Thursday, January 25, 2007

Straight Shootin’ Dick

Vice President Dick Cheney is a guy of not many words. He’s also a guy that isn’t running for any election. You can tell that because he doesn’t need to soften his words when confronted with a liberal interviewer. No spin for Dick; just the facts, ma’am.

Consider this little clip from a recent interview with cnn’s Wolf Blitzer.

Blitzer: Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?
Cheney: No, I don't.
Blitzer: Why?
Cheney: Because she's a Democrat. I don't agree with her philosophically and from a policy standpoint.
Blitzer: Do you think she will be president?
Cheney: I don't.
Blitzer: Who do you think will be?
Cheney: I'm not going to speculate.
Blitzer: Will it be John McCain?
Cheney: I'm not going to speculate.

That's what I like. Straight to the point...

Would she make a good president? Nope.
Why? She's a Democrat.
Think she'll be president? Nope.

Shades of Herbert Hoover.

Cheney gets criticized for being too corporate. Well, yeah, he was the ceo of a Fortune 500 company and was on the board of several other companies. Anybody with a resume that looks like that doesn’t need to be political. No punches pulled, no bushes beat-around here. He shoots straight. (Just don’t go duck hunting with him.)

When Cheney was tapped for the veep job, he didn’t need it. He didn’t need the money. He wasn’t seeking fame or lime-light or glory. He had no legacy that he had to write.

He decided to serve his country. Pretty admirable, if you ask me. And since he expects nothing in return, he feels no need to play politics with the media.

Reporters beware. If you ask Dick Cheney a question, expect an answer. Quick. Direct. Truthful.

In contrast to Bill O’Reilly, the spin doesn’t stop here. Nothing was ever spun in the first place.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Liberals Say the War Isn’t Over

I was prepared today to write an article congratulating liberals on their victory. I was going to say that they had won the civil rights war; there was no longer any reason to continue fighting it.

As evidence that they had won, I was going to point to the federally-mandated observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Dr. King is the only human being that we honor is this method. We do not honor any president on their birthday. (We used to; we had separate holidays for presidents Washington and Lincoln — just watch Bing Crosby in “Holiday Inn” to see how they used to do it in the 1940s. But it was too inconvenient to have two holidays so close together, so they were morphed into a single celebration, supposedly honoring all presidents.)

We don’t honor any other birthdays. Not even the birthdays of liberal bastions like Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy or George McGovern. No liberal is worth of such tribute. None except, of course, Dr. King.

And in typical liberal fashion, we don’t actually celebrate anything he did, we just celebrate the fact that he was born. We don’t celebrate each August 28, the date he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. We don’t celebrate each March 25, when he led the famous march to Montgomery. Surely these — or any number of similar events in his life — would have been worthy of note.

No, liberals are never interested in what people actually do. One’s intentions, their wealth (or lack of it), or their heritage is sufficient for notice.

Of course, that’s in direct contrast with King’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." True liberals are not interested in judging people by the content of their character. Their love of affirmative action policies proves that they would much rather judge people by the color of their skin.

As I was saying, I was prepared to congratulate liberals for winning. They had successfully used the birth — not the accomplishments — of a great American and perverted his message in a way that merely stretches the already-too-long Christmas holiday by another two weeks while doing nothing to advance the causes for which Dr. King so fervently fought.

I was going to congratulate liberals for winning, until I read about their surprising admission that they were, in fact, losing. That admission came from the deep south that Dr. King loved so much. It came from Shirley Franklin, the African-American Democratic mayor of the great city of Atlanta.

Ms. Franklin took to the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the very church where Dr. King was once pastor. Instead of celebrating the victories of the last half century that Dr. King had worked so hard for, according to an ap article, she admonished congregants not to pay tribute to King's dream on his birthday and then contradict it the next.

Millions can't find jobs, have no health insurance and struggle to make ends meet, working minimum wage jobs. Thousands of black and Latino students drop out of high school believing education will not matter. And statistics say it doesn't because they can't find jobs.

Yep, it isn’t good enough to have a black associate on the Supreme Court and a black Secretary of State. It doesn’t matter that the richest woman in the history of television entertainment is black. It doesn’t matter that no black has been denied attendance to a college or the right to vote or told to sit in the back of a bus in fifty years. It doesn’t matter that almost half of all professional baseball players are black, sixty years after Jackie Robinson broke one of history’s most famous color barriers.

No, liberals such as Ms. Franklin point out as evidence that the war has not been won the fact that black high school dropouts who understand rap music better than the concepts of balancing a checkbook have a hard time finding a job in a growing economy with virtually full employment.

Mayor Franklin, you are correct. As long as you keep reminding blacks of their failures and their shortcomings, the war will never be won. With people like you in power, Dr. King’s legacy is indeed one of defeat.