Don’t know why my blog held your comment back for inspection. Maybe you used one of the key spam words, or maybe it is my blogs conservative bias…:) Who knows? But I hit the accept button, and it should be in full above.

As for which political party does more damage to minorities by its economic policies, I don’t want to get into that now, other than to say I disagree. I want to keep this particular blog focused on the topic at hand(Good idea for the topic of a future post though).

So I’ll let your comment stand as it is without me responding directly to it. Just keep in mind that I disagree with you.

I think it was Will Rogers who said that, given a choice between a fake Republican and a real Republican, the American public will vote for the real Republican every time. That was 80 years ago, and yet it’s a lesson the Democrats of today seem to be incapable of learning.

I’m hopeful that the November election will teach the Democrats a lesson about remaining true to their principles. But I’m not getting my hopes up too high.

They seem to be engaging in the normal behavior of the contemporary Democratic party: form a circular firing squad and start blasting. The first victim: Michael Moore. You many not like Moore, but he did not cost Kerry the election—Kerry’s numbers were looking good in the aftermath of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and only began to decline during the Swift Boat scandal, when the Kerry campaign showed itself to be incapable of defending itself against baseless lies promulgated against its candidate.

Still, who’s better for minorities today? Republicans or Democrats? Well, the Republicans have spent us hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, have pursued an incompetent foreign policy, and have sought to appoint an attorney general who condones torture and believes the president stands above rule of law. Those things are bad for all Americans, but they’re going to hurt minorities more because minorities tend to be poorer than white Christians, and the poor are hurt by bad government more than the rich.

By comparisn, the Democrats sin by, well, speaking in a patronizing manner toward minority members they disagree with.

You know, pardon my rant, but I get sick of hearing this stuff. I talk to older black people about voting Republican, and they come at me with the same thing. How they could never vote Republican because Republicans did this, or Republicans did that, twenty or so years ago. If you ask them why they vote Democrat, a lot of them have no clue as to what constitutes real Democrat beliefs. They simply keep marching along to the same vote because of something Republicans did twenty years ago.

Times are a changing Mitch. And the Republican party (or the Democrat party, for that matter) is no longer the party of the Klu Klux Klan. Conservatives and liberals now are different than the conservatives or liberals of the past. For example, all the famous female liberals that fought for the right for women to vote were pro-life, something seen as strongly anti-women by todays liberals. It is time we move past the labels, and see what the party stands for today. I understand that there are some real wounds, and I don’t hold it too much against those older black democrats for continuously voting Democrat. But I am only 28 years old, I am coming into politics fresh from bias, and I can honestly tell you, that I truly believe Republicans of today are better for minorities, as hard as that may be for you to understand.

I am not saying conservatives were better for minorities in the past…I agree that the liberals of the past had the best interest of the minority in mind. I am just saying that those liberals would not feel completely comfortable in your camp, nor in mine. Conservatives and liberals have changed. Simply because we call ourselves by the same names does not mean we continue to hold the same beliefs.

That is all I am trying to say.

Still, that’s secondary to the major discussion, which is your apparent belief that conservatives have done more for minorities than liberals have, and that conservatives are now better friends to minorities than liberals are.

Correct me if I’m wrong on either of those two points.

They are preposterous assertions. Throughout the 20th Century, conservatives were supporters of laws and “gentleman’s agreements” that favored white, Christian men over minorities. Meanwhile, liberals were on the front lines, getting gassed and clubbed and lynched and thrown into prison to protect and expand the rights of minorities.

Now, I agree with you that Bush and his administration do not practice segregation on the basis of race and ethnicity. But they have put in place laws that benefit the rich over the poor and, y’know, that comes down to pretty close to the same thing. So for conservatives to come in and claim all the credit for our equalitarian society and claim liberals are keeping minorities down, well, that’s just ludicrous.

I’m reminded of a scene in a novel called, appropriately enough, “King of the Jews.” It’s set in the Polish ghetto in the early days of World War II. A small boy is sick, and being cared for by a doctor who tries every medical technique known to science at the time, but the boy does not improve. Then a charlatan comes in and starts praying over the boy and giving the boy sucking candies. The boy improves. The charlatan claims all the credit, and the family and community give it to him.

The novel was so skillfully written that I was duped along with the boy’s family and friends. Neither I, nor they, realized that the doctor’s treatments had required time to work—it was the doctor, not the charlatan, who cured the boy.

But why should he? It is a given in liberal circles that Thomas is dumb. Reid is just repeating the same worn out liberal belief that Thomas is dumb without any supporting evidence. Or as the liberal logic goes, because, of course, Thomas made it only with the help of affirmative action, he certainly couldn’t have made it on his own…A black person making it without the benevolence of a liberal, not possible!

I don’t want to open up old wounds but I just had to bring this up. You had said earlier,

My father grew up poor, and in an all-Jewish neighborhood. He attended college on the GI Bill. When he was a boy, and a young man, colleges had quotas as to the maximum number of Jews they could admit.(emphasis added)

Believe it or not, I had read that to mean that Jews benefited from quotas like blacks do. I had thought you meant minimum number of Jews, not maximum. This was a perfectly natural mistake since in the context I was using Jews in contrast to blacks, and the way you brought them up gave the impression you were using them in relation to blacks. So when I saw the word quotas I immediately assumed you were discussing their similarities not their differences. I simply glanced over and never registered the word maximum as opposed to minimum.

That’s why it caught me by surprise. So I was doing some research, since this was such a shock to me, and the more I looked, the more I realized my original claims were true. Jews rose economically despite racism, without quotas to assist them. So I wanted to come back and defend my original claim with more proof, only to read that you indeed had said just that. Jews rose economically despite racism.

So my original point still stands. Blacks, Mexicans and all minorities, like other minorities that have suffered oppression in the past (Jews, Irish, Catholics, even Japanese), can make it on their own merits despite racism. And I have every reason to believe that they will make it even faster, and better than with the current ‘help’ modern day liberals give them.

And apparently, some Jewish people agree with me as well:

Some people say that without affirmative action, blacks and Hispanics won’t be able to succeed. That’s nonsense, and patronizing nonsense to boot.

Lots of groups have been victims of fierce discrimination: Asians, Irish, Italians, Jews. But we’ve overcome this, by working hard and by demanding that we be treated without regard to our ethnicity. Many blacks and Hispanics are succeeding the same way today. We owe it to all groups to expect of them the same thing that we expect of ourselves.

There is something to be said about a person doing things on ones own merit. I’m not against the general principle of helping people out per se, but if it’s just as easily to help them out as let them do it on their own, I’d much rather let someone do it on their own. It adds a certain dimension to the character of that person, and it removes that social stigma that assumes one can’t make it on their own.

I can’t disagree with you on any of these points.

I once counselled the teen-aged son of a black friend; I told him that in America today, a black man can be anything he wants to be. Even President of the United States; after all, Colin Powell probably could’ve beaten Clinton and Bush I handily in 1992, and he still had a good shot at it in 1996 and 2000.

The black man will have to work a hell of a lot harder and be a hell of a lot better than his white competitors for many jobs—but, still, those jobs are within his reach.

And I’m ambivalent on the subject of affirmative action. I see its flaws, certainly.

(Of course the teen-ager didn’t listen to me—what do I know? I’m over 40…. )

I learn something new everyday. Thanks for the info. I’ll look into that. Jews have always been one culture that I hold in high regard because, forgive the stereotype, but they are one very smart bunch of people.

However, even with that correction my point is still made. I stand behind my statement above that currently, in todays day and age, there isn’t enough racism to hold someone back. Maybe affirmative action was needed a few decades ago, but it has become nothing but handicap points now. And with handicap points, comes the natural deduction that we are handicapped. Senator Reid (probably subconsciously), along with many other liberals, make the connection.