You might consider this a hiatus – perhaps it will only be a few months, or maybe a few years.  But for now I am done with the blog.  It’s nothing serious.  Long story short, I just don’t have the time to adequately devote to the blog anymore.  Maybe I’ll change my mind down the road, but for now, c’est le fin.

I don’t really want to write some weepy, extended post saying goodbye.  For many of you, I will just be seeing you in different forums.  I am not completely abandoning blogging – I’m still blogging at Almost Chosen People, where hopefully I’ll finally complete that Federalist Papers series.  I might also pop up in various comment boxes from time-to-time.

I have made many friends through the blogosphere.  We will continue to stay in touch.  I appreciate everybody who has read this little blog of mine, one which has been relatively successful, at least by small blog standards.  It’s nice to know someone out there appreciated my rantings.

Thanks,

The CrankyCon.

Anyway, here’s a little token from the happiest place on Earth.

First, in order to pump up Sharpton, they first tear down the right.

But the interesting question is whether his role is still needed in an era when the man atop the national power structure himself is black, and Sharpton now regularly meets with him—issuing not just demands but advice. If you asked Sharpton himself, he’d undoubtedly reply, are you serious? Blacks still have twice the unemployment rate of Americans overall, and young black men are still being shot by cops under circumstances that range from tragic to suspicious. The election of Barack Obama has provoked an almost hysterical reaction from the far-right media, which last week claimed as its latest victim an obscure African-American official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

It’s highly amusing that a left-wing rag like Newsweek must employ the term “far-right.”  How come the MSM never speaks of the “far left?”  Oh, I guess it might have something to do with such institutions occupying that particular space on the political spectrum.

This is not the last mention of the Sherrod story.

And if Sharpton’s “mission” and “message” haven’t changed, his approach surely has. From last week’s fast-moving events in Washington—which found Sharpton in Hawaii, delivering a speech to a convention of dentists—the lesson he drew was about the danger of leaping to conclusions, as both the NAACP and the administration did in disowning Shirley Sherrod, Georgia’s director of rural development for the USDA, after a right-wing Web site and Fox News denounced her as a racist based on an excerpt from a months-old speech. So outrageous was this charge—in context, her point was clearly about her successful struggle to overcome prejudice—that even Beck came to her defense. But Sharpton knows all too well the temptation to seize the news cycle at its peak and check the facts later; thinking back 25 years, and with the circumstances reversed, it’s easy to picture him grabbing a bullhorn and leading a march on the USDA. He regards that sort of thing now as not just irresponsible but counterproductive. “Shirley Sherrod is an example of what happens when we play the right wing’s game: they win. We have to choose our battles wisely.”

Oh, that poor victim Shirley Sherrod.  How incredibly tone deaf and/or ignorant does one have to be to continue to insist on this portrayal of Sherrod as a victim?  In the very speech that garnered her notoriety she accused everyone who disagreed with the administration of being racist.  She later claimed that Andrew Breitbart wanted to bring back slavery.  Then of course there is the story I linked to the other day that details the radical racial politics of the Sherrods.  And finally there is this calumny against Fox News.  Unfortunately for Newsweek it has been demonstrated that Fox didn’t even run a story about Sherrod until after she was fired.  Of course, it’s possible that Newsweek is just showing its jealousy of a more popular and effective media institution.  The administration – the people who are actually to blame for Sherrod’s firing, by the way – acted out of fear of what Fox News might do.  Newsweek’s major accomplishment, meanwhile, is being useful fuel for suburban dads trying to light their barbecues.

Furthermore, the final sentence is rich in irony.  Al Sharpton has built his entire career on making (usually) false allegations of racism.  The only reason he’s on the cover of Newsweek is because he is a sadly effective demagogue.  So for him to whine about playing at a game that the right usually wins has to be the most unintentionally – or maybe not – obtuse sentences ever uttered.

And while Newsweek is busy defaming the right, it’s content with whitewashing Sharpton’s record.

Sharpton has been right much more often than wrong in his choice of causes, dating back at least to the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager who paid with his life for the mistake of walking down the wrong block in Brooklyn. Many African-Americans will be forever grateful to Sharpton for taking on the thankless task of defending the victims of Bernhard Goetz, who opened fire on four unarmed black teenagers in the subway. But he has also made some grave missteps. In 1991, during a tense confrontation between blacks and Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, he notably failed to calm tensions with a remark about “the diamond merchants in Crown Heights.” In 1995 his reference to “white interlopers,” at a protest against the eviction of a popular Harlem music store, was followed by a fatal arson attack on the white-owned business that held the lease.

Missteps?  He egged on the rioters at Crown Heights, and his words at Freddy Fashion’s Mart directly led to murder.  Those are just missteps?  Even more sickening, Newsweek swallows Sharpton’s tripe about the Tawana Brawley hoax.

It is his refusal to apologize over Brawley—or to pay the defamation judgment, which was eventually settled by donations from wealthy friends—that still haunts his reputation among white Americans of a certain age. Tempting as it must be to put the matter behind him, Sharpton still answers questions the same way, without apology, but artfully framing the issue in the way most favorable to him. “I listened to the child, and I believed her,” he says. “When I hear that people are still mad at me about this case, I want to ask them, ‘Have you ever been asked to help a child that’s been hurt?’ I don’t apologize for anything I did to help her. Judge me the way you will.”

So we’re to believe that this man has somehow changed, yet he won’t apologize for destroying the life of an innocent man, Steven Pagones?  But this hardly the only point in this article where the magazine stands in as Sharpton;’s pr agent.

His enemies sometimes charge, bizarrely, that he has chosen a career as a peripatetic community activist for the money. “It’s amazing when people call me an opportunist,” he says. “Do you know how much money I could have made with a megachurch like T. D. Jakes or Eddie Long? Don’t you think I could have done that?” By the same token, he is too honest to pretend indifference to the ego rewards of fame: “What I do is my passion, but it’s also constant work, and if my reward is getting on television, it seems fair to me.” There are places where he draws the line on publicity, though, and one is Dancing With the Stars, whose invitation he declined in 2008. “There are enough black people dancing on TV without me,” he jokes.

Does anybody believe that Al Sharpton, if he had to actually get by in the real world with the “skills” that he possesses, would be nearly as famous or as well-off as he is right now?  The man is on the freaking cover of Newsweek. Every time he says “boo” there are a million stories in the press.  Every time a white man says something that borders on racism, he’s one of the people that they have to go crawling to in order to beg for forgiveness. I don’t think megachurch Al would have been quite as fortunate. Is there even the remotest hint of self-awareness on the part of anyone involved with this article?

If you haven’t thrown up yet, the closing paragraph should seal the deal:

It is, of course, the fate of people like Sharpton to be misunderstood, and his own tendency to get carried away while addressing a crowd has contributed to it at times. He says, accurately, that the innumerable marches he has held over the years have been almost entirely free of violence, except for the time an enraged onlooker stabbed him in the chest. He is also, he believes, partly a victim of history: Jackson and, before him, Martin Luther King Jr. had much more radical black figures to their left, Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X, who made them seem moderate by comparison. There has been no one in Sharpton’s time to play that role for him. He is out there all alone, still standing on the same principle he first enunciated in his housing project in Brooklyn: poor people have the same rights as rich ones, to justice in the streets and in the courts. If he didn’t exist, we might, in fact, need to invent him.

Awww.  Poor, misunderstood Reverend Al.  If only white folk like me had more place in their hearts for bigoted demagogues like him, this world would surely be a better place.

That our mainstream media institutions can seriously manufacture a piece like this speaks volumes about state of the media as a whole.  That said, Newsweek’s rantings about Fox News are understandable in light of stories such as this one.  Instead of having a monopoly on the dissemination of information, Newsweek has become a shrieking noise machine that is no more relevant to our political discourse than the Onion.

Anyway, I look forward to next week’s cover story on the new and improved David Duke.

The problem with political theory, at least compared to the hard sciences, is that we generally lack any concrete empirical evidence to “prove” our claims.  Sure those quantitative political scientists make an attempt to turn the world of politics into a laboratory, but all they end up doing -aside from boring the snot out of the rest of us -  is proving that political science is not a science like chemistry or physics.

But sometimes we luck out, and we are afforded wonderful examples that demonstrate the validity of our theories.  While such examples may not definitively prove our theories in the same manner as a mathematical proof, they go a long way in helping to make our case.

So, thank you, California.  No state is a better model for the sort of populist democracy that I’ve warned about.  Many, if not most, of the major legislative proposals are brought to the people by way of referenda.  Instead of a class of experienced legislators hammering out ideas, we get democracy by thirty second television spot.  And now we have a political class so cowed by the population that they are unwilling to make any of the serious choices that could potentially guide them out of a crisis.

And so California is on the brink of bankruptcy.  The actor-Governor, who won his job initially thanks to the magical gift of a recall, and who initially boasted about how he was going to change the political culture of Cal-ee-for-nee-ya, decided that actually engaging in the type of reform needed for the state might lead to a failed bid for re-election, and so he retreated.  In many ways he simply went back to doing what he does best (sadly, in this case): acting.  He acted like a big shot toughy, deriding his opponents, for example, as economic girlie men.  Unfortunately he was the girliest of the lot.

And so now the state attempts to dig out of this budget mess with half-hearted attempts and lame gimmicks.  Moreover, the governor has decided that he’s just going to punt this issue to the next regime.

Sadly, even these pathetic attempts at fixing the budget are mocked by dimwitted demagogues.

Shannon Murphy, a spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D- Los Angeles), said Wednesday: “It’s shocking that every single one of the governor’s budget moves deliberately hurt people.”

Yes, that mean governor.  If only he realized that there was a way out of this budget mess that didn’t hurt anyone.  Why, if they got down to business not only could they balance the budget, but they’d also be able to provide ponies and candy to all the wonderful citizens of California.

I recognize that populism is not solely to blame for this crisis, that the irresponsibility of our legislative class extends to every region.  But the deterioration of our country’s most populous state should give pause to those who advocate more of the silliness.

It is substantively disgusting because it implies that all black people ought to think and act alike.  I would go so far as to say that employment of this phrase in order to label someone a “race traitor” is itself racist.  Instead of cotton plantation fields, blacks are to be confined to rhetorical ideological plantations, with various Quimbos and Sambos acting as overseers to ensure that no one “gets out of line.”

Which leads me to the technical point.  Connecting the fictional character of Uncle Tom to race treason smacks of historical illiteracy.  Uncle Tom martyred himself rather than reveal the location of runaway slaves.  Yes, I know that there are shifting literary criticisms, blah blah blah, but  any literary criticism that sees Uncle Tom as a “race traitor” is the sort of criticism worth ignoring.  If there are “race traitors” in the book, they are the aforementioned Quimbo and Sambo.

Soon it became obvious that those that fell all over themselves to laud Shirley Sherrod were acting just as stupidly – if not more so – than those that condemned her.  As I blogged about last week, in a segment of her speech she labeled Obamacare opponents as racists and seemed to indicate that all opposition to Obama was motivated by racial hatred.  Then, in an interview on CNN last week, she asserted that Andrew Breitbart:

would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he would like to see all black people end up again.

And I think that’s why he’s so vicious against a black president, you know. He would go after me. I don’t think it was even the NAACP he was totally after. I think he was after a black president.

Charming to the last.

And today Dan Riehl has an extensive post chronicling the, err, interesting politics of Mrs. Sherrod and and her husband Charles.  He includes a link to this video, which contains the quote mentioned at the top of the post.

There’s much, much more at the link to Riehl’s site.

Civil rights heroes?  I think not.

This deal has to get done if for no other reason than to finally decide the winner of The Contest.