Here’s a quiz
That is not a protest. It is not a statement. It’s people, a handful of people, taking advantage of a situation for their own purposes — and they need to be treated as criminals…
There’s no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing…
When they burn down a building, they’re committing arson. And they’re destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.
Hint: the quotes are from April, 2015.
Obama? (I resisted the clear temptation to Google it.)
That was then. This is now.
(Or, if you prefer, Give him a break: the DOJ will soon be breathing down his neck AND there’s a Republican in the WH who is up for reelection. And not just any “Republican”….)
I did NOT resist to temptation to go to the link. This isn’t the first time that Obama has talked sense. Another time he talked sense was in his 2008 speech at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago.Text of Obama’s fatherhood speech
Polifact’s reaction to the speech: Statistics Don’t Lie in This Case.
Can’t be Rosa Parks, she died 10 years earlier.
She was beaten and robbed by Black youths in NYC in her old age though.
Obama sounded like the quintessential by-your-bootstraps Republican convert when he spoke at the DNC convention. I never understood how he became a Democrat superstar with the story he told.
It is misdirection for the purpose of falsely appearing to be “reasonable” and “moderate”. It is a typical tactic of trolls, including those here.
The very fact you posed it as a question told me the answer was either Obama or Biden.
Obama knew the truth, and knows the truth. But it’s not the truth that give Dems power, and Democrats today want power more than they want the truth.
Between 60-70 years ago, the 50s, the KKK was actively discriminating against blacks. Every politician who was with the KKK was a Democrat. The Democrats are the KKK party. They wanted to burn crosses on lawns in front of black peoples’ houses.
Today, the Demo-KKK-crat party is happy to see so many black owned businesses burnt and destroyed. The KKK party claims to want social justice, but what they really want is power. Other claims are lies or half-truths to get power – especially Fake Accusations against Republicans, which are most often more true against Dems.
Even more famous ML King dreamed of world where blacks would be judged on their character – but today’s Democrats, like the KKK party of the past, wants people to be judged by the color of their skin.
Between 60-70 years ago, the 50s, the KKK was actively discriminating against blacks. Every politician who was with the KKK was a Democrat.
The 3d incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was inconsequential except in select localities. There ceased to be a unified organization in 1949. You had a mess of Klanlets using the regalia. You might find a state legislator or local councillor who was a member, but hardly anyone more prominent than that. The number of people murdered by klavern members between 1953 and 1982 sums to ~16, all of them in one of four states. There have been multiple renderings in media of the kidnapping and murder of three members of the Congress of Racial Equality in Neshoba County, Mississippi in the summer of 1964 as it’s the odd case where local police were actually implicated.
Even more famous ML King dreamed of world where blacks would be judged on their character
Sorry to be a bore about this, but very few people in King’s matrix favored this end state after 1968. Bayard Rustin was an eccentric-and-a-half and Richard John Neuhaus broke with the left tout court. King was attacking some immediate (and quite real) problems. Ceremonial speeches are not intra-office memoranda, and you get down to brass tacks none of them wanted to institute any kind of meritocratic program.
Can’t be Rosa Parks, she died 10 years earlier.
The insipid Mr. Jared Taylor is just about the only person who has pointed out that Rosa Parks was an ordinary woman selected for a task because she was presentable and did not have much of a temper. She lived the life of an ordinary woman. Like nearly all of us, she was of interest to her family, her friends, and the saints watching over her. Most of what’s uttered about her is humbug.
Mr. Pro-Choice. Mr. Politically Congruent (“=”). Mr. Social Justice. The man formerly from Chicago, now living at the climate’s edge.
Off topic, but I’ve got to share this comment I just read at Ace of Spades:
Rufus T. Firefly: William Blake had a different take in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Here’s his intro to the “Proverbs of Hell” section.
________________________________________
As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs…
_________________________________________
The title of C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce” was a reply to Blake’s “Marriage.”
Tom Grey on June 14, 2020 at 11:30 am said:
Obama knew the truth, and knows the truth.?
George W. Bush in 2005
Obama Warned The U.S. To Prepare For A Pandemic Back In 2014
Obama sounded like the quintessential by-your-bootstraps Republican convert when he spoke at the DNC convention. I never understood how he became a Democrat superstar with the story he told.
Jamie: Likewise. I imagined he was a self-made businessman who had gone into politics with good intentions and commonsense — someone who might manage to be a bridge between blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives.
Later I discovered his relationships with Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers and I realized Obama had actually been created in a secret lab run by the Nation of Islam and Weather Underground.
Simple Videos and Complex Causes
Law Enforcement & Society
FB:
I fail to see your point.
Obama also said this about the recent looting and violence:
“[L]et’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it. If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.”
He did praise those who were only out to protest and he called for change. But there is a difference between protestors and the opportunists who were looting and burning buildings. Each city has seen a share of both. I had a good number of friends protest. They held signs and walked with the crowds. None were flipping police cars or breaking into a shop to take shoes.
Montage:
Obama sophistry.
What a virtuous crowd you run in, not a deplorable among them. Useless idiots who aren’t fully down with the struggle, is how you and your crowd will be viewed by the truly woke and committed. Good luck dealing with them, the truly woke and committed, you had better better hope someone else stops their plans.
He did praise those who were only out to protest and he called for change.
I’m just so pleased he took a break from hoovering up speaking fees and buying swank real estate to utter platitudes. Let’s hear from Mooch to double our pleasure.
“Montage:
Obama sophistry”
How grimly appropriate.
Paul Mirengoff has flipped into the civil war is coming because the cold civil war is already here? Well, that one way to read his piece at powerlineblog, which rests heavily on observations by Stanley Kurtz.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/06/a-cold-civil-war-or-a-hot-one.php
Comment are going over 400, most embracing the coming civil war is inevitable thesis, I think.
It’s happening slowly, for now. When Trump wins re-election, the Left will force our hand quickly.
Commenter Clark Carter on causus bellus :
“The major factor that could easily push our country to civil war is the fact that one political party is fighting hard to overturn American traditions so they can carry on their over 200 year tradition of using race baiting as a path to power and graft and corruption as a path to wealth, while the other party is happy going along quietly while this is done, only rousing itself to action when a President is elected under their banner to preserve our Constitution and its freedoms. Unfortunately, they were roused to action to attempt to undermine and hobble their president.
“If all political avenues to preserve our freedom are closed,” then it must be.
Montage: Obama says nice, moderate things like that and people swoon. In 2008 commentators were selling Obama as a “pragmatic centrist.”
Of course he wasn’t. As soon as he got into office all his policies were hard left. When you looked into his background, all his associates were hard left.
Including Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground mastermind who lost his lover, Diana Oughton in the Greenwich Village Townhouse explosion. Something went wrong when they were building pipe bombs from 100 lbs of dynamite.
Obama persists in dismissing Ayers as some guy in his Chicago neighborhood. But Obama launched his political career from a meeting in Ayers’ living room.
Most commenters here see Obama as a leftist and leftists are all about power by “any means necessary,” as Obama’s hero, Malcolm X, put it.
After Trump won in 2016 Obama expressed a rare self-doubt, “What if we were wrong? … Maybe we pushed too far.” Note that’s not about principles, but timing.
Obama’s advice to Democrats since has been mostly that kind of advice. He sees the Democrats pushing too far, too fast, which he judges, correctly IMO, will backfire. However, if Obama believed a blazing wave of riots across the land would beat Trump, I suspect he would find a way to rationalize them, just as most of the party leadership has.
David Horowitz’ parents were card carrying CPUSA members registered prog Democrats. (His parents even gave the ex-mayor of East Berlin refuge in their home at one point.) He’s the most published and most awarded writer frimthrNew Left era.
He immediately saw Barack H. Obama as an unrepentant Marxist, a classic Red Diaper baby because he himself used to be one.
Obama wound up in Chicago because his teenage intellectual mentor, Frank Marshall Davis (also a card carrying CPUSA member), had spent so many years there. And Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s WH advisor – who was so close, she’d join the O family on vacations – had an uncle from Chicago.
It turns out that the uncle and Frank had worked together on the Chicago communist party newspaper.
The fact that Obama was a Marxist is straight out admitted in biographies published in the UK.
But in the US? Dr John Drew (PhD poli sci, Cornell) could not even get David Maraniss ear to tell him about Obama’s early college days at Occidental College, where Obama and Drew’s both dated the same young woman, Caroline Boss (from SF). They were all activists in the Trotskyite group Democratic Socialist Alliance.
https://anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com/2012/07/washington-posts-david-maraniss.html
Obama’s Marxism had to be buried in order to sell Him as a pragmatist, and thus a good American, to gentry liberals. This is what, for instance, Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg did in “Reading Obama,” the professor’s account of Obama’s two (or is it three?) navel gazing books.
Huxley is correct about, for example, “Obama’s wingman” AG Holder, the only AG ever to be censured by Congress for falling to answer queries for documents about the FBIs “Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal to Mexican drug cartels.
A simple example of Holder’s Marxism is how he handled the “slam dunk” civil rights abuse by the New Black Panthers in Philly.
On Election Day in 2008, Panthers prowled voting stations with baseball bats, angrily threatening whitie with a bashing if they were not going to vote for brother Obama, the black man.
What did Holder do? He dropped the case that a longtime veteran lawyer at Justice termed a “slam dunk” case. Then Holder fired those upholding the law, and replaced them with Marxist lawyers.
“…If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.”
Obama calling for “[operating] on (sic) a higher ethical code”!!??
Impressive!
Inspiring!!
And oh so precious….
…and cleansing and purifying…after one showers following an intense, hours-long session of free-style (the only way to really do it, in my experience) ROTFL, which is, come to think of it—thank you Mr. President—the perfect indoor workout for this Covidious period!!
(On the other hand—and to his immense credit—he did say, “IF”….)
“…the only AG ever to be censured by Congress…”
Yes, so it is said.
But is this “factoid” actually true? (Or is it merely urban legend?—I mean, didn’t Ed Meese, for example, find himself in some hot water during his heyday?)
Moreover, along with this “milestone”, does anyone know whether there is any other Attorney General in the history of the Republic, aside from (Lovely) Loretta Lynch (she of the Glorious Order of the Tarmac), who “took the Fifth” when testifying before Congress?
Can any of you fact-crunchers out there help out here?
After all—you never know—someone may want to write a musical some day a la, um, “Hamilton”? (“The Devils of Loudon, the Burghers of Calais and the Attorneys General of the Messiah” sounds like it might be a catchy title….)
Transcript of Dr John Drew radio interview, with Frank Marshall Davis biographer Paul Kengor, on meeting Obama during his sophomore year at Occidental, and his Marxist Leninist commitment to the workers revolution against capitalism, Obama’s agreement with his Marxist professors, and Drew telling him and Boss that no, it wasn’t in the cards given Europe’s history, etc. (circa October 16, 2010):
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/10/exclusive-transcript-obama-at.html
…as the criminal insanity in the Flynn case is allowed to continue and Sullivan (and his cronies) appear to have succeeded in keeping Flynn twisting in the wind for—at least—another month….
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andrew-mccarthy-flynn-case-judge-sullivan
The dishonesty is absolute and astounding; but Sullivan, it appears, MUST be granted the benefit of the doubt…”to do the right thing”.
Incredible.
At the top, Neo teases with a quote from Chairman Obama during a cost-benefit checking moment in life, hence weighing in against rioters.
The times change very fast, today. So what’s changed in the years since then?
I’m listening to the latest interview with Victor Davis Hanson (June 14, minutes 11-16), and his sharp eyed observations see that Covid19 lockdowns in Dem states have driven the Party to accept rioting and embrace the BLM agenda of abolishing police departments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLw-yfygNZY
VDH notes that the Democrat Party has been remade over with the agenda of Bernie and AOC, and therefore the most radical steps are readily now embraced.
Which finds us in the historical parallels of Robespierre and The Committee of Public Safety where utopian solutions are embraced at all costs to and objective good. This period lasted two years before the Thermidorian stormed back.
Hanson goes on to say that Dems have embraced nihilist “solutions” that cannot work. This will quickly pass, as we saw with the MeToo movement when anyone’s history of Bad Thoughts got one “cancelled” or fired, and we this again, today. So, simultaneously, two themes are playing out for the Left, neither of which is sustainable and therefore must end.
Meanwhile, the other half of the country meekly cries to themselves “Bastia!” Enough of the NBA race lectures or the NFL kneeling protests. I can live without that, they think.
The normals and – he doesn’t use the term, but others have revived it – “the silent majority” just wants to escape the city (eg, Minneapolis real estate listing are up 19%), and live quietly somewhere outside of these increasingly dangerous and crazy Leftist shitholes, and refuse to help them “rebuild,” much less pay for their mad follies.
VDH also has a deeper thought-piece up at AmGreatness, with the compelling theme that the Left monger grievance according to immutable identity groups, but the reality is really income class. Andy Trump smartly leverages this more dynamic category and our values and respected aspirational goals.
By contrast, the pretentious “progressive” scold of the Left-world are stuck with undynamic and circular politics easily unmasked today as regressive and simple minded rot-gut.
Thus, we truly are more divided than ever. And conflict now more certain than ever. Yesterday, this last week, the piling on into the BLM agenda smacks of unsustainable moral panic that reveals the weakness of “leaders” and submission to false idols.
Vote accordingly, America — and buy guns and more ammo.
T.J.: Good stuff on John Drew. I hadn’t run across him before.
I’ve long wanted to have a better picture of Obama’s political development. Especially since his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” was even less reliable than I expected (major characters were composites, stories loosely based on facts).
I’m amazed and not amazed how little we still know.
I remain curious about the conjecture Obama’s books were ghost-written, possibly by Bill Ayers.
The machine learning software for author recognition has improved and is used for detecting plagiarism. Here’s one, “Emma Identity,” which “busted” J.K. Rowling writing a detective novel under a pseudonym.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/emma-identity-ai-web-app/
The article says Emma is available for use online, however the web link doesn’t work.
Obama’s best book was ghost written? Yeah. The theme of Jack Cashill. Especially as posted at American Thinker. Plus, his book from 2011, “Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President.”
Style plus themes, plus diction sure support his thesis. Someone (Cashill?) even came up with early college writing samples by Obama. Much was wrong with that effort — ungrammatical, awkward construction, poorly composed — and therefore consistent with O-man’s sudden great late blooming supple style! Not. Or, in other words, not some hidden talent later unleashed.
But, Huxley, to round out my post, here’s something recent and relevant to Maraniss and the Red Obama, also by Cashill:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/no_wonder_the_empostem_hid_obamas_red_mentor.html
T J: I’m aware of Jack Cashill and know some of his arguments from American Thinker. It looks like a deep dive to come to terms with him. “Deconstructing Obama” is on my list.
“(“The Devils of Loudon, the Burghers of Calais and the Attorneys General of the Messiah” sounds like it might be a catchy title….)” – Barry
Ouch.
You could add “The Madwoman of Chaillot” to cover another facet.
AesopFan: If “The Madwoman of Chaillot” another facet cover, may “The Lady of Shalott” be above her.
That’s a poem by Lord Tennyson about a woman condemned to weave and weave in a tower above Camelot but never, never look down upon life there, lest she fall to a curse.
But one day she catches a glimpse of Sir Lancelot riding and she must look.
_________________________________
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces taro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
_________________________________
One of the most gorgeous, heartbreaking poems in the English language. Loreena McKennit put it to music and, I swear, matched Tennyson beat for beat for beauty. And somehow her label rose to the challenge with a music video, which I never saw until tonight.
I’ve loved this poem and this music for twenty-five years.
–Loreena McKennit, “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Tennyson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRIHzr3Pxhc
huxley – outstanding video indeed!
A poem-setting and vocalist who had a similar effect on me many years before McKennit (who is a favorite of all our family, and I am very familiar with her Lady) was Joan Baez singing Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAtSCz9ixWs
…Joan Baez singing Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.”
AesopFran: That’s from my favorite Baez album. She was stretching beyond standard folk to folk-rock with fancy orchestral arrangements. Her “Annabel Lee” is quite wonderful.
I first imagined Joan Baez had romantically risen up from a poor migrant family doing stoop labor in the fields — Mexican cousins in effect to the Joad family in “The Grapes of Wrath.” I later discovered her father had a Ph.D in physics from Stanford and had taught at MIT. Baez started her singing career in the folk clubs of Boston and Cambridge.
Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not exactly the leftie narrative. I still like Baez.
God bless singers who have set great poems to music. McKennitt particularly stands out. She’s also done, as you know, Yeats’ “Stolen Child,” Blake’s anti-war “Lullaby,” and Noyes’ “The Highwayman.”
The dynamics of the Democratic Party pull people to the far Left.
huxley
In my high school Physics class I saw a short instructional film that had a Dr. Baez as the film’s creator or narrator. My teacher informed us that Dr. Baez was Joan’s father. So, I knew early on that Joan was a faculty brat.
And an angelic voice. Coincidentally, I recently have been listening to a 3-CD compilation of Joan’s songs.
While one may poke fun at Joan’s peace-love approach to politics, at least she was consistent. She denounced the genocide in Cambodia, and got a fair amount of flack from the left for that.
Joan’s first album wasn’t a solo. Among the other singers/guitarists on her first album was Bill Wood, then a Harvard undergrad. Joan Baez with Bill Wood – Kitty This was from the first Joan Baez album my family had, though I had also heard her sing on a 4-record compilation of folk songs.Bill Wood went on to a productive career as a biologist at CalTech and U Colorado. Rather impressive.
huxley – Noyes’ “The Highwayman.” was among the poems I learned by heart in middle school (I don’t know if anyone does that sort of thing now), so I love hearing it sung. Up until a few years ago, I could still recite a lot of it, but now I can’t get much beyond the first stanza and the refrain.
(I can still do Jabberwocky though!)
I never did understand why the highwayman went back after she (spoiler alert) sacrificed herself for him. One of my more romantic sons had to explain that feeling to me. I got the theory, but still don’t agree with the practice.
A lot of the “romantic” stuff in movies affects me the same way (e.g. “Titanic” – don’t get me started!)
huxley; AesopFan:
This is the song version of “The Highwayman” with which I’m familiar.
neo: Indeed, Phil Ochs does a wonderful job on “The Highwayman.” He also covered Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells.”
“Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells sung by Phil Ochs”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3FzveBu_34
Since I’m on a Jim Carroll kick, here’s Jim on Phil Ochs and “The Bells”:
________________________________________________
Then a surprise to make my evening, Onto the stage, grinning sheepishly as is his way, steps Phil Ochs, guitar in hand. He hasn’t performed in a while, and he seems nervous and tentative. I scan the room … if these people do not cut the cocktail-chatter scene, I’m not going to silence them with a polite finger to my lips but something more in the line of a baseball bat.
Around the fourteenth year of my life, this dude forever changed it all for me. As faces sometimes embody the meaning of words, his face is lined with affection. My legs tighten as my heart tries to push him the final step to the microphone. He complies, hesitantly, then breaks into “The Bells,” his version of the Poe poem set to music.
His guitar is blazing, his voice is tight at first, but loosening with each word. It’s interesting he chose a lyric he didn’t write and, though it’s an “up” song, his phrasing is mournful beneath its flawlessness… The song ends and he rushes off the stage.
That was it for Anne and Ted and I, and we left together as we’d arrived, but pumped up from Ochs…
By the time I had reached the top of the stairs leading out of the club, the bottom fell out. I realized how sad that man onstage was. Every gesture he made was that of someone who’d been hit-and-run by time.
–Jim Carroll, “The Downtown Diaries 1971-1973”
Not as much as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but Phil Ochs is another guy who changed it all for me.
RIP Phil.
I had to read “The Highwayman” in high school English Lit. But it was Ochs who brought that poem alive for me.
I doubt “The Highwayman” is taught in high school or college anymore. And we are all the poorer for it.
(Though I too was bothered that the HighwayGuy went back and died pointlessly afterward, as AesopFan complains.)
__________________________________________________
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
–Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman”
__________________________________________________
Chills.