Enough Already

Name the political party that started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks, passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws and fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

Which party kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs in 1912? Which party stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs in the 1960s? Which party was opposed to Dr. King’s 1963 March on Washington and had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist?

Di - do – di – do –di – do - tick – tick – tick –

You’re right! It was the Democratic Party. Yes, it was the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

Are you ready for another test? This one is easier. Name the political party that was founded on an anti-slavery plank, fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment), passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. (Note the hint)

Which party appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation, pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools? Which party started the NAACP and affirmative action?

Time’s up. It was the Republican Party. It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans.

Yet today nearly 90% of blacks vote for the Democratic Party. What has the party done for them? Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats.

Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous. Democrats are opposed to school choice scholarships that would help black children get out of failing public schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites. After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29.

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems.

In order to break the Democrats' stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party's economic plantation, we must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity.

The above consists of excerpts from a terrific piece by Frances Rice in Human Events, Aug. 16, 2006.

A few days ago (Aug. 23), Juan Williams, black commentator for NPR and Fox News and a committed liberal, wrote a Washington Post column about the “culture of failure that taints black America.” Williams describes “a culture steeped in bitterness and nihilism, a culture that is a virtual blueprint for failure.”

Failure starts in the home. “With nearly 70 percent of black children born to single women today, these young people too often come from fractured families where there is little time for parenting. Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the "bling-bling" of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies.”

“In 2004, on the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Bill Cosby took on that culture of failure. Cosby said that the quarter of black Americans still living in poverty are failing to hold up their end of a deal with history when they don't take advantage of the opportunities created by the Supreme Court's Brown decision and the sacrifices of civil rights leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to Thurgood Marshall and Malcolm X.

“Cosby asked the chilling question: ‘What good is Brown ‘ and all the victories of the civil rights era if nobody wants them? A generation after those major civil rights victories, black America is experiencing alarming dropout rates, shocking numbers of children born to single mothers and a frightening acceptance of criminal behavior that has too many black people filling up the jails. Incredibly, not one mainstream civil rights group picked up on his call for marches and protests against bad parenting, drug dealers, hate-filled rap music and failing schools.”

(Juan Williams new book is called Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movement, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It)

What do the mainstream civil rights groups complain about? It is the racism that caused the disaster in New Orleans. The esteemed black leader Andrew Young stated that blacks have been "ripped off" by stores run by Jews, Koreans, and Arabs.

Thomas Sowell, a real black leader, noted (Real Clear Politics, Aug. 23) that “one of the biggest blind spots of most civil rights leaders and spokesmen for the black community has been their utter lack of knowledge of economics.”

While it is true that prices tend to be higher, and the quality of service and products lower, in stores in low-income neighborhoods it is because of the higher cost of doing business in those neighborhoods. Many of the ghetto stores charging high prices are struggling to survive because crime, shoplifting, vandalism, and riots have raised the costs, both directly and by causing insurance rates and the costs of security to be higher in ghetto neighborhoods.

And the tens of thousands of blacks who fled from New Orleans and have not returned are now driving up the crime rates in Houston (23% increase in the murder rate) and other cities that welcomed them. Enough, already!