Just who's playing the race card?

From the AP:

Black leaders on Monday accused President Bush of "playing the race card" in his pitch to sell his proposed Social Security overhaul

NAACP leaders Julian Bond and Dennis Courtland Hayes said Bush should focus on addressing the underlying health care reasons why blacks have a shorter life expectancy instead of citing it as a reason they should support his idea of private accounts.

Under Bush's proposal, money diverted by Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts could be passed along as an inheritance. Under the current system, relatives of people who die before retiring sometimes do not receive Social Security benefits.

"Rather than playing the race card to set Americans against Americans, we urge the administration to address the long-term problems the system faces now," said Bond, the NAACP's chairman. "Recognizing the shorter life expectancy of people of color is commendable, but placing them further at risk is no solution."

This is to laugh: "playing the race card to set Americans against Americans" is exactly what the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other race-baiting demagogues do!

Just how does Bond propose President Bush improve blacks' health care? I suppose President Bush need only wave a magic wand and suddenly improve things. Backed by the power of government, no doubt all he has to do is make a proclamation, and everyone's health care will be cheap and effective. I suppose all George H.W. Bush had to do is say abracadabra, and the recession would have ended?

Or how about we apply Ockham's Razor: this is just another way the NAACP and "civil rights leaders" can feed off blacks' fears, by calling on government to pump money into social programs that just don't work.

Instead, let's focus on what government can do, which is to stop stealing blacks' retirement savings. Once government stops wasting resources on what it can't fix, perhaps society will have the means and incentive to fix things naturally.

It's common knowledge that blacks' life expectancy is lower because so many black males die young from violent crimes. There's not a thing government can do to prevent all those homicides; the change has to come from within the community. From within the heart.

The first step is something Bill Cosby has stressed for years: black communities are destroying themselves with a high illegitimacy rate. Crime statistics show that most black homicide victims were killed by fellow blacks; whether the victims were innocent bystanders or criminals, the killers were "desperate" enough to turn to crime. They're "desperate" because they commonly grew up poor, raised only by single mothers, who themselves were raised by single mothers. The families remain "poor" because the mothers had children out of wedlock, often as teenagers, which destroyed their chances of getting an education. The illegimate births are the result of a failed public school system: sex ed classes tout birth control as preventing teenage pregnancies, but they never warn about the consequences of when birth control fails. They teach junior high school girls to put condoms on cucumbers, but they never even hint that condoms aren't perfect, and that fooling around can really screw up their lives.

I'm not saying this is the case with every black family, or even single-mother black families. But saving black communities -- and Hispanic ones too -- must start with the illegitimacy rate. Everything else is applying a bandaid to a bleeding artery.