BY
WALTER E. WILLIAMS
WEDNESDAY,
MARCH 26, 2014
Some
statements and arguments are so asinine that you’d have to be an academic or a leftist
to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives
are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they’re waging war on their
daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do
they abide by the Geneva Conventions' bans on torture, or do they engage in
enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with
female family members? You might say that leftists don’t mean actual war. Then
why do they say it?
What
would you think of a white conservative mayor's trying to defund charter
schools where blacks are succeeding? While most of New York’s black students
could not pass a citywide math proficiency exam, there was a charter school
where 82 percent of its students passed. New York's left-wing mayor, Bill de
Blasio, is trying to shut it down, and so far, I’ve heard not one peep from the
Big Apple’s civil rights hustlers, including Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel. According
to columnist Thomas Sowell, the attack on successful charter schools is
happening in other cities, too (http://tinyurl.com/nxulxc).
U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder recently stated that we must revisit the laws that
ban convicted felons from voting. Why? According to a recent study by two
professors, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse
of Stanford, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science (http://tinyurl.com/pgolu8x), three-fourths of America’s
convicted murderers, rapists and thieves are Democrats. Many states restrict
felons from voting; however, there’s a movement afoot to eliminate any
restriction on their voting. If successful, we might see Democratic candidates
campaigning in prisons, seeking the support of some of America’s worst people.
Decades
ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots' agenda was not
about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about
control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of
most Americans. By the way, to reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental
Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some
years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official
whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar
statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me.
Seeing
as Americans are timid and compliant, why not dictate other aspects of our
lives -- such as the size of soda we may buy, as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg
tried in New York? Former U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman John Webster
said: "Right now, this anti-obesity campaign is in its infancy. ... We
want to turn people around and give them assistance in eating nutritious
foods." The city of Calabasas, Calif., adopted an ordinance that bans
smoking in virtually all outdoor areas.
The stated justification is not the
desire to fight against secondhand smoke but the desire to protect children
from bad influences -- seeing adults smoking. Most Americans don’t know that
years ago, if someone tried to stop a person from smoking on a beach or
sidewalk or buying a 16-ounce cup of soda or tried to throw away his kid’s
homemade lunch, it might have led to a severe beating. On a very famous radio
talk show, I suggested to an anti-obesity busybody who was calling for laws to
restrict restaurants' serving sizes that he not be a coward and rely on government.
He should just come up, I told him, and take the food he thought I shouldn’t have
from my plate.
The
late H.L. Mencken's description of health care professionals in his day is just
as appropriate today: "A certain section of medical opinion, in late
years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content
to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be
their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who
don't want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of
public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to
run things."
