Posted on 07/30/2019 4:10:19 AM PDT by Kaslin
Liberal pearls were clutched from coast to coast again the other day when President Donald Trump tweeted about the Baltimore Congressional district of Elijah Cummings. “Racism,” they cried, mostly because they cry that in response to any criticism who, to use another of their broken record responses, happens to be a “person of color.” Well, I lived in that district from 2001 till 2014, I watched people recoil when I told them. President Trump was too kind.
To give the full context of the president’s tweets, since unless you follow him on Twitter you’ve likely only heard small portions of them, he wrote, “Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA. As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
First off, Cummings did attack the acting Secretary of Homeland Security the week before, screaming at Kevin McAleenan over the conditions in which illegal aliens are held at the border.
Second, the district Cummings represents is one of the poorest in the country. Whereas illegal aliens have three meals per day and a roof over their heads, many in Cummings’s district do not. It encompasses most of west Baltimore, which makes my hometown of Detroit look prosperous. The only reason the economic numbers aren’t worse is the district includes a large swath of Baltimore County because Democrats gerrymandered the state to water down Republican representation (from 3 to 1 in Congress when they redrew the lines in 2010). They drew the lines in a way that would ensure Democrats would win. It also brought in areas that were doing better economically, though not enough to ever defeat a Democrat. The state’s congressional district map looks like someone sneezed on a wet Rorschach test, but it’s by design. So to say the Cummings district is an economic disaster is to understate the problem.
Third, crime in west Baltimore is the only growth industry, if you don’t count the rats and roaches. Taking the trash out on Fridays was an adventure. You’d drag your bag to the alley and toss it a few feet away from the pile, you didn’t want to be too close in case you didn’t beat one of the cat-sized sewer rats to the trash. Most of the time you did, but you always remembered the times you didn’t. It only takes one time that a giant sewer rat runs out of a pile of trash bags you’re standing next to for it to inform how you act thereafter.
The city has a huge rat problem. It’s so bad, one of the most popular bumper stickers in the city has a silhouette of a rat with “Balt” written on it and “Charm City, USA,” ironically under it. Rats don’t thrive in clean areas. And neither does hope.
Baltimore city schools are a disgrace. They’re near the top in spending and near the bottom in results. The schools have “misplaced” tens of millions of dollars, no one in city government seems to care or is ever held accountable. Graduation rates hover around 50 percent, literacy rates below that. There hasn’t been a Republican elected in the city in over 50 years and two of the last three mayors resigned amid scandals.
The murder rate in the city is astronomical. In terms of raw numbers, there have been more murders in the city in the past, but during those years the city had hundreds of thousands of more people living in it. Per capita shows just how dangerous Baltimore is. New York City, with a population of more than 8 and a half million, has fewer murders per year than Baltimore, with a population of just over 600,000.
By crying “racism” over the president’s criticisms of Cummings’s district, none of this gets discussed. Which is why the media is doing it.
Liberals do not want to discuss liberal failures, so they cry racism.
Current Baltimore Mayor Jack Young, appearing on MSNBC Monday morning, whined to host Stephanie Ruhle that he’s not getting enough federal money to fix the city’s problems. Half the city’s budget comes from the state government, and they want more. Money isn’t the problem. Leadership is the problem. Replacing incompetent liberals with younger, “fresh” incompetent liberals won’t change anything. Neither will truckloads of federal cash. Running cities isn’t the domain of the federal government - they have their own governments. If they’re cesspools of graft and failure, it’s up to the citizens to make a change. If they don’t, a state can step in. Short of that, voters get what they vote for.
Crying racism ends the discussion of any of this, of anything related to liberal failures. I didn’t want to live in Baltimore. I worked in D.C., an hour commute was not something I sought out. But it was all I could afford. It took me a long time to escape. I was the exception, not the rule. For the people left behind, the people who wake up to find police investigating a murder on their block or who hear gunshots in the night (both of which I did), none of the cable news chatter over the weekend does a damn thing to help.
What it does do is change the subject. If you want to know what Democratic Party policies will do for the nation, you need only look at what Democratic Party policies have done to the cities where they have absolute power. Nothing scares Democrats more than that. So scream racism.
Democrats are going to do what they’ve always done. The media is going to do whatever the Democrats need them to do. That leaves change up to the voters in these areas. If they’re going to accept generational failure, reward it with lifetime job security for people like Cummings, so be it. Just don’t complain when things get worse. And it’s not racist to point it out. It’s actually racist to not point it out because that district is majority a skin color that isn’t yours.
Democrats are pushing the idea white politicians can’t criticize the actions of black politicians, not because those criticisms aren’t valid, but because they’re racist. Phrases like “rat-infested” are racist when you point out how a majority black district is infested with rats and the Democrat-controlled government isn’t solving the problem. Essentially, they’re saying people have to either speak differently and not use common terms when discussing issues with “people of color.” Think about that – people should be treated differently based on their skin color; that there should be “separate, but equal” language when talking about human beings with different melanin levels. If only there were a word for that kind of thinking…
Racial war is imminent.
What is racist is covering up the terrible problems in Baltimore just to protect the image of the Democratic Party and Democrat elected officials.
Quick, hide all the bad stuff in the back of the bus and pretend it doesn’t exist .
They only talk a good game.
We have become the United States of Corruption.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” MLK
Cummings character content is Nil. Ergo no racism applies
<><> Cummings is a brainless, brutal bully,
<><> Cummings shouted and screamed at the Border Patrol WRT the clean and well-managed, but crowded, Border,
<><> Cummings district is FAR WORSE and dangerous, considered the Worst in the USA.
<><> Cumming's District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.
<><> Cummings has become rich in office, but his district is one of the poorest in the country,
<><> illegals at the border have three meals per day and a roof over their heads,
<><> many in Cummings’s district do not have the luxuries the US provides illegals at the border.
<><> crime in Cummings district is the only growth industry, if you don’t count the rats and roaches.
<><> unable to make it on his own, Cummings was gerrymandered in to ensure a Democrat win,
<><> Cummings district map looks like someone sneezed on a wet Rorschach test.
<><> to say Cummings district is an economic disaster understates the problem.
<><> yet, incomprehnsibly, Cummings always wins the election.
“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well. If the patient gets well, an entire industry of victimhood will get cancer and die. This would be the best thing for the black community. Until blacks throw off the shroud of victimhood, they will be at the mercy of ‘doctors’ who treat a cancer that does not exist but that they are paying for. ”
~ Booker T. Washington
Telling words from a wise man.
If you call everyone a racist, then no one is a racist.
Calling someone a racist used to be the last card democRATS pulled out of their pocket to play, but nowadays it is the first and only one they know how to play.
It's worn out its effectiveness to the point where no one who is accused of racism takes the accusation seriously anymore.
When they accuse Trump and half of the country of being racists, they are overgeneralizing the use of the attack to the point of absurdity.
Part of the statement by Booker T. Washington sounds a lot like what might describe the global climate change “problem”....treating a cancer that doesn’t exist, but they want us to pay for nevertheless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/18/us/ashes-and-tears-in-lost-battle-of-drug-war.html
I’ll never forget Angela Dawson who tried to stand up to the drug dealers.
Cummings congressional district is approx. 260 sq mi. Our school district is 189 sq mi.
Thank you ! Trump should give posthumous Presidential Medal of freedom to Angela Dawson
Additionally, their behavior while playing the race card has driven many of us to not care at all if they think we are racist.
Back in Milwaukee in 1977 in Highschool we didn’t think of the better tanned kids who went there as ‘blacks’. They were just us with better tans. Then they started busing in thugs from the ghetto and that is when people on the south side started getting ‘racist’. The behavior of the bussed in kids showed us that blacks were not to be trusted.
Please note that even after that we never considered our neighborhood kids blacks. And most of them despised the bussed in kids even worse than we did.
All in all though it is a culturalist thing more than a racist thing. We don’t care how people look as long as they are of our culture. The liberal ‘blacks’ are NOT from our culture and their behavior shows that clearly.
BOL......
We never had any idea about racism or that these friends were any different than us all-white guys. It just was not an issue or a factor back in the early 60s.
When I was younger, my dad was stationed in Nome, Alaska in the Air Force and the family couldn't go with him. My mom and brother and sister and I lived in a small house in Phoenix while he was gone.
Our next door neighbors befriended us and took us under their wing. The father, Benny, was a pharmacist in downtown Phoenix. They would have us over for dinner 2 or 3 days a week.
They were Mexican and we always had tacos when we went over for dinner. I loved them. Juanita, the mother, taught my mom the recipe and every Saturday lunch growing up, my mom would fix us tacos. As we got older into high school she taught us kids how to make them and I in turn, I taught my wife how to make them.
To this day, those homemade Mexican tacos are my meal of choice for my birthday dinner. I learned to eat all kinds of Mexican food but tacos are my favorite. I could eat them 7 days a week.
But all of the Mexicans we knew and went to school with, assimilated into American culture and didn't demand that our country change for their benefit. They were industrious, hard workers and never asked for anything to be given to them.
My best friend from childhood is Mexican. I should say he is an American of Mexican decent. He and I palled around all of the time. We played football in school together. He was my best man at my wedding. He was one of "us". I saw him at our 50th high school reunion a couple of years ago. It was like we had never separated. We picked up right where we had left off. His name is Humberto but everybody back in school called him "Beaner" or "Bean" for short. He would get upset if you reverted to Humberto. He liked "Bean" better he told me.
And no one ever accused anyone of racism.
Remember Lake County, Indiana -- the Chicago suburbs at the very northwestern tip of the state.
It epitomized the Rust Belt, with the great steel cities of Gary and East Chicago, the oil refinery city of Whiting, and the surrounding blue-collar suburbs.
It had been a stronghold of the Democrats since the New Deal, and its political corruption is notorious.
It was one of the last great political machines until the Bush Justice Department broke it up in the early 2000s.
Their attacks on Trump are attacks on a white man, therefore they are racist. That’s how they should be characterized from now on. Same when mad Max or any of the rest of them say the nasty things about Trump that they say. They are all attacking a white man—very racist.
I wonder if similar reasoning applies to the medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex. It's far more lucrative to 'manage' a disease than to treat its root cause. I think of diabetes, blood pressure, arthritis and other diseases, which are managed throughout the patient's life. I may be wrong to think this way but as the scripture says, 'the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil'.
Call me cynical.
Exactly!!
Your neighbors and friends were just your neighbors and friends. Just as our black kids were just our friends. We never noticed race (beyond perhaps some good natured ribbing), they were just “us”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.