Liberal College Kid

While roaming around the web, hitting up all of the most popular political commentary magazines and sites, you may notice a growing trend. More and more, you’ll find articles and opinion pieces that have titles written in question form. For example, these are some just from this week:

• “Is voter turnout better than ever?” (Slate)
• “Are Bush’s Tax Cut’s dead?” (Slate)
• “Was Irene Nemirovsky an Anti-Semite?” (Salon)
• “Is the Dem’s Fox News Boycott Over?” (Salon)
• “Iraq: Dem’s Dream Dashed?” (Mother Jones)
• “Obama, ‘Establishment’ Candidate?” (New Republic)

Now, some of the articles, posts, and opinions that fall into this category are definitely worth reading. Sometimes they are very informative or insightful. But their titles alone often say something about their contents’ substance, namely, “get ready for some speculation.”

Most of these pieces are simply the author playing around with some idea that he or she thinks is novel and original, especially if this idea contradicts what most people believe. In “Are Bush’s Tax Cuts Dead?“, (subtitled “Does McCain’s Victory Doom Them?”) Daniel Gross strings out a long line of hypothetical scenarios and less than concrete assumptions to reach the conclusion that the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire in 2010, will not become permanent. In reality, there is no way of knowing this. True, McCain did vote against the measures when they were first before the Senate (twice, in fact), but Gross assumes that he is lying now when he says he’ll make them permanent, or that even if he is not lying, McCain will see the fiscal irresponsibility of them once in the presidency. He points out that any Republican will be facing a Democratic Congress, as if this changes much of anything. The current crop of Democrats we now enjoy have no problem rolling over for Bush, why not McCain or Romney? Now, what Gross posits could happen; its not entirely unlikely. But there is no way to accurately predict something like this, especially so far in advance, so why bother?

Another kind of question-form-headline is one in which the author is reacting to some recently made claim, again, usually one that doesn’t fit into preconceived notions. For example, the New Republic post, “Obama, ‘Establishment’ Candidate?” Those of us that are familiar with the TNR know that they are generally a right-leaning publication. This particular post is merely referring to a statement made by Mark Penn (of the Clinton campaign) that Obama, rather than Clinton, is the real establishment candidate. But rather than title the post, “Mark Penn Calls Obama the ‘Establishment’ Candidate,” the author or the site’s editor decided to turn it into a seemingly provocative question. Normally, I probably would have never even hit that link, having assumed that this was just another speculative piece like the one mentioned above, just from the title alone. It’s far more interesting, to me, that Mark Penn is trying to manipulate Obama’s image in favor of Clinton’s than it is if some writer is doing it just as some sort of academic exercise, so why not allude to the real story in the title itself?

In general, I think that when you decide to present your piece in question form, it makes your ideas seem weak and unfounded, and frankly, it makes me want nothing to do with them. If you really do believe that voter turn out is better than ever, just say so, and try to prove your case with some hard facts. It’s almost as if the authors of this kind of article or post want to make a point without actually taking on the responsibility for the conclusions it reaches. It allows them to make speculations that are not necessarily grounded in any truth and get away with it. If they turn out to be wildly wrong or end up offending someone (as in the one of the articles listed above), all they have to say is, “Hey, I was just asking a question,” and suddenly it’s as if they do not need to be held accountable for their work and its implications. It’s just a form of cowardice, one that, it seems to me, is becoming more and more prevalent.

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Updated: I’ve been thinking about this some more since I published this post, and I believe I failed to note an important distinction. The articles that I am specifically referring to here are usually ones that have a “closed-ended” question format, like all of them listed above. In these pieces, there can only be a “yes” or “no” answer, and almost all of the time, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to actually answer them. Yet, the author almost always does have an answer, but would rather not just state it plainly in the title for lack of hard evidence. In this way, the author is merely positing a theory that might not be able to be fully defended, and skirting their responsibility for making it. On the other hand, “open-ended” questions are a different story. For example, Slate regularly posts a column called “The Explainer,” many editions of which are titled in question format. But the questions are on topics such as, “How Do You Learn a Dead Language?” and “What Do the Cops Have On Me?”. These are things most people have wondered about, and “The Explainer” is very good at enlightening the reader. There is nothing wrong with articles like those. Sorry for the oversight, and I hope I cleared up this admittedly somewhat confusing post.

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On Friday the Washington Post published its biweekly column by Michael Gerson, this time titled “Democrats in Denial.” Before we discuss the basis of the article and the claims made within it, a little about Michael Gerson himself.

Gerson is a former senior policy adviser to the Heritage Foundation, an important and influential conservative think tank. He left that position in 1999 at the bidding of Karl Rove who thought that Gerson would be a nice addition to the presidential campaign for George W. Bush. After Bush was elected, Gerson became one of his speech writers and eventually became the head of the White House speech writing group. If anyone were to doubt the effect that his work has had on the rhetoric and political language of the current time, they would only need reminded that, according to Gerson himself, he was the originator of the “smoking gun - mushroom cloud” image, the term “axis of evil” and that he was one of the most prolific speech writers for Bush (it should be mentioned that other White House speech writers have accused Gerson of exaggerating his contributions, although the point is that even if he did not come up with all of the memorable lines of this administration, he desires to have people believe that he did - which may be even more revealing). In 2006 Gerson left the White House, wrote for a time at Newsweek, and ultimately was given a column at the Washington Post.

Now that we are familiar with Gerson’s past and his obvious interests in defending the actions of the administration, policies that he himself helped persuade the American public to accept, let’s look at some of the claims made in his latest piece.

The mood of this article strongly suggests that it is a reaction to the events in Iowa last night; specifically, that such an overwhelming amount of independents and even Republicans came out to participate in the Democratic caucuses. Gerson seems angry about this, and would like to convince us that most of the platforms of the Democratic candidates are no better - in fact, much worse - than those of the Bush administration. First he takes on the Iraq war. Again, let’s keep in mind the “smoking gun - mushroom cloud” metaphor that convinced the world that the war was justified in the first place, a metaphor that proved to be meaningless.

Gerson says:

“In Iraq, coalition casualties are down significantly, along with Iraqi civilian casualties, roadside bombings and suicide attacks. Large sections of Baghdad have been pacified, and the military rolls toward Mosul. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is in reeling retreat. And, most impressive, we have seen the first example of a large-scale Sunni Arab uprising against Islamic extremism. By one estimate, 30,000 former insurgents and tribal leaders are now fighting the enemy in Iraq, adding their surge to our own.

This progress is reversible, especially while Moqtada al-Sadr’s militias maintain the capability to mount their own mini-Tet Offensive. But Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy has succeeded with disorienting speed. Its combination of vision and competence will fill chapters in military textbooks.”

If the statistics Gerson is referring to are assumed to be accurate (this administration has been less than competent in compiling accurate numbers, especially in respect to the war where they have bet so much of their credibility. A key phrase here is “by one estimate” - almost certainly the highest estimate), then they do reflect that the surge may be working. And this is, at the risk of stepping out of the holy party line, a very good thing. We can debate the merits of the war as a whole, whether or not it should have happened in the first place, but if the surge is working, and therefore fewer Americans and innocent Iraqi’s are losing their lives, it should be congratulated. In this case, partisanship is not only irrelevant, it’s irresponsible. However, Gerson’s characterization of the surge as having worked with “disorienting speed” is an obvious exaggeration meant to insinuate that Petraeus completely blew everyone’s expectations out of the water. I also highly doubt that it will appear in future military textbooks. He wants us to believe that this has been one of the most impressive military undertakings in history, a claim that is almost laughable.

Next, Gerson says:

“In spite of these gains, Democratic presidential candidates still insist on reckless timetables for withdrawal — the surest way to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory.”

One wonders how closely Gerson has actually listened to the Democratic Candidates. Now that the race has effectively been reduced to Obama and Clinton, with moderate hopes left for Edwards, only one of the candidates has pledged to pull out all combat forces by 2013 (Edwards). Surely, both Obama and Clinton would like the war to be over, and they would definitely take whatever measures necessary to achieve these goals. But no matter how politically advantageous it is for any of them to claim they will end the war immediately (which they really have not anyway), they all know that a complete, and in Gerson’s words, reckless immediate withdrawal would indeed probably be a bad idea, and none of them would actually do it.

So far, the column is nothing too spectacular, embodying what most people on the right and definitely everyone inside the White House already thinks. But then he turns his attention to education and the Orwellian No Child Left Behind.

“Democratic rhetoric on education is also an assault on reality. Attacking No Child Left Behind is a reliable campaign applause line — Hillary Clinton promises to “end” the law, because it is “just not working.” Actually, the imposition of educational standards and testing has improved math and reading scores and begun narrowing the gap between disadvantaged and affluent students.”

While Gerson is very correct that attacking the law is a great platform for a campaign, he reveals in this statement more than he means to. Why is it, I would like to ask him, that so many people feel so passionately against No Child Left Behind? Gerson condescends to the nearly the entire American public in his assertion that he knows more about what is or is not working in their own school districts than they do. People are angry about NCLB because they see what it is really doing. It is taking the focus off of real education, the kind that molds students into free thinkers and better members of society and instead concentrating solely on arbitrary test results. If a school fails to meet up to these pointless standards, then they do not get sufficient funding. There is a GLARING logical problem here. Shouldn’t those schools that are not meeting the cut actually receive more funding so that they have a chance of improving their programs? Instead, in the twisted mind of Bush administration members like Gerson, schools that are already disadvantaged and poor (a subject that requires an entire look of its own) are punished and their students are, well, there’s no other term for it other than “left behind,” hence the Orwellian, call it exactly what it is not, sense of the program. In addition, it would be nice if Gerson would provide us with some of the data that he interprets as showing that the gap between rich and poor (sorry, “disadvantaged and affluent”) students is closing. Surely, these incredible findings should be on the front page of every major newspaper, since they directly contradict what any respectable social scientist has found lately.

“There is an angry backlash against NCLB among some Democratic interest groups. Suburban districts resent being labeled as failures just because some minority and disabled children aren’t making progress. But that is the whole purpose of the law — to prevent districts from hiding the poor performance of minorities behind the success of other students. Such districts should feel less resentment and more shame.”

I kid you not, I gasped when I read these sentences. This, above anything else Gerson posits in this piece, is shocking. He doesn’t even make an attempt to conceal his racism. Disabled children?! School districts should be ASHAMED that their disabled students are not meeting up to George Bush’s standards?! No, Mr. Gerson, YOU are the one who should feel shame.

Whether it is intentional or not (and I would bet that at some level, it is), the real result of education policies like No Child Left Behind is to form students into the kind of intellectually numb, power yielding adults that fit so well into the corporate world, where idiotic targets and goals are now the norm as well. And those schools who do not mold enough of their students into this picture will simply have to fend for themselves. It has resulted in many schools being forced to abandon many of their usual and time tested curricula and only teach “to the test” in order to ensure that they don’t fall short. A shocking number of students entering college are entirely unprepared for the sort of real challenges that await them, because they will be required to actually think once in a while.

Gerson accuses the Democratic presidential candidates of being out of touch with reality. But obviously it is he who has become so indoctrinated with the Bush-world view, having spent many years shoving it down the American public’s throat, that he can no longer see reality. The policies that he helped articulate for the president are, in his mind, beyond scrutiny, even as their blatant failures are becoming obvious throughout the country and the world. Now that there is good evidence that the Democratic party is stronger than it has been in a very long time, Gerson and others like him will scramble to find reasons why they are not to be trusted and are incompetent liars. But the public is sick of the nonsense that is constantly spewed by the administration, and many of them can feel at a visceral level and see at a intellectual one that there is in fact substance to what the Democrats are saying. They are finding a vision that has been completely absent in the current administration. And when one of them is elected as president, Gerson is going to have to finally pull himself out of his own denial and myopia and see that it was partly his own fault, with his glaring lies and misconceptions, that the Democrats are back in power.

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The Pakistan People’s Party, formerly headed by Benazir Bhutto, will be lead following her recent assassination by both her son and husband. Her son, Bilawal, age 19, is currently a student at Oxford and will be the full time leader of the party after he completes his studies. In the interim, Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, will apparently hold most of the leadership powers.

It is not difficult to see why the succession of power has fallen to relatives of Benazir Bhutto. Her father was the founder of the party, and this latest move is a tactic aimed at preserving its dynastic qualities. During the press conference announcing the succession it was revealed that Bhutto herself wished that control of the party be given to her husband and son. Bhutto was arguably the most popular political figure in Pakistan; allowing her husband and son to take control is an effort to transfer her popularity onto people who are seen as having been close to her, and therefore likely to embody the ideals that she stood for. This method will most likely work, at least in the short term. However, one could question the logic of allowing someone as young as Bilawal to take control of a party that has such a profound influence on politics in Pakistan. I suspect that the move is more symbolic than anything else. I’m sure that Bilawal is a highly intelligent person. Simply by virtue of having as tremendous a mother as Bhutto, he is also likely to have a relatively firm grasp on world and Pakistani politics. But not only is he young and inexperienced, very soon he will also be absent. How will the common member of the Pakistan People’s Party feel about him going back to Oxford to finish studying,while the events unfolding in their own country are so volatile? Isn’t the current situation there more than enough for him to take a leave of absence in order to stand next to his countrymen and fellow party members? If not, then the leadership of the party should be bestowed onto someone else. Surely, whoever assumes this role is in a great amount of danger - as made painfully obvious by Bhutto’s highly public assassination. But they should follow her lead and refuse to back down in the face of peril.

On a related note, Bilawal and Mr. Bhutto Zardari have expressed that they will not except any conclusions made about Bhutto’s death that are the result of a Musharraf-backed inquiry. Instead, they would like the UN to take on the task of investigating her assassination through an international effort. If the statements made by Musharraf’s government are any indication of how a further investigation might look, then Bhutto’s successors are completely justified in not trusting a domestic inquiry into her death. It seems there have already been three theories of her death given by Musharraf officials(She was shot. Wait, the bullets missed but she was killed in the explosion. Wait, she was killed when she hit her head off her sunroof and her skull was cracked). Although a United Nations investigation will undoubtedly be more objective than one could possibly be if run by the Pakistani government, the truth is that the real answers will probably never be known or made public. Of course, Al Qaeda will be blamed despite little evidence pointing to their involvement and despite the fact that Bhutto herself warned that should anything happen to her, Musharraf’s own security forces would be the likely culprits. We must all question the official explanations given by Pakistan’s government and our own, and ask if certain conclusions are more beneficial to them than other more unsettling ones. More than forty years later we are still debating the specifics of the Kennedy assassination (which was also caught on tape and witnessed by scores of people). Sadly, Bhutto’s death is likely to receive the same fate and be shrouded in historical ambiguity.

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The New York Times ran a story today spotlighting the slow march away from abstinence only education. The article reported that birthrates in American teenagers has been steadily falling since 1991 but that the state of Texas has seen the smallest decline despite receiving the most money for abstinence only education. This, in a nutshell, explains the absolute absurdity of abstinence only education.

If a teenager wants to wait to have sex before they get married, great. Good for them, it’s nice to see the youth of America having principles and sticking to their guns when these principles are called into question. Why on earth, though, would we want our federal government to have a policy stipulating that kids can’t have a real sex education class (I would challenge anyone to show me how abstinence only education can actually be considered educational) in school? Let’s face it most kids don’t want to go to their parents to talk about sex and most parents feel equally as awkward having the birds and the bees talk with junior.

Kids aren’t going to decide to have sex simply because they know how to do it safely. That’s the biggest flaw in the AO argument. It’s as if AO proponents fear that by telling kids how STD’s are contracted and how to use a condom correctly or what other means of birth control are available the students will run out and start shacking-up as soon as class gets out. Have a little more faith in your kids America. If a child is staying abstinent for moral reasons then telling he or she how to put on a condom shouldn’t change that. However by not teaching a child who has no intent on saving it until marriage how to have safe sex you’re not only doing huge disservice to the child but you’re also burdening your community with undue healthcare and social service costs which will come from the unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. A condom is a lot cheaper than maternity care for an uninsured woman.

I have no problem with including an abstinence portion included in a more rounded sex education. After all, the only 100% surefire way not to contract a sexually transmitted disease or to get pregnant is by not having sex in the first place and teens should know that condoms don’t work every single time. This mentality that if we only talk about abstinence with our children then they won’t have sex before marriage (or before they’re ready) is ridiculous. We need to stop being a nation of ostriches in give teenagers the information they need in order to be healthy.

After all this is NOT a moral issue, it’s a health issue and the government needs to realize this.

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Former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, along with former Surgeons General C. Everett Koop and David Satcher, testified yesterday that he felt his four year tenure as SG was wasted. Carmona, and the others, said he felt immense political pressure from those in the Bush administration and had his reports censored. Carmona also said that he was not allowed to speak on issues such as “stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues”. That’s just fantastic isn’t it? I mean I know that whenever I go to a doctor and he or she tells me what’s wrong with my body I like to totally disregard what they say and tell them what I think and then follow that up by telling them that they’d better agree with me or else. I mean, medical school. What’s that about? What, do these doctors think that just because they put years and years of education into learning about the human body and diseases that they actually know more than I do?

President Bush is the most powerful man in the world so obviously that makes him the smartest. If he says that abstinence only education is the only proper method of sex ed then I for one believe him. It’s not like we need to have our heads clouded by all this medical information anyway. Carmona and others who complain about the Surgeon General being censored need to calm down. If Bush thinks he needs to overrule a medical professional then he probably has good reason to do so, look how well all his other decisions have turned out.

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As I’m sure you all know by now I had a piece on Sicko, the new film from Michael Moore, appear on our Blogging Network’s main page: Pajamas Media (PJM). You can read the article here. The comments on the article, however, are far more interesting than my little reaction piece.

PJM has a very noticeable slant in most articles and the vast majority of their blogroll are conservative sites. So, I guess it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that my blatant pro-Moore reaction piece to Sicko was so poorly received. Personally, I think it’s great that it got so many of their reader’s upset. My favorite comment was:

“For the reviewer to accept this movie uncritically only shows his ignorance, prejudice, mental laziness, and utter foolishness. The only debate here is why PJM gave him this forum. Perhaps it’s just so we could point and laugh and teach him a lesson. Personally, I’m not laughing. This review, like Moore, is a disgrace.”

The right only wants to read things that validate their own opinions. I suppose we on the left are guilty of this as well but how can there ever be real dialog if only one side of an issue is ever presented. What’s more, of the 39 comments now up in response to the article, the only ones that support my position are my own. Everyone else, even the two or so who said they were progressives, still either didn’t like Michael Moore or think socialized medicine is the worst thing ever. We are so partisan in this country that people can get all of their news from one sole view point and be contented. We no longer value a dissenting view point and our political dialog is lacking because of it.

I hope we see more articles up on PJM from writers on this site. It’s kind of hard to be the only voice of dissent in a forum like that but at least the position has been presented. And so far only one person has brought up my age as being a negative thing, which is nice.

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Our own JB Goodrich has an article up on Pajamas Media about Michael Moore’s new film Sicko which comes out this Friday. You can read it here: http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/06/liberal_college_kid_on_sicko.php

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Scooter Libby was sentenced today to two and a half years in prison for meddling in the C.I.A. leak investigation. While I have every expectation that Libby’s sentence will, in reality, last only 594 days from today – the end of his sentence coinciding, conveniently enough, with the last day that Bush is in the White House- it is nice to see that someone in the administration will be held accountable for its misdeeds. It’s unfortunate that this sentencing will, in no way, reduce the arrogance and holier-than-thou nature of the Bush administration as it has already distanced itself from Libby and casts him as nothing more than a “helper” to the Vice-President. It’s also unfortunate that the Democrats are so busy trying to become President that they will fail to make it clear to the American public exactly what this sentence means- mainly that the Bush White House broke the law while trying to convince the public to invade Iraq. Finally, it’s unfortunate for Libby that he drew the short straw and was anointed the fall guy for the administration. If anyone thinks he was doing anything outside of what he was told to do by Cheney and Bush then they’ve obviously not been paying attention to how this administration operates. Maybe the next 594 days can provide Libby with some much needed free time in which to write him memoirs on his time in the White House and maybe, just maybe, those memoirs (the voice of which will have been influenced by some time in the clink) will reveal who really did what in the Valerie Plame fiasco. I for one would wait outside Barnes & Nobel with the anticipation of a rabid Harry Potter fan to get my hands on a copy of that book.

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I learned two things this morning. The first is that the name of one of the hosts on NPR’s “Morning Edition” is Steve Inskeep and not, as I had always thought Steve Inskee- who knows, maybe the “P” is silent but I swear I’ve never heard it before. The other thing I learned is that, while there is “no doubt that a trend of global warming exists” we don’t need to worry about it. Well hooray for us, that’s a load off of my mind! It sure is good to know that NASA’s top official doesn’t think that global warming is a problem, even though he acknowledges it is occurring. On the aforementioned Morning Edition, Griffin said about global warming “I am not sure that it is fair to say this is a problem we must wrestle with” and went on to say that “to assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change”. Right… so I guess intact polar ice caps and a lack of pollution (including, interestingly enough, coke and pot) in the atmosphere aren’t part of our “optimal client”.

I haven’t done a lot of research on Michael Griffin but I’m assuming (and I realize that with the Bush administration this is taking a HUGE leap of faith) that his previous position wasn’t one which included judging horse shows. The man holds six degrees (okay so I’ve done a little research on the guy), how can anyone with six degrees not think that global worming should be stopped? Is it possible that after you get degree number four any further education dumbs you down? That appears to me to be the only possible explanation because to admit global warming exists and then to say that it’s not a problem feels like a contradiction in terms to me.

At this point I think it’s safe to say that the Bush administration has completely given up on trying to be either A) coherent or B) an asset to the Republican Party in the 2008 elections. Bush has now decided he will save Darfur on his own (something I’m pretty sure Republican’s are against) and he’s also decided to overhaul his environmental policy, and is now floating a few test balloons to see what the country would think if he decided that September is a little too soon to decide if the “surge” is working (probably because he realizes that the “surge” will never work so he figures he can just keep stalling until he’s out of office). I swear I half expect him to call a news conference and emerge with nothing on but and American flag thong to announce his new initiative to declare Crawford, Texas the new capital of the United States. Seriously, I half expect that to happen, that’s how much he’s given up on trying to appear like he knows what he’s doing. It’s almost like Karl Rove fills out policy mad libs every day and then tells Bush what to do based on that alone. I’m pretty sure next week Bush is going to: Buy Canada while wearing a tunic and listening to Peter Frampton’s Greatest Hits. He will then appoint Michael Emerson as Ambassador to Your Mom and watch Silver Spoons for three hours.

In the end though, I guess after the Democrats bent over and grabbed their ankles with the Iraq spending bill last week the Bush administration (and consequently anyone connected to it) realized that they can pretty much do whatever they want and get away with it. Great, good thing everyone went out and voted for a change in 2006, looks like it’s really paying off.

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The Alabama state legislature passed a bill recently which apologizes for the role the state played in slavery. Fantastic. The bill was passed in the House by an unrecorded voice vote. Okay, no worries there. The bill passed in the Senate by a margin of 22-7 with five abstentions… and along party lines. All Republicans in the Senate either abstained from voting or flat out voted against a bill which apologizes for slavery. Are you kidding me? How does anyone not vote in favor or a bill which apologizes for enslaving people?? Are the Republicans in Alabama not sorry that there state was a fervent defender of the right to “own” another human being? I simply can’t fathom how anyone in good conscious could vote against a bill like this one.

This is just another indication that, “as far as we’ve come”, we still have a lot of work to do if we want to live in a truly equal society. Remember when Clinton wanted to mend race relation in this country and had a town hall meeting to that end? It didn’t do a whole lot when everything was said and done but it was still a start. While I don’t believe that the government can simply tell its citizens to treat everyone with respect and equality and assume it will happen I do think they should be expected to play some role in at least initiating a dialogue or by actively promoting the idea of racial equality.

We want to believe that, as a whole, we do treat everyone equally, after all it’s in our Constitution isn’t it? Because of this anything that works to promote racial equality immediately comes under fire the second it inconveniences someone not being helped (i.e. Affirmative Action). We want to believe that if you’re a poor black kid that grew up in Cabrini-Green you have the same shot at getting into an Ivy League school as a rich white kid from Palm Beach. We still have this fantasy that all it takes to succeed in America is determination and the ability to pull yourself up by your boot straps (a colloquialism I’ve never fully understood) but the reality is that this isn’t the case. We do need Affirmative Action and other government programs that are designed to enrich our culture by making it more heterogeneous. It’s great that race relations are much better than they were 50 years ago and it’s true that things have improved by leaps and bound from where they were before the civil rights movement but when there are still seven elected officials who feel compelled to vote against a bill that apologizes for slavery there is still a lot work to be done and the government should feel obliged to take the lead in starting that work.

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