Alan Keyes is talking nonsense

Well, that didn't take long.

 

Nobody on the right really expected that Alan Keyes, the GOP candidate for senator in Illinois, had a prayer of winning against Democrat superstar Barack Obama, but most conservatives hoped that Keyes would force Obama to engage in a spirited debate on issues that truly mattered.

 

Keyes appears to be flubbing that opportunity.  The Chicago Tribune (registration required) reports that Keyes, an erstwhile vigorous opponent of slavery reparations, now appears to favor it:

Prompted by a reporter's question, Keyes gave a brief tutorial on Roman history and said that in regard to reparations for slavery, the U.S. should do what the Romans did: "When a city had been devastated [in the Roman empire], for a certain length of time--a generation or two--they exempted the damaged city from taxation."

 

Keyes proposed that for a generation or two, African-Americans of slave heritage should be exempted from federal taxes--federal because slavery "was an egregious failure on the part of the federal establishment."

This obvious trolling for the black vote won him no friends.  Keyes himself has already argued eloquently against the very concept reparations.  This particular idea of exempting African slave descendants from federal income taxes for "a generation or two", is insane in and of itself, because it would suck the air out of our economy as the tax burden was shifted to everyone else (the fact of which would also poison race relations for "a generation or two").  As for that "generation or two" duration, Keyes should know as well as any thinking person that once implemented, such a program would be politically untouchable.

 

As many have already pointed out, nobody alive today has been a slave on U.S. soil, and nobody alive today has had anything to do with any aspect of the African slave trade on U.S. soil.  If there is any hope for racial harmony between the races, it lies in burying the past and starting fresh.

 

(Credit: Michelle Malkin)