Is Ed Schultz insane or just an idiot? It’s really hard to be sure anymore

By David McElroy · October 15, 2011

Some of the people who are obsessed with race in this country are insane. It seems polite to assume they’re insane, because if they’re not, they’re just idiots.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz is one of those insane people. Or he’s an idiot. Take your pick.

Here’s the latest insanity from Schultz and others who see racism hiding under every phrase spoken by people they don’t like. In a discussion of rolling back Barack Obama’s health care reforms, Sen. Jim Demint, R-S.C., said, “If we are able to stop Obama on this [health care law], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Schultz repeated, “It will break him,” in an ominous tone and then accused Demint of being a racist for using the word “break” in relation to a black man.

Huh? Give me a break.

A couple of university professors support Schultz’s bizarro assertion. Dr. James Peterson, for instance, is director of “Africana studies” at Lehigh University, and he said that “break” is a racist verb, because it is “a term that was used to destroy, mentally and physically, slaves.”

Huh?

So let me get this straight. We’re supposed to treat people in a colorblind way, but when a white politician says something that plainly refers to ending the political effectiveness of a political opponent, he is held responsible for something that some idiot claims was used in a racial way 150 years ago? Schultz claims the word is an “old southern racist term.” I’ve lived in the South all my life, and I’ve never once heard it used that way.

Never.

People such as Schultz and this black professor I just quoted (plus another professor quoted on the show) see racism wherever it’s convenient to see it. They never see it in their own friends and allies, of course. It’s only among those evil white people who they disagree with. You see, people who disagree with them aren’t just wrong. They’re evil. They’re racists.

I really don’t know whether Schultz and Peterson are insane or simply stupid, but I’m sure of one thing. They will find racism under any rock under which they look — if it’s convenient to their position to find it there. There’s plenty of real racism in this world — among every racial group — but when you only find it among your opponents, that’s a clear sign that you’re seeing the world through a very selective lens.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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