Bookworm Beat 4/10/19 — the flyover country edition

This discursive Bookworm Beat wanders from American black culture, to evil Leftists, to the wonders of Wal-Mart versus the horrors of socialized medicine.

Bookworm Beat Obama Brennan double standards insane leftistsEverything Leftists hate about America. I’ve been spending some time of late in small town America — in Eastern Tennessee to be specific. Frankly, I can see why coastal blue staters hate this part of America. There are so many things here that give offense: good suburban infrastructure, happy people, friendly interactions between the races, staggeringly beautiful nature with lots of open space, Wal-Marts, lawns that homeowners tend every weekend, and lots of pro-Trump and pro-Second Amendment bumper stickers on cars. This kind of well-managed, all-American environment is enough to give any Leftist chronic heartburn and a desire to destroy.

Speaking of those lawns, even though today is not a weekend day, I worked with a friend to get rid of ivy that had overtaken a corner of his property.

Ivy looks so pretty, doesn’t it? It’s not. There’s nothing pretty about it. It’s like Kudzu’s younger brother.

I filled seven big black garbage bags with the stuff and only cleared out 2/3 of it. I am exhausted. I also feel pretty darn self-righteous, though, which helps offset some of the fatigue.

But enough about living the good life in flyover country America. Let me get down to the brass tacks of today’s stories.

For American blacks, the problem isn’t race, it’s culture; more specifically, welfare culture. I’m going to assume that all of you saw Candace Owen’s testimony before a Democrat-run House Committee anxious to find a white nationalism problem where none exists. Owens was obviously nervous, but she was also rocking and rolling, talking about pathologies within the African American community that have nothing to do with white nationalism.

No wonder that the utterly vile Ted Lieu tried to smear Owens as a Hitler lover while the brain dead (Go)Nadler wrongly chastised her for calling Lieu stupid. The Democrats should be deeply embarrassed that these two moronic, immoral people represent them.

Shame, though, isn’t part of a Democrat lexicon unless the Democrat is trying to shame someone else. In fact, what the Leftist media did to try to offset the damage that Owens imposed on the Leftist brand was to repeat Lieu’s smear that a black woman is a Hitler lover. Even worse, those Democrats I follow on Facebook, rather than asking, as Owens did, “How dumb do you think we are?” gleefully passed on those same offensive and nonsensical smears.

A friend of mine keeps saying, “I don’t see any way that we’re going to avoid a Second Civil War.” I always come back at him saying, “We’re already in the Second Civil War. There just haven’t been any shots fired; only hats attacked.” (One of the more insane attacks involved a white woman attacking a Hispanic woman for being a racist because the Hispanic woman were a MAGA hat. As (Go)Nadler demonstrated, white Leftists aren’t even pretending to use their brains anymore.)

What I want to address here briefly is Candace’s point about self-inflicted pathologies within the black community. She’s right, of course, as I’ve blogged here before.

I’ll just add two things. First, while those pathologies were present in black communities through the early 1960s thanks to systemic racial discrimination in the form of slavery, Jim Crow in the South, and open racism in the North, the reality is that by the early 1960s, blacks were making huge social and economic gains by following the universal rules for success in a free market economy: education, job, marriage, children, in that order.

What brought all this to a screeching halt was Johnson’s “Great Society,” which was intended, as Johnson himself admitted to a friend, to keep “n*****s voting for Democratic for 200 years.”  (Some say this quotation is apocryphal, but it’s certainly held up to reality for almost 60 years.) Suddenly, education, jobs, and marriages went out the window. All that remained was children: half of which have been aborted and, of those not aborted, over of 70% of whom have been raised in poverty-stricken homes with single mothers getting some form of welfare.

This ongoing African-American tragedy has nothing to do with skin color and nothing to do with America’s history of either slavery or Jim Crow. Instead, it has everything to do with culture — a culture brought down thanks to what was effectively a pact with the Devil, with the Devil in this case being a welfare state that made education, men, work, and nuclear families redundant and, indeed, offensive. No wonder that, as blacks are finally recognizing the soul-stealing agreement the Left foisted on them, the Democrats are trying to distract them by calling a black woman . . . Hitler.

Looked at in this way, the reparations that all of the Democrat party candidate for president insist must be imposed on a generation of Americans who had nothing to do with slavery is just a reaffirmation of the original welfare contract with the Devil. Reparations won’t make things better. Instead, they will buy another 60 years of Democrat votes built on the ruined bodies and souls of American blacks.

The second thing I’ll add is a point that Scott Adams made, and he’s the first I’ve heard make it: Regarding reparations, he says that someone is going to ask, if we’re giving reparations, by what standard should we measure black lives in America, at least economically? Do we measure them against all whites? Inner city whites? Appalachian whites? Vietnamese who came here 40 years ago with nothing and now are middle class?

Or — and this is the kicker — do we ask how these blacks would be doing if they hadn’t been brought to America in the first place? The answer, of course, is not well. No matter how badly blacks are doing in America, they’re doing worse in Africa.

I’ll offer two links to support that last statement. The first is Kim du Toit’s post saying Let Africa Sink. The second is Keith Richburg’s masterpiece, Out of America : A Black Man Confronts Africa, in which he explains how a stint in Africa while working for the Washington Post made him grateful that his long-ago ancestors had suffered the horrors of being transported to and enslaved in America.

Some of today’s most storied Democrats are either very stupid or very evil. When it comes to the openly anti-Semitic, anti-American Ilhan Omar, I’m inclined to go with the latter choice, although I won’t deny her a strong dollop of the former. I don’t think she’s the brightest bulb on the block, but she has down pat the rap of victimhood, nicely wrapped around her adherence to sharia.

Anyway, the Democrat Omar tale today is a story told in three tweets.

Tweet 1 came when Dan Crenshaw heard how Omar described 9/11:

Tweet 2 is Omar’s response, which does not address the substance of Rep. Crenshaw’s tweet. Instead, she immediately heads straight to victimhood. No surprise there, because it’s worked so well for her up until now:

Tweet 3 explains why I said “up until now.” Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, won’t let her get away with her victimhood ploy. No doesn’t grovel. Instead, he just calls her out on her mindless victimhood calumnies:

I like the cut of Rep. Crenshaw’s jib.

Be sure to whip this out when a Leftist praises socialized medicine. One of my conservative Facebook friend is begging everyone to spread this link far and wide. I’m doing my best right here:

The fraying edges of universal health care : Britain’s version of ‘Medicare for All,’ delivers rationing and even blindness

If you’re wondering what Democrats have in mind when they tout “Medicare For All,” look no further than England. There are more reports of the U.K.’s National Health System’s collapse, this time featuring horror stories of rationing care for the elderly. Doctors are now sounding alarms bells that seniors with cataracts are going blind as they wait for surgical approval.

The Guardian reported, “Patients who are losing their sight are being forced to wait for months before having eye cataracts removed because of NHS cost-cutting. … The NHShas imposed restrictions on patients’ access to cataract surgery in more than half of England. … The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) condemned the rationing as shocking. It warned that not treating people with cloudy vision risks them falling and breaking bones, thus costing the NHS more.”

Last year, The New York Times reported some people in England were waiting for 12 hours to be seen in emergency rooms.

There’s more in the article, much, much more. Once again, let me spell it out: Europe’s post-WWII fling with socialism, or at least its decision to socialize its welfare services, worked for one reason and one reason only: America paid for it. For 70 years, we absorbed most of Europe’s military costs. We worked so that they got free cradle to grave care.

In the unwinding of the world since the Soviet Union’s collapse, Europe’s had to pay for its own socialized welfare system, and it’s had to do that at the same time that its citizens decided once and for all that having children is time-consuming, exhausting, and expensive, so why bother? Without American money and without a rising class of young people to foot the bill for old people’s care . . . older Europeans are in deep doo-doo.

Remember: this is what the Democrats want for you.

The free market is always the best answer. Turn your eyes away from Europe and look at the 1 gig flash drive you got for free at a trade show or a craft fair. When those things first came on the market around the year 2000, you paid several hundred dollars for a 512 MB flash drive. Capitalism drove prices down. People finding needs and filling them, and building better mousetraps is the best way to deliver the greatest amount and quality of services and products to the largest number of people.

Don’t believe me? Go to Wal-Mart. If you’re a Lefty, stop sneering at Wal-Mart’s shoppers and start looking at the dazzling array of products, all at affordable prices. Maybe Wal-Mart shoppers aren’t dressed as expensively as the Kardashians (although most look a darn sight classier), but at Wal-Mart, these shoppers have something akin to the same buying power as the Kardashians do when they’re wasting their money on weird clothes sold on Paris catwalks.

My brain function feels as if it’s entangled with ivy. I’d better stop. Your comments are always welcome.


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