Obama Wants Official Fired for Comments

Last week, the head of the voting rights division of the Justice Department said that voter ID laws hurt the elderly but that they don't hurt minorities as much because they often die before old age. Now, Barack Obama wants him fired. When doesn't a prominent black person want a prominent white person fired because of something he or she said? It's immature and reflects more on the person complaining than then the one who made the remark in the first place.

Here is what John Tanner said:

"That's a shame, you know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance. Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first. There are inequities in health care. There are a variety of inequities in this country, and so anything that disproportionately impacts the elderly has the opposite impact on minorities. Just the math is such as that."

And further down in the article:

A black person born in 2004 had an average life expectancy of 73.1 years, about five years less than for whites, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

So while Tanner should have been clearer and not had generalized as much, he was still right in a sense. Black people, on average, have a significantly shorter life than white people. What I find ironic is that Tanner was taking a liberal position on the issue of voter ID's. And so he should be fired because...?

Barack's name might as well be Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. We're never going to have that honest discussion of race in this country as long as there are people waiting to trip up someone for what they say. I might have had the audacity of hope to think that Barack Obama was different. Turns out, he's just a jackass.