I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The furor surrounding President Obama’s effort to secure the 2016 Olympics for his adopted home town of Chicago took me by surprise. I thought it perfectly natural that the president would do a little lobbying when his own city ended up being a front-runner to host the Olympics. After all, why not? Who, apart from the businessmen of Rio de Janeiro, would be the losers?
Clearly, I was among the minority of conservatives holding that opinion. The outrage on the right was fierce and uncompromising. One objection was that Chicago was an unfit location for the Olympics because of all the crime, they charged. Perhaps, but wasn’t that the Olympic committee’s decision? Personally, I think the world’s athletes would have been perfectly safe on the streets of Chicago, because the Chicago police would have been out in such force and with such diligence as to make the Los Angeles Police Department under Daryl Gates look like mall cops.
Another objection was that Obama was engaging in cronyism, helping out his Chicago friends. Well, yes. And so what? Since when don’t politicians do favors for friends? It wasn’t actual pay to play; no money changed hands. It was just a case of a local boy who made good trying to return a lot of past favors in one fell swoop.
Both in this column and on my blog, I have always been careful not criticize President Obama just for the sake of criticizing him. I save my condemnation for situations when I really think he deserves it, and keep quiet, or even defend him, to the annoyance of some on my side, when I think he is being unfairly disparaged. Some of my fellow conservatives follow a different policy, attacking the president for anything and everything he does, and in my opinion, they are making a mistake that hurts my side far more than the president’s side.
I recently finished reading the economist Thomas Sowell’s autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, and the Republican condemnation of President Obama’s Olympic misadventure reminded me of a passage Sowell wrote about the struggle to end Jim Crow laws in the South:
It struck me as a classic problem in economics. Black people did not — and do not — have unlimited resources, or unlimited goodwill in the larger society. Given all the urgent needs for more and better education, for example, and for all the things that can be obtained with the fruits of work skills and business experience, how much time and effort could be spared for endless campaigns to get into every hamburger stand operated by a redneck? (pp. 140-1)
My point here is not to denigrate the civil rights struggle, and it wasn’t Sowell’s point either. After all, Sowell himself is black and had on occasion suffered the indignity of being turned away from an all white eating establishment. His point was that people need to pick their battles and not squander their political capital, but rather expend it on issues of the greatest importance, and that is my point here. Repubilcans are squandering whatever goodwill we have in the larger society when we jump all over the president every time he opens his mouth. It makes us look like petty, complaining schoolyard bullies.
We need to save our outrage for the issues that really matter. Unfortunately, with a relatively inexperienced president in the White House during a time of economic crisis and international peril, there are more than enough of those.
