THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE

Earlier this month, Dallas County Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield (who happens to be white) ended up in hot water because he complained that the central collections office had become a black hole, where paperwork often seemed to vanish. Black colleagues, Commissioner John Wiley Price and Judge Thomas Jones, immediately pounced on the unfortunate Mr. Mayfield, objecting to the term "black hole" and demanding an apology for the "racially insensitive" comment.

I don't know about you, but if I were as illiterate as Commissioner Price and Judge Jones, the very last thing I'd want to do is open my mouth and let people know it!

Yet it seems there's no lack of ignoramuses ready and willing to make public spectacles of themselves.

For years, certain people have made lucrative careers out of exploiting such ignorance and promoting racial turmoil in this country. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright spring immediately to mind.

Ironically, such men exploit racial issues under the guise of working for civil rights and racial equality.

Men like Jackson, Sharpton and Wright have exploited everything from an employer not having as many blacks on his payroll as they think is appropriate (I think we've all heard about Jesse Jackson's shakedowns.), to deliberately misdefining perfectly appropriate English vocabulary words, to accusing the United States government of "creating the AIDS virus" in order to kill blacks.

Why? To keep their own careers afloat and make sure the issue of race is never laid to rest in this country.

The Don Imus incident is an excellent example of such exploitation. Last year, Imus was canned for referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed ho's".

Certainly, the remark was tasteless and no one in their right mind would commend Imus, but very few people would even have heard the remark had it simply been shrugged off as the nonsensical gibber of a shock jock. However, thanks to the conscientious efforts of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Imus' remarks were broadcast to the entire nation and his radio show canceled—after Sharpton and Jackson met with CBS President/CEO Les Moonves. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Such deliberate exploitation of racial slurs, both real and imagined, has resulted in a thought-police mentality. We labor under the burden of political correctness and have been forced to choose our words ever-so-carefully—not to more adequately express our thoughts and ideas, but so as not to offend the ignoramuses among us.

Such tyranny is directly responsible for the incident that took place in Dallas and an earlier incident in Washington, DC.

The DC mayor's unfortunate aide, David Howard, was forced to resign after he used the word "niggardly" in a discussion over budget problems. Do you remember that one? Marshall Brown, one of Howard's coworkers, in an amazing display of ignorance, objected to the use of the word "niggardly", insisting that it was a racial slur.

Wouldn't it have been refreshing if, rather than accept his aide's resignation, the mayor would have grown a pair and gifted the ignorant Mr. Brown with a dictionary of the English language?

Alas, such an appropriate response to such obvious ignorance is only the stuff of daydreams.

This nation will never move past the race issue as long as people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright make careers out of exploiting such gross ignorance.

© 2008 by Libbi Adams. All rights reserved.

GUNS AND RELIGION

When he thought we weren't listening, Barack Hussein Obama made the amateurish mistake of bad-mouthing Pennsylvanians behind their backs in a speech he gave at a private fundraiser in San Francisco.

Apparently, Obama didn't think any of his elitist friends would rat him out or, if they did, that we folks here in darkest Pennsylvania would be too busy clinging to our guns and religion to bother to turn on our TVs.

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns and religion or to antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigration sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Such condescending tripe!

It's clear that despite the time he spent campaigning in Pennsylvania, Obama has absolutely no understanding of what makes the people of this state tick. Though he "helped feed a baby cow" (Hint to Obama campaign: It's called a "calf".) in State College, raised a glass with some locals in Burnham, and bowled in Altoona, he badly misinterpreted the views of his hosts.

Obama views the world through the prism of "black liberation theology" which he adopted while sitting under Pastor Jeremiah Wright's racist ranting for 20 years. In Obama's narrow world-view, religion is the opiate of the masses (Hmmm… now where have I heard that one before…?) and there is no legitimate reason for owning a gun.

Heads up, Obama! I'm going to clue you in on a few things about Pennsylvanians.

Pennsylvanians are not "anti-immigration". A great many of us are descended from German immigrants. However, we are anti-ILLEGAL immigration! There's a world of difference. We believe in enforcing federal immigration laws. If you enter this country legally, we'll welcome you. If you sneak across the border and then continue to break our laws, we'll arrest you and try our darnedest to have you deported.

We do not "cling" to our religion out of a sense of desperation. Hard as it may be for you to accept, some folks actually believe in God and attend church to worship Him! Now, I understand how difficult that might be for you to understand, since you have no clue what Christianity is really about and attend church only as a social exercise.

Neither do we "cling" to our guns. We enjoy owning guns. We use them to target-practice at the many sportsmen's clubs and pistol clubs in the region and to participate in our state's numerous legal hunting seasons.
As for those jobs that "have been gone for 25 years", they've been replaced by other jobs. We haven't been sitting around on our duffs collecting welfare for generations, like the folks back home in Chicago. We're working, Obama, not looking for handouts! We take pride in our work and don't appreciate it when people look down their noses at us.

Steve Reed, Mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, commented, "We think they [small towns] are the bedrock of the American values that have built this nation..."
Absolutely!

Senator Obama, if you want my vote, you'd do well to expand that narrow mind of yours beyond your warped view of the world and take a look at how the hard-working American middle class really feels about the issues confronting us.

© 2008 by Libbi Adams. All rights reserved.

THE WAR ON THE CELL PHONE

So what is it about the use of cell phones that seems to bother some people?

First, there was a campaign to ban the use of cell phones while driving. While I agree that safe driving requires two hands on the steering wheel—at least, most of the time, I see no reason to designate the cell phone as the root of all evil.

Why not campaign to ban CD players in cars? Fiddling with CDs is at least as dangerous as using a cell phone! And what about eating? Doesn't munching a burger while driving qualify as dangerous behavior? Apparently not. In the eyes of the zealots, only the cell phone qualifies as a distraction while driving.

So legislation was passed and we all bought Bluetooth devices, but did that satisfy the zealots? Not on your life! They then pointed to studies that indicate it isn't the use of cell phones that creates the distraction, but the conversation itself. According to the zealots, only conversations conducted on cell phones, whether hands-free or not, are dangerous. Conversations with real, live people sitting in the car create no distraction. Go figure. And so we were encouraged not to use even our hands-free devises while driving.

An aside to the zealots: As a cell phone user and mother of two, I can assure you that no distraction can compare to a couple of pre-schoolers yammering in the back seat. Now go ahead and campaign to outlaw that!

Now that the zealots have made their point and have relentlessly hammered into the general public the notion that cell phone use while driving is a cardinal sin, they'll go away and leave us alone, right?

Of course not, you fool! Now they've begun a campaign to convince us that the mere use of a cell phone anywhere, even outside a motor vehicle, will result in brain tumors. They want us to believe we will all suffer gruesome deaths at a young age because we have embraced modern technology.

The story of the cell phone-brain tumor connection is slowly catching on, having been reported, re-reported and re-re-reported by a number of news outlets. After it takes off, what will the zealots attack next?

Our computer keyboards, of course! During the course of the past several weeks, I have heard no less than a half-dozen news reports detailing how many germs have set up residence on my keyboard, waiting to strike me down with some dire illness. Why, according to the zealots, the keyboard I'm now using contains more bacteria than my toilet! If we don't stop using our computers immediately, a contagion will arise that may wipe humanity off the face of the earth!

I'm waiting with bated breath for the reports that are sure to follow which prove that video gaming causes cancer.

Don't you get tired of all these half-baked so-called "studies"? And don't you wonder who funds them? And to what purpose?

Perhaps the folks who keep warning us of the dire consequences of using modern technology are in cahoots with the global warming nuts who want us to revert to our pioneer past.

I have a word of advice for them: Get a life!

© 2008 by Libbi Adams. All rights reserved.