Obama’s Old Friends and Why We Should Care

Race-baiter and Friend Of Obama (FOO), Dr. Henry Louis Gates, is not the only questionable academic associate of the current American president.

Appearing on the website Center for Security Policy is an essay by Caroline Glick about one of his other pals, former terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, who is married to yet another former terrorist, tenured academic and FOO, William Ayers:

From 1970 to 1980, Bernadine Dohrn was a terrorist fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Now she’s a law professor at Northwestern University Law School where she teaches a course on law and the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Makes you wonder how this terrorist was admitted to law school in the first place, doesn’t it?

During her time as co-commander of the Weather Underground terrorist organization with her husband, education professor William Ayres, the group committed some sixteen bombings. Among its targets were the State Department, the New York Queens Courthouse, military recruiting offices in Brooklyn and the home of New York Supreme Court Justice John Murtagh while Murtagh was asleep at home with his wife and children.

Dohrn, her husband and their colleagues emerged from hiding in 1980 when terror charges against them were dropped due to a technicality. None of them ever served hard time for their crimes. Neither Dohrn - whom FBI director J. Edgar Hoover once referred to as “the most dangerous woman in America” - nor Ayres ever expressed the slightest remorse for their actions.

Indeed, in a 1998 interview with ABC News, Dohrn said that looking back on her career as a terrorist, her only regret was that she hadn’t committed more attacks. As she put it, “We’d do it again. I wish we had done more. I wish we had been more militant.”

Blame the traitorous MSM for interviewing this rabidly anti-American traitor in the first place.

But then, those who cannot do, teach. And now Dohrn is passing on her knowledge of terrorism to a new generation of students through her seminar on Palestinian terrorists.

Dohrn is no newcomer to the subject. In 1974, together with her fellow Weather Underground terrorist colleagues, she published a book called Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.

Finding a publisher for this deeply offensive book wasn’t hard - radical chic, don’t you know? It is those who write books recommending ways to save America from people like her who can’t find publishers. They’re afraid of the libel terrorism of the militant Islamists and the deep pockets of their backers.

Dohrn and her co-authors dedicated their book to the Who’s Who of the terrorist murderers club. Among their honorees was Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian terrorist who murdered Robert F. Kennedy…

Dohrn’s class is notable because it is likely the only current instance in a U.S. university where a formerly active terrorist is teaching a class about terrorists. But by paying someone like Dohrn to teach a course on terrorists, Northwestern is not pushing the envelope very far along.

In both major and minor universities throughout the U.S., supporters of Palestinian terrorists are teaching American students the history, sociology, politics, law and culture of the Arab and Islamic world’s war against Israel. The fact that the narrative they teach has little to no connection to historic truth or to objective, measurable reality is of no interest to anyone.

It is not that this false narrative is of no interest to anyone. Rather, it is the sad case that it is impossible to break the stranglehold that terrorists and wanna-be terrorists have on the humanities departments in major American universities, all of it generously funded from the largesse of the Saudis and from our own government’s coffers, i.e., our taxes. If these folks had actually to support themselves sans government funding, they’d quickly become marginalized.

I used to think that this bizarre construct of reality would disappear as the ‘60s generation of radicals retired or died off. However, that is obviously not going to happen, not with the bureaucracy in Washington supporting it so whole-heartedly.

Marxism didn’t die in this country; it simply went underground, into "journalism", academia or government “service”.

Dohrn’s mission, she said, was:

…to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.”[my emphasis]

Ms. Glick provides another example of the evil currently afoot in American academia:

Case in point is newly tenured Columbia professor Joseph Massad, a little-accomplished professor of Middle East studies whose resume includes no scholarly achievements. Massad rose to prominence with the David Project’s 2005 release of its documentary “Columbia Unbecoming” in which Jewish students at Columbia related the intellectual intimidation they suffered in the classroom at the hands of Massad and his colleagues. A university panel formed to investigate the students’ allegations found that Massad exceeded “commonly accepted bounds” of behavior in his treatment of one of his students.

As Jacob Gershman reported in the New York Post in June, Columbia quietly granted Massad tenure earlier this year in a secret procedure that likely was unprecedented in its lack of transparency or justification.

Massad’s “academic” achievements to date consist of diatribes against Israel, Jews, gays and feminists. Jews and Israel are guilty of stealing Palestinian land and murdering Palestinians and of being Jewish “Nazis” to the Palestinian “Jews.” Homosexuals - whom Massad refers to as “Gay International” - are involved in a nefarious plot to force otherwise happy gays in the Arab world out the closet. And “Imperialist Feminists” are involved in a conspiracy to destroy the Arab way of life by objecting to so-called “honor-killings,” which in Massad’s view are nothing more than “crimes of passion.”

As Gershman reported, Massad was granted tenure this year despite the fact that a tenure panel convened two years ago rejected his tenure application. Apparently, the 2007 tenure committee was unconvinced that Massad’s work excusing Arab males for murdering their womenfolk for the “crime” of “dishonoring” them was up to Columbia’s traditional academic standards.

The first tenure committee’s loyalty to traditional academic standards apparently didn’t sit well with Columbia President Lee Bollinger and Provost Alan Brinkley. The two men must have felt that in light of the celebrity Massad brings to the school, Columbia stood to benefit from granting him a lifelong appointment. And so Massad was given an unheard-of second hearing before a different committee this past year.

Ms. Glick provides a bit of wry hope regarding what it will take to rid academia of this foul fare. Looking at one now-discredited subject, she recalls how it lost favor:

Unfortunately…in the long history of academia bad scholarship and bad ideas flourish until two conditions are met. First, bad ideas must be so widely discredited that professors become too embarrassed to espouse them openly or associate with colleagues who do. Second, funding must dry up for work in the discredited field for professors to stop engaging in it. The occasions on which both conditions are met are so rare that only one example from the last century comes to mind: eugenics.

Eugenics, the pseudo-science of racial pecking orders, was so much the rage in academic circles from the late 19th century through the 1930s that even a towering liberal figure like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes believed in it. In 1927 Holmes upheld a Virginia law imposing forcible sterilization of the mentally disabled, arguing that “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

It took the Holocaust to force American academics to desert their support for eugenics and American financiers to stop endowing professorships and underwriting conferences in the “scientific” quackery they propounded.

As she says, once that topic became untenable, the current politically correct one replaced “survival of the fittest”, though not entirely if you follow what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to say recently about what America’s abortion laws ought to have accomplished:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

Now what could she possibly mean about “populations we don’t want to have too many of”?

In case the irony washed right by you, we have a Jewish woman alluding to abortion-as-eugenics. And the MSM just tiptoed by that one. After all, Ginsburg long ago earned her Leftist credentials; what could she say they wouldn't find agreeable? The usual deafening silence from our “journalists” followed her awful comment, ignored by all except for a few observations, e.g., the editorial in The Telegraph online from Damian Thompson. In order to find any information about this “creepy” (his word) comment by one of our most Left-leaning Supreme Court justices, Mr Thompson turned to The Creative Minority Report. They headlined the story this way:

This is Why Newspapers Are Dying

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments about using abortion as population control raised a lot of eyebrows in the blogosphere. Over 9,236 to be precise, according to Google blog search.

Huge sites too like Hot Air featured the story prominently. Even Drudge ran with the story yesterday.

But as of this morning the mainstream media has completely ignored the story about one of the most powerful people in the country essentially endorsing eugenics on populations “we don’t want to have too many of.” Not one.

What the heck is going on here? What are we to make of the media’s complete silence on this issue? They don’t see a little eugenics between friends as a big deal? They thought it was taken out of context? What?!

As the large metropolitan newspapers die, they’re wondering “why?” This is why….

Mr. Thompson at The Telegraph added:

…You might think the New York Times might want to trumpet its exclusive. But the mindset of that pompous, prickly, boring, self-regarding publication is so overwhelmingly liberal that it didn’t even realise it had a story on its
hands.

Of course it didn’t. That is the ‘real’ take on abortion among the elitists. Roe v. Wade was going to get rid of the underclass that they were busy creating with the War on Poverty. No wonder blacks distrusted that whole meme, claiming it was a cover for attempted black genocide. Well, Ginsburg just blew the cover, didn't she?

In a way, what is on offer now is simply eugenics in another form: there are undeserving people whom Dohrn and others like her fervently believe don’t deserve to exist. These unworthies include anyone not within their favored circle. Too bad for you if you’re an unrepentant white male (or a traitorous Uncle Tom), a Christian (they can only be “fundamentalists”), or a woman who doesn’t buy the radical feminist transgendered gospel and is ignorant enough to question the ultimate wisdom of abortion-on-demand. Sarah Palin comes to mind as an exemplar of all they hold despicable.

But what if you’re a magic Negro, or a wise Latina, a Palestinian, or an environmentalist willing to do violence to human beings on the behalf of Gaia? Then you are among the redeemed, the saved, the anointed.
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These elitists ( a term of opprobrium they themselves used to fling at those in power) now hold the reins in most areas of public life. One has only to look at another FOO, Ezekiel Emmanuel, the President’s health care “expert” to see that the point of ObamaCare is simply health care allocation of artificially scarce resources. It is a draconian and bureaucratic solution to a problem largely caused by government intrusion in the first place.

Compare Emmanuel’s allocation of scarcity with one that would focus on building resources rather than rationing them. I am reminded of John Kennedy’s determination to build our space program, or of the intense build up of our war materiel in World War II. These are categories separate from health care, but they are robust examples of changing the paradigm: taking what had been termed not possible and making it a reality. A country that can create the Manhattan Project can certainly create a Health Project. But only if it is willing to move with determination beyond the principles of scarcity thinking and trust the free market to come up with better solutions than a centralized, top-down bureaucracy can ever do. The latter is existentially incapable of flexibility, rapid response, or individual solutions to individual problems.

I’m still wondering why Emmanuel’s essay was published in The Lancet (quick registration required, but worth it). Would no American medical journal take this plan? That’s a possible reason, because what Dr. Emmanuel proposes is a calculus of “quality of life years” on which to base medical care decisions for individual citizens. The man is no fool: he allocates the majority of health care to the young - ages fifteen to forty - and the healthy. They don’t require any care to speak of, thus presenting huge savings from the get-go.

Infants and old people, the chronically ill, or those victims of accidents who will require lengthy rehabilitation? They can all crawl to the back of the bus and wait their turn, provided there are any leftovers. God forbid you would choose to bear your handicapped child and then let it live. The “quality of life years” for your kid will be, as Emmanuel euphemizes, “attenuated”.


This chart from his essay makes it crystal clear: up until age fifteen or so, you’re a drain on the public purse. By the same calculus, once past your fortieth birthday, your sell-by date is questionable. Move to the back of the health care bus. Notice that the eighty year-olds don't even appear there at all.

Dr. Emmanuel obfuscates with a great deal of questionable academic-ethicist’s verbiage before he gets to the meat of his proposal, “quality of life years”. Again, it is amazing that this “ethical” discussion is being held by a Jew conversant with the history of the 20th century. He proposes to make the next hundred years a variation on the eugenics theme. The article is very long, deliberately so, but here are some of the more choice morsels, in no particular order:

…As the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin argues, “It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies and worse still when an adolescent does”; this argument is supported by empirical surveys [my emphasis - D]. Importantly, the prioritisation of adolescents and young adults considers the social and personal investment that people are morally entitled to have received at a particular age, rather than accepting the results of an unjust status quo. Consequently, poor adolescents should be treated the same as wealthy ones, even though they may have received less investment owing to social injustice.

Here, just to point out one bit of ignorant utopian thinking, “less investment” or intervention in human beings at certain critical windows of developmental opportunity forever limits the possibilities on the return on one’s investment in these “thrown-away” children, no matter how we strive for some abstract social justice on their behalf.

Our jails and prisons are not full of Boy Scouts fallen on hard times, despite Foucault’s protestations about their treatment. As Heather McDonald points out in “The Jail Inferno”:

The spread of quality-of-life policing, which targets low-level offenses like aggressive panhandling, public urination, and littering, has brought a more mentally unstable, troubled population into jails-one that mental hospitals would have treated before the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and ‘70s shuttered most state mental hospitals [more fallout from The Laws of Unintended Consequences. Thank you, John Kennedy, for a poorly realized, unfunded mandate forced on individual communities. Most of those poor souls wander the streets now, vulnerable to attack by one another and unmedicated, at least until they interface with the legal system eventually -D ]. In fact, jails have become society’s primary mental institutions, though few have the funding or expertise to carry out that role properly. Mental illness is much more common in jails than in prisons; at Rikers, 28 percent of the inmates require mental health services, a number that rises each year. “People are coming right off the streets with a whole range of street problems,” Jacobson reports. “You have to deal with them immediately and figure out: ‘Are you a dangerous lunatic, or just tough?’ “

Jail administrators worry constantly about inmates’ killing themselves-in 2008, Rikers spent $5.3 million in overtime pay for officers to sit watch, 24 hours a day, outside the cells of potential suicides…

But I digress from Dr. Emmanuel’s utopian plans built on scarcity. It was a digression to point out the ramifications of intellectualizing human problems

WHO endorses the system of disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) allocation. As with QALY (Quality of Life) allocation, DALY allocation does not consider interpersonal distribution. DALY systems also incorporate quality-of-life factors-for instance, they equate a life-year with blindness to roughly 0.6 healthy life-years. Additionally, DALY allocation ranks each life-year with the age of the person as a modifier: “The well-being of some age groups, we argue, is instrumental in making society flourish; therefore collectively we may be more concerned with improving health status for individuals in these age groups.” This argument, although used to justify age-weighting, would equally justify counting the life-years of economically productive people and those caring for others for more.

DALY allocation wrongly incorporates age into the outcome measure, claiming that a year for a younger person is in itself more valuable. Priority for young people is better justified on grounds of distributive justice. Also, the use of instrumental value to justify DALY allocation resembles that used in Seattle’s dialysis allocation, which inappropriately favoured wage earners and carers of dependents.

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated. It therefore superficially resembles the proposal made by DALY advocates; however, the complete lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value. Additionally, the complete lives system assumes that, although life-years are equally valuable to all, justice requires the fair distribution of them. Conversely, DALY allocation treats life-years given to elderly or disabled people as objectively less valuable.

Finally, the complete lives system is least vulnerable to corruption. Age can be established quickly and accurately from identity documents. Prognosis allocation encourages physicians to improve patients’ health, unlike the perverse incentives to sicken patients or misrepresent health that the sickest-first allocation creates.

Dr. Emmanuel is quite naive if he believes his system is not vulnerable to corruption. He is also illogical and inconsistent in rejecting Seattle’s dialysis allocations. They are empirically based, and he is the one who seems to find empiricism a good method for making moral judgments as evidenced by his reference to Dworkin, above. Or is it just his empirical judgments that ought to be taken into consideration? Believe me, Emmanuel’s ideas are nothing if they are not simply a construction built on one individual’s “oughts”.

But the biggest failure of this whole complicated formulation is that it never goes outside the box. It never, ever suggests that Americans can do what they do best with this problem: create awesome solutions to the problems of scarcity. For example, how about increasing the number of slots for medical school students? How about building more medical schools? How about inviting in immigrant medical school students? Like Indians and Chinese and Northern/ Eastern/ Central Europeans, and South Americans and Filipinos? Let’s have some real diversity for a change - as long as they speak good English, that is.

The whole system of our jerry-rigged health care is a house of cards that Obama and his FOOS are trying to hold together rather than actually producing any change (unless you consider more shortages the kind of change you’d envisioned). Here’s what needs discussion:

• our physician “scarcity” is artificial;
  
• we need to build more medical schools (and thus bring physicians’ remuneration more in line with others who go to school for comparative amounts of time);
  
• our hospitals compete rather than cooperate;
  
• our pharmacy companies wield too much power with the FDA;
  
• our insurance companies are hampered from being truly competitive by over-regulation at the state level. Why must an “insurance commission” be the final judge of who gets to participate?
  
• group insurance is tied to employment. No job with benefits, no insurance except for what you provide out of pocket. Fewer and fewer jobs (besides government work) come with benefits;
  
• the system is already thoroughly corrupt as a system. Dr. Emmanuel’s rigmarole to prevent corruption in a system already so compromised is pie-in-the-sky thinking. A tiny band aid applied to a hemorrhaging wound.

I am sure that others, more knowledgeable than I, can come up with better ideas than these. However, almost any of us could improve on Dr. Emmanuel’s evil plan. It will only further divide and balkanize this country.

But maybe that is the point? Just a variation on the same old eugenics tune? As in “life for me and mine, but not for thee and thine”?

I don’t like this President’s friends. I don’t like his policies, I don’t like his compulsive intrusion into areas that don’t concern a president. On the other hand, a monarch-in-waiting knows that no problem is too big or too small for his devoted attention.

The blog, Black and Right, is counting down the days, hours and minutes until this man is gone. Look in the upper right-hand side of Bob’s home page.

Meanwhile the Tea Parties are planning demonstrations against ObamaCare during the House recess (it began today) in front of each Congressman’s office throughout the country. The day chosen for these gatherings is August 22nd but I don’t have the time of day yet. As soon as I have more information, I’ll post it.

Health care in the U.S. needs an overhaul, but it doesn’t need the horrific bill being planned for the destruction of our economy. I don’t have the particulars to hand, but one Senator has earmarked an annual ten billion dollars in outlays for “preventive health” in the form of farmers’ markets, hiking trails, and other boondoggles. I’ll also have more details on this stealth robbery as I research more.

Meanwhile, the idea that the Congress should have to eat what it cooks - i.e., it should be provided with the same health care it is shoving off on us - is an excellent proposal. I hope this idea is part of the District Demonstrations on the 22nd.