Whoopi Goldberg is wrong, and out of touch with her roots. The use of the n-word, which she wielded repeatedly on The View in her rebuke of Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s contrary viewpoint, does not empower blacks, as Whoppi insists, it enslaves them.

Whoopi’s invocation to blacks to proudly utter the n-word serves only to resurrect and enshrine outdated 18^th century cultural values and language that African slaves were forced to inherit from the largely poor and uneducated population of Scot-Irish immigrants who imported them to develop the South.

In essence, the original primitive tribal cultural and language roots of the enslaved African men, women and children, were brutally severed by the betrayal of their own leaders, and then grafted to the stock of a newly planted, Southern tree whose own meager European roots were generally of a coarse, quarrelsome and ill-mannered nature.

As Arthur Herman notes in his New York Times bestseller, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, the Ulster Scots, who did the lion's share of settling the South in the early 1700’s , “were quick-tempered , inclined to hard work followed by bouts of boisterous leisure and heavy drinking, and easy to provoke into fighting.” Wow, me thinks Whoopi must play the bagpipes after seeing how she lit into Hasselbeck for daring to wonder out loud how one is supposed to explain to young children the tortured logic of it being okay for some people to use the n-word, but not for others.

The Ulster Scots of the early South also loved to use the crude language of their poor Irish and Scot background. According to Herman, children were referred to as “little shits” and local streams were named “Tickle C..t Branch” and “F......g Creek.” Given Whoopi’s n-word doctrine, I suppose she yearns for a movement to similarly rename some of the parks and playgrounds, streets and monuments that honor positive black contributions to our country.

Another term the old South inherited from it’s European roots was cracker, from the Scots word craik for “talk,” meaning a loud talker or braggart. Herman tells us that the words “cracker” and “redneck” (derogatory for Scot Presbyterians) “became permanent parts of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.”

Looks like the obscenities and swagger of 18^th century Scots has translated well into the crude and “in your face” style of communication Whoopi encourages today’s blacks to use.

It is a shame that today’s multicultural movement insists that history, especially black history, must be dumbed-down and rewritten to conform to current liberal politics, for it makes all who prescribe to it’s mantras blind to the riches that are unearthed eventually from an honest and continuing study of history.

To that point, a more complete look at the evolutionary history of the South reveals that early on, blacks in the South had to adapt to, were absorbed into and eventually began to identify with the dominating Scots-Irish culture.

In Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals, the author shares his copious research into how a variety of history scholars describe the attributes of that predominant white culture:

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions and flamboyant imagery.

Beyond the pitiful fact that imported African natives were stripped of their own culture and condemned to lives in slavery, it was their eventual identification with the worst elements of the Scot-Irish culture that left Southern blacks so ill-prepared for the world that awaited them as free men and women after the ultimate sacrifice of thousands of Americans in the in the War Between the States.

That is not to say that the racism that continued after the war and well into the 20^th century was not also a critical element in limiting the economic and social progress of blacks. Racism fettered most blacks, especially in the South, but despite that, many were able to improve their lives, mainly by evolving out of the restrictive ties to the ineffective social patterns of the Old World South.

But what Whoopi and her supporters won’t allow is for that evolution to continue and extend to all blacks; in fact, sadly, it seems she would like to see a re-identification with the culture of the Old South, a de-evolution back to behaviors and language that don’t serve blacks (or whites, for that matter) well at all.

In Sowell’s words, “What is painfully ironic is that such attitudes and behavior are projected today as aspects of a distinctive “black identity,” when in fact they are part of a centuries –old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South.”

 Until the late 1960’s, many blacks of the South had worked hard enough over generations to throw off the negative aspects of their unique brand of “redneck” and “cracker” pride, and to cultivate the positive aspects of their Southern heritage. The economic fortunes of blacks all across the US were on the rise, families were intact, out-of-marriage pregnancies were a fraction of what they are today, education, proper use of language and upward socio-economic mobility were valued and the Civil Rights Act, which gave teeth to the aims of the Emancipation Proclamation, was passed in 1964.

Unfortunately, the black power politics of the late 1960’s, upon which most of Whoopi’s political philosophy and pronouncements are based, successfully turned the clock back to the aggressive bluster and false confidence of the Scot-Irish Old South. And from that a “gansta” culture, feeding off of the least desirable elements of its Southern roots, has come to predominate today’s social and political language and policies.

It is time for Whoopi and all of her ilk to let go of the past and to realize that the n-word is just plain low-class.

It is time for everyone to stop using the n-word, Whoopi. Be a leader. Let our people go!

It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced.             F.A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, "The End of Truth"

Of course liberals have attacked David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, over his decision to publish illustrator Barry Blitt’s controversial Mr. and Mrs. Obama Go Jihad cover cartoon. Remnick unwittingly violated one of the left’s many unwritten laws: if the rise of today's leftist utopian order is to reach it zenith in November, the infallibility of the movement's god-king Barack Obama must be safeguarded.

We must be allowed only to see images of Obi-Wan Obama that are shrouded in mystery like glowing, numinous holograms. Nothing may be spoken, broadcast or published that pierces Obama's veil of celebrity.

When Tavis Smiley, a popular African-American journalist and radio and television host, publicly criticized Barack Obama for declining an invitation to his State of the Black Union conference, Smiley received so much hate mail and death threats that he quit his radio job on the “Tom Joyner Morning Show”.  According to Joyner,  "He can't take the hate he's taking over this whole Barack Obama thing. People are really upset with him. He's always busting Barack Obama's chops. They call. They e-mail. They joke. They threaten.”

The unconscious projections that Obama stimulates in the mind of followers, through phantasmic homilies about hope and change, are like energy beams that must be continually powered, and protected from even the slightest current fluctuations or interruptions.

As The New Yorker magazine found out, publishing a satirical cartoon of Obama, even in a left-leaning magazine very sympathetic to the Obama candidacy, is just not acceptable. This is not because of the tiny kernels of truth that may exist in the parody, but because of the potential stimulus to thought outside the Obama projection beam.

Apparently, it’s not just crazy right-wing kooks who wonder about an Obama-Muslim connection. In a very interesting July 15, 2008 article (“Belief that Obama is Muslim is Durable, Bipartisan – but Most Likely to Sway Democratic Votes”), Michael Dimock, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, analyzes his organization’s recent study of the perceptions around the rumors.

Dimock highlights one particularly interesting conclusion from the study: “The belief that Obama is Muslim, however, appears to have virtually no effect on Republican voters -- who overwhelmingly support McCain in any case. But Democrats who share the misperception are significantly less likely to support Obama.”

This means that Republicans aren’t making decisions on Obama-Muslim rumors. (Republicans are probably engaged more in a study of ideological differences.) It is Democrats who, in the end, are the great majority deprived of independent thought, which may be swayed by Obama-Muslim rumors and the unintended consequences of the cartoon.

According to the New Yorker (July 13, 2008, New Yorker press release, “How Chicago Shaped Obama”), the cartoon “satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign”. And, as the liberal press tells us all the time, it is the “vast rightwing conspiracy” or “those uneducated, Bible-toting redneck conservatives” who are generating the scare tactics and misinformation and trying to derail the Obama campaign.

The Pew report’s unexpected findings seem to fly in the face of liberal assumptions and must be disturbing indeed to Obama’s propaganda machine. There is nothing worse to the left than interference from truth or thinking outside the "Obama Box".

Just because the Barack and Michelle Obama are not gun toting Muslim radicals or even Muslim at all, doesn’t mean they are exempt from whatever attention the left feels is offensive or inappropriate. It is important for voters to have a chance to learn who Barack Obama really is.

Obama is above all a politician who offers a plan that is purposely vague and alluring, that shuns the scrutiny of reason and deprives “the great majority of independent thought”. It is a plan where “public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support” (Hayek).

The plan is appealing on its surface, because Obama preys on desire for a quick and easy path to a utopian world of economic freedom. But underneath is an unspoken agenda of unlimited governmental social planning through surrogate experts and pressure groups, who think they know better than we what we want and need.

The Obama plan of today rejects freedom as we know it today, the “wisdom of crowds”, self-determination, organic growth and change, and true diversity in a marketplace of competing ideas. As Hayek warned in the 1940s the left has an insatiable impulse to control every facet of society: “Every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide.”

During the current presidential campaign, we see that delving, questioning, pressuring Obama to be specific about his core political and economic philosophies, and to make his intentions clear, are taboo forms of inquiry. Criticizing, disparaging, attacking Obama's statements, ideas or objectives are punishable by ridicule, marginalization and, if possible, censorship, under arcane laws of political correctness.

It does appear that in the liberal world view, anyone not yet within range of god-king Obama’s influence, whether just curious or with legitimate concerns, and especially those in the thoughtful minority, must be silenced. Could this be the end of truth and the beginning of the con of man?

I went to church on Easter Sunday. This is the same church my family has attended and financially supported for nearly twenty years. Our church is part of the United Church of Christ, the same denomination that presidential candidate Barack Obama has belonged to in Chicago for twenty years. We live in the politically left-leaning San Francisco Bay area where most people consider US Senator Diane Feinstein as having sold out years ago and the Boxer/Pelosi tag-team as having betrayed them for not bringing the Iraq War to a close, now. Our church is extremely liberal too. Each of our church activities, from candle light vigils to invitations to attend protests, conferences and campaigns, all center around “peace, non violence and social injustice”, as if those terms had a neutral meaning instead of also being code for a very liberal political activist agenda. However, unlike the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity UCC, our pastor, whom I respect greatly as a loving and warm person, avoids any explicit political comments in her sermons. While she seems aware of the thin line between church and state that she walks, the members of the congregation are very outspoken in their political views.

On Sunday, during the time in our service where church members ask for prayers for loved ones, one church member used her time to ask for prayers for Barrack Obama, because (and I quote roughly) “he had the courage to initiate the long overdue discussion of race in this country”.  As she spoke my jaw dropped and my eyes widened. I don’t think she realized that she was repeating the same “talking points” I’d heard the Obama spin-artists use the night before on television. I also don’t think that she realized that Obama’s speech was a carefully crafted, politically motivated one designed to simultaneously deflect attention from his proximity to Wright’s virulent hate-mongering sermons, shore up his support from those who are actually aligned with Wright’s twisted view of the world and to widen the field of vision around his church so that it appears as only a small locus in a larger race relations landscape. I also don’t think she realized how deprecatory and belittling her comments might seem to those blacks and whites who have for many, many years tried to openly discuss problems of race, only to find themselves labeled as “Uncle Toms” and “racists” by the black and white liberal establishment.

As I listened to her, I couldn’t help but think of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, two brilliant scholars who have worked tirelessly to bring well-reasoned, historically informed and honest discussions of race relations into the public arena.  Sowell’s efforts to unearth the culturally European origins of some of the more destructive aspects in black culture today and to analyze the geographical factors that have influenced the evolution of white – black relations have been rewarded with abuse and insults by the reigning leadership of the black political community. Steele has been attacked for his discussions of how “white guilt” and a loss of moral imperative among whites may have provided the necessary tinder for the anti-American and white-hating fires whose flames engulfed the hearts and minds of militant blacks of 1960’s and whose flames are still fanned in some circles (especially in Chicago) of today’s black political and religious leadership.

And I couldn’t help but see Bill Cosby’s smiling face in my mind, someone who has dared identify, in a very loving way, some of the obviously negative aspects of black culture and who has passionately “called out” those who have seen to lift themselves up from that mire of self-deprecatory behavior. Cosby has been largely vilified by the black establishment and consigned to the same cabin as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

None of these thinkers deny that inequalities have existed and still exist today. None of them deny that anger and resentment exists and in some cases for very good reason. But all of them see that progress has been made and that a bright future of real, tangible hope awaits each person, black or white, who looks beyond the tragic vision that the Reverend Wright’s of this world offer and that Obama will not expose for what it is. Many of us, black and white, have for years been reflecting upon race, evolving our words and behavior to conform to the wisdom we have compiled, and continually asking for blessings to better understand the complexities of race in our country today.

Maybe those guilt-ridden whites and hate-infested blacks who have just realized that it is time to talk about race in an honest and meaningful way ought to take a look in the mirror before they open their mouths.