Video clip of the day

Reason.com presents their Nanny of the Month:


(video approx. 2 minutes long)






Protected status? Protect from what? Are they endangered? If the city charter or ordinance has a blanket anti-discrimination policy, then who exactly needs special protection status?

Oh, that's right. We're talking municipalities here as the great incubators of leftist identity politics because regardless of what you may have been taught in school read in some ancient document somewhere, we are all created equal and some folks just a little more equal than others.



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Because Mark Pryor for President just didn't have the same ring to it.*

Here’s the dirty little secret: Harry Reid’s comments speak volumes to the degree by which the liberal-Left mindset and thus the politics of the Democratic party are bound at the hip to identity politics. Reid merely gave voice to something we've known all along.

You think the Democratic liberal base would be as excited and motivated as they were if the presidential candidate in question was an eloquent junior senator who had not a single piece of legislation attached to his name and was white?

Please.

He really was the perfect candidate for the Democratic Party. Since he hadn’t done anything of consequence, you couldn’t pin anything on him. And in the increasingly vapid state of American “gotcha” politics, it’s not so much about what you have accomplished but rather your ability to avoid verbal gaffes and sloppy personal and political behavior at which a personally-disciplined Obama had largely succeeded.

Democrats, moderates and some Republicans wanting to look cool at cocktail parties could then rally around a postulate of: “Hey, awesome, I can vote for a non-threatening black guy whom I know nothing about and who makes really cool speeches thus proving my racial sensitivity bona fides and who really appears to be the anti-Bush”.

It really was that simple.



*Mark Pryor is a Democratic Senator from Arkansas who entered the Senate two years before Obama.

Help wanted

Man, wasn’t it just a little over a week ago that we were reviewing the President’s qualifications for FEMA grief counselor… excuse us, Supreme Court justice. Let’s roll the tape:

"the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges": "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled or old."

In searching for David Souter’s replacement, the President further amplified qualifications that we, silly us, had not formerly associated with a Supreme Court justice by pledging to name someone who also possessed “empathy and understanding”.

With an entire political establishment wed to identity politics, excitement spread across the capitol over the weekend with rampant speculation that the President might just choose a woman…. or a minority, yet two more qualifications previously unidentified for sitting on the highest bench in the land. Talk about being out of touch.

But since we’re half-way there, lets just go for the superfecta and make sure that this minority female is wheelchair-bound and developmentally-disabled as well ‘cause we all know how much the Prez loves those 'tards.

god, we love identity politics.

Don't hold your breath

For those of you who believe the election of Barack Obama has ushered in a new era of post-racial politics, you would be sadly mistaken. According to columnist Ruben Navarette, Obama owes the Hispanic community for their support of Obama and (partial?) payment in return would be the selection of Bill Richardson as Secretary of State over Hillary Clinton.

Navarette stacks Clinton's resume’ against Richardson's and finds it lacking… which is an entirely reasonable approach to making your argument but apparently the overriding factor is the Good House Keeping Seal of Approval from La Raza: “His appointment would send a powerful message to Latinos throughout our country as well as to our neighbors in this hemisphere.”

And this message would be…? Look, a Latino!

Navarette also points out what he claims is Hillary’s shabby treatment of Obama during the primaries as grounds for not naming Clinton as SecState:

“Does anyone really think that if she had been elected president that she would be vetting Barack Obama for secretary of state?”

No, she wouldn’t as Obama is entirely unqualified for the job. But, we digress…

President elect Obama has run into his first snag with his selection of Eric Holder as AG but these little internecine squabbles as Obama’s various “support factions” come knocking to get of piece of theirs may force us to break out our diversity scorecard to see how Obama’s appointments stack up against Bush’s.

P.S. We should point out that Navarette is not some wacko lefty but a centrist who sometimes fills in for Michael Medved on his radio program.