Beautiful Theories And Ugly Facts

When confronting a racism-shouter, it's nice to have certain statistics on hand, including these:

• Though Negroes are only about 13% of the American populace, they commit slightly more than 50% of all homicides;
• The typical victim of a homicide committed by a Negro is...another Negro.

Today we add to those statistics:

A Brooklyn man was convicted today of first-degree murder for shooting a 16-year-old girl to stop her from pressing assault charges against his friend.

Kendale Robinson, 21, shot teen Al-Taya Conyers three times on a Boerum Hill street in 2010, then stood over her, prosecutors said.

“As she lay on the ground she cried for mercy,” assistant district attorney Tim Gough said during the Brooklyn Supreme Court trial.

“[Robinson] took that handgun and pointed it at Al-Taya Conyers head and pulled the trigger three more times.”

Robinson was charged with first-degree murder because Conyers was a witness to a crime when she was killed. He could get up to life in prison when he is sentenced.

The Post has graciously provided us with a photo of the murderer:

That famed race-card-sharp Jesse Jackson once commented dourly that when he's walking down the street at night and hears footsteps behind him, he's always relieved to discover that they're coming from a white man. How do you feel about it, sports fans?

Political Idiocy

A few days ago, our beloved InstaPundit suggested that, while background checks for would-be gun purchasers is a dubious idea, IQ tests for political candidates is looking mighty good. A supposed Tea Party-affiliated Senator provides a case in point:

“Toomey could be key to a deal on guns,” a headline yesterday on Philly.com reads.

Hopeful speculation that Republican senator from Pennsylvania Pat Toomey is preparing to partner with Democrats on so-called “universal background checks” follows reports that Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) had reached out to him to try to find a GOP partner,” that Toomey “signaled that he might be open-minded after the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, [that he] issued a statement saying in part that ‘there may be areas of agreement with the White House that can be addressed to improve public safety’ [and that] he would consider expanding background checks.”

The story is gaining traction as other hopeful “legitimate media” outlets pick up on a Politico report that brought the Manchin negotiations to light. Adding to the hubbub are related stories on The Washington Post blog, The Morning Call, CBS Philly, and other media outlets.

That Manchin continues to twist the knife he plunged into gun owners’ backs is hardly surprising -- his turnaround has been positively Gillibrandesque, and NRA, which had previously assured his suitability as a “pro-gun Democrat,” needs to take the lead in seeing that his political career is over. It doesn’t matter how he’s voted before any more than it matters that Benedict Arnold was once considered a great hero of the Patriot cause. You can never again trust someone who betrays you, especially in time of greatest need for unity.

As for Toomey, if he and his staff hadn’t opened their yaps to indicate things were open to discussion, they wouldn’t be in this self-created pickle. He, too, has had a pretty good record on guns (even Gun Owners of America grades him at “A-”), and he needs to be reminded that his duty is to improve that score, not to threaten the rights of a core constituency that entrusted him with power.

Assuming the "hopeful speculation" is accurate, the certified idiot in the above is Toomey, who barely won his seat (51% - 49%) and cannot afford to lose the affections of Pennsylvania gun owners and Second Amendment supporters. For a Republican to turn against firearms rights is a fatal step; he'll lose the support of one of the most passionate groups on the constitutionalist Right, without gaining anything from the Left. Manchin and Gillibrand are somewhat differently positioned; they require the support of the Democrat Party, and are unlikely to lose substantial backing from the Left because of a "compromise" on a Second Amendment issue.

I seem to recall that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee backed thrice-traitorous Arlen Specter against Toomey in 2004. The RSCC regards the Tea Party movement as a threat to its hegemony, so now that Toomey's been linked to it, the RSCC is unlikely to smile upon him even at the cost of a Senate seat. So losing any appreciable fraction of the support that put him in that seat in 2010 is likely to end his political career.

If Toomey is "doing a McCain" -- i.e., trying to win some favorable ink from the Main Stream Media -- come 2016 he'll discover to his extreme sorrow just how little that's worth. A Republican conservative cannot gain the support of the Left, nor of any of its ill-disguised affiliates; their agenda has "kill the GOP" at the very top, in 72-point type.

I'm trying to find a silver lining to this...and failing.

Words Fail Me Dept.

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh...or cry:

Roman Catholic, Jesuit-affiliated Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington has refused to recognize the Knights of Columbus as an official student group because — wait for it — the Knights of Columbus is a Catholic organization.

Gonzaga administrators notified the students who had sought the school’s official seal of approval last month, reports The Cardinal Newman Society’s Catholic Education Daily.

“The Knights of Columbus, by their very nature, is a men’s organization in which only Catholics may participate via membership,” reads a letter written by Sue Weitz, vice president for student life. “These criteria are inconsistent with the policy and practice of student organization recognition at Gonzaga University.”...

“If Gonzaga was an institution that served only Catholics and limited the benefits of the collegiate experience only to them, the decision-making process may have been different,” she also opined. “To embrace the diversity and yet endorse a group based on faith exclusivity is a challenge that cannot be reconciled at this time.”...

The Knights of Columbus, founded in 1882 by a Connecticut priest, is the world’s largest Catholic fraternal service organization.

A student-organized Knights of Columbus branch was successfully established at Gonzaga in 1999. At some unspecified point thereafter, though, the group’s officially-sanctioned status lapsed.

There also appears to be a building on Gonzaga’s campus named after the Knights of Columbus. According to the GU Bulldog Blog, the bland, brick edifice houses a members-only bar called the Christopher Columbus Club. Members must pay a $20 fee, get referred by another member and be at least 21 years old. (There’s also free food involved, and a t-shirt.)

The madness of permitting non-Catholic attendees at Catholic educational institutions -- coupled to the craze for "diversity," of course -- brought this about. Catholic schools were hungry for the revenue non-Catholic students would bring them, at a time when rising educational costs were pressing Catholic families more severely than most others. With the above development, we have reached the nadir of the degeneration.

Does anyone seriously doubt that a group of Muslim students who petitioned Gonzaga for the formation of a chapter of the Muslim Students Association would be denied administration approval? Indeed, would Miss Weitz even have taken notice of the affiliation of the MSA with the openly jihadist Muslim Brotherhood?

The country, Rush Limbaugh has told us, is dying. I can no longer doubt that he's right, for the above is the sort of chancre that appears when the diseases of moral relativism, multiculturalism, and self-loathing reach their penultimate phase.

Pray.

Perfect Clarity...

...should have been attained worldwide by now:

Supposing Joe the Plumber actually got rich. Here’s what’s in store for him. As The Hill reports, “Obama budget to take aim at wealthy IRAs”

President Obama’s budget, to be released next week, will limit how much wealthy individuals – like Mitt Romney – can keep in IRAs and other retirement accounts. The senior administration official said that wealthy taxpayers can currently “accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”

Under the plan, a taxpayer’s tax-preferred retirement account, like an IRA, could not finance more than $205,000 per year of retirement – or right around $3 million this year....

The shorthand for this process is ‘Cyprus’....

And sure enough the trend is global. Australian Prime Minister “Julia Gillard has failed to rule out if Labor will raid superannuation funds in the May budget, saying any decisions made for the sector will be in Australia’s long term interest.” That means she’s going to do it.

It will interest Americans to note that according to the Australian Labor party, being “fabulously wealthy” means A$2 million in lifetime savings.

Are you fabulously wealthy? Are you planning on becoming fabulously wealthy anytime soon?

Forget the anxiety about government coming for your guns. It’s your money they’re interested in. The gun part is just to make the money part easier. And if they can’t get the bucks one way, they’ll try another. “French President Francois Hollande declared on Thursday that companies would have to pay a 75 percent tax on salaries over a million euros after his plan for a “super-tax” on individuals was knocked down by the constitutional court.”

I've long believed that national governments provide one another with two things:

• Sources of new ideas in oppression;
• Boogeymen with which to frighten one another's subjects into blind submission.

In the column cited, Richard Fernandez, one of the true ornaments of the Blogosphere, gives us a perfect example of the former. Ponder any recent development in international affairs if you need an example of the latter.

To be sure, some governments are more devious than others:

In the middle of a photo-laden essay on protesters greeting Obama on San Francisco’s Billionaires’ Row, filled with loads of shots of all of the Bay Area moonbattery you can imagine, Zombie stops to make a brilliant observation:

It all culminated in this one sign, which of all the signs at the protest disturbed me the most. Yes, Obama really did say “Show me the movement. Make me do it.” (At least according to Michael Pollan, who quoted Obama while speaking at an environmental event in 2009.) In fact, a more extended quote from that speech might explain the motivation behind this entire protest:

Now, this agenda that I’m talking about, your own agenda, is not gonna happen just because we have a President and a First Lady who are sympathetic. That’s not how change comes. Change is much, much harder than that. Presidents cannot flip the switch and make things happen…. A friend of mine had occasion to have dinner with him and Michelle, and Obama made it clear that he got it, that he really did understand the issue, but he also said he didn’t think the time was right to push hard. He understood the forces arrayed on the other side and the great amount of political capital it would take to defeat them. … He challenged my friend, he said, “Show me the movement. Make me do it. Make me do it.”

I don't know about you, sports fans, but I don't need a cartoon. The governments of the world have decided that we cannot resist them -- that they can take whatever they want without fear of negative consequences. The Obama regime is cleverer about contriving a popular facade for its desires; Obama has encouraged his hardest-left supporters to create a pretense for actions he desperately wants to take but has refrained from taking out of fear of an adverse reaction.

Either we halt these thieves and start pushing them back right now, or within five years they'll own us utterly. Don't imagine that the Twenty-Second Amendment will protect us in America; Obama's successor, even if he's a Republican, is all too likely to preserve whatever usurped powers and Constitutional cessions Obama manages to achieve. After all, he'll reason (if only to himself), they might come in handy some day.

Decent persons can't imagine the lust for power that animates those in high office. It's the one and only thing they value. No amount of power is quite enough; there's always more to be sought, wider and tighter control to be gained. Sadly, getting laid doesn't seem to scratch the itch.

Keep your powder dry. All it will take is a match to start a conflagration that could incinerate the entire world. The time is upon us to make ready. Only the prepared will have a chance to survive.

How It's Done Dept.

"People fear the Left because the Left is vicious." -- Bill O'Reilly

One of the biggest quandaries of our time is how best to defend against the assaults of those who have decided that aggression -- from slander through cyber-war to physical violence -- is a legitimate tool of political action. The major problem is encapsulated in a single word: defend.

No one can remain vigilant and ready to fight twenty-four hours per day, three hundred sixty-five days per year, year after year after year. As were its historical predecessors, the Left, both domestic and international, is fully aware of this. A little known exchange between a captured IRA terrorist and the British security forces that thwarted his assault on Margaret Thatcher expresses the problem beautifully. Upon being caught, the terrorist said, "We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky all the time."

That terrorist was quite correct...if his targets insist on playing defense.

Contrast the effectiveness (and the refreshment) of this approach:

The vicious anti-semite hackactivist "Anonymous" promised to erase Israel from the internet on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day: opisrael.com.

Israel turned it around on these vultures. The Anti-Israel Anonymous opIsrael website was hacked by Israel. It now plays the Israeli national anthem. heh

I posted their threats here a few days ago. The planned assault was organized by the hacktivist group Anonymous and other anti-Israeli groups with "the intent of erasing Israel from the Internet."

* Last week, the three groups claimed they breached the Mossad's mainframe, accessed classified information and leaked the online personal details of over 34,000 of the intelligence agency's officers and agents worldwide. The Mossad did not comment on the matter.

Granted that in this case, the target received warning of the impending attack:

Greetings Israel, We are The N4m3le55 Cr3w. As we have stated it has come to our attention that the Israeli government has ignored repeated warnings about the abuse of human rights, shutting down the internet in Israel and mistreating its own citizens and attacking its neighboring countries and breaking its treaties. Cyber war has been declared on Israel cyber space and you will see exactly what we are capable of Israel. So far we, The N4m3le55 cr3w, have gathered 600 websites and 100 plus servers we will be attacking. We will be attacking multiple banks, schools, businesses and of course government websites like Bank of Israel, Bank Leumi, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Arabs for Israel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University to name a few. That is just our targets. We can not speak on what the rest of Anonymous will be attacking but we can guarantee it will be in the 1000′s. If you have used your credit cards online on an Israel website, we suggest you check your bank statements in the near future. Anonymous doesn’t make threats, it makes outcomes but we are not terrorists like some news medias say we are. As for the foreign minister Avigdor Liberman and the Finance minister Yair Lapid you have brought great shame to Isreal [sic]. Expect us to have great lulz Avigdor Liberman and Yair Lapid, especially on social networks. Israel, it is in your best interest to cease and desist any further military action or your consequence will become worse with each passing hour. To the Israel government and the IDF, Anonymous has grown tired of your bullying, and now you will see the result of your actions. Do not Expect us prime minister Netanyouh [sic] and the rest of Israel, the internet hate machine is already here.

For We Are Legion.

We Do Not Forgive.

We Do Not Forget.

United As One.

Divided By Zero.

That certainly helped to energize the Israeli counter-hackers. It's not guaranteed that such warnings will always be proffered, which is why nations have intelligence services. When the target is somewhat less formidable than a sovereign state -- say, a modest-size private organization, or even a single outspoken individual -- the problem is considerably stiffer.

However, the prescription, to whatever extent one can follow it, remains the same:

Take the initiative.
Go on offense.

This is effective for three reasons above all others. First, for a hunter to discover, to his surprise, that he is being hunted disorients him, creating a period of enhanced opportunity for his target. Second, as we have seen in a multitude of cases, diverting energy to one's defenses weakens all of one's other undertakings. Third, the fear that comes from being hunted is long-lasting, for there is no way to be certain that the threat has passed until the adversary has been captured and eliminated.

A passage from Frank Herbert's novel Dune comes to mind:

"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."

Indeed. The Israelis are currently showing us the way. By declining to wait to be attacked and instead going on offense, they have disoriented their enemies, compelled them to defend themselves, and created a useful measure of fear in those villains. It behooves us in America to learn from their example.

Saber Rattling For Fun And Profit

By the grace of God and the accumulation of a few millennia of history, we've learned a few things about dictators:

• They tend to be ruthless;
• They accept no criticism whatsoever;
• They're monomaniacal about retaining power;
• They view other institutions with influence over people as a threat;
• Their priority is always strengthening the organs by which they maintain control;
• They almost always depart from power, as the saying goes, "feet first."

Your beloved Offender, viewing the recent caperings of Kim Jong-un, North Korea's answer to Baby Doc Duvalier, sees nothing out of pattern. The Little Prince of Pyongyang finds himself in an objectively unenviable position: the country is bankrupt, the people are so beaten-down that an independent recovery is impossible; and all he has to work with is threats of military adventure. So he's brandishing his notional ability to wage nuclear war in hopes of extorting a few billion dollars in "aid" -- Danegeld, really -- from the United States. Hey, it worked for Pop, so why not? Besides, the alternative would require that the regime accept some responsibility for the condition of the country -- and that would mean that Kim, as the "face" of the regime, would receive an enema with high-velocity lead.

Ignore the threats to hit the United States. South Korea, the only plausible target for a North Korean attack, is an important trading partner and an (informal) American protectorate. Its military could not withstand a full-scale attack from the North without American support. And of course, it has no WMDs of its own with which to deter the Norks. So the operative thinking among Kim's inner circle is probably that by threatening a fresh war on the Korean peninsula, the Norks can coerce Washington into disgorging a few billion dollars' more "aid."

However, the threat to use nukes rebalances the equation, and not necessarily in Pyongyang's favor.

With a Republican -- any Republican but Chuck Hagel, at least -- in the Oval Office, the Pyongyang Gang would already be radioactive vapor. For decades, American strategic doctrine has held that the threat to use a weapon of mass destruction is equivalent to its actual use, thus justifying the immediate use of the American strategic force. The doctrine hasn't changed, nor should it. But the commander-in-chief of the moment isn't a Republican. Indeed, he isn't even an American.

Given Barack Hussein Obama's general wimpiness, he's probably hoping that China and / or Russia will take this cup from him. Fat chance (albeit nonzero) of that; China is happy to use North Korea as a cat's-paw of sorts, deflecting American attention and power from Chinese machinations in the Strait of Formosa and the China Sea. Russia has its own problems, and is unlikely to turn its attention from Europe and the Middle East, even for a chance at upstaging the United States.

Obama's Carteresque proclivities strongly suggest that he'll cave -- that he'll pay Danegeld to mollify the Little Prince and stave off any armed unpleasantness. It would work...for four years at most. Then the cycle would repeat, possibly with more bellicose rhetoric and a stronger North Korean military to give it punch. That's what happens when you feed a crocodile: he always comes back for seconds.

Say what you will about George W. Bush, he understood the dynamics of this sort of situation. Whether or not Obama understands them, his unwillingness to use military force at appropriate times and in an appropriate fashion makes it highly unlikely that he'll bare America's teeth in response to the Little Prince's provocations. After all, he has a legacy to consider -- and a Nobel Peace Prize to think about.

Don't expect The Won to hit this jump shot. He's already demonstrated that, in international affairs as in domestic policy, he "ain't got game."

The Inculcation Of Hatred

A few disclosures:

• I'm white.
• And male.
• And heterosexual.
• And old.
• And well-to-do.
• And Catholic.
• And a libertarian-conservative.
• And excessively intelligent.

And I associate, by uncoerced personal preference, with persons who share those characteristics.

But:

• I don't hate non-whites.
• Or women.
• Or homosexuals.
• Or younger folks.
• Or the "impecunious."
• Or non-Catholics.
• Or political liberals or moderates.
• Or persons less intellectually gifted.

I just prefer, in the famous old phrase, "my own kind." Moreover, I prefer them in nearly every way:

• As neighbors.
• As friends.
• As casual company.
• As hired artisans.
• As co-workers.
• As business partners.
• As fellow explorers of the realm of ideas.

And I maintain that you will find that the above statement of preferences is shared by just about every recognizably human creature on this planet. (Probably on all the others, too.)

However, I am regularly accused of harboring such categorical hatreds because of my membership in the categories to which I belong. No, not by persons who actually know me; by activists of various stripes who seek to use hatred as a means of marshaling political power:

• Negro and Hispanic race-and-ethnicity-floggers.
• Feminist gender-warriors.
• Homosexual activists.
• "Youth power" rebels.
• Spokesmen for "the underprivileged."
• Persons who hate Christianity and the Church.
• Leftists of all sorts.
• Idiots.

(Yes, yes, that last item was tongue-in-cheek.)

Yet it has been my experience that those who level such accusations have quite as definite a preference for "their own kind," and when challenged on it will usually launch a torrent of vitriol, or change the subject, or fall silent and depart.

The preference for those who share one's own major characteristics and convictions is perfectly natural:

• It fosters a sense of safety.
• It increases the chance that one will be understood.
• It reduces the chance that one will unintentionally give offense.
• It reduces the friction that arises from differences in priorities, outlooks, and styles.

It gives rise to sorting, of course, but it need not give rise to hatred, violence, or warfare. So why all the accusations? Am I off-axis for not harboring any categorical hatreds, or are the ranters off-base in their perceptions, or is the whole thing a giant con job?

Now, now, let's not always see the same hands!

Of course it's a con job. Of course the people flogging hateful rhetoric have an agenda. And of course we who are usually on the receiving end of their venom spewing have a right to be offended and to dismiss them with prejudice.

The deliberate inculcation of hatred is the oldest of all political tactics. It can be based on any categorical difference, including every one of the categories mentioned above. Ironically, the evils imputed to the target group tend to be of a single sort: the inclination to oppress. They hate us and want to keep us down.

The object, of course, is to create a militant group for political purposes. The imputation the hate-mongers do their best to nurture is that if the group marshals behind them and agrees to be led, then things will improve for that group, individually and severally.

That imputation is always a lie. The benefits, when there are any, flow to the leaders. Worse yet, hatred begets counter-hatred. There was damned little racial animosity in this country before the mid-Sixties, when the race militants got their act in gear. There was damned little animosity between the sexes before the professional feminist agitators started ranting about "patriarchal oppression." Though there was widespread disgust -- justified, in my view -- among heterosexuals for the practices of homosexuals, there was little or no hatred between them, before the ACT-UP and Queer Nation types started to foment it.

The hate parades of today were completely avoidable. They were organized by persons avid for public stature and political power. Such persons still beat the drums to which the paraders march. Some of them have used the tactic to attain high office.

I can think of nothing more contemptible than a deliberate attempt to foster hatred between groups that have no objective need to intermingle. They who do so are the only persons for whom I feel an active hostility -- a hostility that seeks overt expression. Yet they, too, are safe from me...as long as they keep their distance.

Trouble is, they're getting closer to me every day. Probably to you, too; the country isn't all that large.

There'll probably be nothing more from me today, sports fans. It's been a grueling week and I'm very tired. But do please reflect on the above -- and on what you think is the proper response to the words and deeds of the hate-mongers among us. I could use some new ideas.

"Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge" Dept.

Huh??

2 New York brothers have babies 82 minutes apart

Glory be to God! For even one of them to do so would be a Guinness Book Of Records moment. I do hope there were videocameras running in both delivery rooms.

(Say, were their wives in attendance -- and does Lamaze give classes for this sort of event?)

Learning Nothing, Forgetting Nothing

...appears to be Barack Hussein Obama's modus operandi:

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.

In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.

Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.

Officials are also encouraging lenders to use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan and are seeking to make it easier for people who owe more than their properties are worth to refinance at today’s low interest rates, among other steps.

Let's leave aside that the cause of the 2008 crash was a rash of unwise mortgage lending forced upon lenders by the Community Reinvestment Act. Let's leave aside that the federal government has exhibited absolutely no ability to separate creditworthy entities from unworthy ones. And let's leave aside that the federal government can't balance its own books, nor are its masters willing to consider any method of doing so. This proposal is redistribution, with the Treasury and the FHA as the middlemen. Nothing more and nothing less.

A borrower with weak credit represents a risk of default greater than a borrower with good credit. A lender that weakens its creditworthiness requirements is accepting systematically increased risks. Lenders that do so beyond a certain point are inevitably driven into bankruptcy by the quantity of defaulted loans they must write off. There is no escape...unless some other, larger and richer institution guarantees them against loss.

But for Smith to guarantee Jones against loss is a promise that Smith will make any such losses good out of his own pocket. In receipt of such a guarantee, Jones sees "nothing but upside:" no material risk to himself regardless of his behavior.

In this case, Jones is the mortgage-lending industry, and Smith is the taxpaying public.

I won't speak for any of you, sports fans, but I have no interest in guaranteeing the mortgage-lending institutions of America, every last one of which is way richer than I am, against further losses due to more bad mortgages. We've been there and done that; we're living in the sort of tight-credit / trust-deficient / low-confidence economy that results from such madness.

But to Obama, it's quite all right. It's not his money, so why should he worry about it? The Fed will buy as many T-bills as he needs to sell to pay off any losses. Besides, if the policy comes a-cropper, he can always take another vacation to forget about it. Perhaps a month on Martha's Vineyard would do the trick. Come back smiling, make a few more speeches about those eeeeevil Republicans and how they're obstructing the recovery with all their talk about fiscal responsibility and limiting government spending, and all will be well.

I recall a lapel button from my younger days that read "I Used To Be Disgusted, Now I'm Just Amused." I passed through the outer boundaries of "amused" long ago. At this point I'm just waiting for the collapse, which has become inevitable, so I can exercise an old crank's last pleasure: smirking, waving a finger, and saying "I told you so."

All-Racism Wednesday

1. The Origins Of Presidential Racism.

It appears that we now know a bit more about Barack Hussein Obama's seething racist rage: he was a crumby basketball player in high school, but persuaded himself that the reason was "structural racism:"

Obama’s driving ambition as a young man was to be a professional basketball player, and his identity was wrapped up in that dream. Obama was a failure in this endeavor. Obama came to blame his failure on structural racism, explaining his failure on his coach’s "white" game, which prevented Obama from playing his own “black” game. He then turned to politics, and put his identity and ambitions into America’s vibrant racialist, socialist political subculture. (All of this is in Obama’s memoir. Try this. Go read it.)

Well, we can say with assurance that:

1. Obama's still a crumby basketball player;
2. Basketball isn't the only thing he sucks at.

---

2. An "Of Course" Moment.

Dr. Benjamin Carson, a highly accomplished and respected neurologist, made some waves by denouncing Obama's policies to his face at the recent National Prayer Breakfast. The torrent of abuse that's been showered on him ever since tells us a great deal about the left-liberal character of racism in these United States:

Dr. Ben Carson on Tuesday blasted his critics for heat he’s taken recently over controversial remarks on gay marriage, calling his white liberal detractors “the most racist out there.”

“They want to shut us up completely, and that’s why the attacks against me have been so vicious,” Carson said on the Mark Levin radio show. “I represent an existential threat to them. They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me, they can’t find anything else to delegitimize me, so they take my words, misinterpret them, and try to make it seem that I’m a bigot."

Well, of course. Naturally! There's nothing more cherished in the Left's little bag of tricks than the race card -- and every black conservative who disputes their continuous allegations of pervasive racism among white conservatives is a terrifying threat to their control of The Narrative.

Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, Herman Cain, and Ben Carson: men of substance, insight, achievement, courage, and melanin. They must haunt the Democrat Party's worst nightmares. We could have no better examples of what self-reliance and trust in the promise of freedom can do for a man willing to apply his talents to the satisfaction of his desires, no matter what the color of his skin.

---

3. "Community Organizing" In Action.

The latest outbreak of seemingly random violence as reported by CBS:

The warmest day of the year so far brought hundreds of teens to Michigan Avenue on Saturday. Police were calling it “mob action.”

CBS 2 has learned about multiple incidents in at least four different locations along the Magnificent Mile and in the Gold Coast, yielding a slew of arrests. In all, 25 juveniles and three adults were charged.

Many innocent shoppers and tourists became caught in the middle of a very chaotic situation. Hundreds of teens littered Michigan Avenue and State Street near Chicago....

Charges range from battery and strong-armed robbery to reckless conduct.

CBS 2 has learned since these charges are misdemeanors, many of those arrested have already been released on I-bonds.

Sources tell CBS 2 that much of this activity was planned weeks ago through social media.

The story doesn't mention the race of the offenders, nor that of their victims...but videos taken at several of the attack sites make it clear that the mobs were almost exclusively black, and the victims exclusively white.

I've become accustomed to reading about black-on-white violence that the major media are too timid to report as such. It's why I never leave the house unarmed. The critical matter in these most recent mob attacks is given in the last paragraph of the above:

Sources tell CBS 2 that much of this activity was planned weeks ago through social media.

What does that say to you, sports fans? That young Negroes might just be getting ready to rumble with us stodgy old white folks in a really big way, maybe? That their carefully nurtured sense of grievance and entitlement hasn't been assuaged by iPods, gold chains, and designer sneakers? That the lack of public outrage and outcry over their probes to date might just have persuaded them that they can get away with anything?

It's no longer possible for me to believe that it's just "hijinks." Your mileage may vary.