Wasting Time With Alex

The lies about what went on at Tuskegee need to be addressed

With the whole furor in the news these days about Obama’s loony preacher Wright and his crazy beliefs, the subject of the Tuskegee experiments on syphilitic black males and the ridiculous lies about how it was done on purpose have popped up again. Primarily by idiot libs that want to justify the ridiculous assertions by Rev. Wright’s about how AIDS was a US government manufactured disease to kill blacks. I was going to write about this whole ridiculous lie, but Jonah Goldberg beat me to it and did a much better job about it too..

He basically debunks this whole stupid lie that the US government purposefully infected black males with syphilis to conduct a study. That is a lie. Nobody infected people on purpose. Infected males where chosen and then studied for 40 years to understand the spread of syphilis. Nobody can deny that government power was basically misused. But who was government and why did they have no qualms doing this kind of thing? Jonah gets it right:

But why blacks remain the most reliable voters for the party of ever-expanding government power is something of a mystery. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the Tuskegee study, launched during the pre-dawn of the New Deal-era, was symptomatic of arrogant liberal government. The study “emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and well-being of the African-American population,” writes University of Chicago professor Richard Schweder. He adds: “The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.”

As you can see, the evil here is not what the lie about Tuskegee proposes however. The evil is that people that where sick where just observed rather than cured by a “progressive government”. Jonah points out something very important. The left has masterfully, yet again, put blame for something they did on someone else:

Liberals like to invoke Tuskegee as if it’s solely an indictment of what other people did, proof that we need more progressive government. But Tuskegee was in fact the poisoned fruit of progressive government.

In the end the question begs to be answered about why it seems that this stuff is never understood by hucksters like Wright. Or do they understand this just fine? After all, they are preaching hatred because it pays well. The facts be damned.