Richard Cohen: Patrick Sullivan Meet Your Soulmate

      Listen. I've been nice to Patrick Sullivan-I even praised his website that is well written. However, that he just doesn't get it on racial issues is shown by his tiresome attempts to play the reversal game-'aha so you're the real racist! You're the real profiler!'

       He's been claiming that Trayvon Martin is a homophobe based on his comments to his girlfriend that fateful night in the parking lot. It never occurs to him that behind all the false equivalence a 17 year old young man is dead. His parents and loved ones will never get to hug him again. He seems incapable of getting that while he plays word games it was Martin pursued Martin in that gated community based on race. Had he just listened to the dispatcher Trayvon would be alive. 

      Yet I've asked him repeatedly whether he can admit that this would be a better outcome. He can't bring himself to say yes-every time he simply deflects. If he attempts to answer this post my prediction that his answer will be another deflection-he'll change the subject but not answer it directly. Conservatives just don't seem to have any sense of proportion. As the commentator Greg puts it, these folks simply lack basic humanity at least on the question of blacks or other groups they don't consider as worthy people as white, Christian, men. As he seems so worried about anti gay slurs I wonder if Patrick supports gay marriage. Or does he support Doma? 

      I'll tell you what Patrick. If you are so appalled by homophobia-but not racism of course-criticize these GOPers. Is there anything wrong with these comments?

       http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/anti-gay-activists-praise-maine-governor-for-crude

      "They price all lives very cheap, they just don't know it. Get rid of every black and their ilk would find a new "someone different" to hate and marginalize. Its why their ideology isn't compatible with civilization as we know it. We've achieved the level of society we have in spite of the Patrick, certainly not because of them. With them the tribe gets smaller and smaller. The in group gets more and more inbred."

        http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/07/patrick-sullivan-thomas-sowell-and-why.html

     The conservative Richard Cohen thinks he has written very clever column where he declares 'Yes, I'm a racist.' He perhaps says what even Patrick won't bring himself to admit to being. Why not just admit it? You think it's ok to treat young black males in discriminatory ways. Cohen admits it:

      "In a piece that contains the telling (even in context) line “I am a racist,” longtime Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen employed a mishmash of poorly explained statistics and bafflingly ignorant mathematical reasoning to argue that Trayvon Martin was “understandably suspected because he was black” — that is, Americans should assume any young black men they meet are criminals."

      http://thinkprogress.org/media/2013/07/16/2308761/washington-post-columnist-i-am-a-racist/

      As TP points out even if it were true that black males commit a higher proportion of violent crimes this still wouldn't legitimize treating blacks you just met as suspects-either ethically or logically. 

      "Writing that he could “understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize” (hoodies presumably being the universal uniform of all black male criminals), Cohen argued that Americans, and especially American politicians, are too afraid of the PC police to acknowledge the reality that black men are more likely to be criminals. “Where is the politician,” Cohen wails, “who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?”

      "Set aside for the moment that President Obama, who Cohen claims “perpetuated” the enforced silence surrounding black crime, incessantly talks to black audiences about violence in the African-American community. Is Cohen’s basic claim — that higher rates of black crime make it reasonable to suspect black men of being criminals — true?"

      "No. First, the basic assumption, that black men are more likely to commit crimes than the average member of another demographic, isn’t nearly as well-founded as Cohen wants it to be. For instance, blacks and whites use drugs at rates basically proportionate to the population: blacks are 14 percent of Americans and 14 percent of monthly drug users. Yet blacks are at leastfour times as likely as whites to be incarcerated for a drug crime. Could that have something to do with attitudes like Cohen’s?"

     "Broader numbers bear the point about race and drug use out. In a piece entitled “The Trayvon Martin Killing and the Myth of Black-on-Black Crime,” Jamelle Bouie cites a litany of recent statistical evidence to show that blacks aren’t “especially criminal,” including the fact that “among black youth, rates of robbery and serious property offenses are at their lowest rates in 40 years, as are rates of violent crime and victimization.” 

     "While its true that there are some numbers that go the other way, academic research suggests the blacks are still unfairly treated: in a review of the work on sentencing disparities for the American Bar Association, Marc Mauercites 2008 research suggesting “only 61 percent of the black incarceration rate is explained by disproportionate engagement in criminal behavior…Thus, nearly 40 percent of the racial disparity in incarceration today cannot be explained by differential offending patterns.” The American criminal justice system has already done what Cohen wants: assume black men are criminals and ask questions later."

      "But even if every one of Cohen’s prejudices about black men and crime was true, the columnist’s claim that it’s reasonable to assume black men are criminals when you meet them is founded on a laughably simple statistical error. Statisticians call it the “base rate error,” and it goes something like this: suppose taller mountains are disproportionately more likely to be volcanoes than shorter mountains. That doesn’t make it smart to assume that most tall mountains you see are volcanoes, because volcanoes are still a tiny percentage of all tall mountains. The most important question is the basic likelihood of a tall mountain being a volcano (base rate), not whether tall mountains make up a higher percentage of volcanoes as compared to other mountains."

      It's like saying that if all lepers are men then most men are lepers. It's basic logic.

      The cluelessness of conservatives is perfectly underscored by Ted Nugent's call for Zimmerman to sue Trayvon Martin's parents. 

       "From his July 17 column for conservative website Rare, where Nugent worried that "Zimmerman may also face a wrongful-death civil suit brought by Trayvon Martin's family, who refuse to admit their son was a troublemaker who brought about his own demise":

Parents can be held responsible for the actions of their minor-age children until the children reach the age of majority (meaning adulthood), which is exactly why Mr. Zimmerman should explore filing a lawsuit against Martin's parents. The age of majority in Florida is 18-years-old. Trayon Martin was 17-years-old when he attacked Mr. Zimmerman, which potentially means that Trayvon's parents may possibly be held responsible for the stress, emotional pain and anguish their son caused George Zimmerman.

I'm just your simple Motor City guitar player, and generally despise lawyers and all of their bureaucratic layers or legal maneuvering, but Mr. Zimmerman should hire a legal shark to determine if he has grounds to sue Trayvon Martin's parents for the actions of their son.

     "Since Zimmerman's acquittal on July 13, Nugent has made a number of inflammatory comments about Martin. In a July 15 column for Rare, he termed Martin a "dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe." Nugent doubled down on those comments in a July 16 column for birther website WND, describing Martin as an "enraged black man-child" and a "Skittles hoodie boy."

      Right. Because Zimmerman was the victim. Not Trayvon, not his parents That Nugent can honestly want these people who have lost their child forever to be sued by the man who killed him just makes the point. Just like the juror who says she feels equally sorry for Trayvon and Zimmerman, and Patrick who can't bring himself to even call Martin's death a tragedy,Nugent can't even get that black lives have any value, much less that we should value their loss of life more than Zimmerman being inconvenienced.