The Law of Unintended Consequences

As Rush Limbaugh says frequently, "Words mean something." In Barack Obama's lame excuses for besmirching the entire police profession by saying they acted "stupidly", he only exacerbated the situation by claiming his words were mis-calibrated. The words were uttered in plain English. There was no nuance, no obscurity, no doubt about their meaning whatsoever. Obama has now dug a deeper hole by trying to bury the first one he dug. If we had an honest press they would be calling him on it. Don't hold your breath.

The facts are apparently clear in this case: The police officer responded to a call about a possible burglary, investigated and encountered an obviously out-of-control left-winger with a giant chip on his shoulder. The officer apparently did nothing wrong. The professor clearly refused to cooperate with the police officer in any way. The 911 tapes would probably make that abundantly clear if they were allowed to be released. If we had an honest civil administration in the Cambridge police department, they would have already released the tapes. Don't hold your breath.

The tapes will probably not be released precisely because they would exonerate the police officer. They will refuse to release the tapes because it would displease the left-wing power brokers who do not want the professor's outrageous behavior further illuminated. They probably don't dare release the tapes. Don't hold your breath.

One of the most pernicious ways left-wingers wreak damage on our society can be summed up neatly in the Law of Unintended Consequences. In actuality, and in fact, very frequently the opposite result than the left-wingers had intended in their policies and regulations, occurs. For example, John Locke warned over 300 years ago that artificially restricting interest rates lenders could charge resulted in more problems than benefits for most people because the lenders simply stopped lending money at the restricted rates. Therefore, average people could no longer get credit. Instead of helping benighted people to save money on interest, the nanny class prevented them from prospering at all. Many other such examples abound.

Affirmative Action is yet another example of supposed good intentions gone wrong. Professor Gates is a product of the affirmative action generation of the sixties and seventies. No one can ever know what his real merit was when he was accepted to Yale since at the time he was accepted many, many unqualified minorities were being accepted based not on merit, but on the quaint notion that society could correct long-standing injustice against them by just jamming them into Ivy League colleges. Some of them undoubtedly were well-qualified and would have been accepted and would have graduated on their own. However, since they were all lumped together with the unqualified, the smell left behind by affirmative action lingers on and on, permeating each minority college student who attended colleges such as Yale since the sixties. Nobody can know, or ever will know, if any particular student got in, and graduated from the Ivy League educational institutions on their own merit or if the whole thing was as a result of the misguided efforts of do-gooders to right all of the supposed wrongs of prior racial discrimination by reserving slots for less-qualified persons of color, then passing them along because, after all, they couldn't be allowed to fail. The result of this meddling is that many of these "scholars" have a permanent, giant chip on their shoulders, of the variety Professor Gates apparently amply demonstrated. They know the aura of invalidity will follow them the rest of their academic lives no matter what they do. It has to be a heavy burden to bear.

Maybe Professor Gates is the world's greatest scholar on "Black Studies." The news media is convinced he is. The sad reality is that because of the law of unintended consequences as applied to affirmative action, the world can really never know. An honest assessment by commentators would admit this. Don't hold your breath.