Michelle Obama gave a speech to the NAACP yesterday. She cited tragic statistics about the African American community and the speech was televised.
Meanwhile, Mel Gibson is all over the "news" with audio clips adding nothing but crap to the racial discourse here.
In the same news cycle, Bill O'Reilly made a speech on his show about the first lady, wherein he dissected the African American community in a three minute segment. It appeared on Fox on July 13th.
Bill O'Reilly is pretty much Irish America to the American television public. It's a sick joke, but he's some kind of O'-bearing Max Headron to people. He's the big O' that gets more zombies than other talking heads.
To rebutt Obama, O'Reilly tore into statistics about African American men and crime. He gave no context. He said nothing about the destruction of affluent Black neighborhoods in the 1950s when jobs were exported offshore. Within a generation of joblessness, Black affluence was a forgotten memory, and strong Black communities were disintegrating to drugs, violence and the kind of thing you see in Limerick today.
His tone was sickeningly condescending. His face was contorted to show his contempt. He was just disrespectful, and it's not good for us.
O'Reilly's numbers and his criticism of failed social policies in the 1960s are what everyone is talking about. There's nothing new in his spiel. He said nothing about the big waste of social resources on prisons, war, military, nation-building and bank bailouts that could have been better spent in America to create the model society every generation before us had strived to build. That would have been new. Instead we just accept the mis-spending that left so much urban infrastructure and so many communities in ruins.
O'Reilly must chalk everything up to self-reliance, because his pay-masters would never let him tell us that we're wasting far more money on the rich and their wars than on the Blacks and their schools.
If urban Black populations do not find good work, then Michelle Obama's statistics and the ones Bill O'Reilly cited will change little. Our policies promote job flight.
We mis-spend our national resources. We legislate in favor of corporations, while undermining our national industry.
Bill O'Reilly doesn't talk about that. He talks about culture wars that make Irish American males look like racially insensitive pinheads.
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