American Elephants

Chris Matthews has managed to make news in the last few days, by being grateful for Hurricane Sandy because it would help Obama’s election chances. He did apologize partly, by insisting that he wasn’t talking about all the damage, just about the opportunity it gave to Obama to appear presidential. That improves anything?

Mr. Matthews is a prime exemplar of one who has slipped over from politics as the search for good government, to politics as religion, or politics as a belief system. We also found him on Tuesday night during MSNBC’s election coverage, predicting that President Obama would lose the South because of Mitt Romney’s racially charged campaign, and he wasn’t sure that Virginia was Southern enough to swing Romney’s way:

I’ve watched the appeals made by people on the Republican side –- the right-wing side, in some cases -– people like, sort of, screwball people making comments about race. I really think you’re going to see at the end of the night, when we look at the popular vote, when we look at how it’s broken out by region, the president will do well in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. He’s going to do very poorly in the South among white voters.

According to Matthews, white voters in the South aren’t voting against Obama because of the bad job he has done over the last four years, but because they, like all Republicans — are racists.

May I say that I’m getting a little tired of this. If a racist is defined as someone who is obsessed by race, then Chris Matthews is the biggest racist around. Democrats have such a dreadful history with race, that they have a lot to overcome, and thus have considered race to be the greatest problem in the country. Mr. Matthews apparently believes that race is the sole reason to vote for Barack Obama to be  president and the only reason he should be reelected.

I believe that Barack Obama has been an extremely bad president, and that he didn’t deserve to be reelected because of his record of spending, his failures with the economy, his excessive regulation, his record on foreign policy, his record on ObamaCare, his record on energy, and his record on promoting useless “alternative energy.  As far as I can determine, his race has had nothing to do with any of these policies. To the contrary, his policies have been far more harmful to blacks and Hispanics than to anyone else.

The end point of racism is not minority dominance, it is not reparations.  It is, and can be only indifference. That’s what Martin Luther King was talking about, except that he referred to “the content of their character.” Exactly. But to their race, the color of their skin, their ethnic heritage — indifference. Don’t care.

Because Democrats care so much about race, they gerrymander voting districts to be sure that black candidates have majority-black districts. Why is that necessary? It was a whole bunch of white people that elected Barack Obama in the first place.

In the South of the slavery days, white women wore bonnets, long sleeves and gloves in 100° weather, and carried parasols to protect themselves from the sun and keep their skin white and unfreckled. Today, they toast in the sun, go to tanning salons, and buy tons of tanning cremes to darken their skin. When is the last time you heard someone get a compliment on their beautiful white skin?

“Hispanic” is not a race, nor is “Latina”, both terms refer to the use of the Spanish language, except for Brazilians who speak Portuguese. People from the Caribbean islands may be black, but speak French. Far more African slaves were transported to the Sugar Islands than to America, and far more went to South America.

“Asian” is not a race either. There are lots of countries of vastly different ethnicities that compose the Asian designation that have nothing in common with each other, and in many cases detest each other.

I am troubled each year by the political division of people into voting blocks. An enormous amount of trouble flows from those divisions, much of it from the media. We will all continue to notice obvious physical racial designations, but I have quit filling out government forms asking me to designate my race. I’m apparently not alone, as there is now a blank for “refuses to designate.”

I find it fascinating that Democrats are so deeply involved in issues of race, but refuse to recognize that our most essential rights are derived from the simple fact that we are human beings endowed with the only rights that can be guaranteed, by our Creator.