Mugged (35 page)

Among the sons of the South are: Sergeant Alvin York, who received the Medal of Honor in WWI for leading seven men to capture a hundred twenty-eight Germans, including four officers (Tennessee); Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of WWII (Texas); General Lucius Clay, commander of the Berlin Airlift (Georgia); Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Pacific commander in chief of the navy during World War II (Texas); General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded Allied forces in WWII in the Southwest Pacific (Arkansas); General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam (South Carolina); Lieutenant General Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, considered by many to be the greatest marine ever and the only one to be awarded the Navy Cross five times for heroism and gallantry in combat (Virginia); and Tommy Franks, who led the attack on the Taliban (Texas).

The large number of blacks in the military is a reflection of the disproportionate number of southerners in the military.

Freddie Stowers, the only African American to receive the Medal of Honor for his service in World War I, was from South Carolina. After his commanding officers had been killed, Stowers led his combat unit up a hill occupied by the Germans. Stowers and his men took out a German machine gun nest and were advancing toward a second German trench when Stowers was hit by machine gun fire. He kept going. Then he was hit a second
time. As he lay dying, he ordered his men to continue. They did, and drove the Germans from the hill. Seventy-three years later, President George H. W. Bush awarded the medal posthumously to Stowers in a White House ceremony attended by Stowers’s sisters.

Five black marines were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for their service in Vietnam for diving on exploding enemy grenades to protect their comrades. Three of the five were from the South.

The majority of military bases in the continental United States are named after Confederate officers—Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Hood, Fort Polk, Fort Rucker. Former senator and secretary of the navy James Webb describes southern soldiers in his military novels whispering “and for the South,” under their breath when reciting their duty to their country. They go to war not for Old Glory, he writes, “but for this vestige of lost hope called the South.” This is a shared cultural ethic among all southerners, not just the “Sons of the Confederacy.”
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It is pride in the South’s military history—encompassing both races—that the Confederate battle flag represents, a pride in values that exist independently of the institution of slavery. The American flag could just as well be said to symbolize slavery: Slavery was legal in the United States for far longer than the Confederate flag ever flew.

Northern liberals and race demagogues try to turn the Confederate flag into a badge of shame, in the process spitting on America’s gallant warrior class. As with desegregation, Republicans could have used some of this Democratic dudgeon back when the war was being fought.

SOUTH CAROLINA—MCCAIN—2000

The alleged smearing of “the McCain family” in South Carolina was a total hoax. According to the myth, before the 2000 South Carolina primary, the Bush campaign made phone calls to voters implying that McCain had an illegitimate black child. As Linda Wertheimer reported on National Public Radio: “Mysterious callers posing as pollsters asked voters how they felt about John McCain’s black child.”
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That never happened. After a massive investigation by the media into Bush’s mudslinging against their then-heartthrob McCain, they turned up nothing. Bush even took the unusual step of ordering the release of all phone scripts being used in the robocalls. Still nothing. And that was with
hundreds of thousands of these calls being made, thousands of which should have ended up on answering machines throughout the state.

The closest anyone came was one single email sent by a Bob Jones professor, Richard Hand, to a dozen of his friends, claiming McCain had fathered two children with his first wife before marrying her. Hand did not claim that the children were black. He had no connection to the Bush campaign. McCain had, in fact, adopted his first wife’s children from a prior marriage, which Hand simply assumed were fathered by McCain. Hand discovered his error and apologized for his incorrect email before any votes were cast.
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It’s always the same jumble of fact-free invective repeated to the point of delirium. Liberals say conservatives speak in code to communicate with bigots, but they’re the ones with code words for their racist myths—southern strategy, McCain in South Carolina, Bob Jones, Trent Lott, dog whistles, Goldwater, Reagan’s kickoff speech, Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, the “other,” white fear, white picket fences, and on and on. (Also, when liberals say they have gone “duck-hunting,” that’s code for “antiquing.”)

CODE WORDS—LAW AND ORDER, WELFARE

Liberals claim Republicans speak in racist code words for the simple reason that Republicans aren’t saying anything that’s objectively racist. The idea of looking past people’s words and actions to discover some secret motive comes straight from the communist playbook.
The kulaks are bad; the proletariat, good. But wait! Some proletariat don’t listen to us—they’re bad! They’re “lumpen proletariat.”
Facts aren’t important, it’s what is in your hearts. As determined by liberals.

On the
Charlie Rose Show
in 2007,
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman claimed that “race is central to how the conservative movement got where it is in America today.” He said Ronald Reagan’s political career “was largely based on tacit race-baiting.”
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Even Charlie Rose took exception to such inanity, and suggested that anticommunism was somewhat more central to Reagan’s worldview.

“Well, Okay. If you want,” Krugman allowed. “There was some of that.” But he barged on, saying Reagan “had passion on two things, communism
and welfare cheats. And he didn’t have to say what color the welfare cheats were. It just always got through.”

That was remarkably stupid, even for Paul Krugman. For those of us who know something about Reagan, his big issues were anticommunism, tax cuts, abortion and small government. Even when he did talk about welfare, it was to criticize government bureaucrats who kept people dependent on government for their own interests.

Thus, for example, in Reagan’s famed speech at the Neshoba County fair, he said he didn’t believe people were on welfare “simply because they prefer to be there.” Rather, he said, it was the welfare bureaucrats who kept them “so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.”
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To be fair to liberals, even Charlie Rose was perplexed by Krugman’s claim, noting that distaste for welfare might have some rationale other than hatred of black people.

The other big “dog whistle” proving the Republicans’ “southern strategy” is any mention of law and order. Why must Republicans prattle on so about crime? It’s one thing to talk about crime a little bit. But if you start talking about it too much, you’re a racist. (Which is hard to square with liberals’ stalwart refusal to acknowledge an inordinately high crime rate among young black men.)

In
Newsweek
, Jon Meacham said that when Nixon “talked about ‘law and order,’ it was not hard to figure out what he meant.”
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I’m not certain, but I think he meant: law and order.

In the 1960s crime was exploding, the courts were issuing criminal-law decisions to warm an ACLUer’s heart and the colleges were exploding with violent student protests. Only a race-obsessed neurotic could think the public’s concern about crime was really about racism.

But the “concern-about-crime-is-racist” thesis kept popping up as a statement of raw, irrefutable fact. A few years later, Jonathan Alter wrote—also in
Newsweek
—in case its readers missed it the first twenty-seven times—“In 1968, Richard Nixon used code words like ‘law and order’ to exploit racial fears as part of his ‘southern strategy.’”
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So welfare and crime it is! Those are the ground-zero code words, the dog whistles, the irrefutable proof of racism in Republican hearts. We’re all agreed on that, yes?

Those also happen to be the two issues liberals tout as Clinton’s major
policy triumphs. At the end of the Clinton administration, an article in the
New York Times
gushed that he had “co-opted the Republicans’ longstanding political advantage on issues from crime to the economy to welfare.” It was one of his “striking strengths,” the
Times
said.
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Why was it racist when Republicans talked about crime and welfare but brilliant policy making when a Democrat “co-opted” those issues?

Two years later the
Times
ran a column by Joe Klein also praising Clinton for being “candid about crime in the inner cities, about the disastrous consequences of out-of-wedlock births and the need for welfare reform.”
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But when a Republican is candid about crime or welfare, it’s racist.

There was no new twist to Clinton’s crime and welfare policies. As a “third-way,” Democratic Leadership Council–admiring, triangulating Democrat, Clinton had merely claimed credit for Republican policies. When Democrats were losing politically on welfare and crime, they accused Republicans of racism. When Clinton capitulated to Republicans on those issues, he was hailed as a genius.

Clinton’s sole contribution to the Republicans’ welfare bill—besides claiming credit for it—was to sign it, kicking and screaming, and only at the point when it would have been too embarrassing for him not to, having specifically campaigned on reforming welfare.

As for law and order, Clinton’s contribution was to harass and stymie the one man most responsible for declining crime rates: New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. By virtually abolishing crime in one of the nation’s largest cities, he brought down the national crime rate. And the entire time he was doing it, Giuliani was hounded by liberals for being…guess what? Yes, racist.

In Giuliani’s first three years as mayor, the drop in crime in New York City alone was responsible for 35 percent of the reduction in crime nationally. As even the
New York Times
admitted in 1996, Giuliani “has already done as much to re-elect [Clinton] as any Democratic mayor” by lowering New York’s crime rate “so dramatically that it has driven down those of the country.”
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Soon other cities were emulating New York’s crime fighting practices, multiplying the effects of tough-on-crime policies that began in the mid-1990s under Giuliani.

And how did Clinton help this project? As Giuliani was implementing novel policing techniques that would change the nation, the Clinton administration denounced him as a racist. Democratic attacks on Giuliani’s crime policies kicked into high gear in 1999, just as Hillary Clinton was preparing to run for the Senate from New York. In order to dirty up
Giuliani, her then-probable opponent, President Clinton unleashed the Justice Department, two U.S. attorneys and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Giuliani’s police.

The accidental shooting of a black man by four New York policemen in early 1999 gave the Clintons an opening. The cops had shot Haitian immigrant Amadou Diallo when he reached for his wallet and they thought he was reaching for a gun. One cop flinched, lost his balance and fell backwards, leading the others to believe he had been shot by Diallo, so they started firing. In response, the entire Democratic establishment wanted New York City put under federal monitors.

A footnote to the Diallo case that has been wiped from the record is that the cops had stopped Diallo because they were looking for a black man who had beaten and raped more than fifty black and Hispanic women in the previous six years, beginning in the Dinkins administration. Two months after the Diallo shooting, the cops caught the actual rapist, Isaac Jones, who looked strikingly similar to Diallo, lived a mile from where Diallo was shot and was heavily armed. The police found a cache of weapons in Jones’s car, including a 9mm MAC 11, a .380 semiautomatic pistol and a .22 caliber rifle.

The
New York Times
published more than two hundred articles on the Diallo shooting between the time he was killed in February 1999 and when Jones was apprehended a few months later. In the coming months, there would be hundreds more articles on Diallo. That’s almost as many as it published on Mitt Romney’s dog. But the
Times
saw fit to mention Isaac Jones—a vicious rapist who had been terrorizing black and Hispanic women until Giuliani’s police stopped him—in only one solitary article on page B-4.
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Immediately after the Diallo shooting, President Clinton used a presidential radio address to say that he was “deeply disturbed” by allegations of “continued racial profiling.”
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Racial profiling? Black women had identified a black man as their rapist. Hillary piped in with her deep concerns, too—even going so far as to accuse the four officers of “murder.” All four were later acquitted by a jury that included four black women.

Two United States attorneys in New York opened investigations into police profiling and use of excessive force in New York City, as did state attorney general Eliot Spitzer.

It didn’t go unnoticed that Hillary was gearing up for a presumed campaign against Giuliani as her husband, the president, was siccing federal investigators on the mayor. At a press conference, Attorney General Janet
Reno was asked how Hillary’s anticipated run against Giuliani would affect the investigation of the NYPD.
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Giuliani’s spokesman remarked, “We just hope that all of the Clinton administration officials and Democratic attorney general Spitzer don’t bump into each other as they rush to conduct their investigations.”
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If the president and his wife were really concerned with the use of excessive force by the police, they might have started a little closer to home. There were four times as many fatal police shootings in Washington as in New York that year—1.14 per one thousand cops to 0.28.
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At the very same time, Clinton was helping keep New York City safe by pardoning Puerto Rican terrorists who had detonated more than a hundred bombs in New York and Chicago and who vowed to continue their bombing campaign if released.
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