It seems Jeff and I have been doing more than a few posts lately cataloguing the angry derangement of the left. All of this anger, shrillness, violent pathology, intolerance, rage, and rejection of logic coming from those who claim to be the most peceaful, tolerant, and rational members of society creates a paradox. How can a progressive claim to be rationale, and yet consistently favor discredited and unsustainable economic policies? How can a progressive claim to be tolerant, yet demand that all contrary opinion be shouted down and dissidents be jailed? How can a progressive claim to believe all races are equal, but demand that blacks and hispanics be treated as inferiors that need to be condescended to and acccommodated because they just can’t be expected to perform as well as white people if all are treated equally?  And the greatest paradox of all; how are progressive leftists so blind to their own contradictions and hypocrisy?

(Progressive Leftist: “Um, because You’re a RACIST!!!”)

John C. Wright Attempts to explain:

The theory must explain, first, the honest decency of the modern liberals combined with their astonishing indifference, nay, hostility to facts, common sense, and evidence; second, it must explain their high self-esteem (or, to be blunt, their pathological narcissism) combined not merely with an utter lack of accomplishment, but with their utter devotion to destructiveness, a yearning to ruin everything they touch; third, it must explain their sanctimoniousness combined with their applause, praise, support, and tireless efforts to spread all perversions (especially sexual), moral decay, vulgarity, and every form of desecration; fourth, their pretense of intellectual superiority combined with their notorious mental fecklessness; fifth, it must explain both their violence and their pacifism; sixth, the theory must explain why they hate the very things they should love most; seventh, the theory must explain why they are incapable of comprehending an honest disagreement or any honorable foe.

The essay attempts to arrive at this theory, and as such, has to cover a lot of ground, and uses a lot of big words and philosophical concepts that would be utterly lost on the typical progressive Obama-voter. But it sort of comes down to this.

How can anyone continue to be a Leftist for a week, much less for a lifetime?

The answer, allow me to remind the patient reader, grows out of their theory. Again, their theory of knowledge is that there is no knowledge, no truth, only bigoted opinion. The only way to avoid bigotry is to avoid judgment and the use of reason. Avoiding reason necessitates a theory of morality that denies cause and effect. No vice causes loss, no virtue causes happiness. Hence life is a random roulette wheel. If there are no vices and virtues, not even the intellectual virtues of honest thinking, then no independent thought is desired or permitted. Instead, all thoughts are determined by social cues. Thought is collective.

…

The whole point of Liberal theory from start to finish is to form earplugs to smother the ringing of that alarm clock called reality.

…

The Leftists are people who abandon their innate intelligence and moral stature and who  deliberately make themselves to be stupider than average, less moral and upright and decent than average, who at once combine the worst features of a self-deceived fool and a self-deceiving conniving con-man. The only thing that saves them from the constant pain of the dentist drill of their conscience, the constant clamor of their wretched self-esteem telling them that they do not deserve to live, the only thing, indeed, keeping them alive, is their false and inflated sense of sanctimony.

Deranged hatred of guns really brings out Teh Stupid in our left-wing friends, like this fromt the producer of Ellen DeGeneres’s inane chat show.

Why conservatives need so many guns to fight gay marriage #ThingsLiberalsJustDontGet

— andy lassner (@andylassner) March 24, 2014

I wonder if he is the same who wrote this of the president’s appearance on said inane chat show.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA will be talking to our host from the White House, and Ellen is ready to entertain her VIP guest with an inspiring conversation. Both Pres. Obama and our host have proven their dance moves, their desire for good, and their Twitter skills. Now the leader of the free world, and the champion of comedy will get into the President’s new health care initiative. From L.A. to D.C., Ellen rolls out the red carpet for the United States’ fearless and brilliant head of state!

Paul Ryan recently made the mistake of speaking truth to power and was subsequently forced to grovel and apologize to power because power played the race card.

Ryan, in a conversation with Bill Bennett, linked the problem of welfare dependency to 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 and the culture of work.”

This simple and obvious truth made all of the usual racist dogs (i.e. the Congressional Black Caucus whose members are largely elected from inner cities blighted by generations of welfare dependency) claimed they heard dog whistles.

This technique of squealing “racism” whenever legitimate criticism is made of Democrat welfare policies has been highly effective at shutting down debate, but it does nothing to change the reality of trans-generational welfare dependency.

Consider this case from the even more welfare-blighted UK, where a man hasn’t worked in over twenty years, has fathered somewhere between 18-27 illegitimate children by multiple mothers, his children and grandchildren are also on welfare and living with him, and the local welfare office is trying to figure out how to get him a larger house to accommodate them all.

None of the children who are of working age have jobs and Mr Rolfe says he relies instead on state handouts like housing benefit and child tax credit to get by.

‘Getting a larger house would mean the world to us. It would mean we could get some peace  and space.’He said: ‘I hate to see the children have no space, no privacy. They have nowhere to do their homework so they are doing badly at school.’

Incredibly, Mr Rolfe successfully complained to the Local Government Ombudsman that the property, which he moved into in September 2011, was too small.

In the past, this man would have been called a bum, and no self-respecting woman would have given him the time of day. But thanks to progressive welfare programs, not only is his irresponsibility and promsicuity subsidized by taxes confiscated from those who made better choices; but he has also fathered and grandfathered two generations of children devoid of any work ethic, raised to think collecting welfare is normal.

If the state continues to subsidize bad decisions and punish good decisions, it should come as no surprise that people will make more bad decisions and fewer good decsions. This is truth; Or, as the progressive left calls it, ‘racism.’ Paul Ryan owed an apology to no one for saying it. And the fact that he backed down demonstrates how impossible it has become to turn the ship of state away from the unsustainable and disastrous course it is on.

Also, their Benghazi Whitewash had nothing to do with helping to get Hillary back in the White House.

Since I will have more to say about which candidate we will endorse in 2016 than any other editor at the Times, let me be clear: We have not chosen Mrs. Clinton. We have not chosen anyone. I can also state definitively that there was no editorial/newsroom conspiracy of any kind, because I knew nothing about the Benghazi article until I read it in the paper on Sunday.

“Let me be clear”… “I knew nothing until I read about it in the paper…” Gosh, those cadences sound familiar.

Bear in mind when arguing with leftists, this image, to them, is a pretty accurate depiction of what went down on 26 February 2012.

Hat Tip: Legal Insurrection

If you click this link, you can see a vid of Sean Hannity interviewing Glenn Beck. Hannity is a Tea Party Conservative, and Glenn Beck is a Tea Party Libertarian/Conservative. As you would expect, 95% of the interview consists of them expressing their opposition to contraception and gay marriage.

That is, you *would* expect that if *you* happen to be an ignorant liberal/progressive leftist/moderate establishment Republican who believes that the “far right” is obsessed with those issues. The actual number of times contraception and gay marriage come up in the interview: Zero. Zip. Nada.

Conservatives are simply not as obsessed with these issues as the left makes them out to be. In fact, almost always these issues are brought up by liberal journalists or liberal politicians (but I repeat myself); like George Stephanopoulus setting the table for the eventual “Mitt Romney wants to outlaw tampons” meme by bringing up contraception… out of nowhere… during a Republican debate in 2012.

Tea Party Conservatives aren’t obsessed with contraception or gay marriage. Leftist progressives are.

(more…)

As if Oberlin‘s 2013 race hoax wasn’t enough, now we have the Vassar bias hoax:

Reports of bias incidents at Vassar College that involved hateful messages left on students’ doors were actually elaborate hoaxes — and the perpetrator is none other than the student member of the Bias Incident Response Team…

This fall semester at the liberal arts college in New York saw a curiously high number of bias incident reports…The task force had one student member…who is transgendered and was also a vice president of the Vassar Student Association (VSA)…

The DC has learned that one of the perpetrators was none other than [that student].

Via Ace, who goes along with Damn Dirty Rino in suggesting that Münchausen syndrome may be at play.

I’ve made my own assumption that the student must be politically “progressive”; if it’s incorrect, let us know in the comments.

John Hayward at Human Events reviews all three. Here’s the state of play:

• Persecution of lesbian NJ server still a hoax
• Knockout Game still all too real
• and the World Health Organization (WHO) still muddying the waters about people who self-inflict HIV, as there have indeed been some cases (just nothing like half of all new HIV cases in Greece, as the WHO had originally told people).

As to the Knockout Game, Hayward links Thomas Sowell, who says:

The New York authorities describe a recent series of such attacks and, because Jews have been singled out in these attacks, are considering prosecuting these assaults as “hate crimes.” …this “knockout game” has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews — the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry. Attacks of this sort have been rampant in St. Louis. But they have also occurred in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and elsewhere. In Illinois the game has often been called “Polar Bear Hunting” by the young thugs, presumably because the targets are white…

“White Girl Bleed A Lot”…a book by Colin Flaherty…documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks. Chapter 2 of the 2013 edition is titled, “The Knockout Game, St. Louis Style.” So this is nothing new, however new it may be to some in New York, thanks to the media’s political correctness.

Sounds like a ‘social phenomenon’, to me. At any rate, many of the attacks are on video (and/or documented in police reports) and, as such, are facts that can’t be wished away.

From Mona Charen’s new column:

Remember President Barack Obama’s mother? …The moving and infuriating story was a staple on the 2008 campaign trail. His mother had insurance, he explained, but when she came down with cancer, her insurance company claimed her disease was a “pre-existing condition” and refused to pay…In a debate with Sen. John McCain, Obama said: “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

There would be, if it had been true. But when New York Times reporter Janny Scott researched the issue for her biography of the president’s mother, she discovered letters proving beyond doubt that Cigna never denied Stanley Ann Dunham coverage for her disease. The dispute was over a disability plan…

The White House did not deny Scott’s account, but shrugged it off…

The Dunham tale was meant to personify the hundreds of thousands — or millions — of Americans who were “dumped” by insurance companies when they became sick. This is an invented tale, and might have been rebutted by the insurance industry if they hadn’t gotten into bed with Obama in 2010 in return for millions of coerced new customers…

There’s more; RTWT.

Charen touches on a great point: The insurance companies are at fault, but not for the Left’s mythical reasons. The real fault is that Obamacare is based on coercion: forcing people to do business with the insurance companies, when people might choose not to. That is immoral. Obama was wrong to propose it, the Democrats were wrong to impose it, and the insurance companies were wrong to go along with it.

A thief takes your car. You know each other, so the next day, he drives up – in your car – to apologize for the inconvenience he’s caused you. He doesn’t return your car; he drives off in it again.

Was his apology sincere? Of course not. Had he been sincere, he would give back your car. He just wanted to blunt your well-justified anger, which could inconvenience him in the future. He hoped to manipulate your good nature.

Have no fear, kids: President Obama is here to show us how it’s done.

President Obama said Thursday that he is “sorry” that some Americans are losing their current health insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act, despite his promise that no one would have to give up a health plan they liked.

“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” he told NBC News in an exclusive interview at the White House.

“We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

Here are a few of the things Obama *didn’t* say, any of which would have made it a sincere apology:

• I admit Obamacare was a huge mistake, and I’ve asked Congress to repeal it.
• I admit Obamacare was a mistake, and I’m letting Republicans write the bill now to solve its huge flaws.
• To give people immediate relief, I’ve agreed to delay Obamacare by six months.
• I’m not delaying Obamacare; but, to give people immediate relief, I’ve signed an order that will re-grandfather all plans that existed as of Oct 1, 2013.

But he said none of them. His “apology” was geared to one purpose only: trying to gain a few points in opinion polls for Barack Hussein Obama.

RELATED:

• Young people Just Say No to Obamacare. As well they should; it rips them off.
• By driving doctors to retire and squeezing out small practices, Obamacare is increasing the doctor shortage.
• Even The New Republic admits that Obamacare kicks people off of good plans, pushing them into worse plans with higher costs and less doctor access.
• Even the Washington Post agrees that people’s cancellations should not be blamed on the insurance companies.
• Obama was lying about Obamacare’s impacts on people as recently as Sep. 26, 2013.

Well covered on Ace and HotAir, but I can’t let this pass without note.

Recently on November 4, President Obama said:

If you had one of these plans before the ACA came into law, and you really liked that plan, what we said was, you could keep it *if* it hasn’t changed since the law was passed.

The emphasis is Obama’s, in his delivery; here is the clip.

The rules/mandates/costs of the ACA are such that it is nearly impossible for any plan to not be changed by it. But Obama has an even greater problem: what he said in the past, dozens if not hundreds of times in public speeches, had no “If…” qualifier and was much more like this example (from 2009, quoted previously):

No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, *period*. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, *period*. No one will take it away, *no matter what*.

Emphasis was probably also in Obama’s original delivery, but just to keep things easy, let’s say that I’ve added it.

So, let’s see. First Obama lied about whether people could keep their plans under Obamacare. (And he lied about most people seeing cost reductions – rather than the reality of cost increases – and about much more.) And now, Obama is lying about his lies (claiming he had always said something different).

Lies require intent to deceive; otherwise they are only mistakes. Obama has lied, because (1) the White House knew people would lose their plans at least as far back as 2010, and (2) unless Obama is mentally incompetent, he must know today that he didn’t put in those “If…” qualifiers when he was out stumping for Obamacare.

Will the Left swallow Obama’s new lie? Probably, along the lines of Orwell’s _1984_, where the devotees of Ingsoc (English Socialism) believe The Party’s newly-invented claim to have raised the chocolate ration when they’d actually cut it (page 51 of the old Signet paperback).

But the Left is not America. Will America swallow it?

RELATED: Obama’s approval rating is a point lower than Bush’s was at this same time in their presidencies (1st week of November in their fifth years).

And if you want a glimpse into America’s future under nationalized health, here it is: Venezuela’s health care system is collapsing.

A pithy, logical column from Kyle Smith. Key ideas:

Bulls–t is airy, meaningless drivel, the stuff that campaigns are made of. Or it’s a misleading oversimplification with hidden qualifiers. Not only do we forgive bulls–t, we like it…

This week was something new…

Some 10 million Americans are going to lose their health insurance as a direct result of the Affordable Care Act. [But] On June 15, 2009, Obama said, in one of hundreds of similar statements, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

This wasn’t just bulls–t. This was a lie…

What Obama said wasn’t true and that’s all there is to it. To the American public, he is a different man…Obama has rebranded himself as a liar…He will carry this new label to his grave.

UPDATE (well, more a REMINDER): Per NBC News, the Obama administration knew at least as early as 2010 that 67% to 80% of Americans who buy health coverage themselves would not be allowed to keep their plans. And that doesn’t count Americans who are losing their employer-sponsored plans, job hours or jobs because their employers simply can’t afford Obamacare’s pricey coverage mandates.

The administration lies about its pricey coverage mandates now, via Orwellian language. It claims to have made insurance companies “offer more benefits” (NBC’s phrasing). What it has really done is deny companies the ability to tailor plans to consumers’ needs, and deny the consumer the opportunity to buy a plan that is affordably tailored.

UPDATES via The Economic Collapse blog:

• A partial (but still lengthy) list of employers who have cut work hours or jobs, because of Obamacare.
• According to CBS, Americans losing their health plans due to Obamacare far outnumber Americans who have signed up for Obamacare.
• Doctors don’t like Obamacare; in New York, fully 77% of doctors either know they’ll be refusing Obamacare patients, or are undecided.

UPDATE: Even Anderson Cooper wore his ‘concerned face’ last week on hearing that the Obama administration has told insurance companies to stay quiet about what is really going on.

Via HotAir, just a reminder: “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

In Minnesota alone, at least 140,000 can’t keep their plan.

UPDATE: Fine columns on all this from Mark Steyn, Larry Kudlow, Charles Krauthammer.

UPDATE: From The Burning Platform (via ZH):

I am (finally) completely speechless:

Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from The Ranch)

UPDATE (yea, it’s been a whole two minutes):
Come to think of it, it’s not the first time I’ve been left speechless by a House member…

UP-UPDATE: Here’s one along similar lines: Perhaps the new line from the Statists could be that the health insurance policies aren’t new…they’re just changed … see? it’s not different, it’s the same, just changed

…but then again, perhaps this is what they’re hearing when we try to explain to them that it is different:

First, the facts.

• October 16: U.S. national debt is $16,747,370,534,090.62.
• Then they raise the debt ceiling.
• October 18, at 3pm: U.S. debt is at $17,075,590,107,963.57.

That’s a $300+ billion increase, in two days. It’ll continue (albeit, at a slower pace). It moves the U.S. mathematically closer to its coming default, and the added interest will cost taxpayers (especially if interest rates rise in the future).

Now, here’s what Obama said during the shutdown. October 3:

I want to spend a little time on this. It’s something called raising the debt ceiling. And it’s got a lousy name, so a lot of people end up thinking, I don’t know, I don’t think we should raise our debt ceiling, because it sounds like we’re raising our debt. But that’s not what this is about.

It doesn’t cost taxpayers a single dime. It doesn’t grow our deficits by a single dime…it’s not something that raises our debt.

Or, October 8:

…it’s called raising the debt ceiling, I think a lot of Americans think it’s raising our debt. It is not raising our debt. This does not add a dime to our debt.

‘Nuff said.

Via Zero Hedge. Squirming under the Socratic questioning of interviewer Jan Helfeld, Sen. Reid argues here that because the U.S. tax system is cumbersome (having people self-report, having deductions, often using civil penalties rather than criminal, etc.), it’s somehow “voluntary”; that is, somehow not based on the government taking your money under a threat of force:

I’ve commented before on how the government has changed its methods over the years for calculating the economic stats, to make itself look better.

For example, consumer price inflation has been running about 8-9% per year under the 1980 method. I don’t claim the 1980 method is right; but the government claims only 1% CP inflation from its newer methods, and that number violates many people’s first-hand experience of rising prices and declining living standards.

Or with unemployment: by 1930s methods, it has been running 15-20%, which means we are already in the Great Depression 2.0. Again, I don’t view the older method as sacred; but that number fits many people’s experience better (as they have been forced into permanent unemployment, part-time work, etc.) than the government’s claim of 7.4% unemployment.

The people who change the statistical methods always have excellent-sounding reasons. There’s just one problem. Their changes always run in one direction, to make the government look better.

Somehow, they never adopt changes that could make things look worse. The latest example is GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Last week, the government published new data from new formulas for calculating GDP.

Guess what? The changes make the government look better. Suddenly, America’s GDP is supposed to be $550 billion higher. Which improves America’s debt-to-GDP ratio magically; that is, even though nothing has changed in reality.

But some of the changes they made are unreal, almost too silly to believe. The first ZH link above provides neutral-sounding descriptions from Bloomberg. Peter Schiff gave clearer and more colorful descriptions, in a preview back in April: (more…)

At times, certain spokespeople for leftism will assert notions which are so unreal that I must stop to ponder: Are they cynical, that is, people who knowingly spread lies in a quest to gain power through manipulation of the unwary?

Or are they self-deluded and mentally ‘flexible’, Orwell-style, such that they do believe what they are saying – at least in the moment of saying it?

The latest example is Detroit. Its decades of decline are, of course, due in large measure to its decades of uninterrupted rule by left-liberals, as mentioned here.

In reaction, a wave of left-liberals on TV have claimed that Detroit failed because of…(wait for it)…conservatives, Republicans, and small-government policies. For examples, see here (Sally Kohn), here (Ed Schultz) and here (Melissa Harris-Perry with Howard Dean).

So, which is it? Do they lie knowingly? Or are they “that” deluded?

Sally Kohn’s example is instructive for other reasons. She worries that conservatives will “try to use Detroit falsely as an example to push more austerity.”

Think about what she’s saying. She obviously wants the opposite of “austerity”, which word she means as a pejorative for tight government spending and balanced budgets. It follows that she prefers loose government spending and unbalanced budgets, the very factors that have mathematically bankrupted Detroit.

In other words, her solution to Detroit’s decline and bankruptcy is, moar profligacy. Thus proving that, for left-liberals, it is never never ever a good time to reduce government spending.

UPDATE: Commentor BL mentions the possibility that people could be deluded from mis-education. I can accept that answer for younger leftists. It’s problematic for the older ones, because for older people, mis-education is a choice.

I’ve seen the Establishment media get certain things wrong on the Zimmerman case, repeatedly. Especially on racial aspects, and it is time to call out two of them.

First, the alleged “racial profiling”. As the New York Times put it:

The case began in the small city of Sanford as a routine homicide but soon evolved into a civil rights cause examining racial profiling and its consequences…

…said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the N.A.A.C.P. “…we will not rest until racial profiling in all its forms is outlawed.”

Problem: The Zimmerman case has virtually nothing to do with racial profiling.

1. Zimmerman wasn’t police; nothing he did was official.
2. Zimmerman didn’t profile: he described Martin’s race (as “black”) just because a police dispatcher directly asked him to. Finally,
3. If anyone profiled, it may have been Trayvon Martin, who allegedly profiled the Hispanic, neighborhood-patrolling Zimmerman as a white threat (a “creepy-ass cracker”).

Next, about Zimmerman’s race. I think race is a thoroughly stupid way to classify human beings. But, I don’t rule the world. As many know, Zimmerman’s mother is Peruvian and “Spanish was the primary language at home”. Per the same article, the family itself wanted to downplay all racial angles when all of this broke, but… clearly, they didn’t get their way. So, why does the Establishment media never simply describe Zimmerman as Hispanic?

Zimmerman is as Hispanic as President Obama is African-American (namely half, including parentage, cultural heritage/exposure, and choice of identity). Yet CNN and The New York Times weirdly call him “white Hispanic” (no hyphen), while others have used the bizarre – and possibly insulting – circumlocution “Zimmerman identifies himself as Hispanic”. Imagine if they called Obama “white Black”, or said “Obama identifies himself as African-American”. They never would, no matter how much Joe Biden wants them to.

Exit curiosity: If Zimmerman’s parents’ races were switched – so that he were almost the same person he is, in genetics and appearance, but happened to have a Peruvian last name – Would he have still been put on trial? Was anti-German bias at work?

FROM THE COMMENTS: In Baltimore, police investigate claims that black youths chased and beat a Hispanic man, shouting “This is for Trayvon.”

It’s difficult to say more until the claims pan out, but I’ll ask this: Obama chose to reinforce, rather than to correct, a painfully one-sided view of the Zimmerman-Martin case. Has his doing so already led to (more) tragedy? Also linked from the comments: numerous threats on the Zimmerman jurors.

UPDATE: I didn’t know about “watermelon lean”. After a commentor mentioned it a couple times, I googled around and stumbled across this year-old post at American Thinker, “What the Media Choose Not to Know about Trayvon”. It’s fascinating. It shows Martin as part of “urban America’s lost boy culture”, a culture which commits crime in disproportion to its numbers, and which the GayPatriot blog has perhaps touched on, indirectly before.

I’ve avoided weighing in on the George Zimmerman trial, out of deference to the judicial process. But now the jury has spoken: George Zimmerman is not even guilty of a lesser charge such as assault, child abuse or manslaughter; still less is he guilty of any degree of murder. It’s official.

My sympathy, and I’m sure all of our prayers and sympathies, continue to go out to Trayvon Martin’s family for the tragic loss of their son and brother.

But I believe they “lost him”, so to speak, before his lethal encounter with Zimmerman. On the total weight of evidence, I believe that Martin was an aggressor, and I agree with the jury that it would have been wrong to send Zimmerman to prison, on the strong possibility (if not likelihood) that Zimmerman acted in reasonable self-defense.

I want to go beyond what Kurt and Roger L. Simon have said about President Obama. He didn’t just besmirch his office by taking public sides in a painful criminal matter where the utmost caution was needed. And he didn’t just lose politically (by taking the side that lost on trial), nor win politically (by revving up his base). No, it’s worse than that. Obama has lost morally by saying things in this matter that, in all likelihood, are morally wrong.

The latest would be Obama’s call to “honor” Travyon Martin:

President Obama called on the nation to honor Trayvon Martin a day after George Zimmerman was acquitted of his murder by asking “ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence.”

…Obama said in a statement on Sunday…”We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis. We should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like this. As citizens, that’s a job for all of us. That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.”

Let’s be clear. Just as the weight of evidence suggests that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, so it also suggests that Travyon Martin used excessive physical force, acting in illegal, criminal aggression. (Otherwise, how could Zimmerman’s action have been self-defense – objectively?)

Physical aggression, especially that which threatens another’s life to the point where he may be justified in taking drastic action, is morally wrong. And self-defense, IF it is genuinely called for, is morally right. And “honor” ought to be given, if at all, to the person, philosophy or action which is in the right.

I really don’t believe that either party should be “honored” here. But, if one of them absolutely had to be, wouldn’t it be Zimmerman? Certainly not because he killed; but because he was – on the weight of the evidence, and as now officially determined by a jury – likely reasonable to have killed, under the law and circumstances; likely the party who was more in the right.

That President O’Pander ignores the moral implications of what the jury found (after their intensive study of the matter), and even presents the opposite to people as that which is good and true, is typical.

Tragically, it is also divisive beyond words, a terrible injury to our nation. Why? Because it sends many people in the wrong direction – with their emotions and their sense of injury inflamed, on behalf of that which is likely wrong. Honoring the wrong does not bring healing – especially in racial matters.