Holder’s Justice Department certainly isn’t the only part of the government pushing double standards for select ethnic groups. The Military Leadership Diversity Commission, established by the last Congress, urges the military to justify tests that have had the effect of excluding large numbers of minorities from leadership. “Racial/ethnic minorities are less likely to meet eligibility requirements than are non-Hispanic whites, and that gap is widening,” the panel’s recently-completed report notes. “The armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as demographically diverse as the nation they serve.”
If there is something comical in the insertion of race into a governmental stance on bullying, there is something tragic in racial correctness trumping aptitude in the armed forces and law enforcement. Ill-equipped police and military officers are a life-and-death matter. Like 1978’s Bakke case, which inflamed public opinion against affirmative action because it involved racial quotas at a medical school, the Democrats’ overreach in pushing racial preferences for local cops and military leaders so greatly offends because it undermines safety.
Two patterns clearly emerge after more than two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. First, the Obama administration holds an omnipotent view of government that tolerates no limitations. Second, the Obama administration obsesses over race. If the government was not so hubristically intrusive, concerning itself with such distant matters as schoolyard bullies and the number of African Americans employed by a mid-sized Midwestern city, the racial preoccupations of the people running the government wouldn’t be so alarming. The monomaniacs would be powerless to rule us with the idea that rules them. The most dangerous bullies are those with an inflated sense of their own justice and no acknowledgement of an authority holding them in check.
Whoever said “don’t make a federal case out of it” never got around to telling the feds. From schoolyard bullies to the racial composition of local police forces, Uncle Sam has made its business that which isn’t its business. That’s what bullies do.
Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). He has appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, Sky News, PBS, CSPAN, and other networks. He writes a Monday column for Human Events and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.
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