Ryan’s Racist? Then Which Dem Isn’t?

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

daniel-patrick-moynihanThis particular story really pissed me off, Save Jerseyans, which is really saying something since I’m pretty much immune to most liberal idiocy from covering it on a daily basis. There are still exceptions.

On William Bennett’s Morning in America radio talk show last week, a program where the former education secretary and drug czar focuses heavily on cultural issues, Rep. Paul Ryan appeared as a guest (he used to be Bennett’s intern back in the day) and matter-of-factly cited the “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value of work,” as serious problem for the country.

Uncontroversial? Sure. But for a political party that thrives on exploiting -isms, Ryan’s candor presented an irresistible opportunity for partisan-motivated race-baiting…

Paterson Mayor Jeff Jones was among those lazily lambasting the former Vice Presidential candidate for simply stating something that’s obvious… even to most Democrats.

Check out this excerpt from an October 2010 NYT piece published in the middle of the Great Recession’s jobless fallout, a piece which discusses a new lease on life for the socio-economic scholarship of a liberal lion, the late great U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY):

Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.

Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.

The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

Or how about these excerpts from two separate Barack Obama speeches:

“In troubled neighborhoods all across this country—many of them heavily African American—too few of our citizens have role models to guide them.”

“We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households…. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.”

“We know young black men are twice as likely as young white men to be ‘disconnected’—not in school, not working.”

So if Paul Ryan’s a racist on the basis of what he said to Bill Bennett, then Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, and yes, Barack Obama, are or were all racists, too, right?

Is Mayor Jones really offended by what Paul Ryan said? Or is his simply taking advantage of an opportunity to attack a prominent Republican?

All men are undoubtedly created equal, but only a fool believes the popularized liberal lie that all cultures are of equal value. Anyone who’s visited the Middle East and observed how women are degraded and religion is weaponized could tell you that without batting an eye

. The urban rap culture is actually an anti-culture, encouraging violence, irresponsibility, defeatism, victimization, gender descrimination, disrespect for anchor institutions and, ultimately, a disturbing trend of self-segregation which serves to prevent the next generation of urban children from attaining social mobility.

The contemporary Democrat Party’s only solution? Unimaginatively raise taxes to throw more money at the problem, a non-strategy which they passionately defend despite the fact that we’re already spending well-over $20,000 per student, per year, in New Jersey’s most distressed school districts.

Again, only a fool would think the solution has nothing to do with culture.

Free advice to the Mayor of Paterson: he should enter into a dialogue with Rep. Ryan instead of engaging in the endlessly counter-productive cycle of name-calling and boorish demagoguery which liberals typically inject into this debate to everyone’s detriment. Still, I won’t hold my breath waiting for his personal growth to catch up with reality.

 

Matt Rooney
About Matt Rooney 8404 Articles
MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com's founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of 'The Matt Rooney Show' on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.

6 Comments

  1. These accusation stick so well because one cannot prove a negative, and because we are drilled by public schools to have a knee-jerk reaction to them. And the percentage of people immune to this reaction is dwindling with every generation…

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