Below, you’ll see Rep. Marcia Fudge, the Ohio Democrat who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, doing a bit grumpier version of Barack Obama’s slapdown of the black community from a couple of years ago. Here’s Fudge basically telling Black America that since she’s hooked them up with food stamps and housing assistance they need to stop pestering her with silly complaints…

It brings to mind this, from another Congressional Black Caucus confab…

Maybe it’s an annual thing for the black “leadership” to lecture the mob about not bothering their feudal lords and ladies with trifles.

Can we ask whether this shows how irrelevant the CBC is now?

We already know that the Congressional Black Caucus is a constant source of the most rampantly stupid policy pronouncements in this country, from trying to get Sheila Jackson Lee named as DHS Secretary to nationalizing your local police. They’ve so marginalized themselves in the House of Representatives that at this point there is no reason why the majority leadership in the House would consider working with them, and therefore they’ve got less power than ever even with a black president in the White House.

And it just so happens that the constituency of the CBC is not prospering with a black president in the White House, just like they haven’t prospered with black members of Congress representing them. That doesn’t have anything in particular to do with race; it does, however, have everything to do with the fact that the socialist policies the CBC has embraced don’t produce prosperity.

And people who aren’t prospering…complain.

So now we see lots of griping and grumbling at the CBC from the black community. Those people aren’t stupid, and they know conditions in their communities aren’t getting better despite all this wonderful political success they’ve had in taking over lots of American cities, electing and re-electing Obama and growing the CBC’s ranks in Congressional elections. What they don’t know is why that electoral success hasn’t translated into prosperity for people other than politicians like the members of the CBC.

So they call and whine. And Obama lectures them about their bedroom slippers, and Fudge admonishes them to “contain your complaining.”

You might call this courageous, telling the truth to people who don’t want to hear it. But it really isn’t. The actual truth would be that more wealth redistribution won’t make the black community better off. Only the rule of law, and the acquisition and application of marketable skills, can do that. But nobody in the CBC is bringing that message, because at the end of the day prosperity in the black community is going to make that constituency less easily led. Prosperity means people will become upwardly mobile and move to suburbs and exurbs, or it will lead to redeveloped and far more ethnically and politically diverse urban communities. It will mean Marcia Fudge can’t automatically assume her re-election in the Democrat primary, or in the general election.

Marcia Fudge doesn’t want that. Marcia Fudge wants two things: first, for things to stay exactly as they are, and second, for her serfs to stop pestering the lady of the manor.