Dear Bob McDonnell

So Bob McDonnell stepped into it big time the other day by proclaiming April Confederate History Month.  Then a few people noted that in the whole proclamation there wasn’t a single mention of, you know, slavery.  So he amended it.  And bluntly it still sucks, thought it’s a little improved.  So I decided to write the governor, and this is what I sent.

Dear Governor McDonnell,

The Jackie Robinson Theory of the Obama Presidency

Ever since Obama has become president there has been a hyperracialization of every issue of mere politics.  The climax came for me when I went to the Tea Party protest down at the Capital.  I’ll post more on it later, but when I got home I started hearing claims of some kind of racial incident.  You can recognize intellectually that politicians are liars, but to hear them lying about you is another matter, a real baptism.  And it made me try to understand where this was all coming from.

Now some of it is pure hucksterism.  There is no two ways about it.

But there is also an honest, albeit mistaken, belief that this is a racial issue.  And I think I figured out why so many liberals have been seeing it that way.  I call it the Jackie Robinson Theory of the Obama presidency.

The Fallacy of Assuming Everyone Thinks Like You (or “Fisking Keith Olbermann”)

Yeah, several posts ago I wondered if it was necessary to fisk Olbermann, but I am compelled to, here.

But first let me tell you a story.  Now I have said that I support affirmative action in a limited sort of way, based on the present reality of racism and other forms of bigotry.  And I remember saying that once in a Constitutional History class back when I was an undergraduate and a man vehemently disagreed with me that racism was a real problem.  He said something like this:

I don’t think racism is so bad.  At my fraternity, a black guy wanted to join.  And one guy said we shouldn’t let him join because he was black.  So I stood up and said that the fact he was black didn’t matter.  And we voted to let him in.

That’s a paraphrase, of course.  And this is what I said in response.

Court Case Rips the Veil Off the Misogyny of Forcing a Woman to Wear Veils

Often it is claimed that the Islamic veil, meaning the kind that actually covers most of the face of the woman, is actually a commitment by Muslim men to the soul of the woman, to her inner beauty.  Only by hiding what she really looks like, can the prospective husband see past her outer beauty and into her inner beauty, or so the argument goes.

Well, if you thought that, here’s the proof that it is crap.

A man in Dubai said that he had been misled about what his bride-to-be looked like.  And when he lifted the veil, he found she was not as pretty as hoped.

So he asked for the courts to give him an annulment.  And worst of all, they did.

So stick a stake in that one, that theory is dead.

Kill Your Parents, Get their Money

So a man in Canada kills his parents, with an axe, and is rewarded for it by inheriting their money.  You see, there is a statute that says that if you are held criminally responsible for a person’s death, that you can’t inherit from them, but the problem is that he was acquitted by reason of insanity. 

Sick, yes, and its tempting to blame the courts.  But, I won’t.  I get the feeling that the actual blame lies with the legislature in Canada.  Is it so hard to understand that sometimes people kill without being held legally liable?

Anyway, you can read about it, here.

Obama Flunks History (Again)

Man, how is it that no one in the White House knew this was wrong?

With victory at hand, Lincoln could have sought revenge. He could have forced the South to pay a steep price for their rebellion. But despite all the bloodshed and all the misery that each side had exacted upon the other, and despite his absolute certainty in the rightness of the cause of ending slavery, no Confederate soldier was to be punished, Lincoln ordered.

(Source.)  Um, no, Mr. President.  Just off the top of my head there was Henry Wirz, executed for war crimes at Andersonville.  And I could be wrong, but I think there were others.

Maybe I am just too big of a history geek, but how does he not know this?  I mean Wirz was one of the early precedents for punishment for war crimes after a war, and after the holocaust people would look back at Andersonville with a new set of eyes.  The sight of those soldiers looking literally like walking skeletons took on new meaning:

Take a long look and you will get why there was so much rage at the South after the Civil War.

(Yeah, that's a little off topic, but those who suffered at Andersonville deserved to be remembered).

In Which George Washington Saved the Republic...

Yes, really, he did and not just by killing redcoats.

This was a nice op-ed from President’s Day.

I Have to Agree...

With pretty much all of this fisking of an ugly personal account.

More on the Unconstitutionality of McCain-Fiengold

Why exactly should the law allow this, but not Hillary: The Movie?

Global Warming Meltdown

Earlier, I shared my view on man-caused global warming (often called AGW).  Here’s just some of the evidence I see piling up every day that the whole thing is at best founded on really bad science, and at worst an actual fraud.  Time for some linky goodness.

IPCC warnings of African crop yields turn out to be bogus, too.

This is an oldie but goodie explaining what decline they have been hiding.

And a bombshell set of admissions from Professor Jones.  You know, like there has been no global warming in fifteen years.

But then he turns around and tries to shift the burden to skeptics.  See we are so certain of man-caused global warming, that now you have to disprove it.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has more linky goodness.  And more.  And then draws a historical comparison.

And the Climategate story has officially become too big to ignore.

And this might be the quote of the century on ClimateGate: “I don’t think the credibility of the IPCC can be dented. If the IPCC wasn’t there, why would anyone be worried about climate change?”

And the OC Register has a really nice summary of all of the scandals.  The problem is that it is dated last Friday, so surely, it is woefully out of date by now.  Really it’s like computer obscellescence on steroids.

And James Taranto tears into global warming and decides it might all really be a scam.  Really, Taranto is a daily must read.  So if you want to see a link that will work every day when he writes a new column, use this.