President Obama has announced a plan cut the deduction percentage that can be taken on one’s tax return for charitable contributions. While the administration claims that it will not affect behavior of taxpayers who give, we know better. This move will negatively impact charities. Why go after charities under the guise of soaking the rich by cutting the amount of deductions available to them? Perhaps to marginalise charities and use the proceeds to fund big government programs that will pick up the slack (in theory of course)?

Young Jeezy

My President’s black, My Lambo’s blue

I’ll be g******ed if my rims ain’t too

My money’s light green and my Jordan’s light gray

And they all love to see white, now how much you tryna pay

This is a story about the power of misinformation. I should begin not by translating the the introductory lines (I’ll get to that later), but by directing your attention to the video below wherein rappers Jay-Z and Young Jeezy ”articulate” their feelings about Bush and Obama in a highly coarse and to some, a racist manner.  The less streetwise among us may find the two rappers’ words shocking. In fact, a number of rappers have referenced their enthusiasm for Obama since the bginning of his candidacy, and the narrative in general has centered either on Obama’s skin color or the evil supposedly perpetrated by Bush. The catchy lines that lead this story are from Young Jeezy’s “My President” which I first heard in Novemeber. My first reaction was to roll down the windows and crank up the volume in my truck, and jam out to the smooth groove coupled with a tight Dirty South beat. After deciphering the lyrics though I realized Jeezy was a little bit confused.  In traditional English, the lines would read as follows:

My President is Black. My Lamborghini is blue.

I’ll be g******ed if the wheels (on the Lamborghini) aren’t blue as well

My money is light green. My Nike Michael Jordan-labelled apparel is light grey.

Everyone loves to see cocaine. How much are you willing to pay for some?

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, I know. But this is the first sign that Jeezy is likely not well-versed in the intricacies of Obama’s policy initiatives. As I understand it, whether due to record sales or cocaine sales, Young Jeezy is worth well over $250,000, so he can count on a tax hike from his new President. At any rate, Had Jeezy stopped there, he would go down as little more than an ardent supporter of Obama with an affinity for blue automobiles. Instead, he goes down in my book as a misinformed consumer of the narrative promoted by many liberals that Bush stole the 2000 election and has spent the intervening eight years engaing in an orgy of corruption. “Bush robbed all of us, would that make him a criminal?” asks Jeezy. He goes on to describe how he’s “Stuntin on Martin Luther, feelin’ just like a king. Guess this is what he meant when he said he had a dream.”

I trust he was referring to Martin Luther King rather than the 16th century author of the 99 Theses. 

I said at the beginning that this story was about the power of misinformation. I later told that in my opinion Young Jeezy had bought into the far left’s hateful characterization of President Bush. Jeezy’s next step is the key here. By packaging that distorted narrative–which not only makes false claims about President Bush but also focuses on Obama’s skin color as an attribute–into a tasty, consumable morsel packed with Atlanta-bred hip-hop flavor, he propogates or perpetuates incorrect and potentially harmful ideas in the minds of the millions that listen his music. And this is to say nothing of the glamorization of drugs, guns, prostitution, etc. So when O’Reilly derided Young Jeezy and Jay-Z for their tirades, he missed the fact that these ideas have enjoyed wide circulation among hip-hop listeners for a long time. Maybe O’Reilly should put a little more underground rap into rotation on his IPod.

Young Jeezy isn’t a political junkie. He consumes the loudest narrative in the media, and generalizes like most Americans. The problem for conservatives is that the wrong narrative is the loudest. This will not change until we find a way to yell as loud as liberals with superior arguments. Until then, Young Jeezy will continue consuming twisted truths, mixing them in with musical poems of cash, cars, and women and broadcasting hip-hop fans worldwide.

 

Obama Finally Goes in O’Reilly

Its on now. Bill is going right after national security.

When it comes to Iran, Obama says he will not take the military option off the table. Says he can’t divulge detailed plans for a response to Iran. Diplomatic options and sanctions have not been exhausted. “Maybe” that will work says Bill.

Bill says Obama was right–Iraq was a mistake–but that Obama needs to admit the surge worked. Obama responds that the surge succeeded. But he will not admit he was wrong because we’re still wasting money over there. Bill challenges Obama to get the Iraqis to pay us back with oil money.

Then Bill call out Obama for saying McCain can’t find Bin Ladin. “You won’t invade Pakistan,” Bill says. Obama wiggles out, says time to put more pressure on Pakistan.

And like that, its over. Unlike his two-piece interview with Hillary, this one will be split up over 4 nights!

Hillary’s Memory Fuzzy, Misremembers Treacherous (?) Visit to Bosnia in ‘96

CBS does a bit of a hit job on Hillary with this piece, especially focusing on the sweet little girl that greeted her on that day in ‘96. But then, Hillary earned every bit of it. Yet another reason I am almost 100% certain she will be bested by Obama. And another lesson in how trying to act like 1990s Bill when you aren’t Bill leads to disastrous results.

What if?

Let’s face it, the vaunted Clinton machine has shown complete fecklessness in the face of Obamania. The ways in which she has failed to make headway against this force of nature–the rhetoric of Obama–are countless. Its actually staggering the missed opportunities and the inability of her campaign to find weak points to harp on, especially considering the willingness of the Clintons to play dirty.

 A new thought occurred to me this afternoon, though. Did Hillary just get unlucky? What if Obama had decided to wait until the next go ’round in ‘12? How would the “inevitable candidate” fared in a race without the Illinois senator-cum-rock star/hope-monger/Presidential candidate?

For starters, she would have dispatched all the second-tier candidates with ease. John Edwards would have remained as her chief rival. I suspect that she would have become at some point the clear establishment candidate, meaning all the endorsements and money flowing to Obama would instead have been hers. She would in that case have been able to play by her own rules. She could have hit Edwards with more traditional attacks, since he would be a more symmetrical opponent. Without Obama, it is highly likely she would have all but wrapped up the nomination by now.

Then what? She would face McCain in the general election. Theoretically, she should win, because she would be the “change candidate.” In the general election, her more centrist foreign policy would dilute McCain’s biggest selling point, and she could probably demagogue her way to victory on domestic issues.

But this is 2008. Would the voters really go for the old Clinton tricks this time around? Cynicism directed toward Washington is high, as shown by not only President Bush’s perennially dreadful approval ratings but also the even worse approval rating for the Democratic Congress (which somehow has managed to do worse than the shamefully useless Repubican Congress before it). The Clintons of ‘92 and ‘96 got away with all manner of semantic gymnastics and fallacy, and developed evasion of tough questions into an art form. They played dirty but never got mud on their clothes. And somehow, they could connect with Americans, who were all too happy to overlook the closets in Arkansas bulging with skeletons.

Methinks today’s voter would be less apt to let them get away with it. The Clinton machine is a 20th century dinosaur that has proven itself inferior to better evolved species. Perhaps she was unlucky in that in her year to shine, Obama also rose. Perhaps, however, she was doomed anyway.

Your comments are appreciated.

Public Service Announcement: Candidate Edwards Appears to be an Amateur

Check out John Edwards on ABC’s “This Week.” He shows clearly that he hasn’t put it all together just yet. Worse, he seems to have picked up a bad habit from his 2004 running mate John Kerry-the ‘ol flip flop. Just something to keep in mind as the race heats up.

Double Standards of Political Correctness

Funny how the response to what is said is determined by who says it. Let’s be honest-if a Republican commented that Barack Obama, the fresh young Senator from Illinois, is “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” well, the media, the DNC, the intelligentsia-heck, just about everyone-would waste no time in demanding an apology, and the more extreme factions within each of the aforementioned groups would be haughtily muttering accusations of racism just above their collective breaths. It obviously insinuates that prior to Mr. He’s-so-hot-right-now Obama’s rise to prominence, there existed no clean-cut and competent African American statesmen. That’s a pretty unequivocable slap in the face of the African-American community and beyond.

And yet, it was not a Republican congressman who remarked such. It was 2008 Presidential hopeful Joe Biden, a Democratic congressman from Deleware (CNN).  Now two weeks later, the incident seems to be all but forgotten. But it was not the only recent racially-insensitive remark by a congressman this month, and indeed another Democrat. South Carolina’s Robert Ford proclaimed earlier in the month that “Obama winning the primary would drag down the rest of the party…Every Democratic candidate running on that ticket would lose because he’s black and he’s at the top of the ticket” (Associated Press). Ford summed it up rather nicely: “I love Obama, but I’m not going to kill myself.”

Even if these remarks are made by Democrats in the context of Obama’s impact on the party, they still should provide a grand display of the mass hypocrisy of the party that claims to be the party of the minorities, the poor, the middle class, and of tolerance. If a Republican were to stand up and say Obama could not win the Presidency because he is Black, they would be burned in effigy. Somehow, these utterances from Democratic lips are easily forgiven and forgotten.

For reference, consider two historical cases. Republican Trent Lott made a racially-insensitive remark in 2003 and was forced to resign his post as majority leader in the Senate. Conversely, Robert Byrd, a documented Ku Klux Klan leader until at least the late 1940s, became in 2006 the longest serving Senator in US history (Wikipedia). Yes, he was a Democrat.

As long as Democrats can get away with publicly-voiced disrespect for African-Americans, no progress will be made toward a time where when we mention the Senator from Illinois, the parenthetical notation of his race is no longer obligatory. That, my fellow Americans, should be the real story here.

www.barackobama.com