July 18, 2013
Rudolph Giuliani
Well, here is that politician, a solid northeastern liberal. Here was that politician, I should say: Unfortunately he died earlier this year, at age 88. He made the acknowledgment Mr. Cohen is pining for twenty years ago. (Jared Taylor passed a comment on it at the time in some magazine or other.)
Cohen has found his stride, though, and he presses forward fearlessly, decapitating graven images and disemboweling sacred cows as he goes:
The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism….
“Surely”! So the different statistical profiles of blacks as compared with other races on traits of behavior, intelligence, and personality are “surely” explained by slavery, Jim Crow, and racism? Good grief! How can Cohen get away with saying that in a major newspaper? No wonder people are shrieking!
For want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.
The evidence out of the human-science labs is that the better word is “biological.” Try putting that in your syndicated column, Mr. Cohen.
In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
A poet speaks. Famous poet Maya Angelou had things to say about the affair, things like this:
What is really injured, bruised, if you will, is the psyche of our national population.
I”d pass comment on this if I could understand her meaning, but I have never been able to do that. Frankly, I think Ms. Angelou is an affirmative-action bag of wind.
Come back, Rudy. Perhaps the most dismal spectacle in current US politics is the New York City mayoral race, voting for which is this November.
You”d think that a big, bossy city such as New York, stuffed up to the subway vents with oversized egos, would produce an exciting mayoral contest. In the past it has, but this year’s race is a snoozer. I”ve had more excitement at the all-night Laundromat. The mayoral candidates are more numerous than when I looked them over a year ago, but there’s been no improvement in quality.
Veteran reporter Bob McManus agrees. “What a sad, shallow bunch,” he says in the New York Post. He’s referring mainly to their comments on the Zimmerman verdict, which are almost uniformly stupid. Samples: “A shocking insult,” said far-left diesel Christine Quinn. She’s polling second behind far-left exhibitionist drama queen Anthony Weiner, who called the verdict “deeply unsatisfying.”
McManus singles out Republican John Catsimatidis as an exception, praising the guy’s remark: “When you have safe streets, tragedies like this don”t happen.”
I don”t know about that. It looks epistemically very thin to me, like saying: “When it’s not raining, the streets are dry.” By the standards of the current mayoral field, though, it’s positively Socratic.
Can”t we draft Giuliani back?
