Quote of the Day 2

From George Will, writing about criticism that the federal government's post-Katrina response was motivated by the economic condition of the victims:

America's always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its banks, and last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois's freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president's inadequate "empathy" and an amazing criticism of the government's "historic indifference" and its "passive indifference" that "is as bad as active malice." The senator, 44, is just 30 months older than the "war on poverty" that President Johnson declared in January 1964. Since then the indifference that is as bad as active malice has been expressed in more than $6.6 trillion of anti-poverty spending, strictly defined.

The senator is called a "new kind of Democrat," which often means one with new ways of ignoring evidence discordant with old liberal orthodoxies about using cash — much of it spent through liberalism's "caring professions" — to cope with cultural collapse. He might, however, care to note three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.

Will goes on to note that nationally, about a third of all American births are to unmarried women. The percentage among African American women is double that, and among Louisiana African Americans (that's the entire state, not just New Orleans), it's three out of four births. "That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males," Will said, "and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine."

When will any African American "leader" (other than Bill Cosby) decide to work on that, instead of pointing fingers at White America? Maybe there is some attention to the issue, but I don't hear about it. Do you?