Friday, July 2, 2010

Rewrite the Past

"[Afghanistan] was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."
Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele
When I was in college, most of the cafeteria workers were African-American. And, sad to say, many of them seemed, if you can picture this, woefully unqualified for their jobs. Personally, I suspect they simply resented being the de-facto wait staff for a bunch of kids 20 years their juniors, or simply the fact that they had dead-end jobs. Anyway, the students created a narrative to explain the poor performance and attitude of the food service, and given the generally anti-establishment (read: college administration) and paranoid bent of student body, it was predictably conspiratorial in nature. As the story went, the school administration had been sued for refusing to hire African-Americans, and forced to hire some. So they went out and hired the most incompetent people they could rope into taking the jobs, so that they could later point to their inability to do the work as a reason not to hire any more.

It seems that I must have gone to college with the folks on the selection committee for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, and they were paying attention to the school, if not necessarily in school.

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