On National Review Online’s Phi Beta Cons this morning Carol Iannone takes Michelle Obama to task for this paragraph in her recent speech to the Democratic National Convention:
If farmers and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire…if immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores…if women could be dragged to jail for seeking the vote…if a generation could defeat a depression, and define greatness for all time…if a young preacher could lift us to the mountaintop with his righteous dream…and if proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love…then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.
Iannone is perfectly right: “the “farmers and blacksmiths” remark makes the American War of Independence sound something like the French Revolution” (in the Obamian version of the Revolution there apparently were no merchants or shop keepers, not to mention planters), and “[t]he rest of the paragraph is pretty much an enumeration of the different interest groups that the Democratic party now cobbles together to get their majority.”
There was, however, an additional Obamanation in that paragraph that deserves attention: Michelle and the Democrats have turned their backs on the very “righteous dream” they piously claim to honor.
Here’s a reminder, since Michelle and her cheering audience either never knew or have forgotten what that “young preacher” dreamed, and where his dream came from. “It is a dream,” Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed in his famous speech, “deeply rooted in the American dream.”
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
“The American dream,” based on “the true meaning of its creed,” is that Americans will no longer be judged by, and treated differently because of, the color of their skin.
For the Obamas and their Democratic acolytes, however, the American creed-based dream of colorblindness has become a nightmare, and they fight it tooth and nail at every opportunity.
The National Review HATED Martin Luther King when he was alive.
“For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind. But it is not they alone who reap it, but we as well; the entire nation.
It is worth noting that the worst victims of these high-minded rabble-rousers are not so much the hated whites, but the great mass of the Negro people themselves. The great mass of the Negro people cannot be blamed for the lawlessness and violence in Harlem, Chicago, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. All they want to do is what decent people everywhere want to do: make a living, raise a family, bring up their children as good citizens, with better advantages than they themselves ever had. The “civil rights” movement and the consequent lawlessness has well nigh shattered these hopes; not only because of the physical violence and insecurity, but above all because of the corruption and demoralization of the children, who have been lured away from the steady path of decency and self-government to the more exhilarating road of ‘demonstration’ — and rioting.
–Will Herberg
National Review
http://themoderatevoice.com/15520/recall-the-words-of-the-national-review/
The Moderate Voice (http://s.tt/1ndtk)
Do I even have to post what William F. Buckley thought of King and Civil Rights Movement in general?
It’s 2012, right wingers. African-Americans have both memories AND internet access.
–Cobra