These New Bloggers Don’t Got the Same Sowell

Sometimes, in a rush to find juicy stories to blog about, you can miss some great nuggets. Such is the case with me and Thomas Sowell. In my hurry to empty out my Blog Lines, I often miss out on his weekly column (which is my loss). This week, Dr. Sowell posted four columns on Frivolous Politics. And they’re worth the read.

Sowell hits a home run on Iraq in Part One:

All this rhetoric about a withdrawal timetable is based on trying to make political hay out of the fact that the Iraq war is unpopular. But all wars have been unpopular with Americans, as they should be.

Even World War II, won by “the greatest generation,” was never popular, though the home front was united behind the troops a lot better than today. The last shot of that war had barely been sounded before the cry arose to bring our boys back home.

The exuberant celebrations across this country when World War II ended showed that we weren’t looking for more war or more conquests. We weren’t even trying to hold on to all the territory we had conquered. There has probably never been a time in history when a military force in the millions was disbanded so quickly.

In Part Two, Sowell takes a look an honest at why to vote Republican:

Some people say that there is no point voting because there is no difference between the two major parties, and the other parties have no chance of winning. However, there is a difference: the Republicans are disappointing and the Democrats are dangerous…

The most that can be said for the current Republicans is that they want to throw away less money than the Democrats. In general, Democrats are the only real reason to vote for Republicans…

When it comes to national security and the war on terrorism, that is a big reason.

The same liberal unwillingness to get tough with criminals that has marked the Democrats, and the judges they put on the federal courts, for decades on end has now been applied to the captured terrorists for whom they want to create new “rights” that are nowhere in the Constitution or the Geneva convention…

Against that background, those disappointed Republican voters who plan to stay home on election day to protest their elected officials’ failings are seeing politics as a way to vent their personal emotions. That is a frivolous self-indulgence in a deadly serious time for this nation.

In Part Three, Sowell an African American, lays it on the line about the GOP and race relations:

The only black voters the G.O.P. have any real chance to attract are those whose views and values happen to be closer to those of the Republicans than those of the Democrats.

These are certainly a minority of black voters but many elections are won or lost by a few percentage points. In a closely divided country, if the Republicans can just reduce the Democrats’ 90 percent of the black vote to 75 percent, the Democrats are in big trouble.

Instead of specifically targeting those black voters they might have some chance of winning, Republicans have been trying for decades to placate black “leaders,” including the NAACP, and to throw blacks such sops as stamps honoring Paul Robeson and Kwanzaa, and awarding a Medal of Freedom to Mohammad Ali.

Sowell sums up the choice this election well in part four, along with what the Democrats have to offer:

If you think political spin and political gamesmanship are the answers to this country’s problems, then vote for the Democrats.

Spot on stuff, read all four pieces. As for me, from now on, I’ll make sure that I read any column Sowell writes.

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