Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, Bacon Time and Whores and Ale for the Rule Five links, and to our pals over at The Daley Gator for the blogroll link!

Townhall’s Derek Hunter had an interesting piece yesterday, but I think he missed a few salient points.  Selected excerpts, with my comments, follow:

Wouldn’t you think that, after generations of complaining about the “school to prison pipeline,” someone should look into the school part? If there’s really this pipeline feeding minority children into prisons, rather than letting people who’ve broken the law out of prison, maybe reform the institutions feeding them into prisons in the first place?

Of course, to do that you’d have to actually want to educate minority children so they could improve their lives on their own. With complete Democratic Party control for 50 to 60 years in most of these areas, you’d think that thought would have occurred to someone. It has, obviously, but it hasn’t resulted in action for some weird reason.

In fact, the best thing to happen to kids trapped in poor-performing schools – charter schools – are in the crosshairs of the Democratic Party; set for sacrifice on the altar of campaign contributions from teachers’ unions. The very same people who’ve failed to educate kids are sinking the lifeboats. Isn’t that a problem? Of course, it is.

Of course, there’s a far better solution than charter schools, although they are a step in the right direction.  But the end goal should be to eliminate government involvement in education altogether.  Eliminate government schools and the taxes that fund them, and let a thousand flowers bloom.  Will some parents choose to send their kids to substandard schools that teach hyper-PC liberal orthodoxy or religious nutballery over actual education in trades, arts and sciences?  Sure.  Will those kids have marketable skills once their education is complete?  Probably not.  Is it my responsibility to subsidize the mistakes of those parents?  No.

Solutions aren’t the Democrats’ objective. What does it say about a party that benefits more from the escalation of a problem than its solution? Again, I’m just asking questions. I would like to have a serious conversation, as I suspect many of you Democrats who mainly vote for Democrats because you’ve always voted for Democrats or you think Republicans are somehow the problem, would like to as well.

While I understand that Mr. Hunter is engaging in a bit of Socratic dialogue here, I can’t see the value in asking questions to which we already know the answers.  The fact that the political left, and statists in general, profit more from the escalation of a problem than its solution, is a feature, not a bug.  Both parties do it.  Both sides of the political spectrum engage in it, because, if you aren’t part of the solution, there’s big money to be made in prolonging the problem.

The people you are addressing don’t want a “conversation,” or a “dialogue,” Mr. Hunter, as I’m sure you know very well.  They want to lecture you, browbeat you, force you to submit; they have no compunction about using force, and they have no intention of allowing you to respond.  And if these people seize governmental control, then free discourse as we know it has ended.

Here’s a better answer:  Take a meat axe to the size and power of government.  Strip these assholes of their power.  We’re Americans, dammit; most of us are perfectly capable of managing our own lives.  And if an angry mob shows up on the street in front of our businesses, well, most of us know the answer to that as well.