Monday, October 20, 2014

Wake Me Up Before You Vote Vote

I saw an odd headline the other day about Michelle Obama. According to the headline, she was encouraging “women and minorities” to “wake up,” like some sort of call to arms. This struck me as an interesting appeal, especially given Obama’s track record with both groups. But it turns out that wasn’t what she meant. She literally meant to wake up and not to sleep through voting day. Good grief.

To start with, let me laugh at Michelle Obama having to tell her supporters to get their lazy butts out of bed. That really adds to the stereotype of her followers being lazy and useless, and it explains why they aren’t more successful. Seriously, what normal person needs to be told to get out of bed by their leaders? The pathologically lazy is about all who come to mind.

She did try to expand the point a bit to include those who simply aren’t paying attention, but that hardly makes it better. Basically, she wants her supporters to go grab their sleep nephews or college dorm mates, their indifferent aunts and neighbors, and the rest of their lazy families “who are like, no, I ain’t going to vote, or I couldn’t wake up.” So I guess laziness runs in families. Anyway, nice grammar, lady.

But let's look at the bigger picture, shall we? Let us assume Madame O actually meant “wake up and realize what is happening to you.” This is a rather ridiculous thing for her to say. Do you know why? Well, consider her behavior and her husband's record and you'll see.

First, Madame O has spent her time suckling off the taxpayers. Five star hotels. Shopping in the most expensive shops around the world. Taking Air Force One to restaurants. This woman has lived like Marie Antoinette on steroids. For her to claim that somehow these poor, supposedly-oppressed women and minorities should support her is borderline insane. Imagine if Warren Buffett made the same appeal! Not to mention, they already support her! Every penny of the social security they collect from the few who work and every dollar of the benefits the rest get that gets taxed goes to pay Michelle's lavish lifestyle. So her appeal to wake up really should be met with, "What the hell are you doing with my hard-earned money?"... and maybe a guillotine.

Then there’s her husband. He has presided over a collapse in minority employment, minority household incomes, and minority net worth. They took the brunt of the housing bubble because they owned the subprime homes and nothing was done to bail them out. They were tricked by liberals into getting worthless degrees in African American or Gender Studies which left them unemployable and with vast debt. Liberals run the schools that seem to specialize in not teaching minority kids to read and write or do math. And Obama has done nothing to shake any of this up, even as middle class white parents are pushing their kids into charter and private schools at amazing rates. To the contrary, he's tried to block the door to save his teachers union buddies. He didn't fix the housing issue either, preferring instead to send trillions to the nation's largest banks. He's done nothing to help small (minority) businesses get credit either.

From the ranks of identity politics, he’s presided over the collapse of the black Congressional district under the Civil Rights Act with nary a genuine peep. He’s watched helplessly as voter ID laws quickly spread around the country. He’s whined, but done nothing else, as Affirmative Action basically has been strangled by the Supreme Court. He did appoint a black guy as Attorney General and an Hispanic chick to the Supreme Court, but neither is all that competent and won't make anyone proud. Beyond that, his minority appointments have been few and far between, and the White House continues to pay women far less than it pays men, not to mention it fought the extension of benefits to gays for as long as Obama thought he could. And look at Hispanics. He’s made all kinds of false promises to them!

So what exactly has Obama done to help minorities? We know what he’s done to crush them, but what has he done to help? The answer is nothing.

You know, Michelle is right, it is time for minorities to wake up and to see that Obama and the democrats are not their friends. So yeah... wake up. Oh, and get out of bed and get a job.

19 comments:

  1. If they wake up and vote, do they also get cake?

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  2. Have you ever been a cop and worked security details at an inner city grocery store? Trust me Rustbelt, they get cake, at our expense, whether they wke up or not.
    GypsyTyger

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  3. And chips,and frozen pizza,and ice cream, and hot dogs... If Michelle Antoinette had real concern for obesity her husband would work with his party to curb what you can buy with food stamps instead of screwing with kids school lunches. They won't because the recipients of free (to them) largesse are the democrat's base. But we all knew that.
    GypsyTyger

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  4. Rustbelt, No, they get an Obama phone!

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  5. GypsyTyger, I find it interesting that students are suddenly being forced to eat broccolli and are banned from things like Coke, but food stamps recipients can still eat all the junk food they want.

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  6. Hey, be nice to Michelle. She's a fashion icon...like Jackie O! And what would we do without all the schol lunches that are ending up in the compost heap? She is making the world a more nutrient rich place for plants...

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  7. Bev, She's closer to being a fashion icon akin to Jackie OMG.

    Good point about the compost. I hadn't realized that Michelle's plan was to feed all the animals who eat at the nation's dumps, but that does seem to be working! LOL!

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  8. BTW, Did anybody notice that a Democratic crowd walked out on Obama as he spoke at a political rally this weekend? My, how times change.

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  9. Yes, I heard about people walking out. Well, people aren't allowed to challenge him anymore, so what are they supposed to do? No one is allowed to question him...even the press. Turning your back on him and walking away is about all they have left. It's kind of an "imperial" snub. Back in the day when we had a king, no one was allowed to show their back to the king and had to walk out while supplicated themselves. Hey, at least they didn't throw shoes at him...or organically grown, GMO free rotten tomatoes.

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  10. Bev, They should have flung poop! ;-)

    I just find it amazing that people who cried when they saw him five years ago now just walk out on him. He really has lost his people.

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  11. "Did anybody notice that a Democratic crowd walked out on Obama as he spoke at a political rally this weekend? My, how times change."

    Maybe they were Democrat candidates. ;)

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  12. Did anybody notice that the cover of Rolling Stone last week featured a picture of our Kenyan Overlord trying to look thoughtful and the headline was "In defense of Obama" by Paul Krugman? I didn't
    read the article because Rolling Stone, Obama and Krugman all make me sick.
    But I think it's neat that a far left publication like RS thinks they need to put that on the cover. Six years ago the rise of the oceans was going to stop, the earth was going to cool, and people had thrills going down their legs. In 2012 we were subjected to articles about the republican party going the way of the Whigs. Now they're publishing :In defense of " articles. With tyrants you never say they're on the ropes because it's never over until it's over. But the body blows are adding up. TeeHee
    GypsyTyger

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  13. And yeah, they should have thrown poop. Maybe that's next. :)
    GypsyTyger

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  14. Andrew,

    While all signs point to 2014 being an usually bloody bloodbath even by the standards of second term midterms, I don't get the sense broad patterns are going to change. The Republican strategy in 2014 has been to avoid stupid candidates and let the focus stay on Obama's incompetence. That will work well in 2014, but its not the sort of strategy that permanently changes the electoral landscape.

    My largest issue with your article is the lack of focus on personal responsibility. Stuff still happens, but blacks have largely achieved equality and the biggest obstacles in the lives of most blacks are their own poor decisions (half of black males drop out of high school, too many black parents aren't involved in the lives of their kids, etc). Republicans pursing the black vote need to sound more like Bill Cosby (step up!) and less like Al Sharpton (its not your fault, its those powerful outside forces!). The Democrats have the Al Sharpton angle covered pretty well already.

    On a side note, I'd like to know what you are basing your criticism of colleges off of. I've never heard of departments pushing kids into different majors (based on what I have seen and heart, people focus on what interests them and what they are good at).

    Also, while maybe you've seen different, more up to date data, but based on what I could find, the percentage of African Americans with degrees in Ethnic or Gender studies is a lot smaller than the percentage of white students with such degrees (the article is 5 years old) so that can't be the reason for the employment gap between black and white college students.

    http://www.jbhe.com/features/64_degreelevels.html

    Another important statistic contained in the new Department of Education figures shows that the stereotypical view of the African-American college student rushing into black studies majors is totally false. Only 1,095, or 0.7 percent, of all African-American bachelor’s degree recipients received their degree in any type of ethnic or gender studies. Therefore, only one out of every 134 bachelor’s degrees awarded to blacks was in ethnic or gender studies. In fact, there are more blacks who majored in the physical sciences — a field in which there are very few African Americans — than African Americans who earned their degree in black studies. There are nearly five times as many blacks majoring in computer science and more than five times as many blacks majoring in the biological sciences than in black studies. Blacks make up only 13.4 percent of the students earning bachelor’s degrees in ethnic or gender studies. There are four times as many whites who earned bachelor’s degrees in ethnic or gender studies as blacks who majored in this field.
    -----------

    Last but not least, to quote Tim Scott, 'People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care'. Obama's missteps are unlikely to do Democrats permanent damage with women or minorities unless Republicans make adjustments (which in fairness they have to a degree).

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  15. GypsyTyger, I'm all about the poop flinging. It's the most civilized form of retaliation I can think of for the robocall!

    I didn't see the Rolling Stone cover, but I agree completely with your point. If things weren't totally falling apart, there wouldn't be a need to run articles like that to prop Obama up.

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  16. Anthony, As a conservative, I believe entirely that personal responsibility is the key to success. Unless you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, then the only way... the only way... you will succeed is either pure luck or hard, smart work. There is no substitute. The government cannot do it for you. The government can't "lift you up."

    In terms of obstacles, everyone faces obstacles. Some people simply won't like you. You will face discrimination for any number of things. You may have inherited bad genetics that makes you prone to things that disrupt your life. Your parents may have been dingbats who just didn't equip you to succeed....... but none of those things is an excuse. Liberals love them. Liberals cling to them as if they were unpassable walls. Black racists/race hustlers treat them as a justification for living by largess rather than success. Democrats push them as reasons to hate those who aren't part of the club. But that's all bullshit. Almost all of that is fantasy, and none of that can stop anyone in the modern world who sets out to succeed on their own terms.

    The point to my article is that the Democrats and the left keep selling minorities on the idea that only they can lead the minorities to a free and fair society where they will all be rich and happy. So it's more than fair to point out how bad things have become statistically for these people and how many promises the Democrats have broken to them.

    I'm not saying, "Join the Republicans because we can do the same things better." I am instead saying, "Stop being delusional. This current plan of yours really isn't working, is it?"

    (continued)

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  17. In terms of winning minorities, I've said before that my appeals would not be to "minorities" at all, because that just perpetuates the identity politics game. Instead, I would appeal to subsets of minorities on their issues: small business owners who happen to be black or Hispanic and who need a better business environment for small business; mothers of children in schools who want the best education for their kids; minority homeowners; college kids who don't want to drown in debt; workers who need a better jobs market; etc. The idea is that we reach out to these groups and show them how our ideas will make their lives better. And little by little, we hopefully they start to support us instead when they see that we are genuinely offering them a chance to build a better life for themselves rather than just another minor handout.

    In terms of college, that was me talking in shorthand. My mistake. My full point is that colleges have created an entire block of liberal-inducing degrees that are entirely not marketable: gender/ethnic studies, sociology, education, etc. These are things that are largely devoid of any true knowledge except leftist grievances, but are sold as being equivalent to degrees that are actually marketable, e.g. engineering.

    In terms of pushing people into these degrees, there are several angles to consider:

    1. Schools almost never separate employment/salary information by degrees, giving the impression that they are all roughly equal even though they are absolutely not. Not to mention, employment/salary data is almost always faked in my experience when schools present it.

    2. At a time when things like Shakespeare and economics are becoming electives (if they are even offered), the basic indoctrination classes of these phony programs have been made into requirements under the supposed theory of "exposing students to new ideas." The real point, however, is to force kids to learn the basic points of these programs and to give these professors a chance to try to pull in students.

    3. Education degrees have been turned into requirements to become a teacher. That's pure force of law.

    4. The liberal media and Hollywood both have no problems mocking things like business majors or science majors, but never mock these liberal indoctrination programs.

    5. All schools promote ethnic and gender clubs, which in turn become recruitment tools for these programs.

    To me, it seems rather obvious that colleges force students to gain exposure to these programs and mislead them about the economic value of the degrees they confer. The only time I ever see schools do anything similar for the more marketable programs is when they push women to get into science... another PC cause.

    (continued)

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  18. So I stand by the idea that colleges are tricking thousands of kids each year to get degrees that will prove utterly worthless to them once they leave college. It would be one thing to offer special programs in sociology or German literature or political science to people who have a particular interest and fully understand there is no job market at the other end, but it strikes me as borderline fraud to sell these things to naive kids out of high school as the equivalent of having an engineering or accounting degree.

    And while I haven't done any studies on this, I can tell you that in my experience, women and minorities are MUCH more likely to come out of these fake programs than white males and much less likely to come out of the harder, more marketable programs. That's why white males still win the income battle even though women and minorities go to college at higher rates -- they are more likely to earn degrees that will pay off. Indeed, someone with an education degree or a gay studies degree will never out-earn or "out-employ" someone with a fiance degree or a science degree.

    Finally, I totally agree with Scott. Right now, the conservative world comes across as racist, sexist and openly hostile to minorities and women. And out side reinforces this time and again. We need to stop that, and we need to start dealing with these people just like we would any average white male.

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