Friday July 16, 2010

PROJECTING IN WIDE-SCREEN AND 3-D. It's increasingly clear that minority rights remain a sore subject for conservatives, and that their present strategy is to insist that blacks, gays, and liberals are the real oppressors.

Yesterday I showed you an American Thinker genius who explained how liberals were using homosexuals to steal straight people's self-respect ("The primary pathway the Left currently uses to decouple childhood sexual development from self-individuation is the gay rights agenda"). But AT's kind of a clearing house for crazy, so let's turn our attention to the opinion of highly respectable libertarian Ilya Somin, expressed during yet another tedious discussion of the "liberaltarian" schtick:

Most liberals do not in fact agree with libertarians on civil liberties, the war on drugs, and gay rights... On gay rights, libertarians favor laissez-faire, while liberals tend to favor antidiscrimination laws that restrict the freedom of private organizations.

See, it looks like liberals advocate more for gay folks' rights than conservatives, but they favor getting those rights through legislation, which is anti-freedom by definition, rather than by the magic of the marketplace. Why, if liberals had their way, we might wind up with another abomination like the Civil Rights Act! Forbid it, Almighty Paul!

Meanwhile the Washington Times tells us celebrity black people Barack Obama and Eric Holder are the real racists --and they have proof! Dictionary proof!

By now, the default judgment about the Barack Obama-Eric H. Holder Jr. Justice Department is that it discriminates intentionally on the basis of race. By the precise definition used in the American Heritage dictionary, the department is racialist.

Plus they have tiles on the triple word score! The WashTimes also says that the DOJ allocates its resources differently now than it did under Bush, therefore the black people who took it over are favoring their own over Whitey. Basically it's the Reconstruction section of Birth of a Nation written in code.

I may have to come up with a new name for this increasingly popular sort of hallucinogenically bad pseudo-argument based on race panic. "Honkydelic," perhaps.

UPDATE. To be clear, reverse-discrimination complaints by privileged white people have been with us for a long, long time. But these are normally dull, unimaginative "how come they can say nigger and we can't" pro-formalisms. Conservatives are really riled about it now and, as the cited posts show, escalating to a new level of hilarity. A golden age, friends!

UPDATE 3. Right on time: Moe Lane of RedState says Sheila Jackson-Lee is the real racist; also, that she's stupid, and that having a majority-black district will reliably produce a stupid Representative. In Lane's defense he tried to disguise his point with lots of extra words, so he does have some sense of shame, or at least awareness of what others find shameful.

UPDATE 3. Also in comments, zuzu reminds us that under Bush the DOJ Civil Rights Division became a living tribute to Alan Bakke. And thanks Hunger Tallest Palin for the proofreading!