"Obama is No MLK" and other pieces of GOP thought

One of the things I find that I need to do, as a citizen as well as a librarian, is to get summaries of differing points of view politically, delivered by e-mail because I’m not likely to remember to go to the sites. On the left, it’s Common Dreams which I find less strident, and less likely to get into internecine battles than, say, the Huffington Report, which, at this point I seldom read. On the right, it’s Human Events, which features some political heavyweights such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan; the latter is so iconoclastic that he sometimes gets criticized by people on the right end of the spectrum.

Now and then – OK, often – Human Events will offer up an ad, such as from the McCain camp. One recent one, from the National Black Republican Association is currently trying to get a lot of mileage out of the assertion by a niece of Martin Luther King, Jr, that MLK was a Republican. I don’t doubt it for a minute; my parents were Republicans, the party of Lincoln. Particularly in the South in the 1960s and before, the Democratic Party was the party of segregation; think George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Strom Thurmond before he switched; lots of blacks in the South were Republicans. What’s bothering me is the implication that the GOP of 1968 is the GOP of 2008, and therefore, of MLK were still alive, he would still be a Republican. This, of course, is utterly unknowable.

Meanwhile, a Human Events contributor, whose initials are the same as Alternating Current, has been beating the drum on this John Edwards story for weeks that the National Enquirer “broke”. She has submitted that the story did not make it into the MainStream Media because of its liberal bias. One could make the case that it didn’t make it into the MSM because the original source was the National Enquirer. The Washington Post may have just felt uncomfortable trusting it enough to quote the Enquirer as the source of its stories. Also, the Enquirer story is still suggesting that Edwards is the father of his former lover’s child, something Edwards is still denying, even as he admitted to the affair.

Suddenly, all those stories about John Edwards’ $400 haircuts can be/will be spun into a symbol of his general narcissism. I’m just happy, in retrospect, that his candidacy never really caught on, though John McCain (and Newt Gingrich for that matter) have been accused of the same thing; having sex with someone not his spouse, while the wife suffered from various ailments.

This political season is getting really…interesting, and it’s not even Labor Day yet.
ROG

Musing about February

February? It’s not even Christmas yet!

But February is Black History Month, and I’m always looking for a new angle to tackle the subject in my church . I think the topic’s still important, and that was before I skimmed the US Human Rights Network finding that “the US Report On Race Covers Up Reality of Discrimination in America”.

I’m interested in the New Demographic workshops. I’m intrigued by the titles. As important as I think the topic is, quite often, diversity training DOES suck. The core beliefs work for me. I’ll have to price these seminars. I’m also intrigued by a recent report which indicates that We’re ALL prejudiced; Now what? Some New Demographic article I can’t puts my hands on addresses this as well in a different light. To say one does not see color, usually in some hyperbolic terms such as “I don’t care if he’s black, white, red, yellow or purple polka-dots, because I don’t see color” is insulting. It’s insulting because virtually ALL of us see color, just as we see gender and age and hair color and height and weight. (So, Lefty, I WAS kidding when I “confused” you with the musician Chris Brown.)

So if you’ve come across a fresh way to talk about race, racism, racialism in America, please let me know.
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I don’t know what “liberal” and “conservative” mean. Listening to the Writer’s Guild, I’d find the six big production companies to be conservative, trying to maintain the status quo. But I get regular e-mails from self-proclaimed conservative groups, and Human Events writes: “liberal media giant Time Warner lobbied the federal government’s taxpayer-subsidized mail-delivery monopoly, aka the United States Postal Service, to hit us with a postal hike that will cost us an extra $120,000 per year to deliver HUMAN EVENTS — a shocking sum we simply cannot afford to pay.

“Our subscribers and supporters are rightly outraged about liberal Time Warner’s machinations that can put smaller competitors such as HUMAN EVENTS out of business.” By liberal, the group means that…well, I’m not sure. Limiting access to a variety of forms of information – where exactly does that fit on the political spectrum?

ROG

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