Apparently Senator Webb recently felt the need to take a stand on a particularly pressing area of public policy:

White people are being kept down by the government and funny colored immigrants.

No, seriously:

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

Yes indeed, it is a tragic historical irony that the white man, once lord and master of all he could survey (and steal from the Native Americans) has become a lowly serf in his own former kingdom of ‘Merika, kept in chains by those dastardly college admissions offices and a social safety net so robust it is the envy of slackers and Communists the world over.

Wait. What?

Lyndon Johnson’s initial program for affirmative action was based on the 13th Amendment and on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which authorized the federal government to take actions in order to eliminate “the badges of slavery.” Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

Yeah, I seem to recall that Southern Whites were particularly understanding of these policies.

Webb goes out of his way to justify the past existence of programs to aid African-Americans, and even notes their continued necessity… before calling for their elimination, in favor of some nebulous ‘aid’. Riiiiiiiight.

So, if it’s not hating on black people that’s gotten Senator Webb so agitated, what rod HAS been jammed up his butt? Turns out it’s a rising, inexorable tide of BROWN AND YELLOW PEOPLE heading to America.

*dun dun DUNNN*

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

*sigh* Ok. First of all, the United States has, as official governmental policy long claimed the ENTIRE WESTERN HEMISPHERE as its own private sandbox; it was called the ‘Monroe Doctrine’

Then there’s the matter of our very long-standing policies of economic imperialism in Latin America, setting up banana republics, toppling governments we don’t like, fueling both sides of the violent drug wars on Latin American soil, setting up an entire academy for Latin American human rights abuse and mass murder, etc. Naturally many of these policies continue to the present day.

And if all that doesn’t work, we just embargo your country, ala Cuba.

So one might, just might, be forgiven for thinking that the United States has had *some* negative influence over the lives of people throughout Latin America, over the years. Just maybe.

But it’s clearly nothing compared to what’s happened to white people here in America:

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy.

…

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America’s white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

See? Some of those funny colored people are super-smart, and they’re invading America to take our jobs, thanks to the Federal Government! Conspiracy! Conspiracy!

In support of his thesis concerning the longstanding oppression of the lowly White Man, Webb cites a study from the 70s on how many people went to college and some data on how much schoolkids got per capita during the Great Depression. (He also repeatedly confuses the concepts of religious background and ethnicity.)

This groundbreaking and ironclad research completely and forever refutes the silly notion that white people are privileged in American society.

I hope my fellow liberals are ashamed. /snark

In all seriousness, here we have a Democratic Senator going to the Wall Street Journal to vent his ugly, nativist, racially inflammatory gobbleydegook, and that’s apparently ok. We have to have a big tent, after all.

Uggh. This party deserves every ounce of the curb-stomping it’s going to receive at the polls in November.