Mugged (46 page)

As Shelby Steele has said: “Whites don’t think they have the moral authority to ask anything of black people, certainly not to judge them. But there’s something wrong with people who have a 70-percent illegitimacy rate. This is a group of people who are lost. But we are surrounded by whites who refuse to tell us that.”

The national obsession with racism is a self-inflicted punishment that has resulted in disaster, for everyone, but most of all for black people. The initial lie from which all other lies flow is the idea that black people’s condition in America depends on white people’s beneficence. It’s Bull Connor’s last revenge.
²⁴

Thanks go, first of all, to my publisher, Adrian Zackheim, for taking on a lightning-speed publishing schedule after the idea for this book struck me like a thunderbolt in April. He and his editorial assistant, Eric Meyers, have done an amazing job, along with a team of long-suffering copy editors and production staff, whose names I don’t even know yet. Whatever errors remain—it would have been a lot worse without them. (We plan to correct any additional mistakes after Media Matters does its painstaking fact-checking the day the book is released.)

A number of my friends have read or commented on sections of the book—often in first-draft form, and my first drafts are abominable. They became less so, thanks to: Trish Baker, Jim Hughes, Jeremy Rabkin, Jim Moody, Marshall Sella, Younis Zubchevich, David Friedman, Allan Ryskind, Hans Bader and Ned Rice.

Other friends have helped in a thousand small ways with this book, other books, my columns, my life—with title ideas, helpful insults, enthusiasm and, most important, interest. Jon Tukel told me he started reading one chapter in the middle of the workday and couldn’t stop. When you’re not sure if you’ve become Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
, a comment like that is important. These friends include: Steve Gilbert; James Higgins; James Mann; Miguel Estrada;…Robert Caplain; Jonathan Tukel; Jon Caldara; Gene Meyer; Bill Armistead; Melanie Graham; Barry Puckett; David Limbaugh; my current agent, Mel Berger; my agent for life, Joni Evans; Beda Koorey; Mallory and Thomas Danaher; Lee and Allie Hanley and my brothers, John and Jim.

1948 ELECTION

1952 ELECTION

1956 ELECTION

1960 ELECTION

1964 ELECTION

1968 ELECTION

1972 ELECTION

1976 ELECTION

1980 ELECTION

1984 ELECTION

1988 ELECTION

1992 ELECTION