Saturday, June 23, 2007

Affirmative action

As a conservative I'm naturally against it but a better deal for everyone would be if, instead of a government program based on race we had an informal system based on economic need this way poor whites on welfare would benefit as well as blacks and Hispanics. At any rate one of the unintended consequences of affirmative action as it is today is that, on occasion, you do get someone who totally does not belong in that job, everyone knows it and at first you're mystified that nobody seems to talk about it and that nothing is done, it's a classic elephant in the living room moment. This is not the goal of the proponents of race-based hiring but I've seen it on at least a few occasions and that's when your Peter Principle kicks in.

Isaiah Washington, the black actor on "Grey's Anatomy" who made the gay slur against co-actor T.R. Knight, has been fired from the show and the man is angry, said he did everything they told him to re atoning and that they now want to have Knight's character as a centerpiece of the show so this is interesting, apparently gay men trump African-American men in the victim stakes only it took a while longer to fire Washington than CBS Radio did in canning the I-man, well he was just a rickety old white cowboy anyway. If T.R. had responded in kind and called Washington the n-word it would have had a kind of karmic cancelling effect or something and would have confounded and stunned the whole pc crowd, what to do? two members of historic and time-honored victim groups have engaged in name-calling! do we fire them both and so not have a tv series at all or send them both off for reprogramming? Barring that maybe all T.R. has to do is question global warming and become pro-life and he can join the growing ranks of the damned.

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