'Won't Get Took Again'?

Anybody else hear a big cracking sound? That might be the backbone of the Democratic Party snapping. (Yeah, it doesn't make much of sound at that.)

Black voters in Detroit are angry at what, already, they consider the hijacking by Bill and Hillary’s team of Obama’s nomination for president.

Callers to WCHB this morning, (Detroit’s biggest black talk radio channel), were threatening to leave the Democratic Party, and either skip the election this year or vote “independent,” (presumably because folks aren’t independent enough to vote Republican yet).

Mildred Gaddis seemed to be stumping for a boycott of the presidential election so that Hillary loses. One of her callers described how she has always voted the Dem ticket, but now for the first time is going to vote “independent,” namely, make up her own mind based on a candidate’s qualifications—as if that is a novelty for American voters! (Unfortunately, it's too much of a novelty for black Democratic voters).

If blacks defect, I don’t see how the Democrats could win in November, nor recover as a national party.

The irony of it would be almost too much to take.

For nearly 40 years now Democratic leaders have counted on a loyal cadre of paid-for clergymen, corrupt local politicians, and other union and “civic” organizers/hustlers to feed a steady diet of sound-bites, rumors, half-truths and falsehoods into the black community to keep the knowledge base diluted and the electorate disinformed. The whole strategy was to persaude black voters that all that stood between them and the malevolent forces dying to push them back down into Jim Crow and second-class status was the Party of God and civil rights--the Democrats. It was bullshit then, and it's so far past bullshit now that it's not even funny.

But this is funny: Now, that same sound-bite machine is smoking and throwing off sparks, imploding with the news getting around in the black community that “they’re” trying to steal the nomination from Obama so they can give it to “Billary.”

And this time, “they” doesn’t mean Republicans, conservatives, or (as they are called by the precious black clergy) “the Bushies”: instead I’m hearing names being thrown around like Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow, Jennifer Granholm, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The fact that Obama’s nomination, while it still seems a live possibility, is not yet his officially enough to be hijacked, is beside the point. Facts have always been the least of it in this kind of politics. We’re talking here about catechism by sound bite, about a voting block of millions with a knowledge of history and political science based almost entirely on rumors and interpreters like Wright, Farrakhan, and Sharpton. Thanks in part to the endless, deliberate racial baiting of black Americans by the Left, the black community—as a political block, anyway—has been conditioned to respond to all “injustices” by embracing conspiracy theories and echoing fables that forever after cannot be disproved.

Facts were equally beside the point in the OJ trial, in Florida in 2000, or after Katrina. In November 2000 the lie was spread in Florida, (Democratic operatives abandoned this lie within scant hours once they realized how much attention was going to get paid) that police barricades and guard dogs had been used in Broward County to prevent black supporters of Al Gore from reaching the polls. Farrakhan stole this lie and re-used it in slightly modified form after Hurricane Katrina, claiming that black residents fleeing high water in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans were prevented from crossing an overpass into a dry “white” neighborhoods by police barricades and machine-gun nests, leaving them to drown or starve to death.

The real lesson in the Jeremiah Wright story isn’t that one Chicago preacher is either racist or anti-American, (though he’s both), or that Obama proved his cynicism by attaching himself to Wright just to have a channel into Chicago’s black community. The real lesson is that there’s a voting constituency eager to defend Wright by defining themselves as sharing a common black “experience” that transforms fables about AIDS being invented in a laboratory to kill blacks, or about the US Coast Guard blowing up the New Orleans levees, or that there is a mother ship hovering above Planet Earth to rescue blacks, into historical truth. (Some may object that I am painting with too broad a brush by ascribing this level of incredulity to the entire black voting block. But for weeks I’ve heard countless black commentators explaining that Wright’s remarks are not only understandable—but substantially true--if you are a black person).

What gives these stories their power isn't their fantastic quality so much as their reuse of the theme of black victimhood at the hands of tricky whites, stories that always trace out the same pattern of racial malice and deception as laid down, in one of its Ur-versions, by Malcolm X, and then re-told about the White Man in every generation since:

“Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had!

“Ya been took!

“Ya been hoodwinked!

“Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!

“This is what He does….”

“He” being the White Man.

Except in this case, “He” isn't Dick Cheney or Don Imus, or Trent Lott.

"He" is Carl Levin, or Howard Dean. Or Billary.

In fairness to the ancient tale of bamboozlement, I guess the Democrats really have bamboozled the blacks. That's what Democrats do best. They even know how to hoodwink themselves. And the blacks really did get took. Run amock. No doubt about it. How else to explain the blind devotion of the victims of Jim Crow and the KKK to the party of Jim Crow and the KKK??

That is some first class example of bamboozle.

But Democrats, by managing now to make themselves the villain in this most recent Jena-Selma-Katrina-Lynching serial drama, (the one where Obama gets screwed out of his God-given entitlement to be President), have practically invited 20-some million potential black voters to abandon the party all together.

Which is exactly how the Democrats getting blown ass-over-teakettle by their own dropped racial grenade reaches its highest altitude of irony.

They've spent forty years spoon-feeding black voters on the politics of envy, anger, victimhood, and racial resentment. They worked things so bad for their black constituency that political goals in that community--more than forty years afte the Voting Rights Act--still haven't even evolved beyond using political office to spite imagined enemies or enrich corrupt leaders. As Detroit is the living, bleeding embodiment, black support is never the reward for a record of any measurable political or social gain. The reward is just getting it from them, and keeping it for us.

But the lack of clear political goals and social benefits has been a real benefit for the Democratic operatives working to keep blacks loyal, on board, or at least only manageably disaffected.

The lack of measurable goals spares Democrats accounting for why their policies fail to improve the lives of blacks. If the objects were better schools, for instance, or more jobs, or restored cities, Democrats would have to own up to being total failures. It bears little reminding that the places where the most Democrats lord it over the densest black populations are the places where the short end of the stick is shortest--places like, say, Detroit or New Orleans. If you sell people vacuous buzz phrases like “racial justice” in place of rational political metrics like better schools, or business investment that bring jobs, Democratic candidates need only ask every election time (like they’re asking now): “Are you more angry, frustrated, and suspicious now than you were four years ago? You are? Then vote for me, because we hate those people too!”

In Detroit, there’s a high school graduation rate somewhere down around 25% (we can’t be sure because no one here ever learned to do percentages). But there'll be no political consequence for this failure. That's because control of the cash-rich district is a “prize” all on its own, even if only a few district cronies get to enjoy it. A public school system's got little, or--in Detroit's case--nothing, to do with enriching and educating the city’s young people or making the city a more attractive place to live. The purpose of a school district is its value as a political fief, and a jobs and retirement program for teacher unions, income supplement for crooked preachers who get rich selling service contracts to the district, and general money trough for hangers-on of the city’s decades-old Democrat machine.

Now, because the national Democratic leadership are beginning to discuss, just maybe, throwing over the faltering and unready Obama in favor of a Hillary candidate in November, black voters who've grown very fond of Obama are getting that old hoodwinky feeling again.

The Democrats are facing the unintended consequence of Obama’s unexpected success: that black Americans would support Obama for their own independent reasons of pride and hope, reasons unrelated to reflexive obedience to long conditioning to just keep pulling that lever, regardless, for the ticket with the donkey picture at the top.

I think Howard Dean and Carl Levin were so jazzed at the idea of one of their most leftist Leftists in the Oval Office, enjoying unfettered tax raising power and Middle East partnering in Democratic 2009, they couldn't be bothered asking themselves if Conyers’s and Waters’s and Jackson-Lee’s compliant constituents would march in on Election Day and vote for whomever they were told to--just as they were trained to do—even if it meant turning their back on one of their own.

Meanwhile, without waiting to be ordered to do so by the national party, black Democrats adopted Obama, the smooth-talking handsome upstart, and started seeing him as “our” candidate. And in the politics of race, and envy, and mistrust, you just can't have an "us" without an enemy “them.”

And if there’s one thing Democrats have told black voters over and over and over, it’s: "Can't trust 'them.' They're tricky! Don't get took!"

Which worked fine, as long as the Dems got to define who "them" was.

But now the party that perfected the campaign appeal of
"vote for us, and we'll keep you from getting took by them,"
now is "them."

Even if Dean and the rest try to enforce party discipline (hah!), or explain the advantages of winning the White House with Hillary over losing it with Barack, it will sound (it already sounds, from what I heard today on Detroit talk radio) like nothing more than more wicked trickery laid down by one more doctor with an advanced degree in bamboozleology--trying to hoodwink us, again.

This can only get better for everyone.