When news came out that a third "Fast & Furious" gun had been used in the brutal killing of US Patrol Border Agent Brian Terry, and the gun had subsequently been hidden by the Justice Department to disguise their involvement, people wanted to know "where is Eric Holder" to give answers?
When the New Black Panthers recently put a price on the head of George Zimmerman, the man accused of shooting Trayvon Martin, law-abiding folks again asked "where is Eric Holder? Why isn't he arresting those people?"
And only days ago, when a white man was beaten nearly to death by a mob of blacks using chairs, pipes, and paint cans in the name of "justice for Trayvon," people again found themselves asking "where is Eric Holder?!" And now we know.
He was busy filing a far more important legal action: in this case, suing the city of Jacksonville, Florida for requiring black firefighters to take the same written exams as every other firefighter in order to qualify for promotions.
The Justice Department argues that the tests have "disparate impact" on black firefighters because those firefighters get significantly lower scores than white firefighters...and therefore, the results can only be explained by racism, and such testing needs to be stopped immediately. Based on this logic, we assume that Mr. Holder will also be filing suit against the SAT testing service, since Asians tend to score better than other ethnic groups...and therefore that test must be racist.
Unless, of course, it isn't - and instead reflects things like how hard someone has studied, the quality of their education, and - just possibly - their innate mental ability. And all three of those qualities should be legitimate concerns when weighing leadership positions within life-and-death professions like firefighting.
Frankly, Hope n' Change finds it unacceptable that Mr. Holder would assert that in the 21st century, with one black man as president and another as Attorney General, African-Americans are simply incapable of competing scholastically with other ethnicities.
On the other hand, if he's right it might explain why Holder previously pronounced Arizona's immigration law unconstitutional without ever having read it.
Maybe he thought he couldn't.
Hey, if you were named Venkataratnam Narasimha Rattaiah,
you'd grow up to be a good speller too.-
Barack Obama recently declared that he would "lead by example" in bringing civility back into political discourse...but apparently, he's as incapable of leading in that area as in any other.
Because David Axelrod, Obama's senior campaign strategist, just took to the airwaves to denounce Mitt Romney and other republicans of being "in the thralls of this reign of terror from the far right that has dragged the party to the right."
Clearly, such an ugly and incendiary remark would be considered uncivil if it couldn't be backed up with facts. Which is why Axelrod then trotted out the long list of mass murders, bombings, and public executions which the Tea Party Right is responsible for and...
Oh wait, no he didn't. Because he couldn't.
But he did say that conservatives are waging a "reign of terror" by not supporting Obama's "everybody in, all you can eat!" immigration policy (and Janet Napolitano's new "Unlawful Presence Waivers" which give illegals a free pass on deportation).
In other words, Axelrod threw out the libelous insult for no reason at all, other than to inject a little more poison into the national dialogue...and because he knows that the media will give him a free pass when he presents defense of our nation's jobs and borders as being as morally unacceptable as the 9/11 attacks.
Per today's cartoon, all of this puts Hope n' Change in mind of Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," in which an epic - but somewhat vague - battle is described with impressive words which impart feeling but actually make no sense at all.
Which, sadly, will be indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Obama's reelection campaign.
But this time, when the vorpal swords go snicker snack, the real victims will be be truth and civility.
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Perhaps because he wanted to distract from the media frenzy attached to his admission of eating dog meat and other sordid things, Barack Obama finally decided to make a bold, decisive move to set America back on the path to prosperity and harmony.
Specifically, he flew Air Force One to Detroit in order to be photographed sitting pensively in the bus made famous by Rosa Parks (and, oh yeah, as long as he was in town, attend another fundraiser) knowing that the inspiring image would cause all Americans to ask themselves the same troubling question etched into the president's somber face: "I wonder why this bus isn't going anywhere?"
Because our economic bus isn't going anywhere...and the longer Obama is driving, the farther back African-Americans are being told to sit.
This situation is captured perfectly in a now-infamous recent photo of Obama's reelection headquarters in Chicago, which shows a room crammed with computers, tables, and seemingly hundreds of enthusiastic young campaign workers. All except one of whom are white. And the one who isn't white is Asian... presumably because the campaign needed at least one worker who could do math.
Supporters of the president say that he's forced to overcompensate for his own alleged blackness by not having too many black people around him or his organization (although they're still apparently fine crowded around him at photo-ops as if they were Japanese subway riders during rush hour).
And similarly, he's overcompensating for his own blackness by doing virtually nothing to help the plight of Blacks in America. So bad is his record that the Congressional Black Caucus has said they'd be demonstrating in front of the Whitehouse now...if Obama was a white man. But if the first black president fails to do anything for the African-American community, they don't want to risk criticizing him as being heartless, manipulative, and ineffectual - no matter how truthful that assessment is.
In response to the embarrassment of having a campaign headquarters that looks whiter than a gathering of the KKK, Obama's people are now making an "urgent push" to hire more minorities - especially black ones. Although last time we looked, it was a serious crime to hire someone based solely on their race...or even to consider it as a condition of employment.
Maybe this is why Barack Obama felt the sudden desperate need to be photographed sitting in Rosa Parks' bus. And we hope he enjoyed the experience while it lasted.
Because he's got to get off at the next stop.
Barack Obama shares a ride with all the Black Americans he's helped.
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(Note to readers: the first link in today's commentary is actually a bit of
Hope n' Change Friday mischief. Feel free to share it with your friends!)
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