Bodily harm greater than secret shame

According to Washington Post columnist Lonnae O'Neal, Charlie Sheen is a victim. Raised in Beverly Hills by the Hollywood set, sharing famous father Martin Sheen's movie star good looks, and success as an award winning actor with both a highly successful movie career (lead character in Best Picture “Platoon” (1986); opposite Michael Douglas's Oscar-winning performance in “Wall Street” (1987)) as well as being a one-time highest paid TV actor at $2 million per episode. Further, a previous marriage to fellow actress, former Bond girl bombshell Denise Richards wasn't half bad either. Indeed, by any rational standard, Mr. Sheen the younger, has led a very charmed life.

Yes, Charlie had the world on a string—and understandably millions would have traded places with him. Many brave souls among us probably still would despite Mr. Sheen's new public disclosure as HIV positive. After all, while not cured, there are effective treatments. Likewise, the very real terror of the disco era late 70's and early 80's and the stigma faced by Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury is nothing compared to the educated and tolerant attitudes of today.

Per 2012 World Health Organization (WHO) figures HIV is the 6th leading cause of deaths worldwide at 1.5 million. So, the threat—same as the stigma—has receded, but remains real. Yet, Charlie Sheen should not be portrayed as a victim due to his poor personal life choices. With this wrong-headed assertion, Ms. O'Neal has missed the mark: the true victims here are Mr. Sheen's sexual partners—who did not know about his status—and may have contracted the virus from him. In the final analysis public health trumps “sick” secret shame every time.

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A controversy full of beans

A plain, solid red Starbucks coffee cup as a veiled political statement?  Maybe it's simply a corporate printing cost-cutting measure?  Maybe it's a wink to China's Communist red?  This dynamic reminds me of surrealist painter Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images.  This work clearly shows a smoker's pipe despite the fact that the artist wrote in neat French cursive beneath it: “This is not a pipe.”  Both above instances examples of mind-bending perception.  Real head-scratchers: Rorschach tests to ponder while sipping that $4 cup of morning Joe.

In today's hypersensitive society, it seems any minutia—even the absence of a snowflake pattern on a beverage receptacle—inexplicably rises to the level of a newspaper-reported “controversy?”  Even Freud acknowledged that sometimes “a cigar is just a cigar” and moved on.  The Washington Post should drink up and follow suit.

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Race: from the eye of the beholder

Stop The Washington Post presses! One of their race-obsessed scribblers—their intrepid columnist Lonnae O'Neal—has begrudgingly admitted in print that she was wrong! She who previously has seen absolutely every black-white human interaction through that divisive prism—might have had a moment of clarity. A real rarity in political terms: a "come to Jesus" epiphany. Don't expect it to last as habitual race-baiting pays the bills. After all, unlike 93 million able-bodied Americans who can't find a job, Ms. O'Neal doesn't want to inadvertently find herself the latest casualty of Mr. Obama's “5%” unemployment rate.

Her new column, 'Why can’t we agree on what we see when we see race?' addresses her previous one: 'Was classroom arrest a case of excessive force? Just imagine it was a white girl.' Regarding the latter, the reader has not even gotten to body of the article (or the objective details of the situation) and Ms. O'Neal's bias is already in full flower in the title.

Fast-forward two weeks. Suddenly, that which she was so adamant about—that race was the causal factor—perhaps, after all, was incidental to the greater issue of a bullying cop wrongly manhandling an intransigent student. Although Ms. O'Neal is very late to the party of evolved and generally tolerant 21st century race relations, it is a real pleasure to extend a welcoming hand. If she lounges, she will find the waters more than fine.

Today, she sensibly sees video cop incidents, such as the above, as “'racial Rorschach test[s,]' [d]ifferent people seeing the same thing but drawing different conclusions.” In other words, scientifically, one's internal belief system automatically filters physical stimuli into a unique point of view. Therefore, by definition, a “racist” has nothing to do with skin color, but with a mindset that sees every societal ill as framed by a racial cause or consequence.

Is it any wonder 7 years into the most polarizing president in U.S. history who subverts the social order (“The cops acted stupidly”) and engages in race (“If I had a son he'd look like Trayvon”) and class warfare (“You didn't build that”) at every opportunity that attitudes would not be hardened? Indeed, how could they not be? Obama and the abetting MSM (which, of late, Ms. O'Neal has been an active participant) have spawned the Black Lives Matter Frankenstein monster.

Ms. O'Neal has finally seen the enemy that she acknowledges threatens to tear our divided republic asunder from within. Yet, same as our chronically responsibility-phobic president, she has still not realized she was looking in the mirror at the time.

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Bad/good cops or unruly/innocent teenagers?

In the contest of the dueling Washington Post columnists Lonnae O'Neal and Petula Dvorak, both address competing viral police videos. In the first, Ms. O'Neal focuses on the negative view, highlighting the superficiality of ethnicity: a white officer inappropriately manhandles a seated black teen in a classroom. In Ms. Dvorak's, a white cop and a black teen have an impromptu dance-off which diffuses emotional tension, and causes spectator laughs and cheers. While O'Neal's subject is terrible and unfortunate, it thankfully is not Democrat Bull Connor's army of cops brandishing batons and attack dogs, barring the schoolhouse doors to minorities. On the other hand, Dvorak's “dancing” cop got her unexpected 15 minutes of internet fame while O'Neal's ill-tempered cop was fired.

In the final analysis which scenario truthfully depicts how 780,000 law enforcement officers generally interact with the public?

If we use MLK's enlightened standard of evaluating individuals by the content of their characters and not skin color, latitude should be given equally to cops and minorities. Indeed, demonizing either group compounds the disharmony MLK worked so diligently 60 years ago to overcome.

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Like Elvis, “clock boy” has left the building

Under Obama, a record number of Americans have renounced their U.S. Citizenship. Some don't bother with that formality and simply leave.  Among that number is teen hoaxer, Ahmed Mohammad known by his internet nickname “clock boy.” He of 15 minute millennial fame has fled to Qatar—an Islamic totalitarian state—for freedoms apparently no longer found here. Interestingly, this decision came just 24 hours after personally meeting with Mr. Obama. Indeed, after lavishing such public praise—via Twitter: 'Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great'—the loss of Ahmed's so-called scientific “genius” is something he must privately bemoan. But, like Mr. Obama's “chicken little” obsession with weather, this trivia is the least of our country's many woes.

Snap! Even dissed by a 14 year-old Islamic boy. Despite Mr. Obama's clear pro-Islamic bias, the admiration is historically never mutual (much, I imagine, to his private frustration). If only Mr. Obama, a two-term U.S. president, would show such impassioned fidelity to average Americans and Christians, in specific. In any case, Ahmed Mohammad's sudden flight is an interesting commentary on Mr. Obama's political radioactivity as the worst-ranked living U.S. president.

This unprecedented migration is a direct consequence of Democratic leaders' bold-faced lies and anti-American policies causing our ever-dwindling fortunes, widespread societal chaos and the dimming of the long-term prospects of this nation. Since when has the politician's big lie become “no big deal?” While Richard Nixon turns in his grave, that has certainly been the case during the 7 years of the Obama administration. And while Mr. Obama—like his prodigal “clock boy” wunderkind who took the money and ran—so too will Mr. Obama take the taxpayer-funded largesse of his presidential pension and likely retire to some exclusive golf course laden enclave of the uber-rich. However, as past is prologue, current Democrat-created circumstances do not portend good things for the rest of us.

Indeed, Obama—who only praises all things big government (anti-Capitalist), Islamic and/or scientifically backwards—perhaps could join scholarship-awarded Ahmed at the Qatar Foundation of Education to teach U.S. Constitutional law; no doubt an elective class subservient to Sharia law. Ahmed created a crock (not a clock) and the same thing can be said for the disastrous Obama presidency.

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Interracial marriage: a big deal now?

Interracial marriage was indeed a hot-button issue in America—in 1958. With the aptly named Lovings—a white man, Richard, married Mildred Jeter, a black woman—in violation of Virginia state statutes against miscegenation. Undoubtedly 57 years ago racial tension was a seemingly insurmountable issue reflected by novels like To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and in film with “Guess Whose Coming to Dinner” (1967). Contrast that to 2013 when a record-high 12% of newlyweds married someone of a different race, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. So, in light of a factually-supported more open cultural dynamic why is Washington Post columnist Lonnae O'Neal—apparently stuck in a time warp—writing about it in now?

As Bob Dylan prophetically sang of social mores in 1964, “The Times They Are A-Changin.'” And they have to an amazing degree with a black man cooling his heels in the Oval Office for 7 years and minorities at all levels of American society. Today, for example, it would be unconscionable for public opinion to condemn interracial marriage or children of mixed parentage (who tend genetically to embody the best of both). And while there will always be unfortunate, isolated circumstances to this obvious societal trend (as the divided family Ms. O'Neal highlights) one must recall that gay marriage has recently been embraced in all 50 states. In any case, however one evaluates others' marriage choices, to be black in America—compared to past generations long gone—is beautiful.

Naturally, per First Amendment guarantees of free speech (which in particular protects unpopular views), differences of opinion are healthy in a democracy and all should be respected. Therefore, individual bigotry is to be pitied as a throwback exception to our society's 21^st century rules of widespread tolerance. Ms. O'Neal's bumbling attempt to trumpet the rare exception as more than it is is nothing but the vain creation of a tempest in a teapot.

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Blowing dollars: Obama's, politicians' choicest drug

Will the schizophrenic man who has theoretically been “in charge” as president (but is apparently not responsible for anything, ever) please step forward for his psychotropic medication?  Once again, Mr. Obama single-mindedly pontificates about race and income inequality.  This time at a West Virginia town hall meeting, poverty was cited as the primary casual factor of that region's skyrocketing drug epidemic, highest and double the national average: 33.5 fatalities per 100,000 people.  His also-ran Democratic non-solution response that always compounds every problem—a hallmark for Mr. Obama's dytopian administration: more government spending, this time on treatment centers and “training” for doctors.  As if our beleaguered, highly educated physicians don't have enough to deal with already related to Obamacare: socialized, costly medical bureaucracy that has gutted the best medical system in the world.  Likewise, spending a record 8 trillion under Mr. Obama's oblivious watch which threatens to sink America into a permanent Greek economic morass.  (In concrete terms that's more debt than every president combined over 227 years from George Washington and the inception of the republic to Bill Clinton.)  Is this what Mr. Obama meant by his cryptic reference to the “fundamental transformation of America?”  Who knows?  7 years in to this total debacle, the powers-that-be in the MSM have yet to questioned him about it.

Indeed, with Biden's exit stage left from a White House bid (and Hillary circling the presidency with the inevitability of a vulture) what difference at this point does it make, right?  None to Mr. Obama who is content to kick-the-can down the road to the next undoubtedly headache-prone occupant of the Oval Office.  In truth, his denial—a complete, deep-seeded almost pathological disconnect from his actions and their real world consequences—an unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious connection between his extreme environmental policies that have dismantled the coal industry and with it any hope of American energy independence (read: the Keystone XL Pipeline).  Better to monetarily submit to Islam by funneling U.S. resources into that Middle East powder keg borrowed at interest by our Communist banking masters in China.  As bad as the drug epidemic may be in West Virginia it pales in comparison to politicians in Washington of both parties who treat the American dollar like an endless supply of crack cocaine.

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