- My conservative friend, T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, educates us on the goals of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We learn from T. Paine that Dr. King was not interested in transforming America. His only goal was preserving and perfecting it. The goal of equality would be much closer to achievement if it had not been for liberals along the way. Like Barack Obama.
- @bjork55 at Bjork Report reports without comment as Dana Loesch explains the real reason Martin Luther King died.
- Max’s Dad remembers what he learned as a child the evening Martin Luther King was killed. Seems a little different from the lessons the NRA’s Dana Loesch and my friend T. Paine learned.
- Tommy Christopher covers the tax reform roundtable discussion at which my President repeats his famous analysis of ethnicity and sexual attacks: See? I told you Mexicans were rapists.
- Andy Borowitz reports as Mexico finally capitulates and agrees to pay for Donald Trump’s psychiatric care.
- Green Eagle takes a look at targets, subjects, investigations, and the world’s greatest negotiator.
- At Stinque, nojo sniffs about the administration and counts the smells.
- Wisconsin’s best conservative writer, James Wigderson, is getting impatient. The problem with democracy, according to James, is that voters are getting everything wrong.
- Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post does his usual thorough research, then screams at us about the ominous rise of reactionary media groups.
- Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica reviews the video footage and draws reasoned conclusions about a police shooting of an unarmed man.
- Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara objects to a New Jersey bill that would allow exemption from vaccination for religious reasons because the ONLY exemptions are religious.
- Author John Scalzi spends a not-so-bad afternoon relaxing in the emergency room for chest pains.
- “2017 was a decent year for films,” says Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar, “with a solid crop of noteworthy movies.” Actually one of the best noteworthy events is Batocchio’s review of this year’s this year’s Oscars.
- This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Time Magazine with the real story behind Trump and Amazon and the United States Postal Service.
7 thoughts on “Martin Luther King, Trump Crazed, Corruption, Democracy”
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Since our friend Mr. Paine gentlemanly banned me from his blog for misconstrued slights and perceived accusations, I humbly ask your indulgence. After I elicited from him his opinion that Trump is a “foolish” yet “stable president” my welcome was officially worn out.
While I commend Mr. Paine for honoring Martin Luther King, I couldn’t help but notice a peculiarity or two.
He dedicated nearly twice as many words blaming racism on liberals and the Black President, than he did for White Nationalists, the KKK and Nazis.
He elaborated:
Even more sadly and even ironically, some of the biggest unintentional antagonists to racial parity sometimes come from folks that should be erstwhile allies of Dr. King and his dream… The compounding of this problem occurs though when misguided but perhaps well-meaning people see bigotry and point out racism where it does not exist. Disagreeing with a person of color on any given issue does not immediately denote racism.. . It does a huge disservice to discerning and eliminating true racism when we succumb to political correctness or political agendas by fabricating cases of racism where none exists. Further, by doing so, we actually set our race relations back in time, as we seem to have done currently… seek equality and justice for all Americans not by “fundamentally transforming America” as our previous president stated, but rather by preserving and perfecting it.
As opposed to:
And while there are some very small minority right wing groups that truly do hold vile and repugnant racist views of others simply based on the color of their skin pigmentation, they are typically easy to spot, disavow, and ignore for their evil and decidedly un-Christian attitudes towards their fellow human beings. ..sadly some people will cling to their hatreds and racism. These people, thankfully, are small in number and even smaller in their influence.
Obviously Mr. Paine doesn’t see a birther, Mexican-hating, racist in the Oval Office. Nor does he see “true racism” in the conservative White Republican legislatures cited by the courts for implementing racially targeted gerrymandering and voter restrictions. Maybe they aren’t as “typically easy to spot” for him as it is to blame the Black President and liberals.
But we can be thankful Mr. Paine is still dedicating himself against “true racism”.
continuing eradication of true racism and hatred… to point out, fight against, and help to eradicate true racism…
Here, here! Although I’m afraid I get the impression “true racism” is not what Blacks or Liberals see, but whatever white conservatives say it is.
When my conservative friend begins educating us on how Dr. King’s dream has been pretty much accomplished, despite liberals like Barack Obama, I consider his insight primarily for its entertainment value.
I’m happy to report Mr. Paine is kindly continuing to educate us benighted liberals in his comment thread. After all, he knows exactly what is defective in our thinking and how we are wrong in our viewpoints.
It comes down to politics instead of actually working with others, including most conservatives, to denounce and combat real racism; to decry the judging by the color of a person’s skin instead of the content of that person’s character.
Sadly it is a fact that is missed by Mr. Dubya, and even my well-meaning friend, Mr. Deming, as he graciously summarized my article on his blog with a typically characteristic misinterpreting of my words to meet a leftist political world view.
Try as we may, and unlike most white conservatives, I’m afraid we Liberals, Blacks and Brown people will never quite understand what “real racism” is. Misinterpreting Mr. Paine’s words to “meet a leftist political world view” will be our lifelong curse, it seems. It’s rather pitiful the best we can do is accept his beliefs, opinions, and wisdom as the “real truth”, however opaque his lessons are to us.
So that’s our problem. We liberals need to learn to accept, follow, and never question conservatives. But that would make us the oddest creatures in the universe. Liberal authoritarians.
No wonder we are so difficult to rehabilitate. Perhaps punishment is the only solution. “Ours is not to reason why”. Mr. Paine understands this, and banned me…accordingly, of course. For that I must take comfort. If nothing else, at the very least, I now know my place.
“It comes down to politics instead of actually working with others”
“Sadly it is a fact that is missed by Mr. Dubya, and even my well-meaning friend, Mr. Deming, as he graciously summarized my article on his blog with a typically characteristic misinterpreting of my words to meet a leftist political world view.”
These two statements were made in the same comment. Can’t even exercise what he himself advocates “leftists” exercise in his own responses. A little thought. A little introspection. This is the internet. We have the luxury of pausing and reflecting on what we’ve typed before we hit submit.
In a comment thread for a post on MLK, I was mentioned NINE times. Dr. King was mentioned THREE times.
But I can’t complain. I’ve learned so much about me there.
“He simply cannot fathom… He doesn’t understand… unserious leftists… my distorted reputation in militant leftist circles… charges of racism are simply a tactic used by the left to silence or convert those on the right, or are part of a hyper-PC mindset that simply informs many leftists that anyone right of center is by nature a racist…. Dave cannot keep a civil tongue… Dave could not resist getting too personal and aggressive and blowing the whole thing up.”
But it wasn’t ALL about me. And for another: “He is a leftist activist and not a liberal in the original definition and understanding of the word… an anarchist leftist”
At least Mr. Paine found the words to blame some Black men again.
“Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other leftists have become quite wealthy at even threatening charges of racism against people and corporations in order to line their pockets. It is a tactic that many on the left employ, as you and I well know.”
After years of demonizing the word “liberal”, con-servatives have decided to call us “leftists”.
It is a not uncommon formulation in today’s conservative mindset, Dave. If you start with the premise that racism has mostly disappeared, with only a few remaining puddles left to dry, the rest flows along predictable lines.
Racism, for the most part, does not really exist. So it follows that those who see racism must be dishonest or easily misled.
Racism must therefore be an emotionally charged illusion, used either as an empty rhetorical cudgel or as a scare tactic to defraud the easily manipulated. There are no other possibilities.
Such is the current condition of contemporary conservative thought.
If I had a dollar for every time this was thrown out…”Obama won TWICE! How can Americans be racist?”
Conservatives latched on to Lou Dobbs’ declaration of a “post-racial” America. That settled it. No more racism. As proof they point to Blacks in high positions in business and government.
That left them satisfied enough to ignore the continuing cycle of everyday racism, generating countless Black victims of profiling, violence, poverty, discrimination, intimidation, harsher justice under law, gerrymandering and voting restrictions.