By Patrick J. Buchanan

Having lost both houses of Congress and the White House in two straight elections, Republicans are going through an identity crisis, its leaders holding town hall meetings to “listen” to the people.

“What should we focus on? Should we drop the social issues? How do we get the young people back?”

Such angst and soul-searching is not the mark of the leader, but the mark of a man suffering from doubt and despair.

Why is the party in trouble? Simple. Dubya got a hold of the keys, got high on neocon hooch, and crashed and rolled the family SUV.

He launched an unnecessary war against a country that had not attacked us. With his utopian No Child Left Behind scheme and his Medicare drug plan, he did his passable imitation of LBJ, and blew a hole in the budget.

Touting globalism, he presided over the loss of one in every four U.S. manufacturing jobs and ran up $5 trillion in trade deficits. He refused to defend the Mexican border against an invasion, then pushed an amnesty for the invaders.

This was no Reaganite. This was the neocons’ apprentice.

How does the party reconnect with Middle America? How does it win back the Reagan Democrats who went home disgusted?

Become again the party of Frank Ricci.

And who is Frank Ricci?

He is a fireman in New Haven, Conn., with 11 years in the department, who suffers from dyslexia, but nonetheless has pursued his dream of becoming a lieutenant and a captain.

Six months before the promotion test, Ricci quit his second job. He bought $1,000 worth of the textbooks he was told to study, had a friend read them onto tapes to compensate for his dyslexia, studied every spare hour he got, and sat for the test, to compete for one of eight lieutenant slots open.

Frank made it. Frank Ricci came in sixth.

It was after the results of the test were made known that the problems arose. For, of the officers who had made the cut, all were white, except for one Latino.

Concluding the test results would, if used by the department, have an “adverse impact” on the black community, New Haven tossed out the results and called for new exams to ensure a “fair” outcome.

Thus, because he is a white man whose people came from Italy, Frank Ricci is to be denied a promotion he worked for and won, and be robbed of his American dream by the liberal bigots who run New Haven.

Had Frank Ricci and half of the other top performers been black, all would be on their way to becoming lieutenants and captains.

What is being done to Frank Ricci is exactly what was done to black folks for decades. Great black ballplayers who might have become legends like DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig never got the chance because they were black. Black students were denied admission to prep schools, colleges and military academies because of their color.

Now, what was done to them is being done to white folks. And it is just as wrong as it was then.

In 21st century America, race discrimination endures.

All we have done is switch the color of the victims with the color of the beneficiaries. Today it is white males applying for jobs and promotions as cops, firemen, government workers, who are held back because their color does not comport with the desired “diversity.”

What New Haven has done to Frank Ricci is like the U.S. Olympic Committee throwing out all the trial heat results in the 100- and 200-meter races because not a single white runner qualified.

New Haven contends the “disparate impact” of the test hurts the black community, proving discrimination. But does the relative absence of blacks in the National Hockey League prove discrimination?

If the Republican Party wants a future, it will become again the party that stands on the principle that “No discrimination means no discrimination,” that stands with the victims of state bigotry, and that stands up to hypocrites like the Jim Crow liberals of New Haven.

Affirmative action began as a mandate to cast a wider net and ensure all had an equal shot. It has become a mighty engine of state injustice that seeks to remedy the consequences of past racial sins and crimes, by committing new ones.

In Michigan, Washington and California, none of them red states, majorities have voted to abolish affirmative action. Only Colorado failed in a dead heat last fall. A Republican drive to write into federal law an end to all race and gender preferences, as well as to all race and gender discrimination, is a cause whose time has come.

This is a winning issue for the GOP, for it is rooted in principle and comports with what is written on the human heart. Down deep, even liberals know that what is being done to Frank Ricci is not right.

http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-jim-crow-liberalism-1524

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1983 300D

Wow. Those poor defenseless white people. Gee, I hope they don't lynch him.

Leave it to Pat Buchanan to find an offensive way to make a legitimate point. What happened to Frank Ricci is wrong, but it is also wrong to claim that his grievance compares to what this country did to black people during the days of Jim Crow.

Cases like Mr. Ricci's should give everybody reason to pause, but as a white American male, I don't feel as if I am part of an oppressed group. If you look at it strictly from the standpoint of economic opportunity, I hit the lottery when I was born a white male in this country.

I hope Mr. Ricci gets some sort of justice, but his misfortune should not be used as an excuse to abandon efforts to help level the playing field. IMHO.

Exactly.

Thanks to the advances made by the Civil Rights movement, minorities like Conneticutt White People will find they now have the opportunity to seek redress of their grievances in court. It beats being tied to a tree and whipped any day.

Typical liberal response. To hell with standards, just as long as pollitical correctness rules.

Hopefully the "affirmatively" selected officials will be capable of doing their jobs effectively and there will be no negative consequences from their substandard attributes.

- Peter.

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Yes, we can only hope that an oppressed minority like New England White People will be able to succeed inspite of the horrendous deck that is stacked against them. Godspeed.

Hah! Payback's a b*tch!

As a minority student who was denied acceptance to college of my choice because of my race I'd jump at the opportunity to take a bite out of white privelege. It is, however, not the right thing to do, and as much as I symphathize with the position of many Black folk, you play by the rules if you want to live in a nation of laws.

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

Qualified whites may have more percieved privleges than minorities (arguable), but don't think that this "It beats being tied to a tree and whipped any day." did not happen in large numbers to endentured servants during the early days of our country. Endentured servants, mostly white Irish, Scottish and English were treated harsher than slaves during the height of this practice and had a somewhat higher mortality rate. Most holders of endebtedness tended to "use up" the endentured servant as they knew that the time they had use of this labor was finite. Slaves were viewed as long term investments and treated a little better. DON'T GET ME WRONG: BOTH WERE HORRIBLE MARKS ON OUR SOCIETY. Just illustrating a point how it has been the poor or the powerless in our society that have been taken advantage of. Fast forward to around the late 1800s and find the descendants of those same indentured servants being fiscally enslaved to the coal companies mining in the Appalachians. It has happened with many of the ethnic groups that come here: Chinese and the railroads, Irish and the Union Army, Italians, etc. Those who are disadvantaged and poor, while attempting to pull themselves up the economic ladder are often put in bad situations in order to make a living. Not slavery exactly, but when you cannot get ahead because you owe all your wages to the company store and live in company housing, you really are not free....

What are you talking about? I didn't say anything remotely like that. As I already said (you might have been reading too quickly to notice) what happened to those firefighters is wrong, but that does not mean that we can ignore the disadvantages certain groups have in our economy. I don't know the answer, but it has little to do with political correctness.I agree with that, but I don't see how it's going to happen in that specific case. It's a bad situation.

That is true. In Pennsylvania, for example, Irish and Polish immigrant coal miners were essentially slaves to the coal companies until the unions came along. But that is not the complete picture. In addition to giving so many advantages to the wealthy, our country also had an official policy of race discrimination, regardless of wealth. Just saying.

true. include in that various degrees of "whiteness" Irish, Polish, Italian, East Europeans were thought of as lesser peoples than the original English settlers... No defacto Jim Crow for them, but a myriad of schemes and such to keep them disadvantaged and thus, a cheap labor pool. we have sort of legislated that out of existance here now (sort of), hence the strong interest in Mexican labor......

That's fine, so long as the playing field is level. It's closer to level than it used to be, but it's not there yet. Until it is, some government intervention is needed, just not the sort of government intervention they had in Connecticut.

Is it possible to agree that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, and will not be tolerated?

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

Yeah.

I think, however, that some people argue that the test was discriminatory. ie., the playing field is level, hence a fair test should produce fair results, and that the proportionality should be congruent from test to result.

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman