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If you ever have invited liberal friends over for an evening, you probably follow our practice. When tykes come to visit — we shift everything breakable out of their reach. In anticipation of liberal guests, we move all valuables out of their reach.
Alas, their sticky fingers have struck again.
Liberals, you may remember, introduced to these sunny shores such imaginative notions as:
College-educated men over 6 feet earn $10,000 a year more than short men. Therefore, America is a bigoted against short men.
Women with glasses, on the average, on both coasts, earn $40,000 a year more than non-bespectacled girls. Therefore, America is prejudiced against girls who see clearly.
Which Is the Right Gender?
Hispanic immigrant women under 25 earn less than Hispanic immigrant men over 35 in the maintenance field.
Ergo, the United States is a racist country, though we are not sure whether it is biased against Hispanic ladies or men or perhaps cars made in Mexico.
A New Racist Argument
Since it never will be mathematically possible for men and women to earn exactly the same salaries, or for non-whites to own homes worth exactly as much as Caucasian Americans and not a dollar less, there always will be fissures.
With redistribution of America’s wealth being a cornerstone of their philosophy, liberals find this a confounding calculation.
Comes now a fresh, though not necessarily virgin, battlefield.
In liberals’ permanent quest to divide Americans, along come two firebreathing left-wingers to start a new racist argument in an unlikely area, athletics.
Over the baseball pitcher Roger Clemens. Mr. Clemens became the most famous sports personality in America last week when he testified before Congress. He is suspected of taking illegal drugs late in his career to prolong his earning power.
He Probably Did Cheat?
Frankly, I agree with the majority of Americans who believe the pitcher is lying, that he did inflating drugs — along with dozens or hundreds of other baseball players.
Many liberals, as you know, see racism under every bed, and such is the case here.
There probably is enough racism in professional sports that writers, such as the two under study this morning, don’t have to invent scenes to score one of their precious political points.
Pushing a New Book
Todd Balf is a freelance writer who is a textbook liberal, make an attention-grabbing accusation, and then wait for the reactions to roll in. Bill Rhoden is a black sports columnist with The New York Times who loves to stir racial turmoil in athletics.
Like good, little liberals, these two pot-stirring gentlemen think in precise lockstep.
Mr. Balf probably is the more offensive arsonist. His motivation appears to be coldly selfish.
In an op-ed piece in last Friday’s Los Angeles Times (“Demonizing Marion Jones”), Mr. Balf made up his own self-serving scenario expressly to promote his new book, due out a week from tomorrow with a similar premise.
Thank Goodness for Lightning
He worries that Mr. Clemens, because he is white, will escape both opprobrium and jail. He claims, speciously, that the Olympic sprinter Ms. Jones, who pleaded guilty to taking performance-enhancing drugs before the 2000 Olympics and goes to prison next month for cheating, has been vilified by media and by fans because she is black, not because she did wrong let down millions of fans.
By the sheerest coincidence, Mr. Balf draws analogous lines between the book he is promoting and the alleged treatment of Ms. Jones. He admits she got what she deserved, a 6-month prison term. But why, he wonders, do people refer to her as “the disgraced Olympian” or a “fallen superstar” just because she is off to prison?
By golly whillickers, Mr. Balf sputtered, he sure hopes that Mr. Clemens gets punished similarly — or at least waterboarded — because by golly whillickers, the last black athlete caught doping, Ms. Jones, not only was caught, not only pleaded guilty, by golly whillickers, she is going to jail.
You Go to Jail, Then I Go
In Mr. Balf’s little Beancounter’s Book of Racial Mischief that he sleeps with every night, it says on Page 1 that when a black goes to prison, a white athlete needs to be sent away, too, to keep liberal beancounters happy and to keep the racial scales balanced.
As a generic premise, Mr. Balf, quite accidentally, has stumbled into a legitimate area of debate: In punitive settings, are white and black athletes treated fairly evenly? He, however, veers into a ditch.
Like many liberals, he is unable to control his impulses. A writer with a history of angry texts intended to shine a spotlight on him rather than his subjects, he runs around the room, in his Times piece, setting little bonfires.
If Only He Had Been Reflective
Another instance of passion and zeal gone wild.
A sad case of an excitable liberal ruining a perfectly good argument by emotionally advancing unsupportable claims.
Had he argued intellectually, he would have realized the fallacy of his claim. Emotionally shaky, Mr. Balf looked past the fact that Ms. Jones, once trapped, forthrightly confessed her guilt.
As a liberal who took a vow never to change his mind, I suspect what really bothers Mr. Balf is not so much that Mr. Clemens is white but that he was identified last week as a Republican. (Mr. Clemens’ accuser is a Democrat.) In Mr. Balf’s hierarchy, the most repulsive thought he could entertain is that not only a white man but — gad — a Republican could escape jail.
Next Case
Born black and unable to convert to white-ism, Mr. Rhoden, of The New York Times, has decided to make the worst of it.
Still trying to make up his mind whether God is white or black or a new color, much of Mr. Rhoden’s columnizing is conducted through racial prisms.
Mr. Rhoden attempts to go Mr. Balf one better by dragging into the Jones-Clemens debate the best-known fibber among baseball players, Barry Bonds. Mr. Bonds is such an odious character he is not even liked by his friends and family.
Mr. Rhoden makes the creative claim that if a black baseball liar can be scorned by fans and media, then the same pit of tar should await a white baseball liar.
I will bet Mr. Rhoden would be a barrel of (racial) laughs on a cross-country train ride.
Problems to Vanish in a Flash
Meanwhile, like radio static in the background, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama say that America’s race and gender problems will be blotted out if you vote for one or both of them.
Do you see now why, for150 years, America usually has chosen non-liberals as Presidents of the United States. Otherwise, you would have to put everything out of reach when they visit your home.
