XDA

Let's talk about race for a second.

Here is Joan Walsh talking about, what else, how Republicans are racists, specifically the Republicans at the National Review:

Rich Lowry himself, though he has now distanced himself and his magazine from “Derb’s” crude racism, continued Buckley’s tradition last week, with a tendentious column accusing black leaders of “politicizing” Martin’s death while “ignoring” the problem of black teens murdered by other black teens. (This has become a big fake issue on the right.) Lowry ignores years of hard work to combat “black on black crime” by national and local black leaders.

OK, Ms. Walsh had before this paragraph accused Bill Buckley of being a racist "with finesse" for talking frankly about the over-representation of black defendants in the criminal justice system. She puts quotes around "politicize" and "ignoring" as if she were quoting Mr. Lowery, but he never used those words in his column. Indeed what he said is true: There is no doubt that a black on black murder generates very little national press while black on black murder is the norm, by a huge margin (so huge a margin, one has to wonder what's up with that?) The Trayvon Martin tragedy, however, is generating huge national press. Why?

To point out the facts about black on black crime, is for the left, as Ms. Walsh has shown us, supposedly to miss the point of the Trayvon Martin matter and engage on a "fake" issue. She chides Rich Lowery for ignoring the "years of hard work...by national and local black leaders" to combat the more common crime stats. Who'd been doing that? What leader? What work, hard or otherwise? I can think of no such efforts and, sadly, Ms. Walsh provides us no links to this difficult labor. (If anyone has really been addressing the more common problem, he or she certainly hasn't been very effective).

She continues:

The murders Lowry writes about indeed deserve more attention and more outrage than they inspire, but it’s preposterous to claim black leaders haven’t demanded society pay attention. They have, and sadly, they will again; it’s the larger society that refuses to listen.

OK, so she admits that the very common scenario, a black youth killed by another black youth, doesn't generate much press attention, just as Lowery and others have pointed out, but she accuses Lowery of saying something that he never said in his "tendentious column," namely, that black leaders have done little to nothing about black on black crime. Lowery accused them merely of seizing on the outlier for their selective outrage. Indeed they have. But more to the point: I'm listening. I'm in fact all ears about black on black crime and the causes and the solutions the black leaders are supposedly working so hard to identify and to propose respectively. I just don't know what they are, largely because, I suspect, there have been none. Black on black crime is just not discussed among polite, lefty society. To do so would be, dare I say it, racist.

She winds up:

Meanwhile, the right-wing outrage machine is more concerned that Zimmerman may be being wrongly accused of racism than that a boy died largely because he’s black. William F. Buckley’s magazine played a key role in building that outrage machine, and it continues to keep it going, whether or not John Derbyshire works there anymore.

The right wing outrage machine? I thought it was a "noise machine." I could have sworn I've heard that term before. What we on the right were concerned with was the press, and the black leadership, ignoring the lack of knowledge of complete (or nearly any) facts about the shooting while judging Mr. Zimmerman guilty of murder. That Zimmerman was called a racist was a lesser concern to us cogs in the Republican "outrage machine" (largely because that erstwhile potent epithet has been thoroughly debased lately). Of course, to Ms. Walsh and her ilk, Zimmerman's imagined racism is the paramount concern. I would venture to differ, to say that Mr. Martin's skin color had little to do with his being shot, rather it was his decision to approach Mr. Zimmerman and, likely, assault him which were the proximate causes of the shooting. Race, I believe, ultimately has very little to do with this case, the media's and the black leaders' selling points notwithstanding. Which is part of the reason we on the right have been covering the coverage and pointing out its lies by elipsis all the while wondering why this case, and not the 18 times more likely scenarios, were ginning up all the outrage.

Even ignoring the completely projected "outrage machine" meme, the truth is that Bill Buckley had nothing to do with anything Ms. Walsh is complaining of here. Her entire point to this piece, such as it is, is fiction, along the trusted "progressive" meme--"you're being racist for pointing out facts about race we choose to ignore."

Even deeper than that is the campaign season lefty talking point: "Whatever it is the Republicans are doing, it is wrong, and racist."

My ultimate response is a yawn.

Labels: Joan Walsh; Bill Buckley; Rich Lowery; Trayvon Martin; Republican racism