A Past Long Gone

I'm sorry to report that Georgie Anne Geyer's faith in our country's "maturity" about race has been shaken:

It had furthermore become hard to imagine that any American candidates would dare to raise race in a negative manner. Those were the days of a past long gone, and thank God for it!

But just as I was reveling in joy at our maturing over race, we were struck by an unexpected challenge.

It's hard to imagine how this racially negative past could be described as "long gone," given that Tom Tancredo - whom Geyer previously praised as "truly eloquent" - only dropped out of the race in late December, and Ron Paul - whose wisdom Geyer says "is something we might attend to at our own gain" - is still in it.

Although public squabbling over race pains Geyer deeply this week, it wasn't very long ago that she was lamenting the chilling effect of "political correctness" on sober discussions of black and Hispanic inadequacy, as modeled by the racialist windbag Richard Lamm:

Lamm politely but firmly suggests that black and Hispanic cultures fall short of Asian and Jewish cultures in fostering ambition and success not because blacks and Hispanics are not as capable or smart, but because "different cultures give different signals, and some cultures are giving out stronger performance signals than others....”

In that column, Geyer went on to say that "the brilliant African-American scholar Shelby Steele" - a man who has explicitly mourned "the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority" - thinks Lamm is right on the money, so you card-carrying members of the Grievance Industry can keep your talk of effort optimism to yourselves.

At any rate, we now know that it's "mature" for politicians to wax obsessive over the perils of multiculturalism while waving a copy of Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia, and "cynical" for them to engage in "a tedious argument" over which candidate is "the greater advocate of civil rights." If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to win Geyer's honest heart, they'll take care to observe this distinction in future.

Just to make clear where I stand on the "inevitable" candidates themselves, I may as well post this immature but heartfelt comment from Eschaton:

I don't like their positions. Whether or not I like their personalities strikes me as totally irrelevant.

That said, there's no way either one of them is going to do as much damage to the US, or the rest of the world, as this country's kneejerk, dipshit misogyny and racism causes every fucking day of every goddamn year.