»  Radio Derb — Transcript

01 — Intro.     That was our customary introduction from one of Haydn's Derbyshire Marches, and this is John Derbyshire with another edition of Radio Derb, your one-stop shopping store for all the news you need to bother with.

Before we get properly underway let me just respond to the innumerable host of readers who have complained that I am merely a disembodied voice to them and who would like to know some of my personal particulars.

Well, there's not much to tell. I have a wife and two teenage kids. I live in a modest three-bedroom house in the outer suburbs of New York City and I drive a 1993 Mercury Topaz.

That's about it, really. I am, in short, what Senator Barack Obama would call "a typical white guy."

I hope that is satisfied your curiosity. Now let's get to the events of the hour.

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Oh, sorry! Uh … yes … uh … Well: Barack Obama made his big get-me-off-the-hook speech this week.

Main points of the speech: Jeremiah Wright may be crazy as a coot; he may hate white people; and he may want God to damn America; but he's done some neat stuff for poor folk.

Well, for a minute there, I thought we were going to hear that he'd made the trains run on time.

And anyway, said Obama, you have to understand that the Ranting Reverend grew up when, quote, "segregation was the law of the land."

Well, no, actually it wasn't the law of the land in Philadelphia in the 1940s when Jeremiah Wright was growing up. That in fact is why his family moved to the city from Virginia: because they didn't like living under legal segregation.

And please, Obama, enough already with this stuff about Jeremiah being a family member. He's not a member of your family, Senator. He's a power player in local politics, who you decided, with cold calculation, was the person most likely to give you an assist up the ladder of Democratic Party politics in Chicago. Nothing wrong with that for an ambitious young politician trying to get started, but please just speak honestly and cut out the sentimental flapdoodle.

Meanwhile, I have looked up some data on Jeremiah Wright. He drives a Porsche and currently lives in the Chicago Community of Beverly, which is one of the wealthiest regions in the area. And also, in fact, one of the whitest: It's 65 percent white, though I wouldn't care to speculate as to how many block parties Jeremiah Wright will be getting invited to this summer.

Well, it seems like all those sermons that Wright preaches against middle-classness and rich white people are strictly for the rubes. Wright's house is valued as of last week on Zillow.com at $733,000.

It looks like our man's done pretty well for himself. Calling on the Lord to damn America really pays! Is this a great country, or what?

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Why, it was about hope! Change! Unity!

Eh, not really. What it was really about was eating the rich.

Obama's a socialist. He doesn't hate white people, like his friend and mentor Jeremiah Wright does. Obama wants poor white people and poor black people and poor Latino people to unite under the red flag to humble the callous rich people and take their stuff, or at least force them to give more stuff to the poor.

Come on, you all know the words; join in with me.

[Sings]  Then raise the scarlet standard high!
Within its shade we'll live and die!
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We'll keep the red flag flying here!

On the really tricky issues, of course Obama skated.

Sample, quote:

Segregated schools were and are inferior schools. We still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education; and the inferior education they provided then and now helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

End quote.

All right, let's unpack that. "Segregated schools were and are inferior schools." Obama seems to be saying that segregated schools are necessarily inferior and that we still have segregated schools.

The first thing is not true. If for instance, we had legal segregation against Koreans and all the Korean kids had to attend Koreans-only schools, I'd be willing to bet there wouldn't be anything the slightest bit inferior about those schools. In fact, they would probably have a lock on the Westinghouse Science Contest.

As for the other bit, that we still have segregated schools — Well, that is largely true; but the segregation is voluntary. If you want to end it, you have to change a lot of people's minds about how to give their kids the best possible start in life. How are you going to do that? By giving gassy speeches about hope and unity?

The only other way to end this voluntary school segregation, whose root cause is voluntary residential segregation, is by a massive program of forced social engineering.

Well, we tried that, Senator. It was called busing. If you're going to try it all over, you really should let us know.

Continuing to unpack: Obama tells us that these inferior segregated schools help explain the achievement gap between black and white students. I think if you look at the data, Senator, you will find that the achievement gap is present and just as glaring in well-integrated schools.

And what do you think, Senator, explains the achievement gap — which is perfectly real, well known to all parents of school-age kids and visible on any college campus — what explains the achievement gap between white and East Asian students, or for that matter between Jewish and gentile students?

Continuing to unpack: We still haven't fixed those inferior schools, says Obama.

You mean we haven't even tried? But that's not true. In Kansas City, 1985 to 1997, there was the huge twelve-year experiment of throwing great wads of money at a failing school system. Twelve brand new schools were built with media labs and fencing coaches and planetariums and everything else you could think of. A billion and a half dollars was spent under the dictatorship of federal district judge Russell Clark, who forced city and state taxpayers to pony up for a world-class set of schools in Kansas City.

What was the result? Test scores didn't budge. High school senior attendance figures actually fell. The dropout rate nearly doubled, and the Kansas City school bureaucracy became one of the most corrupt in the country.

Would you like to talk about the Kansas City experiment, Senator? No, of course you wouldn't. I understand that. You just want to repeat it nationwide. Well, that'll be great, Senator.

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Trying to decide whether this is the worst idea Bush has ever had is pretty futile. That's too crowded a field. It's a shameful thing for him to do, though, for a guy who bills himself as leader of the Free World.

The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once said that the test any prominent Westerner should apply to any proposed interaction with communist dictators is: What does it look like to the boys in the camps?

What will this look like, Mr President, to the brave Tibetan patriots being clubbed unconscious in Chinese police dungeons? For shame, Mr President.

Oh, I know: We're in hock to the ChiComs for a couple of trillion dollars, and that is shameful, too. Even a debtor should hold onto some dignity, though.

How about telling the swine that you'll attend, but only if you can bring the Dalai Lama as a personal guest?

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The people who write TV sitcoms have a term of art that they use, quote: "the moment of dung." Well, "dung" isn't precisely the word that they use, but you get the idea.

The moment of dung is that bit at the end of a half-hour sitcom where, after insulting, outwitting, and cheating each other for the previous 29 minutes, the cast all comes together in a group hug whimpering, "I love you, mommy" and, "We love you, Timmy" and so on.

Well, just like a TV Sitcom, a politician's speech must end up with a moment of dung. Sure enough, Senator Obama wound up his speech with a story about some 23-year-old woman named Ashley feeding mustard sandwiches to some poor old black guy. I think that's what it was about, anyway; I was sobbing too much to give it my full attention.

Reflecting on it afterwards, I couldn't help wondering if this was the same Ashley we've been hearing about recently in connection with ex-Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer.

Checking with my newspaper, I see that Eliot Spitzer's Ashley has her age given as 22. Well, she might have shaved off a year, I suppose, to make herself sound younger. Such deceptions are not entirely unknown in her line of work.

So I think we have to ask ourselves: Is the Ashley in Senator Obama's story the same person as Governor Spitzer's Ashley? Were mustard sandwiches included in the five thousand dollars an hour that Ashley was billing the Governor? Is the old Uncle Remus guy in Obama's story actually Client Number Ten? Or am I just letting my imagination run away with me … which has been known to happen?

I don't know; but if a mustard sandwich turns up as an exhibit in Spitzer's trial, just tell everyone you heard it first on Radio Derb.

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All this fired off a long chain of reminiscence going right back to my childhood. Every English child of my generation was raised on the stories and poems of A.A. Milne, the bloke who gave us Winnie the Pooh.

Among those poems there is one titled "Disobedience" about a little boy whose mother got lost because she wouldn't listen to him. The poem begins:

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he;
"You must never go down
To the end of the town,
If you don't go down with me."

Did this inspire me to a parody? Is a bean green?

Ashley Rae
Maika Youmans
DiPietro Alexandra Dupré
Took great care of the Governor,
Though not yet twenty-three.
Ashley Rae said to the Governor,
"Eliot," she said, said she;
"Don't go back down to Albany town
Until you've paid my fee."

Did you know, by the way, that young Ashley — and again, this is Governor Spitzer's hired playmate I'm talking about, not the mustard-sandwich girl in Senator Obama's little multicultural drama … and I'm assuming again that the two Ashleys are indeed different persons — did you know that Ashley has launched a singing career? She has actually cut a record which you can download from iTunes.

The diligence researchers here at Radio Derb, however, have scooped iTunes on this via sources that I am not at liberty to disclose, we have obtained a much earlier recording of Ashley's singing, which was actually made during her very first encounter with Governor Spitzer. I shall play a brief clip from it now for you, if my senior technician has the recording ready at hand. Yes? Thank you.

[Clip: Gracie Fields, "It's the Biggest Aspidistra in the World."]

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I used to think that being state Governor was a really boring job. You know: arm-wrestling with public employee unions, kissing up to Washington for federal funds, cutting ribbons at state parks, that sort of thing.

Not so. When you get to the Governor's mansion nowadays, it seems what you find there in the private suite is one of those circular beds that Hugh Hefner used to have in the Playboy Mansion. Anybody remember the bogus Latin inscription over the Playboy Mansion doorbell? Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinnare: "If you don't swing, don't ring." That seems to be pretty much a state motto up here in the Northeast.

The discovery of Eliot Spitzer's shenanigans obliged him to resign, of course. So here in New York we got a new Governor, name of David Paterson. Governor Paterson had barely had time to figure out the control panel for the circular bed and the rotating ceiling mirrors when he decided to tell us that he and his wife had been feeding mustard sandwiches to third parties in highly intimate situations.

We had just about absorbed that when news came out about the former governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey. McGreevey had confessed to having played Kiss the Lizard back in '04 with a male employee, and then he had done the whole stand-up resignation scene, with shattered wife standing stoically by his side. Everybody had felt sorry for the wife, of course.

Well, now we learn that McGreevey and his catamite, having perhaps got tired of mustard sandwiches, had decided to go for the full governor sandwich by including Mrs McGreevey in their games. I imagine cries of "Hold the mayo!" must've been echoing down the corridors of the Governor's Mansion in Trenton … or perhaps "Over easy!"

Now what I want to know is, where is Connecticut in all this? This is supposed to be the Tri-state Area, yet it looks as though New Jersey and New York are getting all the action.

And Heaven forbid I should put any evil thoughts into the mind of Mary Rell, the Governor of Connecticut, who is a very respectable married lady and also a brave cancer survivor. Still, the folks in Connecticut have to be feeling a bit left out of things, you know, over there in the Nutmeg State.

Can you make sandwiches with nutmeg? I'm not sure. I'll ask Ashley.

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Taylor was President of Liberia in West Africa from 1997 to 2003 and he's on trial for war crimes. Some of the testimony has been very gruesome: a certain Joseph Zigzag Maza for instance, who identified himself to the court as Taylor's chief of operations.

Well, Mr Maza has testified that on Taylor's orders his unit had killed and eaten enemy soldiers. Asked by defense counsel how he had prepared these vittles for the table, Mr Maza gave complete instructions for butchering, cleaning and cooking the enemy. When butchering, for example, you throw away the head; when cooking, you want to add lots of salt and pepper.

The eats included troops from the West African ECOMOG peacekeeping force, and also some U.N. peacekeepers; although, in a qualification that wouldn't have been out of place in a Monty Python sketch, Mr Maza insisted indignantly that not many peacekeepers were eaten.

Well, thank goodness for that. I mean, anyone might be tempted to eat an enemy soldier, but eating a U.N. peacekeeper is really over the line.

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In my days as a Wall Street back office worker bee, Bear Stearns was considered one of the more solid and well-run firms. Mind you, that's comparative.

Let me give a little background here. Before I went to work on Wall Street, I didn't know anything about investment banking. All I knew was commercial banking. After my first few days on Wall Street, I started to form a picture in my mind contrasting the two kinds of banking.

On the one hand were these commercial banks, which seemed like a little better than stores, really; where underpaid clerks handed out cash across grimy counters and you engaged in petty transactions involving nickels and pennies while people stood in line behind you, snapping gum and yelling at you to get a move on.

Then there were the Wall Street investment banks: all polished oak paneling and deep-pile carpets, where grave gentlemen in thousand-dollar three-piece suits discussed billion-dollar deals in hushed and reverential tones.

The first thing seemed so flimsy and lower-middle-class and commercial; and the other so majestic and solid.

Pretty Soon I realized that I'd had it the wrong way round. For all their brass ornaments and Queen Anne side tables, for all their seven-figure bonuses and legions of attorneys, Wall Street investment houses can be, and often are, essentially fly-by-night operations run by innumerate and amoral cowboys who tend to round off their books to the nearest hundred thousand; while a commercial bank handles all those nickels and pennies with dogged and inflexible discipline, and runs its affairs with all the rigor of a mathematical theorem.

Well, what's to be done with these overextended investment houses? Bringing back the Glass-Steagall act, which put a high wall between commercial and investment banking, wouldn't be a bad idea. Nor would be the advice that Andrew Mellon offered to Herbert Hoover, quote: "Liquidate Labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate, purge the rottenness from the economy." End quote.

Of course, that would mean an awful lot of us would be eating mustard sandwiches for a year or two, but then we will be anyway. We might as well get it over with. More bailouts, more credit inflation, is just going to postpone the evil day.

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It doesn't seem to be much of a factor in the election campaign. The candidate who would be happy for us to stay in Iraq for a hundred years is jostling competitively for position with the candidates who claim — though in my opinion, not very credibly — that they would get us out of there ASAP.

Outside the Noam Chomsky wing of the Democratic Party — the people who think that the war has been a project by evil multinational corporations seeking profits to be squeezed from the blood of shoeless fellaheen — and, on the other side, the folks at the Weekly Standard who think that a bunch of snaggletoothed goat-herders with suicide belts are a mortal threat to Western civilization, nobody much cares about the war.

Not much that's newsworthy happens in Iraq, mainly because we've bought everybody off, burying the place knee deep in hundred-dollar bills.

That was always the best strategy. Nir Rosen's piece, "The Myth of the Surge," in Rolling Stone magazine, gives all the details.

Sample quote, referring to a militia leader named Osama who served as Rosen's guide, quote:

The American forces responsible for overseeing volunteer militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young army intelligence officer. The Second Squadron, Second Striker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out thirty-two million dollars to Iraqis in the district, including six million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, "serve only to make Iraqis more divided than they already are."

End quote.

We've thrown so much money into Iraq, in fact, that we have created the world's most socialist nation there.

I'll say that again. Iraq is now the most socialist nation in the world. That, anyway, is the conclusion of the blogger who calls himself the Audacious Epigone.

Audacious, who is pretty handy with numbers, went through statistics for all the nations of the world, computing, for each nation, the ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product.

Top of the table is Iraq, with government expenditures at 87.3 percent of GDP. A full six points behind in second place is Cuba at 81.4 percent. Then there's a big gap before you get to third place: Slovakia at 66.2 percent. Fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh are Timor, Romania, Moldova, and France.

Uncle Sam, I am happy to report, ranks 144 on this list, with government expenditures 19.9 percent of GDP. I think that's only federal government expenditures though, so we should probably be a bit higher up the rankings, although I hope not way up at the top there with Romania, Cuba, and Iraq.

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