Chris Lane

The Red Ranger: Recognize the name?. Probably not given your allegiance to the MSM and radical, left-wing news sites.

Chris Lane is an Australian baseball player who was gunned down by three teenagers in Oklahoma while he was jogging.  One other item of note in this case is that he was white and his killers are black.  One of the assailants has postings on his Twitter account about how he hates whites.  I wonder if the Department of Justice  is going to be looking into this as a hate crime and whether Chris’ civil rights were violated.  My guess is that they will not, given how the prevalent thinking there is that minorities cannot be racist and it is only evil white folks who can be racist.

When will Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson comment on this case?  Will Barack Obama get in front of the nation and say it could have been him?

My challenge to you, Nattering Naybob, is to find this story on one of your favorite websites where they indicate the racial context of the shooting or that one of the assailants has a history of online racial rants.

Nattering Naybob: Here we go again.

Let me start off by saying that I have always been uncomfortable with assigning any violent act an extra layer of a “hate crime”. I am a  little more sympathetic to a crime being labeled a “civil rights violation”, but even that term is poorly-defined. I don’t know what the point is of saying that a particular murder is a “hate crime” and another isn’t. I feel that any pre-meditated or depraved act of murder, is inherently hateful by definition.

I did a Google search a few minutes ago and I found several links to mainstream media outlets like CBS News, NBC News, Huffington Post, and others, whose first sentence mentioned the fact that one of his killers publicly voiced his hatred for white people. Expecting Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to comment on this case in the same manner as they did the Trayvon Martin case, is a waste of time because their main objective, as African-American activists, is to identify and comment on examples of the African-American community being treated unfairly. That is what they do. I find nothing wrong with admitting this very openly and honestly.

This reminds me of the argument I hear from white people who find fault with such institutions as “Black Miss America”, or any number of any other African-American based contests, ceremonies etc. The familiar dry is, “Oh, is they ever had a White Miss America contest, can you imagine the uproar?” Well, new flash for you: Most all public institutions, competitions, etc. throughout our history have been, by default, nearly 100% white, all along.

The Red Ranger: I tend to agree with you on hate crime.  I am honestly confused by the term civil rights violation.  What does that mean?  Aren’t all murders civil rights violations merely by the fact that they took away the persons civil rights.

Here is another story which is actually even sadder than the Australian baseball player given this guy’s record.

Yes, I believe that the MSM picked up the Chris Lane story as it gathered some notoriety.

Just because in the past, black women were thought by some to not be deserving to compete in beauty pageants with whites, doesn’t make it OK that they have pageants that exclude whites by their very nature.

“My job is not to worry about those people”

Nattering Naybob: Well, Red Ranger, I suppose Mitt Romney only solidified his support with you and the rest of your Republican bretheren who think that all of Obama’s supporters are nothing more than people who “…depend on the government, who believe that they are victims….My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”. Isn’t it comforting to you all to think that the person who (despite all his inadequacies as a candidate and as a person) still has roughly a 50% chance of being our next President, has such hatred to roughly 50% of the citizenry which he is trying to lead ?

The Red Ranger: This is Mitt Romney’s answer to Obama’s, “Clinging to their guns and religion” statement. I think I read somewhere that the video was uncovered by Jimmy Carter’s grandson. If that were true it would just strengthen the ties between Carter and Obama.

One issue I have with the statement is that just because 47% of people get a check from the government that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve it. While technically my mother is reliant on the government to mail her her Social Security check, she has worked most of her life (and still is) and is now getting back what she paid into Social Security. I know that some people will say that she is getting back more than she paid in but that is not her fault it is the government for not calibrating payments correctly

Nattering Naybob: That famous Obama quote has been compared to this, but honestly I think Romney’s is much worse for the following reasons: 1) It comes closer to Election day, which is now less than 50 days away. As ill-advised as Obama’s comment was, it came in, I believe, April or May, so he had time to recover from it. 2) Obama made his comment in the context of “wanting” those “bitter” people’s vote, but afraid he was not going to get it. Romney seems like he does not care whether or not he gets the support of the “47%”. 3) The video has Romney making rather foolish statements on a wide variety of issues, including foreign policy (in one comment he speculates what he would do if he were an Iranian terrorist trying to attack America with a “dirty bomb”).

I sense that The Red Ranger is getting more uneasy with each passing day about the fading prospects of the Republican candidate. An NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday indicated that when people are asked “Who is better suited to manage the economy”, Obama and Romney got the same percentage of support (I believe 43%). I think this poll number is perhaps the most devastating to Romney, who was counting on his supposed advantage in all things economic, to propel him to the Oval Office. When the American people, who have seen 3-1/2 years of steady but slow economic improvement, think Obama would be just as good as Romney in handling the economy, that should be a sign that things are not going well for Romney. He better hope he has a fantastic debate performance (three of them might be necessary), or that the results from a wide variety of polls, are wrong.