Overt partisanship has become a kind of liberal crack. Just like an addict whose able to keep his life together for a while, but slowly starts spinning out of control until they finally reach the point where everybody can see they have a problem--everybody but themselves, that is--the liberals have gotten to the point where they can't help but use funerals as political platforms for cheap, petty, partisan, and factually inaccurate swipes. And they seem oblivious to how obvious, and ugly, their lack of self-control and self-awareness is.
Said Jimmy Carter in his political speech/eulogy:
[T]he struggle for equal rights is not over. We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.
Carter, in his eulogy, also snuck in a slam for Bush on the NSA spying scandal:
It was difficult for them personally - with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and as you know, harassment from the FBI.
Because of the constraints of time, Carter neglected to mention that the wiretapping and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. came at the hands of Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson--all of them, interestingly enough, Democrats. And not just Democrats, but Democrat icons. He also neglected to note that his own father had been a staunch segregationist. And a Democrat. Jimmy Carter himself exploited the race issues to defeat his primary opponent in his 1970 run for governor of Alabama, circulating a picture of his opponent, Carl Sanders, joking with a black athlete, suggesting his opponent was a "race-mixer", and pointedly refused to condemn or criticize George Wallace, the leader of the pro-segregation movement in Alabama. Turns out he was faking, but still. He did do it to win.
By contrast, Bush noted, in a much shorter, non-partisan speech that King's "dignity was a daily rebuke to the pettiness and cruelty of segregation". And he did not run down through the laundry list of Democrats that supported segregation in the 50s and 60s, the Democrats who called the police out on protesting African-Americans and had them sprayed with water hoses, the Democrats that stood in the door of school houses to keep blacks from mixing with whites, or the Democrats that voted against the Civil Rights Act--including such esteemable folks as Al Gore's father, Albert Gore, Sr. He did not note the passionate activism of a man Clinton called a personal hero and mentor, and whom Clinton awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, J. William Fulbright--a steadfast segregationist who voted against both the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. And the list goes on. And on. And on.
So, despite the many problems and scandals on the Republican side, I think 2006 is still looking pretty good for the Republican party overall. They continue to have an invaluable ally in their effort to beat the Democrats at the polls--and that's the Democrats, and the political left, themselves.
Said the Reverend Joseph Lowery, a longtime Democrat activist:
We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we knew that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor.
Even if you accepted this nonsense--there is, in fact, more being spent on the poor by percentage and in real dollars than in 2000, the last year of the administration of our first "black" president, Bill Clinton--funeral eulogies are not the place for it. Even if the dearly departed would have wanted it that way, it plays as cynical and manipulative to much of the larger population. And even to some who might otherwise agree, it can strike them as being in poor taste. Because, frankly, it is.
And it provides another opportunity for the record to be set straight. While it may not happen on most of the mainstream media, it might happen on Fox, will certainly happen on talk radio and on the conservative blogosphere, and Democrats, liberals, and even moderates find themselves exposed to the real facts, and a few of them might find themselves thinking about things a little differently. And each Wellstone Memorial, each politicization of a funeral like Corretta Scott King's, is another chink in the armor. It's another Democrat voter down, it's another potential leftist true believer lost. First, because it's just ugly. Secondly, because it shines a light on their hypocrisy.
While Jimmy Carter and CBS News, in this opinion piecemay want you to think the victims of hurricane Katrina were disproportionately African-American, and that this would somehow be Bush's fault, by percentage of overal population of New Orleans, whites were hit hardest. And Lousianna and New Orleans have been under the control of Democrats since, well, almost the beginning of time. They have had a steady diet of federal dollars for decades with which they were supposed to reinforce and build levys, dams, and otherwise prepare for disaster. They have more money and support of the Bush Administration than they had gotten in the previous 8 years of Clinton/Gore. Or during the 4 years of Carter/Mondal, with Democrat control of the house and senate.
And, in the end, now matter how evil and unapologetically caucasian the Republican party may or may not be, even evil conservatives can't control the weather, or who gets flooded and how bad. As the hurricanes and their aftermath were largely and act of God, and after God the mayor and governor of New Orleans and Lousianna respectively, both Democrats, who is Carter really implying are racists? The Democrats who control, and have controlled, Louisianna and New Orleans for years? Or God?
As for the right Reverend Lowery's assertion that we're blowing billions on wars, but there's nothing for the poor--and by implication, nothing for African-Americans--it seems like a good time to hilight the fact that social spending is up. That we're spending more on education now, for everybody, than we ever have in the history of this country. And that the statistics, on the whole, are pretty good. Since 2000, the last year of the enlightened Bill Clinton's reign, things must have gotten worse for poor folks and black people, with evil Republicans controlling everything, right?
Well, maybe not. Reading and math scores for African-American nine-year-olds are up significantly since 2000, and are the highest they have ever been since testing began. Reading scores are up 14 points and math scores are up 14 points in the past five years for African-American 9 year olds. Overall, the "Achievement Gap", long lamented by liberals who felt each other's pain about it but otherwise didn't seem to get much done, is closing. The gap in reading scores between white and African-Americans is the smallest it has been since testing began. Under 12 years of Republican reign in the congress and 6 years in the Whitehouse.
African-American business ownership is at all all time high. The Small Business Administration, under the auspices of the evil George W. Bush, has increased loans to African-American small businesses by 28%. And nearly have of all African-Americans now own their own hom, and African-American home ownership is up significantly since 2000. Violent crime is at a 30 year low, which helps everybody, but particularly the black community, which is disproportionately effected by violent crime.
And it's worth noting, for someone (and the political party he's part of) who supposedly is inherently racist, the Bush administration has sent more money to Africa to fight hunger, malaria, and HIV/AIDs than any president in the history of our country, than any other world leader or government in any other country in the world, and has tripled aid to Africa since 2000. While we can debate, as conservatives, whether or not this is a good idea, or if the aid just ends up subsidizing the problems in Africa, and numerous corrupt governments, he should certainly be winning the Nobel Peace Prize by the usual yardstick of the left--that is, good intentions. Since the Democrats are traditionally the part of "throw money at it" problem solving, Bush's Africa aid alone should earn him huge kudos.
But did anybody on the left mention any of that during Coretta Scott King's funeral? No, they didn't. And they shouldn't have. It would have been inappropriate. Unfortunately for them, what most of them did say was just as inappropriate.
Fortunately for conservatives, it's not the behavior of people who win elections--see the Paul Wellstone Memorial for proof of that--and it's not the behavior of idealogues who win the hearts and minds of the majority.
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