Affirmative action and PC ideology smite the military
I remain absolutely convinced that Obama, the boy genius of the left, is a product of affirmative action who is hiding his academic record because it is dismal. If it weren’t dismal, he’d be showing it off. Frankly, though, after thirty years of affirmative action, we expected nothing more from our academic institutions. That’s a shame, too, because it means that, for most Americans, a Harvard degree in the hands of a black or hispanic person is written off as a gift from a beneficent liberal bureaucracy, while a Harvard degree in the hands of a white or asian person means that person is damn smart. The presumption is that a minority couldn’t have made it on his (or her) own. Affirmative action, rather than removing hurdles, created an insuperable one, which is the virtually immovable assumption that all minorities are below average, and obtained their degrees with help.
For a long time, it seemed as if the military was the last bastion of quality in America: a place in which race, color, creed, religion or place of origin were irrelevant. What mattered in the military, we were told, was ability and commitment. It was the most successfully integrated institution in America because it was color blind. Turns out that is a lie.
The whole Hasan debacle revealed the PC horror of the military to a shocked America. Here was a ticking jihadist time bomb within the heart of our military, and no one did anything for fear of offending PC sensibilities. Then, in the wake of his massacre, the powers that be in the Obama administration and the military itself rushed out speeches, not to assure Americans that they were keeping us safe from jihadists, but to ensure jihadists that they were going to be kept safe from us.
That is a big, bloody story, but the PC corruption of a formerly egalitarian institution turns out to exist at all levels in the military. CDR Salamander let the cat out of the bag when he blogged about the way in which the Navy Color Guard put together for the World Series was jiggered and rejiggered so that it would look “good” (read, victim identity appropriate) for television. I was under the impression that Color Guard status was an assigned position based upon skills. It turns out, however, that what matters is that the Guard’s appearance appeals to identity politic sensibilities. I urge you to read Phibian’s original post (linked above), as well as his follow-up to that post.
Academic corruption is bad. It means that, in the marketplace, I’m going to place substantially less value on a black or hispanic person, than I will on a white person. If I were lawyer shopping, I’d pick the white Baylor grad over the black Harvard grad. At least with the former, I actually know what product I’m buying. With the military, though, because this is all about chain of command without any market freedom, the consequences are much worse than the devaluation of any specific diploma. Instead, troops in the military stand to die (as they did in Fort Hood), and we Americans stand to lose our freedoms as our military becomes ever less efficient and increasingly in thrall to the destructive forces of Political Correctness.
I’d like to add here that I am not racist, in that I do not believe that any specific race is inherently better or worse than any other race. Instead, I’m a smart shopper. If I know that a factory is cheating to turn out a product, I won’t buy from that factor. And it’s a damn shame that it’s minorities in America who are the ones being cheated.
