How to Talk about the Black Vote

I don’t think I need to spend a lot of time persuading you that the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) are going to keep trying to claim that opposition to Obama is racist. The NAACP vote is just the latest in a long string of examples that the liberal playbook is really just one play Xeroxed over and over again.

We don’t need to get into the weeds on all of this, but there’s one slice of the issue worth dwelling on here. Whenever conservatives point out that Obama’s standing in the polls (or Bill Clinton’s when he was president) is skewed heavily by the overwhelming support of African Americans, liberal writers insist that the only motivation for pointing this out is racism. Here’s ”conservative” writer Dave Weigel last year:

Byron York engages in a perennial conservative media stunt – breaking down poll numbers between blacks and whites to make the point that Democrats wouldn’t be so popular if it wasn’t for the 14th Amendment. Or something. I’ve really never figured this out. (Some of the less tactful analysis I’ve seen on this was David Horowitz’s 1998 comment [BROKEN LINK] that “the black community votes like a communist country.”)

I find this sort of deliberate obtuseness annoying. Are there really no legitimate reasons for pointing out that certain groups are outliers in their voting behavior? If that’s the case, please no more analysis that depends on pointing out that evangelical Christians are conservatives, that “angry white men” are Republicans, and so on. Oh, but wait, if we banned that from polite discourse, Frank Rich would have to take up fishing.

Here are a few reasons why Obama’s outsize and fairly unshakable support among African Americans is relevant to political debate.

1) Thanks to gerrymandered districts (the result of an evil scheme hatched by the RNC and the Congressional Black Caucus), blacks are concentrated in a relative handful of congressional districts. Hence black support in national polls doesn’t reflect the party’s chances in most swing races.

2) Black support for Obama seems to be detached from most questions of day-to-day policy (just as it was with Clinton). Sure, philosophy is important, but African-American voters are devout Democrats. Just ask yourself what public policies Obama could enact that would cause African Americans to abandon Obama and the Democratic party in significant numbers. Within the realm of the plausible, I’m not sure I can think of any. It’s no more racist to point this out than it is anti-Semitic to point out that for the last 70 years Jews have lived like Episcopalians and voted like Puerto Ricans. This is relevant because it means that Obama’s policies are more unpopular than they might seem with swing voters, centrists and other voters the press normally insists are so noble.

3) It’s entirely legitimate to illuminate and discuss the fact that African Americans are politically monolithic. There’s a diverse array of conclusions one can draw from the fact, but it is a fact and pointing it out isn’t racist. I’d argue it’s bad for African Americans because it means they’re votes are taken for granted (how many black political activists have you heard making that point?). But I’d also argue it’s bad because I think, on the whole, very liberal public policies are bad not just for America generally but for blacks in particular.

I can think of other arguments for why it’s perfectly legitimate to point out this electoral disparity. I’m sure there are nasty justifications for such observations as well. No doubt racists draw conclusions of their own from African-American voting behavior. What I find offensive is that liberal pundits immediately assume there can’t be any other kind of explanation or justification.

What Lurks Within

So the missus and I stumbled on Animal Planet’s highbrow show, Monsters Inside Me. If it were a show on SyFy, it’d be about a Lovecraftian creature from another dimension living inside an underwear model. If it were on ”E” it would be the subtitle of the True Hollywood episode about Mel Gibson. If it were on Logo – well, some jokes are probably best left for the director’s cut of the G-File.

But, since it’s on Animal Planet, it’s about people afflicted with invasive species. I’m not talking kudzu in the backyard or the zebra mussel in your ballast water. I’m talking about critters inside you.

Cue When A Stranger Calls trailer, except the “phone call” comes from your stewed bowels.

“Have you checked your undergarments?”

“Those twinges are coming from inside your small intestine!”

Anyway, we caught the end of one program where some older couple had picked up a nasty parasitical worm that worked around their bodies like Donald Pleasance in Fantastic Voyage.

The doctor thinks he knows what it is! It’s the spongey-thorn whatchamacallit. Apparently, the only way to get this critter inside you is to eat undercooked fish or to eat the feces of something that ate undercooked fish (“I guess Sidney Blumenthal better get himself checked out!” – The Couch).

So the woman says something like this to the camera: “I wracked my brain trying think of where in the world I could have possibly eaten undercooked fish. I couldn’t think of anything. And then it hit me. It might have been when my husband and I were in Africa on a safari and our guide caught some catfish and decided to serve it to us sushi-style.” They then show a reenactment of these bottom-feeding fish being pulled out of a muddy river and then cut up with a filthy knife that looks like a small machete.

It reminded me of the time I accidentally rubbed hot sauce in my eye. My dad came into the bathroom, where I was furiously trying to rinse out my eye at the sink. He asked what happened, and when I gaspingly told him about it, he responded: “Damn. I could kick myself for not telling you not to rub hot sauce in your eye.”

The Stagliano Window

Speaking of stuff inside stuff, the other day I participated in a panel at Reasonmagazine HQ to discuss the whole libertarians vs. conservatives thing, again. It was a fun time. The folks at Reason were grand hosts. You can read the exchange here, and, allegedly, the panel itself will be available at ReasonTV.

Before the formal proceedings began, Matt Welch, editor of Reason, called to the audience’s attention the “Stagliano Window.” While it sounds like spy-thriller title, it’s actually a real window at Reason’s swank offices that was paid for by one of Reason’s donors: John Stagliano, a porn mogul. Matt Welch encouraged everyone in the audience to educate themselves on the topic. He suggested the whole thing was self-evidently outrageous. I haven’t had the time to go to school on it yet, but you can find a world of links here. I don’t suggest you start here, unless you want to be persuaded that what’s under consideration is actually obscenity. As to the question of whether we should have federal obscenity laws at all or whether they are too strictly and arbitrarily enforced (a stronger case, if you ask me), that’s a matter for another time.

Khaaan!

Last week I wrote that Khan (the Star Trek villain played by Ricardo Montalban) was “from the Muslim world.” A lot of readers objected. For instance:

Jonah,

I know this is probably email #3,212 telling you this, but Khan Noonien Singh was a Sikh, not a Muslim.

Memory Alpha states the following:

“The surname ‘Singh’ suggests northern Indian ancestry (from the Sanskrit simha, ‘lion’) and possibly roots in Sikhism (male Sikhs are obliged to assume the surname ‘Singh,’ regardless of their geographical or familial origins); however, ‘Khan’ (‘ruler’) is a name of central Asian origin generally associated with Islam, which may suggest heteroethnic parentage.”

However, it was clearly established in The Eugenics Wars series by Greg Cox (Pocket Books), The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume 1, that he is indeed of Sikh descent. (I know you’re very busy, but if you ever read any Star Trek books in your life — that trilogy is among the most entertaining of the hundreds of books out there!)

Don’t you just hate people like me? ;)

Michael

Your Auxiliary Word Guy and Trek Fact-Checker

First, let me say, “Yes, yes I do hate people like Michael. But not because of this e-mail. I know Michael. And I hate him because he keeps live ferrets in his pants.”

Second, as I pointed out to ferret-pants, I did not say that Khan was Muslim. I said he came from the “Muslim world.” And he did. Or so I assert, which is good enough for one of us.

Vocab Dolorifuge

Okay, so last week’s experiment with weird words seems to be a hit. But several readers made a good point. If I deliberately sprinkle wild words into the text of the G-File, it completely messes up the melodic flow of my lucid prose. I mean, I could be divagating wildly about the merits of Canadian porn and its relevance to William Shatner’s girdle when, just as I was about to deliver, with foudroyant panache, an insight into Friedrich Hayek’s concept of the knowledge problem, suddenly the reader is distracted because he doesn’t know what “salariat” means. The charming quaquaversality of my writing would be ruined.

So, I guess I’m just going to have to figure out how do this without messing up the flow.

Meanwhile, most readers supported the idea of having a glossary, but some didn’t like the idea. I think not having a glossary makes more sense if I’m not trying to weave the words into warp and woof of the G-File.

Still, I’ll backslide today.

Divagate: To wander off. According to Simon Hertnon in his fantastic book,Endangered Words, divagate is very close to digress but not quite the same thing. If you stray from your planned remarks once, you digress. If you wander around in a million crazy directions like David Hasselhoff after a two-for-one Happy Hour at Bennigans, you divagate. I don’t merely digress in the G-File, I divagate like a mental patient who has wandered off in the snow.

Foudroyant: This means to strike suddenly and overwhelmingly, lightning-like. When the waitress brought the plate of nachos, the National Review interns struck foudroyantly at the snack.

Salariat: The salaried class. These are the folks in an economy who make a salary. Pirates, typically are not members of the salariat, though pirate henchmen may be.

Quaquaversal: This is mostly a geological term, but geologists can kiss my ass if they want to keep this word to themselves. It means: “dipping, pouring, or occurring in every direction,” according to the OED. Sort of like the old Al Sharpton in an extra-small tracksuit.

That’s it for today folks. If you read this far, again I ask you to spread the word about the G-File. We at NR are trying to figure out if this is worth continuing, and the more subscribers it has, the weaker my arguments become with the suits, who want me to do this slave labor on principle!