Condi Rice's Speech before the RNC

Prepared Remarks at Republican Convention

Good evening. Distinguished delegates, fellow Republicans, fellow Americans.

We gather here at a time of significance and challenge. This young century has been a difficult one. I will never forget the bright September day, standing at my desk in the White House, when my young assistant said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center – and then a second one – and a third, the Pentagon. And then the news of a fourth, driven into the ground by brave citizens that died so that many others would live. From that day on our sense of vulnerability and our understanding of security would be altered forever. Then in 2008 the global financial and economic crisis stunned us and still reverberates as unemployment, economic uncertainty and failed policies cast a pall over the American recovery so desperately needed at home and abroad.

And we have seen once again that the desire for freedom is universal – as men and women in the Middle East demand it. Yet, the promise of the Arab Spring is engulfed in uncertainty; internal strife and hostile neighbors are challenging the fragile democracy in Iraq; dictators in Iran and Syria butcher their own people and threaten the security of the region; China and Russia prevent a response; and all wonder, “Where does America stand?”

Indeed that is the question of the moment- “Where does America stand?” When our friends and our foes, alike, do not know the answer to that question – clearly and unambiguously -- the world is a chaotic and dangerous place. The U.S. has since the end of World War II had an answer – we stand for free peoples and free markets, we are willing to support and defend them – we will sustain a balance of power that favors freedom.

To be sure, the burdens of leadership have been heavy. I, like you, know the sacrifices that Americans have made – yes including the ultimate sacrifice of many of our bravest. Yet our armed forces remain the sure foundation of liberty. We are fortunate to have men and women who volunteer – they volunteer to defend us on the front lines of freedom. And we owe them our eternal gratitude.

I know too that it has not always been easy – though it has been rewarding – to speak up for those who would otherwise be without a voice – the religious dissident in China; the democracy advocate in Venezuela; the political prisoner in Iran.

It has been hard to muster the resources to support fledgling democracies– or to help the world’s most desperate - the AIDs orphan in Uganda, the refugee fleeing Zimbabwe, the young woman who has been trafficked into the sex trade in Southeast Asia; the world’s poorest in Haiti. Yet this assistance – together with the compassionate works of private charities – people of conscience and people of faith - has shown the soul of our country.

And I know too that there is weariness – a sense that we have carried these burdens long enough. But if we are not inspired to lead again, one of two things will happen – no one will lead and that will foster chaos --- or others who do not share our values will fill the vacuum. My fellow Americans, we do not have a choice. We cannot be reluctant to lead – and one cannot lead from behind.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan understand this reality -- that our leadership abroad and our well being at home are inextricably linked. They know what needs to be done. Our friends and allies must be able to trust us. From Israel to Poland to the Philippines to Colombia and across the world -- they must know that we are reliable and consistent and determined. And our adversaries must have no reason to doubt our resolve -- because peace really does come through strength. Our military capability and technological advantage will be safe in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hands.

We must work for an open global economy and pursue free and fair trade – to grow our exports and our influence abroad. In the last years, the United States has ratified three trade agreements, all negotiated in the Bush Administration. If you are concerned about China’s rise – consider this fact – China has signed 15 Free Trade Agreements and is negotiating 20 more. Sadly we are abandoning the playing field of free trade – and it will come back to haunt us.

We must not allow the chance to attain energy independence to slip from our grasp. We have a great gift of oil and gas reserves here in North America that must be and can be developed while protecting our environment. And we have the ingenuity in the private sector to tap alternative sources of energy.

And most importantly, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will rebuild the foundation of American strength – our economy – stimulating private sector led growth and small business entrepreneurship. When the world looks at us today they see an American government that cannot live within its means. They see a government that continues to borrow money, mortgaging the future of generations to come. The world knows that when a nation loses control of its finances, it eventually loses control of its destiny. That is not the America that has inspired others to follow our lead.

After all, when the world looks to America, they look to us because we are the most successful political and economic experiment in human history. That is the true basis of “American Exceptionalism.” The essence of America – that which really unites us -- is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion – it is an idea -- and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.

Ours has never been a narrative of grievance and entitlement. We have not believed that I am doing poorly because you are doing well. We have not been envious of one another and jealous of each other’s success. Ours has been a belief in opportunity and a constant battle – long and hard -- to extend the benefits of the American dream to all – without regard to circumstances of birth.

But the American ideal is indeed endangered today. There is no country, no not even a rising China, that can do more harm to us than we can do to ourselves if we fail to accomplish the tasks before us here at home.

More than at any other time in history –the ability to mobilize the creativity and ambition of human beings forms the foundation of greatness. We have always done that better than any country in the world. People have come here from all over because they believed in our creed – of opportunity and limitless horizons. They have come from the world’s most impoverished nations to make five dollars not fifty cents– and they have come from the world’s advanced societies – as engineers and scientists -- to help fuel the knowledge based revolution in the Silicon Valley of California; the research triangle of North Carolina; in Austin, Texas; along Route 128 in Massachusetts – and across our country.

We must continue to welcome the world’s most ambitious people to be a part of us. In that way we stay perpetually young and optimistic and determined. We need immigration laws that protect our borders; meet our economic needs; and yet show that we are a compassionate people.

We have been successful too because Americans have known that one’s status at birth was not a permanent station in life. You might not be able to control your circumstances but you could control your response to your circumstances. And your greatest ally in doing so was a quality education.

Let me ask you, though, today, when I can look at your zip code and can tell whether you are going to get a good education – can I really say that it doesn’t matter where you came from – it matters where you are going. The crisis in K-12 education is a grave threat to who we are.

My mom was a teacher – I have the greatest respect for the profession – we need great teachers – not poor or mediocre ones. We need to have high standards for our students – self-esteem comes from achievement not from lax standards and false praise. And we need to give parents greater choice – particularly poor parents whose kids – most often minorities -- are trapped in failing neighborhood schools. This is the civil rights struggle of our day.

If we do anything less, we will condemn generations to joblessness, hopelessness and dependence on the government dole. To do anything less is to endanger our global economic competitiveness. To do anything less is to tear apart the fabric of who we are and cement a turn toward grievance and entitlement.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will rebuild us at home and inspire us to lead abroad. They will provide an answer to the question, “Where does America stand?” The challenge is real and these are tough times. But America has met and overcome difficult circumstances before. Whenever you find yourself doubting us – just think of all the times that we have made the impossible seem inevitable in retrospect.

America’s victorious revolutionary founding – against the greatest military power of the time; a Civil War – hundreds of thousands dead in a brutal conflict – but emerging a stronger union; a second founding – as impatient patriots fought to overcome the birth defect of slavery and the scourge of segregation; a long struggle against communism – that ended with the death of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Europe, whole free and at peace; the will to make difficult decisions, heart-wrenching choices in the aftermath of 9/11 that secured us and prevented the follow-on attacks that seemed preordained at the time.

And on a personal note– a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham – the most segregated big city in America - her parents can’t take her to a movie theater or a restaurant – but they make her believe that even though she can’t have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter – she can be President of the United States and she becomes the Secretary of State. Yes, America has a way of making the impossible seem inevitable in retrospect. But of course it has never been inevitable – it has taken leadership, courage and an unwavering faith in our values.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have the experience and the integrity and the vision to lead us – they know who we are, what we want to be and what we offer the world.

That is why this is a moment – an election – of consequence. Because it just has to be – that the most compassionate and freest country on the face of the earth – will continue to be the most powerful!

May God Bless You – and May God continue to bless this extraordinary, exceptional country – the United States of America.

Why Statistical Disparity does not Equal Discrimination

         Because no two human beings are exactly alike, no two groups of human beings are exactly alike either.  That’s the consequence of what some call “the snowflake principle” of human life:  While we all are alike in some ways, no two of us are quite the same.  We have different talents, backgrounds, attitudes, habits, goals, inclinations, beliefs, and friends.  Because we do, we experience different outcomes and results, which in turn yield differing socio-economic statistics about us.

         That’s another way of saying that statistical disparity does not equal discrimination, the way that so many on the left frequently assert.  Differing outcomes can imply many things, discrimination is just one of them.   Let me give you four examples:

         (1) Let’s say that a major American city has a population that is 80% black.  Let’s say as well that its police force is 80% white.  (The numbers here are purposely exaggerated in order to underscore the point.  No major American city and its police force are so disproportionate).  One could not, from those data, conclude that the police force discriminates against minorities in its hiring or promotion practices.   If, in urban black culture, the police force is held in low regard, then black youths, whether male or female, will be less likely to want to grow up to be police officers.  They will choose other options, however wise or unwise.  If, at the same time, in white urban culture, the police force is held in much higher regard, then, predictably, far more white youths will aspire to that career than do their black counterparts.  The difference in outcome here is rooted in cultural values, not discrimination.  That would be the case even though minority applicants to the police force, and minority applications for promotion within it, actually receive preferential treatment such that a test score for them yields better results than the same score does for whites.  Statistical disparity, even radical statistical disparity, does not mean discrimination.  It might actually indicate preference. 

         (2) If, as studies show, educational expectations within the Asian–American subculture tend to emphasize mathematics and the hard sciences, and if, in the African-American subculture, those preferences tend toward the social sciences; and if the hard sciences pay more money than do the social sciences, then it is not a matter either of hiring or payroll discrimination that Asian-Americans with graduate degrees in mathematics and the hard sciences make noticeably more money per year than African-Americans with graduate degrees in the social sciences.  Their two cultures’ differing values and expectations dictate the outcome, not discrimination.

         (3) If black drug offenders go to jail more often than white drug offenders and serve more time when they do, that statistical difference does not prove discrimination.  To prove discrimination, one must ask and answer many other previous questions before deciding the issue.  For example, one must take into account things like mandatory sentences and recidivism.  If drug usage or drug arrests are less frequent in predominantly white jurisdictions than in black ones, and if judges in those predominantly black jurisdictions are more inclined to render stricter sentences as a result, it does not mean the judge is racially prejudiced.  It might mean the judge is quite concerned for public safety and the rule of law, even if, in a nearby jurisdiction, judicial discretion is exercised more leniently.  Or if a judge works within a jurisdiction that has mandatory sentencing requirements in such cases, and if the mandatory sentences are harsher than those in other, non-mandatory, jurisdictions just over the state line, and if the offenders here are predominately black, it does not prove racial discrimination.  Or if whites are less inclined to be repeat drug offenders (and therefore are more likely to get lighter sentences as a result), it does not prove racial discrimination if their average sentence is lighter than the average sentence of their black counterparts.  Racial discrimination is but one of many possible explanations.  Statistics alone cannot establish the fact.  Things like recidivism need to be considered in the mix.  In a system like ours, with multiple jurisdictions, all of which work on varying bases, differences in sentencing inevitably emerge.  To label them discrimination is reckless and goes beyond the evidence.

         (4) Or, simply because the average salary of women is 60-70% of the average salary of men in the same field (The exact percentage is always changing.), it does not mean that sexual discrimination is the reason.  On average, women work fewer hours per day and fewer days per year.  They also work fewer total years and take more time off during those years than do men.  As a result, they make fewer dollars per hour, week, and year than do men.  But when those differences are erased, when women have the same education as their male counterparts, and when they have the same work experience and work record, they actually make 102% of what men make, and have done so for nearly 30 years.  Statistical disparity is not proof of discrimination.

         Discrimination is easy to assert.  Our leftist friends do it all the time.  But it is notoriously difficult to prove, and invoking mere statistical disparity does not prove it.   

         I am not saying something so silly as that there exists no discrimination in America.  It does exist, and you might be surprised where to find it.

             

Legislating Morality (Part 2)

When it comes to prohibiting sexual harassment or sexual discrimination in the marketplace, feminists do not complain that the proposed legislation attempts to enshrine morality in the civil or penal code, even though it most definitely does.  No serious feminist has ever sought to undo or to oppose such legislation because it was based upon a system of morals.  They complain about legislating morality only when it comes to outlawing abortion.  They object to legislating morality only when the morality in question is one from which they dissent.  When the law in question encodes a morality they support, their objection to morals-driven law disappears.

            By the same token, when a civil rights leader supports affirmative action laws and opposes the Jim Crow legislation of the old South, both that leader’s support and opposition are based upon the moral judgment that all persons are created equal and ought therefore to be treated equally under the law.  That civil rights leader cannot then turn around and say to someone else, pro-life advocates for instance, that they are imposing their morality on others because the pro-life advocates are doing exactly what the civil rights advocate is doing, and on precisely the same basis, namely upholding the dignity and worth of every human being.  Like the civil rights advocate, the pro-life advocates are affirming the obligation of a just nation to insure that all persons enjoy equal protection under the law.

            Sometimes those who resist legislating morality do so not because they object to the morality being legislated, but because they value freedom and wish to defend it.  They seem not to understand, however, that their allegedly morals-free proposals will be the death of the freedom they value, not its protection.  Without the guidance and constraint of morally-informed law, liberty degenerates into mere license, which is not the same as political freedom.  One simply cannot reject moral authority and yet live in an orderly world.  When you banish morality from the public square, you give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom.  To live outside the moral law, to live without the wisdom of the ages and of God, is to court slavery and death.  Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable law political freedom is short-lived, and finally impossible.  Indeed, without great volumes of enforceable law chaos -- not freedom -- always results.  Authentic political freedom, if it is to remain true to itself and avoid the excesses of license, must be exercised according to the dictates of truth and virtue, never the other way round.  Freedom must be limited by the demands of justice, of morality.  The most important consideration regarding any action is not “Is it free?” but “Is it good?”

            Make no mistake, legislating morality is not only inescapable, it works.  The proof that laws change behavior is widely known and not far to find:  Almost no one in the South today argues that slavery is moral, even though many of their grandparents and great-grandparents thought it was and, as a result, owned other human beings as property.  What stands between today’s southern Americans and their slave-owning ancestors is morals-based law, specifically the thirteenth amendment and the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s and later, all of which helped radically to reshape the behavior and beliefs of those who grew up in their wake.  Similarly, before prohibition the average annual consumption of alcohol in America was nearly three gallons per person.  After prohibition that number fell to slightly less than one gallon.  In fact, alcohol consumption did not return to pre-prohibition levels in America for nearly forty years.  By the same token, before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, about 100,000 abortions were performed in the US annually.  After Roe v. Wade, however, the number rose to between 1.2 and 1.5 million a year.  In short, whether the laws in question are good or bad, law has an effect.  The morality in the law, whatever it might be, tends to become the morality of the people.   Law is always a tutor to morals and a shaper of national character, both for good and ill.

            To digress:  While legislating morality is an inevitability, I am not saying anything so silly as that all sins ought to be made crimes.  No government could effectively enforce laws against lustful thoughts, gluttony, or so-called white lies, even though such activities are sinful.  And if somehow the impossibility of enforcing such laws were overcome, the immediate result would not be less lust, for instance, but rather the overcrowding of penal facilities on an unimaginable scale.

          Back to the point:  When people object to legislating morality, they fail to recognize or to remember that their own understanding of morality is the impulse behind the laws they themselves propose and defend.  It is also the impulse behind their opposition to other laws.  Yet, despite their inescapable dependence upon their own moral code when designing, proposing or opposing laws, they seek to deny that same moral impulse to others who wish to be heard, who wish to have their own ideas taken seriously, who wish to have their own beliefs and values prevail.  But you must not withhold from others in the public square what you wish to make use of yourself.  If you would banish the moral basis of the laws proposed by your political opponents, you must banish it from your own.  But no one does and no one can.

Legislating Morality

The constant or determined repetition of an error does not make it true.  Errors are errors regardless of either their prevalence or the persistence of those who advance them.  Indeed, given the egregious foolishness of some of our most widespread beliefs in the recent past, the great popularity or predominance of a notion sometimes is enough to raise suspicions about its truthfulness.  We moderns too eagerly and too often live our lives on the basis of insupportable, indefensible, half-true truisms that cannot stand up to close analysis.  The assertion that you cannot legislate morality is just such a notion.  No matter how often one hears that you cannot legislate morality, the truth is that you can legislate nothing else. 

         All laws, whether prescriptive or prohibitive, legislate morality.  All laws, regardless of their content or their intent, arise from a system of values, from a belief that some things are right and others wrong, that some things are good and others bad, that some things are better and others worse.  In the formulation and enforcement of law, the question is never whether or not morality will be legislated, but which one.   That question is fundamentally important because not all systems of morality are created equal.  Some are wise, others foolish.  Few are still in their first incarnation, nearly all having been enshrined as law at some time or place, often with predictable results.  For better or worse, every piece of legislation touches directly or indirectly on moral issues, or is based on moral judgments and evaluations concerning what it is we want or ought to be, what it is we want or ought to produce and preserve.  

         When, for example, the founding fathers drafted our original Constitution, they did so on the basis of competing belief systems, on the basis of competing assertions of right and wrong, which they endeavored to build into the Constitution.  One or more of those belief systems permitted slavery, others did not.  No side in the slavery debate at the Constitutional convention argued that you could not legislate morality.  That notion they all recognized as balderdash.  They knew that indeed you could legislate morality, and they intended for that legislated morality to be theirs. 

         Nor did any side in the struggle to legislate morality at our nation’s founding say to its opponents that trying to legislate morality was a breach of the wall of separation between church and state.  Morality, after all, is not a church.  They would have laughed at the confusion of mind revealed in one who thought that separating church from state meant separating morality from law.  They wanted the nation to be moral.  They wanted its laws to be just.  But they did not want to give any one church a national legal advantage over the others.  They did not want the nation to be Presbyterian, Baptist or Roman Catholic, which is a far different issue from whether or not to have ethics-driven law.  Under the Constitution the founders drafted, all persons are free to follow and to worship God.  The founders enshrined freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.  In seeking to avoid a state-established church, they were not thereby establishing secularism or separating law from morality.

         More fundamentally, the very fact that the founders were creating a new Constitution for their fledgling nation arose from the fact that they understood the actions of King George to be morally evil, to be politically unjust.  They all knew quite well that morality belonged in politics, in fact that politics was simply morality applied to the public square, to the public’s business.

         The founders sought to establish what they called an “ordered liberty.”  The order they sought was provided in part by the morality they intended to enshrine in law.  By seeking ordered liberty, the founders were not seeking anything new or unprecedented in political thought or in political history.  They well knew from reading the ancient works of Aristotle, for example, that morality encoded in civil law helped to provide order because law inescapably has a teaching function, or pedagogical effect:  Law teaches the citizens what is right and good, and it punishes those who cannot or will not learn that lesson, or at least act as if they had.

         To make the point from a different angle, when we pass laws that require drivers to drive their vehicles at 20 mph or less in school zones, we do so because we have a value system that rightly puts greater worth in human life than in vehicular speed.  That valuation is a moral judgment.  That moral valuation we properly and wisely seek to translate into binding and enforceable law.  We propose and pass such laws because we think it wrong for drivers recklessly to endanger the lives of defenseless children, who lack the experience, foresight and physical dexterity to keep themselves out of harm’s way on the streets.  Drivers who do not do as the law requires, we punish.  No one, in the face of such proposed legislation, says to the local authorities that those authorities have no right to impose their morality on others, even though that is precisely what such laws do.  Much less does anyone seriously argue that to propose such values-laden laws is an effort to tear down the wall of separation between church and state.

         Those objections are not raised because the laws in question are laws with which all serious-minded citizens are in agreement.  That these laws are morals-based, or values-driven, creates no problem for those who find the laws agreeable.  Rather, people tend to complain that laws are morals-based only when the law in question is based upon a moral valuation with which they disagree.  But to be consistent, those who object to morals-based laws would have to raise the same objection to all laws whatever, including the laws they support.  But they do not.  They never do.  When their own morals are encoded in law, they raise not even the faintest whimper of protest.  Yet when laws are passed that they dislike, they say almost nothing else.  They seem to want a sword that will cut only others, never themselves.  But any sword of objection sharp enough to cut Jack is sharp enough to cut John as well, even though John might not like it.

         Legislating morality, in other words, is not an option; it is a necessity, an inevitability.  Justice, equity, fairness -- those characteristics that all thoughtful citizens want from their government and upon which they think government and its laws ought to be predicated -- these are all moral categories.  We outlawed slavery, theft, murder, fraud, deceit, rape, etc., precisely becausethey are immoral and we wanted them stopped, or at least radically curtailed.  We proposed, passed and enforced these morals-based laws specifically toward that end, and in so doing we were right.

Why Martin Luther King was a Republican (by Frances Rice, Human Events)

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman's issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King's leaving Memphis, Tenn., after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a "trouble-maker" who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon's 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation's fist goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.

Critics of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President against Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.

Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater also ignore the fact that Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on Jan. 4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only 35 words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King's protest against the Vietnam War, Johnson referred to Dr. King as "that Nigger preacher."

Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist "Dixiecrats" did not all migrate to the Republican Party. "Dixiecrats" declared that they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than vote for a Republican because the Republican Party was know as the party for blacks. Today, some of those "Dixiecrats" continue their political careers as Democrats, including Robert Byrd, who is well known for having been a "Keagle" in the Ku Klux Klan.

Another former "Dixiecrat" is former Democrat Sen. Ernest Hollings, who put up the Confederate flag over the state Capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Sen. Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been "a great senator for any moment," including the Civil War. Yet Democrats denounced then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott for his remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.). Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Byrd and Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.

After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004, blocked passage of a bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and vetoed twice by President Clinton before he finally signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose $10,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More than $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

In order to break the Democrats' stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party's economic plantation, we must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity.