By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, May 2, 2015
I was going to write about the latest Clinton stuff but,
frankly, I can’t muster the energy. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. The
Clintons are to sleazy behavior what Joe Biden is to craziness and
inappropriate backrubs. Sure, they get criticized or mocked, but ultimately it
gets discounted because that’s just the way they are. Biden could divulge his
sacrofricosis addiction on national television while explaining how the Germans
bombed Pearl Harbor and within a week it would be “old news.”
“Oh, that’s just Joe!”
But at least Biden’s behavior is contained to himself and
perhaps whoever is foolish enough to get in his bitch’n TransAm. The Clintons
run a vast enterprise which at this moment is in the finishing stages of taking
over the Democratic party and, if it has its way, the United States government.
No serious person of any ideological stripe denies — privately, at least — that
what the Clintons have been doing over the last 15 years has been unseemly.
Legitimate debates can be had as to whether it was criminal. But if the
standard is the appearance of corruption, tax-status abuse, influence-peddling,
access-selling, money laundering, greed, self-aggrandizement, arrogance,
non-transparency, or simply flat-out lying, then no serious person can deny the
Clintons have fallen short of that standard.
Sure, the foundation spends a few pennies on the dollar
for latrines and textbooks. But its real purpose is to serve as a super–super
PAC with better branding.
But what really rankles is that the Clintons began their
post-presidency in reputational shambles. Bill Clinton sold pardons, or at the
very least didn’t care that it seemed like he did. That’s not my characterization;
it’s Barney Frank’s, E.J. Dionne’s, Jimmy Carter’s and Patrick Leahy’s, just to
name a few. Oh and Hillary’s brother was in on it as well. Hugh Rodham, a
Haitian gold-mining expert of late, took $400,000 dollars to shop for pardons,
too.
Many people thought that Bill Clinton created his
foundation in an effort to repair his reputation. And that’s probably true. But
that’s just part of what makes Bill Clinton such a spectacular sleaze-ball. He
created a foundation to restore his good name and then used the foundation to
do precisely the kind of things that gave him a bad name. It’s like Tony
Soprano doing volunteer work at an old-age home just so he can rob money from
little old ladies while they’re at bingo. Win-win!
But where is the sense of betrayal from liberals? Sure, a
few people have been noticeably embarrassed, but for the most part they are
acting like Clinton deserves the benefit of the doubt or that the appearance of
impropriety is a fair standard to apply to every politician except ones named
Clinton.
It’s like having an addict in the family (something I
know a bit about, alas). Everyone agrees in principle that you shouldn’t enable
bad behavior, but no one has the stomach to actually live by that principle.
The Clintons left the White House having used up every second, third, fourth,
fifth, sixth chance they had.
And their behavior never changed!
Only their public-relations strategy changed. In Aesop’s
fables, the scorpion must sting the frog because, much to the frog’s foolish surprise,
that’s what scorpions do. The Tudors of the Ozarks must do what they do. I get
that. Indeed, I sometimes feel like I’m one of the only ones who does. But we
are long past the point of blaming the scorpions for being scorpions. Frankly,
I don’t expect better from the Clintons and their ability to arouse anger in me
is pretty limited at this point. But it’s time to point fingers at the frogs
who insist on playing the part of the fool. If you ever find yourself saying
something like, “I don’t understand how the Clintons could let us down like
this,” understand this: You’re the frog.
I don’t think
Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States, but if she is,
her enablers will have no right to be shocked by any of the inevitable embarrassing
scandals that will follow. Heck, they lost that right a long time ago.
Thug Strife
I don’t get it.
I feel like Tom Hanks in Big when all the executives are
excited about the toy buildings that turn into robots. Hanks just doesn’t get
it. He asks, “What’s fun about that?”
Except I’m asking, “What’s racist about that?”
The mayor of Baltimore, who will spend the rest of her
days living light-years from the word “Churchillian,” recently apologized for
two gaffes. First, she walked back her statement that she gave rioters space to
“destroy.” That’s not what she meant, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.
It sure sounded like it to me, and the facts on the
ground seemed to line up with the rhetoric (this new video of Baltimore cops
fleeing rioters is pretty compelling). But fair enough. People often say things
clumsily in stressful situations.
But then the mayor apologized for calling the destroyers
“thugs.”
“There are no thugs in Baltimore,” she added. “Sometimes
my own little anger translator gets the best of me.”
Really, there are no thugs in Baltimore? It’s a thug-free
zone?
A Thug by Another Name Still Stinks . . .
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were plenty of
non-thug kids pretending to be thugs in the mobs in Baltimore. When I was
growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City, I knew, or at least met,
dozens of kids who said they were in gangs. The number who were actually in
anything like an actual gang was much, much lower. Long before we hunted the
woolly mammoth to extinction, young men were acting like they’re tougher than
they really are.
But here’s the thing. Someone torched those stores. Those
looters weren’t holograms or masked Scooby Doo villains looking to get those
good-but-meddling kids in trouble. At least one actual carbon-based life form
is responsible for burning down a community center and apartment complex that
was being built by the Southern Baptist Church for low-income old folks.
Now, if there’s some reason we can’t use the word thug to
describe these people, I’m all ears. I’ve written about the etymology of “thug”
many, many times and if the issue is lexicological exactitude, I’m up for that
conversation.
Others argue that the word has now taken on too many
racial connotations. Barret Holmes Pinter writes that “thug” is the new
“ni**er.” Baltimore city councilman Carl Stokes bullied CNN’s Erin Burnett the
other day. “These are children who have been set aside, marginalized, who have
not been engaged by us. No, we don’t have to call them thugs,” Stokes said.
“Just call them ni**ers. Just call them ni**ers.”
First of all, it seems to me there’s no small amount of
racial paranoia here. I use “thug” all of the time with no racial intent at all
(I started calling Robert Gibbs a “thug-dufus” after I heard someone else use
the phrase). At the dog park, my wife and I will sometimes call bullying dogs
(including, alas, our own) “thugs.” One time when Zoë pinned a standard poodle
on the ground, I grabbed her, and said, “Don’t be such a thug.” I’ll canvass
for witnesses to be sure, but I don’t recall everyone in the park gasping in
horror the way they would if I’d yelled at my dog: “don’t be such a ni**er.”
Pinter argues that the word was imposed on blacks and
that Tupac Shakur and others boldly appropriated and embraced it. I’m not sure
I buy the first part. It seems to me the term “thug” was mostly imposed on, you
know, thugs. But the second part is pretty obviously true. After all, Shakur
tattooed “thug life” across his stomach. Which, according to Pinter, he did for
really complex reasons:
Tupac’s embracing of the word, in effect, said that black Americans have been unfairly called this word for far too long, and that now we need to start employing the word so that we can impact the discussion and the word’s usage. It is not a justification for non-black voices to refer to blacks as thugs, but rather the appropriation of insult as a mechanism for social discourse.
Well, maybe.
Maybe there’s something to this “mechanism for social
discourse” thing. Or maybe Tupak Shakur was part of a broad transracial fad in
American popular culture to glamorize criminality.
Whatever the case, I’m not an absolutist here. If it’s
really true that a significant share of blacks hear “ni**er” when someone says
“thug,” I’m totally open to the idea of using a different word.
But here’s the real problem, even after we expunge this
now-hateful word: We will still need a negative word for people (of any race!)
who riot, rob, torch and act like [insert non-racially loaded term to replace
“thug” here].
I don’t want to be racist. So, please, give me the
shaming word for people who behave horribly that lets me condemn the content of
their character without referencing the color of their skin.
You can be a transgender half-Hmong half-Swede in a
pinstripe suit, an albino Norwegian in a Bentley, or a poor black kid from West
Baltimore, but if you burn down a home for poor old people there still has to
be some bad word available to us to describe you.
Excuses vs. Explanations
Where is the acknowledgement that some of the so-called
thugs aren’t so-called, they’re simply thugs?
Pinter is outraged about the fact that some tough
football players get called thugs. Okay that’s one conversation. But getting
offended when gangsters who loot mom-and-pop stores are called thugs strikes me
as a completely different conversation.
Before he insinuated that Burnett is a racist, Stokes
waxed eloquent about how these kids have been marginalized, etc. Translation:
The punks setting cars on fire and looting stores are the real victims.
First of all, it’s not only plausible, but obviously
true, that many of these punks had rough starts in life. Unlike the largely
bogus claim that poverty and powerlessness is what creates terrorists, the
root-causes argument has explanatory power for street criminals. No serious
conservative disputes that poverty, joblessness, crime, family breakdown,
crappy schools, etc. help explain why young men make bad choices. But explanations
aren’t excuses, even if they overlap at the margins from time to time. Bad
choices are still choices, and if we don’t judge people by their choices we
can’t judge people at all.
If a sane man rapes and kills a little girl but, when
caught, explains how terrible his own childhood was, the civilized response of
the criminal justice system must be “we don’t care.” Some crimes are moral gray
areas — the man who steals bread to feed his starving family, etc. But, other
crimes aren’t. Nonetheless, a society that refuses to distinguish between
people who behave criminally and people who don’t won’t be a society for very
long.
And by the way, how exactly it helps the black community
to say that th*gs cannot be singled out from the rest of the black community
completely mystifies me. I thought the antidote to racism was judging people
individually, based upon their behavior. I don’t discriminate against people
because of the color of their skin, but I will freely admit I discriminate
against people who burn down senior centers. But that’s just me.
No comments:
Post a Comment