George Rebane
One of the major RR tenets over the years has been that the voters, those who resonate with the promises and programs promoted by the Left, are more than somewhat stunted in their abilities to comprehend and reason about the issues of the day. Admittedly these issues have become more complex as our world has become more entwined. But the gulf between the understanding of reality and our liberal electorate has grown to yawning proportions. And this does not bode well for our republic.
Recently we saw textbook evidence of this as elitist progressive central planners again characterized their constituencies as being dimwitted, and therefore susceptible to bumbled legislation presented within a bamboozling context. Now the beat continues with two more examples that I believe deserve to be highlighted in order to illuminate this asymmetry.
Hillary’s emails. It is hard to imagine the contempt with which progressive Democrats hold the people who will vote for her. She clearly violated federal regulations in setting up and operating her own email server at her private residence for doing highly confidential State Department business. It now turns out that her claims of self-selecting, archiving, and turning over what she considered to be relevant to her federal business may also be part of a larger criminal enterprise – a felony to be exact depending on which affidavits she signed as SecState. But what completely confuses her supporters is the claim that she “turned over 55,000 pages of emails” that by its arbitrary quantity is supposed to somehow be a sufficient and satisfactory response to the congressional demand for all her government related emails.
These poor folks cannot even bring themselves to the thought that her vetting which emails to turn over is a preposterous and totally inadequate response. It is the federal government that has to determine what emails and other records from the comprehensive archive of her private server fall under the aegis of government business. And that function has now been abrogated by the former SecState and denied the government – it is very likely that no one will ever know what constituted ALL of the information and data stored on her server. To these gruberized voters, ’55,000 pages’ and ‘all’ are pretty much synonymous, and they don’t understand why Republicans, and even some Democrats, are making a fuss over this.
Turning to the DoJ’s hit job on Ferguson. In his report AG Holder accuses Ferguson police of conducting a “systematically racist” relationship with the city’s large black majority. The argument is based on the statistic, quoted hourly on the media, that Ferguson’s finest accosted, arrested, and assaulted more black vs non-black citizens than a simple pro-rata calculation would justify. And that argument is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by not only Ferguson’s black citizens, but also by nationally prominent activists, liberal politicians, and college professors whose work deals in such fields as social justice and race relations. Holder is congratulated for digging deeply into the local police records and discovering such an egregious mismatch that demands immediate remediation. The political fallout is so intense as to have already caused the resignations of the city manager, police chief, and a local judge who dared temper his judgment.
But what no one asks or even suggests we look at is Ferguson’s record of criminality. What fraction of the town’s population was involved in acts illegal and/or violent? Wouldn’t it be more informative to see if the fraction of police encounters with blacks matches in some sense with the fraction of crimes that the blacks actually commit? That obvious question in today’s politically insane environment is considered prima facie racist and not material to such enquiries. We have every expectation that the Democrat rank and file constituencies would never think of such factors, but what amazes me is that none of the lamestream, along with the “fair, balanced, and unafraid” media have the wherewithal to raise this question.
The answer to this important question, no matter where it falls, would be tremendously revealing. If police encounters would tally below the pro-rata crimes committed by blacks, then the DoJ case becomes specious, and blacks should re-examine their own behaviors (culture?). However, if the converse is true, then that would give cause for suspecting racism on the part of Ferguson police. And the strong case such a finding makes would give justification for similar examinations in other majority black jurisdictions policed by overwhelmingly non-black police cadres. But Holder does not have to worry about such details, his contempt for Democrat constituencies is well-placed, and his own racist pulpit remains secure.
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