Steve Sailer has nailed an important newspaper datum:
All those boring end-of-year / end-of-decade articles that journalists phone in so that they can take the last week of the year off are finally over.
Wed. Journal of OP&RF had a head for its year-ender that got my attention: it had me thinking its villager of the year was being investigated.
Until I remembered this was an issue I didn’t have to read. Year-ending thumb-sucker, you know.
Chi Daily News’s Don Zochert used to call up clips and go to work isolating the important and the curious brilliantly. He’s a novelist and a stylist — and biographer of Laura Ingalls Wilder. His stuff I’d read, because it had surprises. Pleasant ones, not crash-bang accidents, horrifying but attention-getting.
Most not, however. Sailer, an expert on race relations, spots a decade-long trend that everyone missed, “a hidden key to understanding the two seminal events of the last decade—9/11 and the economic collapse.”
The factor linking the two big stories of the 2000s: George W. Bush’s sizable degree of culpability in both disasters:
Bush had Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta eradicate the airport security ethnic profiling system before 9/11. (Then he reappointed Mineta, a Democrat, for his second term!).
Bush repeatedly signaled the mortgage industry in 2002-2004 that zero down payment home purchases would be A-OK with his federal regulators.
Of course, those are by no means the only causes of the subsequent disasters. But shouldn’t we at least talk about them?
Sailer does, asking, “what links Bush’s two blunders” and answering, “George W. Bush’s Commitment to Diversity.
Here’s Governor Bush during his second debate with Al Gore on October 11, 2000:
“And secondly, there is other forms of racial profiling that goes on in America. Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what’s called secret evidence [sic]. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that. My friend, Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect.
Which is related closely to this:
Michael Tuohey, the U.S. Airways desk clerk who checked Atta in that morning later admitted that he said to himself: “If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does”. But, then “I gave myself a political correct slap”. And three thousand died. “[“I Was The One,” Interview with Oprah Winfrey, September 12, 2005]
Etc. Read the whole thing.
Blithe Spirit 