Last Call For Rock Hard Truth

Your evening assignment is Frank Rich's interview with comedian Chris Rock, who lays out the issues of President Obama, race and America better than anyone else I've read in years.

On Obama:

What do you think of how he’s done? Here we are in the last two years of his presidency, and there’s a sense among his supporters of disappointment, that he’s disengaged. 

I’m trying to figure out the right analogy. Everybody wanted Michael Jordan, right? We got Shaq. That’s not a disappointment. You know what I mean? We got Charles Barkley. It’s still a Hall of Fame career. The president should be graded on jobs and peace, and the other stuff is debatable. Do more people have jobs, and is there more peace? I guess there’s a little more peace. Not as much peace as we’d like, but I mean, that’s kind of the gig. I don’t recall anybody leaving on an up. It’s just that kind of job. I mean, the liberals that are against him feel let down because he’s not Bush. And the thing about George Bush is that the kid revolutionized the presidency. How? He was the first president who only served the people who voted for him. He literally operated like a cable network. You know what I mean? 

He pandered to his target audience. 

He’s the first cable-television president, and the thing liberals don’t like about Obama is that he’s a network guy. He’s kind of Les Moonves.8 He’s trying to get everybody. And I think he’s figured out, and maybe a little late, that there’s some people he’s never going to get.

He goes on to say that Obama should have let the economy crash and then bring in his own people. Not sure I agree with that, but then again who would have really been hurt doing that?  Wall Street? Main Street was going to be screwed either way.

On race and Ferguson:

What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn’t? 

I’d do a special on race, but I’d have no black people. 

Well, that would be much more revealing. 

Yes, that would be an event. Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. 

Right. It’s ridiculous. 

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people. 

It’s about white people adjusting to a new reality? 

Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.

It's amazing stuff and long overdue being said.  Check it out.

A Total Loss

Instagoofball has some 2016 predictions, and nobody's surprised to find he's predicting a total wipeout of the Democratic party, as the conventional wisdom now is that Democrats have permanently lost the white vote forever.

Working class white people don't like President Obama much. According to the latest Gallup poll, only 27% approve of him. That's 21 percentage points down since he took office in 2009.

A standard talking-point is that these voters don't like Obama because they're racist. But that assumes that the key word in "white working class" is "white." In fact, the key word is "working." After all, Obama isn't any blacker than he was in 2009.

That's a pretty bizarre chunk of logic there: because fewer white voters like Obama now than six years ago, none of them can be racist, otherwise they would have hated Obama six years ago. Putting that idiocy aside for a moment the fact that the right wing noise machine has spent the last six years trying to convince white voters that Obama is the racist and that he will give taxpayer money to black voters as reparations and bribery, we arrive at this:

Can the Democrats solve this problem? Sure. These are all policies that could be changed, though a lot of party constituencies would oppose it. And Democrats might choose a working-class-friendly nominee, too, if they can find one. Of course, the current favorite is Hillary Clinton, who went to Wellesley and makes $300,000 for giving a speech, and the No. 2 prospect for 2016 is probably Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor who made $212,000 for representing an asbestos company. Portraying either of them as working class heroes will be an uphill battle.

And there's another problem: The white working class may have abandoned Obama, but the black and Hispanicworking classes have mostly stayed loyal to him. But what do Clinton or Warren have that might inspire similar loyalty? Come 2016, it may not just be the white part of the working class that the Democrats have trouble with.

Democrats not only cannot be populists because they make money (you know, like that Obama guy) but that racist, anti-white Democratic minority voters are going to stay home because the Dems will nominate a white person, so nobody on Earth will actually vote for them and Republicans will win easily because they are the party of the working class. 

That's actually kind of funny if you think about it.  Certainly the Democrats can lose.

But only if they try to be the Republicans.

 

Another Massive Cop Out

Remember folks, according to conservatives, it's on you the citizens to always obey police officers at all times, or your life is forfeit.  This applies to off-duty police officers too, right?

A Houston woman was shot in the head by an off-duty police officer after she honked at him for cutting her off, KHOU 11 reports.

The victim — who did not wish to be identified for fear of retaliation — said that she was driving on the 610 Loop when Kenneth Caplan cut her off.

“He was about to hit me,” she said, “so I switched to the other lane, got in front of him and cut him off. I guess that pissed him off,” because he pulled alongside her, rolled down his window and opened fire.

“He was aiming at me and I thought he was going to cuss me out. It didn’t register that I was, you know, going to get shot. I just started crying because I knew I was going to die,” the victim said. “I wanted to call my mom to tell her ‘I love you.’”

One bullet grazed her head, opening a gaping wound that would not stop bleeding.

“I was like ‘oh my God, he just shot me.’ I was applying pressure to my head because it wouldn’t stop bleeding,” the victim said. “The blood was in between my nails, just crazy blood, and all over my cellphone, just covered.”

If she had just obeyed the police officer, she wouldn't have been shot.  That's the "lesson of Ferguson" we're supposed to all have learned, yes?  She didn't obey the law and she didn't obey the officer, so her life is forfeit.  That's what conservatives tell us we need to do or else people get shot.

Right?  Clearly she was a threat to the officer with her vehicle.  He was afraid for his life.  He had every right to shoot her, there's no need for a grand jury, and we should take the officer at his word 100%, anyone else is a radical and identity politics hustle, right?

Right?

StupidiNews!

• Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi says he has removed some 50,000 "ghost soldiers" who have abandoned their posts in the Iraqi Army from the rolls.
• A St. Louis police officers' group is demanding that several St. Louis NFL players face league punishment after showing solidarity on the field with Ferguson protesters.
• Hong Kong police are warning pro-democracy protesters not to return to the streets after they were able to successfully shut down a government HQ for several hours on Monday.
• Beijing-based Dalian Wanda Group, parent company of AMC Theaters, is making a $4.7 billion bid to buy a stake in studios Lions Gate and MGM.
• EU police agency Europol has arrested nearly 120 in a major credit card fraud sting to purchase plane tickets for illegal drug transport and human trafficking.