Mark Cuban: Truth Teller

Viva La Cuban
“If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street,” he said in a video interview for Inc.’s GrowCo Conference in Nashville. “And if on that side of the street, there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face — white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere — I’m walking back to the other side of the street.”

At a business conference in Nashville on Wednesday, Mark Cuban admitted to being less than enlightened. “I know I’m prejudiced and I know I’m bigoted in a lot of different ways.” It is one thing to initiate a dialogue about racism but something else to spew tone deaf ignorance in an interview. The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the miscarriage of justice that the not-guilty verdict represented are wounds that, for many, have not healed. (New York Times, 5/24/2014)

Being a self-made billionaire is not enough to insulate you against political correctness as Mark Cuban recently discovered. Cuban incorrectly confessed to bigotry because he admitted to being wary of black gang-bangers wearing hoodies and white, skin-head, neck-tatooed neo-Nazis. We'd call Cuban sensible, not prejudiced. His sin apparently was using the word "hoodie" which opened the door to relitigating the whole Trayvon Martin tragedy. (Note that the New York Times news department has officially concluded that the Zimmerman not guilty verdict was a "miscarriage of justice." This is how the Liberal media creates history, by the way. Climate change is fact; Bill Clinton is a senior statesman; and George Zimmerman got away with murder.)

Quick! What is the natural reaction that anyone would have to seeing youths in hoodies or with shaved heads? Answer: concern for one's own personal safety. In a stunning admission many years ago, no less of an authority on the subject of race than Jesse Jackson confessed to feeling relief when realizing that the people walking behind him on a city street at night were white not black. 

Is Cuban is wrong? We don't think so. He has nothing to apologize for.


Fractionally
As of Friday, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.66, a fraction of a cent lower than last year. (New York Times, 5/24/2014)

One of the wonderful things about the Obama presidency is the endless list of things that - whenever we next have a Republican president - can no longer be blamed on that president or even discussed. A partial list includes the following:

- the price of gasoline
- that president's past drug use
- the president's foreign policy experience
- the number of war dead
- the unemployment rate
- the economy in general 
- the president's golf outings