The tortured journey of the hoodie through the maze of political culture took a few twists recently. On Monday, we learned that the Obama campaign decided to start tweeting out a special discounted price for its campaign hoodie, in what many saw as an attempt to cash in on the Trayvon Martin shooting.
The sale didn’t last for long. By Tuesday evening, Team Obama had not only canceled the sale price, but deleted the Tweet offering the discount. Since the indispensible quality of an Obama supporter is his ability to forget inconvenient history upon command, that should be good enough to get them out of hot water.
More problematic is the behavior of Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), who decided to wear a hoodie onto the floor of the House, and was promptly ejected – primarily because he insisted on keeping the hood up, and the House has a rule against members wearing hats while it’s in session. Rush came into the chamber wearing the hoodie under his suit, then did a dramatic “Superman reveal” to make his Big Statement.
Fortunately, keeping his hood tightly knotted around his ears keeps Rep. Rush from hearing the screams of all the people murdered in his district every week, many of them black. His Congressional territory covers the south side of Chicago, which just observed its one hundredth homicide for the year. Yes, 100 homicides by March. Among the recent dead are three men gunned down in a shower of two dozen bullets, and a 6-year-old child caught in a gang-war crossfire. No word on how many of the victims, or shooters, were wearing hoodies.
Chicago, of course, is a permanently Democrat city, and one of those “gun-free utopias” you hear so much about these days. That means nobody wants to talk about the crime problem festering under generations of corrupt Democrat misrule, but everyone has a heart failure when an 80-year-old man uses a gun to defend himself from a burglar.
This whole “hoodie” issue, like the Trayvon Martin case in general, is a circus meant to distract everyone from the real issues facing black America. The menace of zealotry from neighborhood watch patrols is very, very low on that list. But the people who have helped create generational dependency among poor Americans of every color are now pleased to inform us that a single, confused incident in Florida somehow discredits those who advocate an end to dependency. We’re supposed to draw “larger lessons” from an isolated incident, in a little condominium complex, in a small town in Florida, while ignoring the mountains of corpses in our great cities… and the indisputable fact that the same broken-down party machinery and ruinous ideology has governed those cities for decades.
Would any of these loudmouths care to back up their concerns by providing some statistics on the number of otherwise innocent, hoodie-wearing youths gunned down by people of different races? I’ll save them some trouble. The sad truth is that most homicides occur between people of the same race, and young black males are far more likely (by a factor of ten) to be murdered by other black males. Working backward from the already tiny demographic of whites and Hispanics gunning down blacks, it won’t take long to arrive at a vanishingly small number who demonstrably opened fire for no other reason than the appearance of their target.
Throw in law-abiding black citizens who shot black youths because they were wearing hoodies, and you’re still looking at a very obscure cause of death. You can pump the number up by throwing in cops, but then we’re not talking about anything even tangentially connected to the Sanford shooting any more.
The insertion of national politicians into the Martin case is an assertion that society and government have broken down, which is a concession to anarchy. It doesn’t take long for those signals to percolate down to people who conclude that justice can only be dealt “outside the system.” Grandstanding liberals are stirring a pot full of highly explosive materials.
