303
|
600
|
48.3
|
|
New York
|
8,115,690
|
539
|
6.6
|
|
Los Angeles
|
3,871,077
|
489
|
12.6
|
|
Chicago
|
2,873,441
|
448
|
15.6
|
|
Philadelphia
|
1,472,915
|
406
|
25.6
|
|
Houston
|
2,045,732
|
334
|
16.3
|
|
Phoenix
|
1,466,296
|
220
|
15
|
|
Dallas
|
1,230,303
|
202
|
16.4
|
|
Washington, DC
|
550,521
|
169
|
35.4
|
|
New
Orleans
|
431,153
|
162
|
37.6
|
|
|
23,957,431
|
3,569
|
14.90
|
These places are noted as failures using any
metric we might wish to select for any society. The few negative attributes we cannot identify
at this time are cannibalism, human sacrifice and Baal Worship although we may soon
see some of these in the future in places like San Francisco or New Orleans. These places are fully and completely liberal, run solely by
minorities or narrowly-defined ethnic identities [except for the idiot
Bloomberg], are far-left in political outlook and politics, are pro drugs and
ignore crime and have taxed and taxed and taxed until the folk who could bring
prosperity to these places were driven out. We wonder if Herbert can tell us
why the equation: (minority) + (democrat)
+ (government control) always equates to disaster. Bob will tell you that the
whites are the problem. He will say that the greedy took away their future.
“President-elect
Obama campaigned on the mantra of change. For years the federal government
catered increasingly to the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. This reached a
destructive crescendo when the ideologues and incompetents of the Bush
administration came to power.”
“One of
the reasons the economy is so deeply in the tank is that ordinary Americans
have not received a
fair share of the economic advances of the past several
years. You don’t hear much about this. Americans have been working harder and
harder, and more and more efficiently (we are now the hardest working people on
the planet, having passed the Japanese in this category), but ordinary workers
have not been paid for this enhanced productivity.”
This is the old Herbert. There is only one solution to hopelessness: tax those who can work the system efficiently then just give the money to the ‘poor.’ We hear nothing about the 5 trillion
dollars wasted on phony zero-d0wn sub prime mortgages that were supposed to
provide ‘affordable housing’ from the CRA [Community Communist Reinvestment Act] We still wonder what happened during the Great Society, HUD, The
War on Poverty and ‘education.’ Why didn’t busing work? The response to these
questions is always: give us more money.
Herbert closes
with a sob story:
“I want to know who in
the Obama administration will be listening to the young girl on the South Side
of Chicago whose future is constrained by a lousy public school, and the factory worker in Toledo whose family’s future
has been trampled by unrestrained corporate greed and unfair trade policies.
All the evidence is that the next administration will be
competent and smart as hell. Now I’d like to know for whom they plan to
deliver.”
It seems that lousy public school
systems are
pandemic in places where the liberals are in control. Does Bob know about the
lousy teacher’s unions? Does Bob have the courage to tell us why the Washington, D.C.
Schools system is the worst in the US and probably the ugliest place to
learn [or live] in the western hemisphere?
With very
poor standardized test results [The Bell Curve.],
phony, lazy and incompetent teachers, a union mentality, drugs, crime and sloth
what could Bob want the rest of us to deliver?
Money, of
course, with no strings attached. So, Bob does the best that he can with his
limited resources and so do his friends and brothers and sisters. There is no
where to go here.
rycK
Comments
to: ryckki@gmail.com
The NYT Laments the Future of the Young
with No Solutions Proffered. They Have a
Great Future in Crime.
“Bear
Stearns made the first public securitization of Community
Reinvestment Act (CRA) loans started in
1997.[6] Editorialists in some American
newspapers[7][8] and US Congressman Ron Paul[9] say the CRA loans were lent to
otherwise un-credit-worthy consumers in the name of ending discrimination,
although an analysis of actual lending patterns does not generally support this
conclusion.
On June 22, 2007,
Bear Stearns pledged a collateralized loan of up to $3.2 billion to "bail
out" one of its funds, the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Fund,
while negotiating with other banks to loan money against collateral to another
fund, the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund.[13] The funds were invested in thinly
traded collateralized
debt obligations (CDOs)
found to be worth less than their mark-to-market value. Merrill Lynch seized $850 million worth of the
underlying collateral but only was able to auction $100 million of them. The
incident sparked concern of contagion as Bear Stearns might be forced to liquidate
its CDOs, prompting a mark-down of similar assets in other portfolios.[14][15] Richard
A. Marin, a senior executive at Bear Stearns Asset Management
responsible for the two hedge funds, was replaced on June 29 by Jeffrey
B. Lane, a former Vice Chairman of rival investment bank, Lehman Brothers.[16]
During the
week of July 16, 2007,
Bear Stearns disclosed that the two subprime hedge funds had lost nearly all of
their value amid a rapid decline in the market for subprime mortgages.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (ISBN: 0029146739)
by
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray,
Charles Free Press of Glencoe , Inc, Old
Tappan, New Jersey, U.S.A., 1994.