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Monday, January 21, 2008

Another Dr. King post

Yeah it was going to get more flooded that I'd like so here's another. Let's start with a cartoon shall we!


If you want some context to this read up on it here. The hat-tip for this cartoon goes to The Political Realm in a post that contains other great cartoons.

Here's a Pajamas Media piece from Michael Weiss: Identity Politics: Not What Dr. King Was About...

Clinton may be forgiven as the wife of America’s “first black president” in thinking that she was anything other than obscene to invoke African bondage to describe the follies of the current administration. (Perhaps she took a note from the songbook of Harry Belafonte, who once referred to Condoleeza Rice as a “house slave.”)

But leaving aside the fact that members of her campaign have used both subtle and unsubtle bigotry to defame her main Democratic rival, Clinton herself sounds like a holy fool whenever she talks about civil rights on the stump. Earlier in the month Obama – answering her charge that he was trafficking in “false hope” – tried to brush up against the optimistic grandeur of Martin Luther King. Her response? To imply that she was crafted more in the mold of Lyndon Johnson, who converted that grandeur into hard legislative currency.

The younger Hillary might have paused before identifying with the architect of the Vietnam War, an event still cited by her as central to her political awakening. Thus does the politics of “identity” make a mockery of everything else you may have once believed in.

Clinton also apparently found that being a woman is not without its easily manipulated charms. The New York Times has been no help in disabusing her of this notion. When it isn’t publishing a cringe-inducing editorial by Gloria Steinem, who claims that “[g]ender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House” — it is quoting Geraldine Ferraro accusing Obama of underhandedly stealing black votes away from Clinton in an article focused on “race and gender.”

“As soon anybody from the Clinton campaign opens their mouth in a way that could make it seem as if they were talking about race, it will be distorted. The spin will be put on it that they are talking about race. The Obama campaign is appealing to their base and their base is the African-American community. What they are trying to do is move voters from Clinton by distorting things. What have they got to lose?”

Is it a coincidence that the newspaper of record asked the only woman vice presidential candidate to comment on how a black presidential candidate is exploiting race to damage the first woman presidential candidate? What new and inventive ways will we come up with next to shuffle the stacked deck of race and gender “cards”?

Finally a video provided by the Illinois Review of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is entitled appropriately, "I've been to the Mountaintop".

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's been a few years since the Chicago Newspapers have printed the I have a dream speech. I wonder if they ever will run it again?

Anonymous said...

Also we lost two prominent Black leaders in Chicago this week, Eugene Sawyer, and John Stroger.
John Stroger the first black CC Pres. and Sawyer the 2nd black Mayor who followed behind the first, Washington.

Anonymous said...

The "I have a dream" speech is not in the public domain. The King family claims the copyrights.

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