The Conservative Soldier

Chicago Tribune political columnist Clarence Page is mentally wandering, even all these months later, through Grant Park on election night 2008. In Page’s mind’s eye, people are still weeping and trembling as Barack Hussein Obama speaks. What else explains why racist remarks in 2010 are OK when they come from the left?

I was not surprised when MSNBC host Chris Matthews mused on air right after President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address that ‘I forgot he was black.’ After all, I’ve known Chris for years and I often forget that he’s white.

Just kidding. Let’s lighten up, please. Matthews meant no offense. He was caught up in the moment, he told me Thursday, with his excitement at how much the nation’s first black president has ‘taken us beyond black and white in our politics, wonderfully so, in just a year.’

Help me out here, Clarence. Why is it so exciting to see a Socialist president leading us from “black and white” to red, as in the U.S. budget deficit and Obama’s ideological leanings?

In his haste to defend fellow liberal media elites and coat them in post-racial Teflon, Page tosses in a tip of the cap to conservative Rush Limbaugh, writing that he “defended” Limbaugh when his radio show broadcast a lyrical satire in 2007. The piece was entitled, “Barack the Magic Negro”. What Page does not say was that he had no choice but to defend the satire on Limbaugh’s show because the concept did not originate with Limbaugh. The observation that Barack Hussein Obama was emerging as a political “magic negro” was delivered in print in March 2007 by black Los Angeles Times columnist David Ehrenstein, who had written several pieces opining whether Obama was black enough to be heralded as this historic Presidential messiah.

Not only are Ehrenstein and Page like-minded, they are employed by the same company. Tribune Co. owns both the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. So how would Page NOT give Limbaugh a pass for turning the Times piece into satirical lyric sung by a comedian impersonating Al Sharpton? Page fails to mention any of this, of course.

Page insists he believes MSNBC’s Matthews should be spared backlash after saying “I forgot he was black”. Radical liberals always stick together. Page’s Sunday column did not make me forget. No, it reminded me he is an irrelevant pundit in a dying medium who will be carrying Obama’s water long after all of the magic has worn off.

Law professor Paul Campos decries the folly of “security theater” at U.S. airports as a purely symbolic response to the ever present threat of terrorism within commercial aviation. His essay appears in the January 9 Wall Street Journal, entitled, “Undressing the Terror Threat”.

He observes that about 6,700 Americans die, on average, every day. Nothing approaching the invasiveness of airport security is imposed on our daily lives in an effort to prevent these randomly occurring deaths, including deaths by murder, suicide and traffic accidents.

The reason is completely logical, yet the logic is not applied to the wanding of your sweet innocent grandmother by a TSA agent.

Writes Campos, a University of Colorado academic:

“We seem to consider 43,000 traffic deaths per year an acceptable cost to pay for driving big fast cars. For obvious reasons, politicians and other policy makers generally avoid discussing what ought to be considered an ‘acceptable’ number of traffic deaths, or murders, or suicides, let alone what constitutes an acceptable level of terrorism. Even alluding to such concepts would require treating voters as adults—something which at present seems to be considered little short of political suicide.”

Treating voters as adults? What a concept. The politics of fear that the Obama White House loves to engage – ”If we don’t pass this or that into law right now, ASAP, look out, America …” — not only covers up the root causes of our vulnerability to Islamic jihadists but conveniently keeps the drums beating for “health care reform” as well.

The politics of fear distracts most Americans from our weakening stature on the world stage. The politics of fear minimizes the shoddiness of our intelligence collection, profiling and analysis, wherein real security occurs, focusing instead on how much hair gel and mouthwash you’re trying to bring aboard an airplane.

Finally, the politics of fear makes it possible for people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry “I Like A Light Skinned President” Reid to hijack the U.S. economy and stoke the fires of Socialism by exploiting the “outrage” over the less than 2% of the American population that might, or might not, be in need of medical insurance coverage.*

So it comes to this. A hard working, law abiding citizen trying to fly to a meeting is treated as a potential threat to aviation security (off with your shoes, capitalist swine!) and is vilified as heartless because his employment package provides medical and dental insurance.

If we consider 43,000 annual traffic deaths “acceptable”, what’s so appalling about five million people who are very much alive but merely uninsured?

* Of the 46 million uninsured, 9.7 million are not U.S. citizens; 17.6 million have annual incomes of more than $50,000; and 14 million already qualify for Medicaid or other programs. That leaves less than five million people truly uncovered out of a population of 307 million. (Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal, 09.03.09)