Democrats target not just Republicans but America itself

by J. Peder Zane, News and Observer, December 16, 2014.

Winners may write the history, but left-wingers have controlled the headlines since their thumping in last month’s elections.

While most citizens worry about the economy, the news has focused on social issues cast as a broad indictment of the decency of America and her people.

Coverage of police tactics, sexual violence and CIA interrogation methods has revolved less around specific and nuanced facts than raw charges of racism, sexism and sadism both in the press and on the streets.

This damning narrative, echoing false and divisive Democrat talking points about racist Republicans and the “war on women,” has been pushed by party activists and their media shills. Essentially, they’ve broadened their broadsides against the GOP to target America itself.

Let’s be clear: America is far from a perfect union. We have not vanquished bigotry and cruelty. But the recent coverage tendentiously ignores the vast improvement Americans have made in how we treat one another, not just over the last half-century, when we dismantled Jim Crow and cultural norms that limited women’s opportunities, but even during the last decade.

Begin with the Rolling Stone article alleging that seven fraternity members at the University of Virginia gang-raped a woman with impunity. The assault, which reportedly took place for hours upon shards of broken glass, was not just stomach-churning. It was cartoonish.  Nevertheless, the Washington Post published a glowing profile of the article’s writer.

It was only after conservative writers questioned the obvious holes in the story that serious scrutiny began, forcing Rolling Stone to apologize for the article. Why did the magazine run it? As in the Duke lacrosse case, the national media – whose leaders are overwhelmingly privileged people of pallor – seem blithely willing to advance stories of white privilege run amok.

Sexual assault is a problem on (and off) campus, but it is not an epidemic. Sexual violence against females declined 60 percent between 1995 and 2010, according to the Justice Department. The department also reports that  less than 1 percent of colleges students annually say they suffered a sexual assault – which includes not just coerced penetration but “forcible kissing, fondling, or grabbing.” The department estimates that 80 percent of assaults are unreported, but that figure is still far below the White House claim that 1 in 5 female college students will be assaulted in her college years.

The “torture report” issued by Senate Democrats is also problematic. Given the wall-to-wall coverage, you’d think this is the first we are learning of harsh interrogation techniques used on alleged terrorists. In fact, we’ve known about waterboarding for more than a decade; President Obama promised to ban such practices when he ran in 2008 and did just that on his second day in office.

While news stories imply that the CIA was running concentration camps, the report found that the CIA  subjected 39 people to these harsh interrogation techniques. The partisan report does not mention that well before the post-9/11 panic, President  Bill Clinton authorized a policy of extraordinary rendition, through which at least 14 individuals were kidnapped and sent to nations such as Egypt that inflicted barbaric forms of torture.

I’m glad Obama barred these repugnant practices. So what is to be gained through this rehashing? We are diminishing our standing in the world and, ironically, condoning torture by refusing to indict those who authorized and carried out these practices. The 2016 election will be interesting if Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are running for the presidency while her husband and his brother stand trial for war crimes in the Hague.

Finally, the killings of unarmed black men and boys, including Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, by white police officers is tragic. While suggesting that the criminal justice system is overprotective of police officers in such circumstances, those cases do not support  wider claims that it is “ open season on black folks.”

From 1999 to 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found  that 2,151 whites and 1,130 blacks died after being shot by police. The Department of Justice found that between 2002 and 2008,  the number of African-Americans reporting that police used force against them fell more quickly than the figure for whites. And,  while black officers account for about 10 percent of fatal police shootings, 78 percent of their victims were black.

Again, there are clear and alarming racial disparities in America, some of which revolve around policing and destructive incarceration policies. No one needs me to say that people have a right to be angry.

But the over-the-top rhetoric expressed in response to this and other issues paints a false picture of America. Worse, it fuels a divisive us-versus-them environment that will make it harder for us to come together to continue to identify practical and effective responses to the challenges we face as a people.

Contributing columnist J. Peder Zane can be reached at jpederzane@jpederzane.com.