Let’s see, you get 6 points for being a legacy applicant at Michigan (that means one of your parents went there before you), 20 points for being a member (in good standing, I assume) of an underrepresented minority group, another 20 for being on athletic scholarship; some more for being from an underrepresented Michigan county, and a few points if you happen to be a man going into nursing, or so the piece below from The Daily Feed, picked up off the democrats.com website, tells us. (If, by the way, a few newspapers exhibited this point chart — the Michigan system — on their front pages or in any prominent way, this whole “debate” might take a different turn.)
Now, our President, who made the announcement yesterday that his administration would go before the Supreme Court to lobby against the Michigan “quota” system, was himself the direct beneficiary of college affirmative action. He arrived at Yale in 1964, only a few years after the college threw out its unofficial quotas against Jews (in those years Blacks and Hispanics were barely on the radar screens of most major Ivies). He was admitted at the end of an era during which Yale’s admissions people thought it obvious that you empty the bottom third of Andover, his prep school — those were our natural leaders of the future — into the Yale freshman class before you went into a major public high school and found yourself fearfully face to face with some brainy Jew.
Our President, a self-admitted mediocre student at prep school, was a major legacy admittee to Yale. There was nothing strange about this in those days — affirmative action then, by whatever other name, meant offering an extra hand to those who already had every benefit on earth. This was the carefree world of George the younger. It still is. After all, does anything sound familiar here — from a president who has just announced a major affirmative action tax plan that gives everything to those who already have it? It’s called ideology, I suppose, and whatever it is it has the remarkable ability to blind George to his own life.
That said, as one of those then relatively rare Jews who ended up at Yale (two years ahead of our president), I can testify to a world of such an unexamined sense of entitlement that, at the time, it staggered me to the core. This is still the stance from which the President and some other conservative Republicans feel aggrieved (and I don’t think it’s simply a ploy to strengthen their electoral “base”) over Michigan’s modest system for achieving “diversity” and quite capable, as Derrick Z. Jackson, the fine Boston Globe columnist indicates, of imagining themselves the victims of a “lynching” when the Democrats refuse to accept one of their retrograde candidates for judgeships. Tom
GOP puts a new twist on ‘lynching’
By Derrick Z. Jackson
The Boston Globe
January 15, 2003To prove it is the party of Lincoln and not Lott, the Republicans have made a startling declaration:
They hate lynchings!
To prove it is the party of Lincoln and not Lott, the Republicans have made a startling declaration:
They hate lynchings!
This is incredible. As recently as 1999, President Bush, then governor of Texas, refused to support a new hate crimes law that would have stiffened penalties and added new provisions for gay and lesbian victims. Only seven months ago, Republicans blocked an attempt to add sexual orientation and disabilities to federal hate crimes laws.
What a difference seven months makes. What a difference the victim makes. He is not black like James Byrd, dragged behind a pickup truck in Texas in 1998. He is not gay like Matthew Shepard, skull crushed and tied to a fence in Wyoming in 1998.
This lynch victim is white, well off, and has a son in Congress. He is the oppressed Charles Pickering.
To read more of Jackson click here
Good Quotas vs. Bad Quotas
The Daily Feed (of Junction City)
January 16, 2003Today, the Feed gets ready for MLK Day.
Yesterday, Bush stood up and said that he opposed the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program. Pay close attention to this. The President himself made the announcement. Not Ari Fleischer. Not a press release to accompany a friend of the court brief in the Supreme Court case against Michigan’s policy. But W hisself, a guy who got into Yale with alumni connections, using his rich guy quota points to get into college. Geez. What gives with this, people? Karl Rove trotted out Bush — which means they wanted to make news. What a shame. It just goes to show that, no matter how many absurd Trent Lott comments Bush repudiates, no matter how many black leaders meet with the RNC, it’s the same old GOP.
To read more of the Feed piece click here