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Peggy Noonan

To quote Fred Reed and Peggy Noonan ... in that order

Submitted by Roanman on Mon, 04/23/2012 - 09:38

 

“The Coming Race War in America was published in 1996 by Carl Rowan, the black columnist and former ambassador to Finland...

Our racial policy has proved a disaster. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, blacks have not assimilated. They constitute a separate people having almost nothing in common with the surrounding European society. They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration…

First, on every known measure of cognitive ability, on IQ, SATs, GREs, everything, blacks average about one standard deviation, fifteen IQ points, below whites. The gap is a fact. It exists. It is reflected in performance. It has proved intractable.

In a technological civilization that rewards intelligence, the deficit sharply limits legitimate access to the higher reaches of money, power, class, and prestige. Second, blacks continue to show little interest in schooling. Exceptions and degrees, yes. Yet consider cities such as Washington, which usually has a black mayor, black city council, mostly black school board, black staffs in the schools, black parents, black students, a high per-capita expenditure—and perhaps the worst schools in the country. This is a fact, and shows no signs of diminishing. It is repeated in countless cities…

The economy has no need for huge numbers of people who read at the level of second-graders, if that. The existence of these people is a fact. When such jobs exist, as for example on police forces, better qualified whites are invariably available.

Without remedial intervention, the academic and professional worlds, the managerial ranks of blue-collar trades, would turn almost pure white, and there would be actual hunger in the inner cities.

The solution, to the extent that it can be called a solution, has been a combination of welfare and affirmative action. Each has produced its own kind of dependency. Whites in their own way depend on welfare payments to blacks in that ending welfare would send the cities up in flames. We now have dense concentrations of unemployed, unemployable blacks leading meaningless lives in rotting cities. They are angry, blame whites for their troubles, and do not have a lot to lose…

None of this improves, and it seems to be getting worse…on the web, video after cell phone video appears of pack-attacks by feral blacks on whites and Asians. These attacks often result in brain damage: the attackers are trying to hurt the victims badly, and usually laugh while doing it. Other videos time and again show black teenagers looting Seven-Elevens…

Whites are frightened of blacks. They are afraid of taking the wrong exit from the freeway and ending up in a black ghetto. They are afraid when they pass young black males in a dark neighborhood. White women clutch their purses and cross the street, try not to get into elevators with them. The fear, seldom mentioned, determines where whites live, where they go, and where they send their children to school…

Government also is afraid of blacks…The signs are ominous. Tension rises in America. Incomes fall, foreclosures rise, jobs go east, police powers increase, trust in government evaporates, and expectations for the future decline. An unfocused edginess germinates. It is not a recipe for domestic tranquility…

The response of whites to riots by blacks has always been to back away. This prudence, as it is thought to be, has been enforced by the government…

A spring is being wound.”  Fred Reed

 

 

“A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He's pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They're too busy taping it on their smartphones. That's how we heard their laughter.

The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonalds beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: ‘flash robs.’…

Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She's the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience…

There is the General Services Administration scandal. An agency devoted to efficiency is outed as an agency of mindless bread-and-circuses indulgence. They had a four-day regional conference in Las Vegas, with clowns and mind readers…

Only a generation ago, earnest, tidy government bureaucrats were spoofed as drudges and drones [zombies]. Not anymore. Now they're way cool. Immature, selfish and vain, but way cool…

There is the Secret Service scandal. That one broke through too, and you know the facts: overseas to guard the president, sent home for drinking, partying, picking up prostitutes. What's terrible about this story is that for anyone who's ever seen the Secret Service up close it's impossible to believe. The Secret Service are the best of the best…

This week I saw a picture of agents in Colombia. They were in T-shirts, wrinkled khakis and sneakers. They looked like a bunch of mooks, like slobs, like children with muscles…the journalistic story of the week, the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish pictures of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who smilingly posed with the bloody body parts of suicide bombers…

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they? And again, these are only from the past week. The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective. Something seems to be going terribly wrong.“  Peggy Noonan 

 

Peggy Noonan says it all

Submitted by Roanman on Mon, 05/03/2010 - 16:31

Reading on a Saturday Morning

Submitted by Roanman on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 11:22

 

As far as I'm concerned, Peggy Noonan is one of the finest writers in America.

I make my son read her editorials in the Wall Street Journal (he hates it) ... (I don't care).

Here's her analysis of what went wrong with the mortgage market.

Click anywhere below to get the entire piece.

 

You, for political reasons, both Republicans and Democrats, finagled the mortgage system so that people who make, like, zero dollars a year were given mortgages for $600,000 houses.

You got to run around and crow about how under your watch everyone became a homeowner.

You shook down the taxpayer and hoped for the best. 

"Democrats did it because they thought it would make everyone Democrats:

'Look what I give you!'

Republicans did it because they thought it would make everyone Republicans:

'I'm a homeowner, I've got a stake, don't raise my property taxes, get off my lawn!'

And Wall Street?

We went to town, baby.

We bundled the mortgages and sold them to fools, or we held them, called them assets, and made believe everyone would pay their mortgage.

As if we cared.

We invented financial instruments so complicated no one, even the people who sold them, understood what they were.

"You're finaglers and we're finaglers.

I play for dollars, you play for votes.

In our own ways we're all thieves.

We would be called desperadoes if we weren't so boring, so utterly banal in our soft-jawed, full-jowled selfishness.

If there were any justice, we'd be forced to duel, with the peasants of America holding our cloaks.

Only we'd both make sure we missed, wouldn't we?"

 

I think that just about covers it.

 

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