Courtland Milloy, the Washington Post's local (i.e., black) columnist, writes in the WaPo about veteran hack Vince Gray's defeat of press favorite Adrian Fenty for mayor of DC:
But Fenty was a cruel mayor. He inflicted deep hurts, not little boo-boos that you kiss and blow to heaven and make feel okay overnight.
Air out those wounds.
Having taken office promising to cradle the most vulnerable residents, Fenty set out almost immediately shooting the wounded. Closing homeless shelters. Forgetting about job-training programs. Firing city workers with the wave of a callous hand -- black female heads of households more often than not.
Fenty boasted of being a hard-charging, can-do mayor. But he couldn't find time to meet with 98-year-old Dorothy Height and 82-year-old Maya Angelou. Respect for elders -- that's too old school for Fenty. Dis the sistas -- his supporters will understand.
Watch them at the chic new eateries, Fenty's hip newly arrived "creative class" firing up their "social media" networks whenever he's under attack: Why should the mayor have to stop his work just to meet with some old biddies, they tweet. Who cares if the mayor is arrogant as long as he gets the job done?
Myopic little twits.
And lordy don't complain about Rhee.
She's creating a "world-class school system," they text. As for you blacks: Don't you, like, even know what's good for you? So what if Fenty reneged on his promise to strengthen the city from the inside by helping the working poor move into the middle class. Nobody cares that he has opted to import a middle class, mostly young whites who can afford to pay high rent for condos that replaced affordable apartments.
Don't ask Fenty or Rhee whom this world-class school system will serve if low-income black residents are being evicted from his world-class city in droves.
You blacks, always playing the race card.
There's lots more where this came from.
I believe this is why the founders were leery of too much democracy: it's the people. They can't be trusted to safeguard their/our rights.
ReplyDeletesigh
Can't afford DC blacks (and working class whites)?
ReplyDelete:::Poor People Math:::
This is how Hispanics do it. Two guys buy a house, then shack up with two females. They only make $8-an-hour each, but there are 4 of them working, and that makes $32-an-hour. Thats $1280 a week coming into that house*, or $66,560 per year.
They buy a 3 or 4 bedroom house, and begin to have families. Preferably one family lives upstairs, and one lives downstairs. The kids all either share a bedroom (remember bunk beds? I knew you could), or each family's kids have a bedroom.
*That $1280 per week is taxed at a low rate, even if they are paying income taxes, because its made in small increments. If they all make $8 each, they only make $16,640 per year individually on 40 hour weeks. They literally might be getting earned income tax credit monies back.
We need a term for this. I'd like to see it called, "getting low" econimically.
All of you whites yearning to live in places as nice as Washington D.C. (and you blacks) have this silly antiquated notion of deserving "middle class lifestyles". What you deserve are "getting low" lifestyles as your betters (Karl Rove, Charles Krauthammer, Tamar Jacoby) keep trying to tell you.
Firing city workers with the wave of a callous hand -- black female heads of households more often than not.
ReplyDeleteThis seemingly inconsequential statement illustrates the axiomatic value hierarchy of liberals.
He adds "black female heads of household more often than not" for no apparent reason. But if one's familair with the liberal mindset, the mere fact that it's black women being affected by this initiative means it's an even greater moral sin.
What I find so funny (in a sardonic way) about non-whites like Courtland Milloy is how self-righteously indignant they can get when middle-class whites move into "their" neighborhoods. Whites who voice similar objections when NAMs move into their neighborhoods are irredeemably racist. Who? Whom? Indeed.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize Obsidian wrote for the paper.
ReplyDeleteI think I prefer this guy to Fenty, Rhee, or Obama.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, Milloy lives in Prince George's County, having fled the dysfunction of DC for the slightly less dysfunctional African-American suburb.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing the lesson is that black female government workers are still the majority of voters in DC, and it's very easy to annoy them sufficiently (eg by lack of deference to Maya Angelou!) that they'll vote for your opponent, at least where both candidates are 'black' males.
ReplyDeleteSo what if Fenty reneged on his promise to strengthen the city from the inside by helping the working poor move into the middle class. Nobody cares that he has opted to import a middle class, mostly young whites who can afford to pay high rent for condos that replaced affordable apartments.
ReplyDeleteSigh. How protectionist and anti-immigrant can you get? Just as the duty and success-maker of the US government should be to any random person who wants to come there rather than their citizens, surely the same should apply for a city major should be to any random person who wants to move there.
"She's creating a "world-class school system," they text. As for you blacks: Don't you, like, even know what's good for you?
ReplyDeleteI don't recall Courtland Milloy getting all exercised when Obama did this to the whole country on the health care bill, do you?
In addition to the irony Tom pointed to, it's ironic that nothing could help Blacks more than WHite ingress (materially and socially at least, maybe not spiritually).
ReplyDeleteI'm a native of Washington, D.C. So too is my father. And so too was his father.
ReplyDeleteMy father grew up during the Great Depression. He and his 9 siblings plus his parents all lived in a duplex in SE D.C. The duplex had one bathroom; my father slept in the basement by the coal chute. His family's duplex is two houses down from Marion Barry's home. http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/330-Raleigh-St-SE-Washington-DC-20032/527976_zpid/
My father and his siblings were poor. So too were all the other whites in Southeast D.C. It was during the Great Depression after all.
My father and his siblings attended D.C. public schools. He graduated Anacostia High School. He trained as a plumber in high school. He later learned how to program mainframe computers. He was smart enough and motivated enough to program in assembly language.
Violent crime was unknown in Southeast D.C. until the '68 riots. Then it exploded. Shortly after that the majority of whites still left in Southeast fled to the suburbs.
Poverty is not the problem in D.C.
Registered Democrats are the problem.
Anonymous is wrong.
ReplyDeleteThere ain't no such thing as an "earned" income credit.
It's a gift from Uncle Sam.
Or rather, from me.
With respect to Miss Rhee, I don't know anything about her or what she tried to do, but I'll speculate any way. Are you okay with that?
ReplyDeleteAlright, I assume that "world class school system" means the same school system that whites have. That's a noble goal, one you've criticized.
So, Miss Rhee is either importing schooling methods that don't work well with blacks students, or she is positioning the school system to attract more white parents b/w/o gentrification.
Why shouldn't blacks vote Fenty out?
Joe Klein blames the teacher's union for the defeat of Fenty. In Klein's opinion, we are only allowed to form unions against capital, not against our enlightened social engineers.
ReplyDeleteWhat is all this outrage over lack of respect for elders?
ReplyDeleteBlack culture doesn't have a tradition of respecting old age. Rather the opposite I would have said.
The Chinese we are told revered their ancestors but so too did the ancient Romans. The Bactrians literally "threw them to the dogs". They kept packs of vicious dogs to whom they fed old people past their usefulness. The Scythians murdered their own parents when they got too old. And often drank their blood.
There weren't a lot of elderly around the Aztecs - they ate them when they were still tender. In one day at Tenochtitlan they killed and butchered 80,000 people.
Before modern public health the universal life expectancy was about 36. It's still about that in Mali and the Sahel. So there wasn't much opportunity in the African bush to develop a tradition of respect for the elderly.
Is there a word for "grandfather" in any African language?
Albertosaurus
Typical example of black magical thinking combined with extreme racial hostility. A mayor is to wave a magic wand and turn residents of homeless shelters and halfway houses into middle class, upstanding citizens. If the teachers that were laid off were white he'd be applauding it. He's just dripping with race hate when he stereotypes whites; if he were white there'd be an uproar. Just part of the double standard we all wink at. Combine Mugabe style politics with cargo cult economics and there you have it, the black formula for progress.
ReplyDelete"On the other hand, some people in Australia are suing to stop people saying that they are white, not black."
ReplyDeleteI followed the links in that article. Several very, very white-looking Australian "artists" are apparently claiming to be aborigines. This reminded me of something:
Michelangelo claimed to be descended from royalty all his life. Modern historians have concluded that he was mistaken about that. Compare, however, his and those guys' aspirations. Who's looking up, who's looking down? Then compare Michelangelo's art to modernist art.
Silly half-white mayor of DC. Black people don't want to be contributing, educated members of society. They want to be government employees who can't be fired for sloth and bad attitude. Why should they have to work and contribute? After all, money grows on trees down on some plantation in Mexico, and white people go kill the indigenous people to harvest it.
ReplyDeleteBut when Whitey tries coming north of the border with their pirate booty, Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel, Barbara Lee, and Barack Obama say, "Not so fast, Mr Whitey. You break me off a piece of dat. You owe me." And Whitey gives them a trillion dollars of Aztec gold and cash that dropped off the Mexican money tree, and he says, "Don't hurt me African Americans. Here's your welfare, food stamps, ObamaCare, and section 8 housing vouchers. But please leave me alone and don't sucker punch me, stomp on my head, stuff me in a garbage can, and leave me for dead."
Blacks should be allowed to freely associate and live how they want.
ReplyDeleteYou guys should read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Loewen for the truth about this country.
He proves that European men are at all "civilized", that they stole most of what is good from the Indians and Blacks and never really contributed anything in return, the right wing is the source of all woe, white men are the scourge of the earth.
This is not an opinion. It is a fact. Loewen sets it all out in his wonderful book. You cannot refute him.
Come on Steve, you're shooting fish in a barrel again, presenting an article written in earnest as self-parody.
ReplyDeleteExcept, well, you didn't actually go through the formality of "setting off excerpts so they play as parody." You just did a verbatim copy of the middle 2/3rds.
So what does one call it when the fish jump out of the barrel and into your hands?
"I believe this is why the founders were leery of too much democracy: it's the people. They can't be trusted to safeguard their/our rights."
ReplyDeleteMaybe so in black majority areas, but problem today is it's run by a minority oligarchy with control of MSM and much else.
Democracy may suck but do we want to give today's liberal elite even more power?
"Fenty boasted of being a hard-charging, can-do mayor. But he couldn't find time to meet with 98-year-old Dorothy Height and 82-year-old Maya Angelou. Respect for elders -- that's too old school for Fenty."
ReplyDeleteMaybe, but I wonder how many blacks respect elders? They sure don't act like it. And how many black adults care for their children, what with nearly 80% of black children born out of wedlock? Black men sure don't stick around, and black women wouldn't amount to much without welfare and affirmative blacktion.
Blacks scapegoat silly politicians but don't look at their own problems.
If blacks indeed knew what was good for them, they would not look to politicians to solve all problems. When one comes along to solve them, blacks bitch and whine that they've been dissed.
Black mentality: Take care of us but don't criticize us.
@Glossy: Yup. You got it right. When it comes to government benefits, the One Drop Rule applies. Now why don't you find your own One Drop and get on the racial welfare gravy train. Get a DNA test done, hang some framed Kente cloth around the house, put up a few of those wild-ass cowry shell Yoruba masks and tell everyone you are a black conservative. Get you kids to join the black clubs at school, and play it up in their college admission essays.
ReplyDeleteYou, my friend, will make out like a bandit. Just like these Aboriginal artists have by "embracing their roots".
From the bard herself, Maya A. :
ReplyDeleteDoes my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room....
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard...
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?....
It's always fun to watch SWPL yuppies get a taste of their own medicine. They constantly play the race angle because they think it gives them moral superiority over lesser whites. Then they find out what most blacks actually think of them, and how little their racial pandering has gained them. The best example of this was in 2008 when blacks abandoned the Clintons for Obama (our 2nd black president).
ReplyDeleteBlacks should be allowed to freely associate and live how they want.
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to troll, troll well. Blacks and pro-blacks don't say things like this because they're too obviously easy to turn back against them, like this:
"If blacks should be allowed free association, so should whites, and everybody else."
And the "scourge of the Earth" thing is a loser. You have to give submissive crackers an out, like this:
"Crackers have made mistakes historically, don't join their perfidy."
Most crackers are weak enough to let you piss on their ancestors and fellow whites, but if you throw them out with the bath water then you just chucked your carrot, too. Better to give them an out so they can turn 180, puff themselves up beside you, and point the finger at the rest of their race.
Funny thing is that electoral college was supposed to be safeguard against "the people" .Yet you guys successfully circumvented that safeguard labeling it as obsolete and "unfair"
ReplyDeleteTo nobody in particular:
ReplyDeleteRead Angelou (quoted by Elvisd) and then read Svigor.
One is near-poetry, the other simply doggerel. Can you tell which is which?
Obvious troll is obvious:
ReplyDelete"Blacks should be allowed to freely associate and live how they want."
But not whites, huh? No freedom to live and associate freely for them, no sir.
"You guys should read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by Loewen for the truth about this country."
Bwahahaha. You really think we aren't already well aware of these kinds of white racial guilt-mongering left-wing bullsh!t books?
"He proves that European men are at all "civilized", that they stole most of what is good from the Indians and Blacks and never really contributed anything in return, the right wing is the source of all woe, white men are the scourge of the earth."
Wow, he "proved" it, huh? Well, that settles it then! Thanks for sharing!
"This is not an opinion. It is a fact. Loewen sets it all out in his wonderful book. You cannot refute him."
Nice try troll, but not even leftist anti-racists are as stupid and naive as you are pretending to be.
You need the Like button that Facebook has just for articles like this because comments would just be redundant in this case!
ReplyDeleteAnd Chicago is sooo bad!!
ReplyDeleteReaders shouldn't place too much stock in the rant of a Washington Post writer.
ReplyDeleteI delivered the Post as a teenager. This was over 30 years ago. I used to get a hernia from hand delivering the paper to a customer's front door.
The paper was fat back then. I mean it was inches thick on Sunday; more so on holiday weekends.
I read the Post a few months ago. It was the paper version. I was back in D.C. visiting family. My father had a copy of the Post on the kitchen table.
The Post print edition was wafer thin. I thought it was a tabloid from Hooterville. It was that thin.
And the pathologies (a.k.a. the Murder, Mayhem and Metro) section was the same old-same, same-old about the problems in the 'hood, and the need for more "programs" to deal with said problems.
Albertosaurus said:
ReplyDeleteIs there a word for "grandfather" in any African language?
Mandela ?
Article: ...98-year-old Dorothy Height and 82-year-old Maya Angelou.
I've never heard of the former, and Miss Angelou is but a name: I had imagined she was in her early 40s. Still, it might have been a pleasant gesture for the gentleman to take tea with them.
On the other hand, whatever the misdeeds of modern mayors they can't begin to compare with the standards set in America between 1850 and 1950 for city corruption and misgovernance; which now idealized past gave far greater reason for despising any theory of democracy.
And... although not American I would suggest some commentators there should be careful of completely alienating blacks as a group --- however annoying they may be: if the former according to choice choose to settle on Hispanics, the Chinese or muslims as the main threat either to America or Western Civilisation, they're gonna need all the allies they can get.
Albertosaurus said:
ReplyDeleteIs there a word for "grandfather" in any African language?
In Tswana it is Madlala. It has nothing to do with Mandela who is a Xhosa.
I wrote about time orientation, but I'd like to add that there is a correlation between the diversity of a community and it's time orientation. Maybe there is a relationship between "trust" and time orientation.
ReplyDeleteThis matters as you can't directly address trust issues, but you can manage and address time orientation issues.
"elvisd said...
ReplyDelete(quoting Maya Angelou)"
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?...."
No wonder that Bill Clinton liked her. What a tasteless, talentless hack. God is she ugly too. She looks like Terry Thomas in drag and black-face.
I'll bet black women were especially pissed at Rhee for stealing their man.
ReplyDeleteWhenever the hi-yalla elite lapses into Stephen Foster dialect as Mr. Milloy does, there is some existential challenge to their blackness. Black-speak is one way of proving their bona fides.
ReplyDeleteWhen you see guys who normally speak like Harvard PhD's doing the fist-bumping "'sup, brutha" stuff, you know (1) they are trying to get back in the good graces of other black folk, or (2) there is a status battle between black males and one is trying to "out-n*gg*r" the other.
As a white man, I am always fascinated when this appears at my black wife's family gatherings.
She and her family have spoken accentless Middle American for at least two generations now, so whenever a black male or female goes into dialect it is worthy of analysis.
Consider Milloy.
He has championed Rhee and Fenty for at least a couple years now. (Read his previous columns).
He now sees that Fenty and Rhee have been rejected by the black lower class and lower middle class.
Either Milloy can (1) continue to support Fenty and Rhee and be excommunicated from the black community, or (2) he can tuck his tail between his legs and join the chorus of black LC/LMC voices.
He has chosen the latter and hammers it home by adopting black-speak.
Can we blame him? From his vantage point there really is no reason to chivvy poor black folks to "ack white" and support the job-killing DC overhaul of Rhee and Fenty.
Why should he risk losing his status among ghetto dwellers by telling them uncomfortable truths when (1) his success at persuading them to "ack white" will only generate competition for his own children, and(2) his failure to persuade them to "ack white" will lose him his job and readership?
Putting it more bluntly, seeing which way the wind is blowing, why should he risk being the Fenty or Rhee (or Clarence Thomas!) of the Washington Post?
Black voices for personal responsibility, hard work, and no more bastards will always be faint.
They will always be quick to turn tail and run.
As members of the hi-yalla elite it really is not to their advantage to rescue poor, feckless, irresponsible blacks.
Svigor:
ReplyDeleteNice try troll, but not even leftist anti-racists are as stupid and naive as you are pretending to be.
You're thinking of white leftist anti-racists.
I wonder if all the hoopla in DC is indicative of some future rift in the Democratic party between SWPLs and blacks. If so, the party will be vamoosed.
ReplyDelete"Is there a word for "grandfather" in any African language?" asks Albertosaurus rhetorically.
ReplyDeleteYes, 'babu' in Swahili, 'ubabamkhulu' in Zulu, and 'bàba ìyáñlá' for great-grandfather in Yoruba.
Honestly Albertosaurus, what an
isidingidwane you are.
"Honestly Albertosaurus, what an
ReplyDeleteisidingidwane you are."
You can almost get "idiot" out of that if you move a few letters around, Al.
white man-black wife's comment has it right. As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger as the Indian army surrounded them: "Good bye, white man!"
ReplyDeleteIf you let them get over 20% anywhere, you have problems. Pack opinion is all-important, and the pack exists for the pack, not outsiders.
Courtland Milloy is at it again:
ReplyDeleteRhee needs to take a look in the mirror
Listening to D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, I noticed a familiar refrain. She readily accepts credit for success while always attributing failure to the shortcomings of others. ...
[The] reformer's superhuman facade [has begun] to crumble, revealing some emotionally vulnerable, in-over-her-head inner child.
...
What Rhee didn't say is that she has gone all out to make residents who live in the wealthier, predominantly white parts of the city feel good. And if their feathers got ruffled and needed smoothing, she went so far as to visit their homes for coffee klatches and pep talks.
So what happens when black residents on the other side of town start waving their hands - don't forget about us; we'd like to feel good, too? Rhee holds them up for ridicule. School reform is not "warm and fuzzy," she says.
...
Rhee has certainly focused a lot on reforming schools in the District's more well-to-do and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. If you thought her priority was supposed to be educating poor black children, you were wrong.
Admit it. Learn from it. Don't make the same mistake twice.