GONNA STUDY WAR LOTS MORE: Ways to name-call The Other in clumps!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2013

Part 2—Fascist pigs, Nazis, Confederates: At Salon, the liberal world’s intellectual culture is in a state of free fall.

Much of that fall involves The Hate. Then too, liberal readers are getting massively doused with The Dumb.

Consider yesterday’s piece by Falguni Sheth, a professor of philosophy at Hampshire College. But first, consider this:

In mid-September, the analysts spent the weekend sobbing after Sheth began a piece with this absurd complaint about the undergraduates she is forced to teach. The headline at Salon said this:

“Why our best students are totally oblivious:”
SHETH (9/13/13): This past week, I taught my first classes of the semester. The college where I teach attracts young men and women who are generally left of center. Some of them are the children of progressive activists and academics. Many of the students who enroll in my courses hope to spend the rest of their lives ending poverty, racism, sexual oppression, among other forms of injustice. As such, they are an extremely aware crowd.

In one of my courses, which deals with race, philosophy and legal theory, I listed a series of names on the board and asked students to describe who they were: Trayvon Martin, Yusuf Salaam, Shaker Aamer, Aafia Siddiqui, José Padilla. Nearly every student in the room was familiar with the first name, and could give in excruciating detail the facts of the case and trial, and the questionable laws used to defend George Zimmerman in public discussion...

Not a single student recognized the other three names.
What makes those students “totally oblivious?” To support that assessment, consider this:

Nearly every one of the students recognized Trayvon Martin’s name. But good lord! Not a single one of these undergraduates knew about Aafia Siddiqui!

(We’ll take a break while you click this link, attempting to qualify yourself for admission to college.)

We were struck by how absurd that passage was. At the same time, Salon was running a piece by Brittany Cooper, who complained about the students she taught in a recent stint at the University of Alabama.

“I did not find the couple of hundred that I taught to be particularly progressive or forward thinking about race relations, in my courses where topics about race and gender diversity were critical subject matter,” Professor Cooper wrote.

If we might borrow from our Dylan, we pity the poor college professor, burdened with students like these!

In truth, the dumbness of these particular pieces extended well beyond these absurd remarks. But the new Salon is committed to advancing The Dumb, as Professor Sheth helps us see again in her latest piece.

Everybody makes mistakes! That said, the analysts screamed and covered their eyes when they hit Sheth’s latest, which appeared at the start of her piece about the killing of Miriam Carey in DC last week.

The piece is full of complaints about the early press coverage of this event. Many of Sheth’s complaints are absurd; some of her complaints involve points which are well worth considering by some steadier hand. But the highlighted passage is a classic mistake, of the type in which the new Salon seems to revel:
SHETH (10/7/13): But while Carey’s family since corroborated that she indeed suffered from mental illness, the temptation to use this confirmation as evidence that the media (and police) handled this tragedy appropriately, is misguided. Like Alec MacGillis and several others, I am skeptical of the insistence that her shooting was necessary and inevitable.

For one thing, at least one part of the chaotic series of events was clarified: Carey was unarmed and shot after having gotten out of her car. (Italics by Sheth)

“Ms. Carey managed to get out of the car, and was shot by several officers. According to a law enforcement official, she was not armed, and it was not known whether she presented an immediate danger.”

Yet, with few exceptions, the media had little interest in exploring those two tiny details. In fact, they unquestioningly repeated the police narratives which—no surprise there—were intended to justify the shooting.
Puzzled, we clicked Sheth’s link to see where that quotation had come from. Groan! It came from the New York Times on Friday, October 4—from that paper’s initial report of the shooting of Carey, which took place on October 3.

Why were we puzzled by that quotation, which Sheth was presenting on Monday afternoon? We were puzzled because we had also read the New York Times on Saturday, October 5! On the paper’s front page that day, the Times largely retracted its report from the day before. This was the start of Saturday’s updated front-page report:
KLEINFIELD (10/5/13): The woman who was shot to death after a taut, high-speed car chase through the streets between the White House and Capitol Hill was still in her car, snagged on the curb of a grass-covered median, when the police fired at her, a Senate official said on Friday.

Terrance W. Gainer, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, who was briefed on aspects of the episode, said the woman, Miriam Carey, was trying to make a U-turn between a United States Capitol Police security booth and some planters in the middle of the street on Constitution Avenue when Capitol Police officers and uniformed Secret Service officers shot at the car with semiautomatic pistols.

[...]

Initially, Ms. Carey was thought to have gotten out of the car when she was shot on Thursday afternoon. Early accounts of such events are often inaccurate, however, and on Friday, new details emerged about the shooting and the woman who was killed.
For the record, Gainer was once the DC chief of police.

Was Carey in her car, or out of her car, when she was shot and killed? We don’t know. As best we can tell, the question has not been resolved. (In this report from Saturday's Washington Post, the Post seems to report that Carey was in the car.)

Everybody makes mistakes, but this is very much the way The Dumb now works at Salon. Last Friday, Professor Sheth read a certain fact in the New York Times. Three days later, she was still linking to that report, not knowing that the Times had amended its report the next day.

Meanwhile, what was the gist of Sheth’s piece? She was savaging various news orgs for their careless initial reporting of the killing. But alas! To show how bad the initial reporting had been, Sheth had quoted an initial report—an initial report which itself was rejected as premature.

Does anyone know how to play this game around this liberal journal? This is the way the clowning proceeds at the new Salon on a daily basis. And as the clowning proceeds, the liberal world is getting dumbed down to the ground.

Might we state the obvious? This is very much the same kind of Big Dumb which has driven “conservative journalism” in the past several decades. In both tribes, we now get the tribal stories we like. Please disregard the mountains of Dumb required to give us those tales!

That said, the new Salon isn’t restricting itself to The Dumb. It’s also aggressively selling The Hate. It’s teaching liberals to hate The Other. Most pleasingly, it’s teaching us how to hate The Other millions of folk at a time.

We don’t refer to Joan Walsh alone, though her work has been awful. To punish your brain, just try reading this new piece, in which the relentless Andrew O’Hehir complains about “this year of white rage and white derangement, the year of George Zimmerman and Paula Deen and a government shutdown engineered entirely by a small group of congressmen who represent a lily-white, neo-Confederate nation within a nation.”

(Headline: White America says, “Let the Fire Burn.”)

In the piece, O’Hehir discusses a film about the bombing of Operation MOVE in Philadelphia in 1985. Needless to say, he is reminded of the many people whom he currently hates—the people who live in (name-call alert!) that “lily-white, neo-Confederate nation:”
O’HEHIR (10/7/13): Welcome to America, people, where the past, as Faulkner famously observed, is not even past. That wrenching story of hope and hatred from 28 years ago hit me especially hard in this year of white rage and white derangement, the year of George Zimmerman and Paula Deen and a government shutdown engineered entirely by a small group of congressmen who represent a lily-white, neo-Confederate nation within a nation. Half a century of evil and insidious racial politicking has brought us to this point of right-wing wish-fulfillment apocalypse, along with the profoundly racist congressional gerrymander of 2010 and the creeping fear among many white Americans that the country they thought they understood—thought they owned—has been yanked out from under their feet.
Like Walsh, O’Hehir can tell you what people are thinking millions of folk at a time. What they’re thinking is often quite vile. But the way, what made the 2010 gerrymander profoundly racist? At the new Salon, no such questions need apply!

We’ll discuss O’Hehir’s piece by the end of the week. For now, let’s turn to Frank Bruni’s latest column, which discusses one part of this mess.

In this morning’s New York Times, Bruni discusses a manifestation which increasingly defines our nation’s political discourse. He talks about a familiar topic: over-the-top name-calling.

There’s nothing new about this piece. In our view, Bruni fails to turn the corner—he fails to spot the new species of name-calling which is polluting the world.

He starts with a familiar suggestion—we shouldn’t compare our political opponents to Nazis. He goes on to offer other examples of over-the-top name-calls.

We don’t necessarily agree with all his judgments. For ourselves, we don’t think references to “hostage-taking” are necessarily the same as talk about Nazis. We don’t think that every comparison to the Nazis—or to Neville Chamberlain—is just like every other.

That said, we keep seeing a new type of comparison in the pages of the new Salon. It represents a domestic equivalent to comparisons to the Nazis. We keep seeing very dumb people compare other folk to Confederates.

Some such discussions may make good sense. History lasts a very long time. So do human cultures, including the culture in which certain kinds of northerners hate people who live in the South.

Some such discussions may make good sense. But at the new Salon, very little ever makes sense; comparisons tend to leap over the top. As one commenter to a recent piece wrote, “Salon is quickly becoming the liberal version of Breitbart.”

For decades, people like the late Andrew Breitbart have worked to make conservatives dumber. Now, Walsh and the rest of the gang at Salon have adopted the same business model. They’re schooling us liberals in The Dumb. And they’re schooling us all in The Hate.

They’re teaching us to “study war,” in the words of the old Negro spiritual.

Last weekend, we saw Joan Baez discuss name-calling as an act which violates the basic tenets of non-violence. In that same American Masters program, we saw Jesse Jackson describe the way Dr. King viewed Baez.

This is the best transcription we can find. In this excerpt, Baez praises the relative success of non-violence:
BAEZ: When we were in smaller groups and I was there and [Dr. King] was speaking, he would joke afterwards. He would say, “Yeah, I threw the word 'nonviolence' in there a couple, couple of extra times 'cause I know Sister Joan was there."

JACKSON: King, I think it really was mutual admiration. Most artists, protecting their careers, stood a bit away from the cutting edge of our struggle, asking for their hot tea and their lemons and their fruit and all of the stuff that you get performing on some stage. She came as a member of that family.

DR. KING (videotape): Please, dear God, go into the march, to the activities, and I'm with you as much as I possibly can be, but do it with nonviolence. Thank you.

BAEZ: To be realistic about nonviolent action, I got good news for you guys, it works pretty well, certainly compared to the other stuff. It works pretty well. The only failure worse than nonviolence, as a method of fighting, has been violence—complete flop!
Is it true that non-violence works? Why in the world did Baez seem to say, earlier in the program, that calling policemen “fascist pigs” was a violation of the tenets of this approach—of this approach which works?

Does that mean that name-calling doesn’t work? Is there evidence backing that claim?

The new Salon is actively teaching liberals to “study war.” Frequently, that way lies disaster.

It’s thrilling to learn to hate The Other. It’s especially thrilling to learn how to hate large groups of The Other.

To learn how to hate the racists, the Yankees! To learn how to see large groups of people in the least flattering, least forgiving, most diminished way possible.

Dr. King didn’t do that! Famously, Mandela invited his jailers to his inauguration. But what would those dumb-asses know? They were just the biggest winners of the past century!

It’s thrilling to learn to hate The Other, especially when we learn to hate them in clumps. But uh-oh! Be careful what you thrill to!

Remember the start to Gone with the Wind? An hour into the famous film, do you recall where all that tribal fervor had led?

Tomorrow: Dr. King looks at The Other

55 comments:

  1. Regarding the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia - that was a black mayor, Wilson Goode, who approved it.

    Where are some examples of Breitbart dumbing people down or fostering hate? Honest question. Bob S. is making a comparison and I have no idea what exactly it is that he's comparing with the hate mongering of Salon et al.

    Bob S. is rather an elitist, of course. Look forward to tomorrow's article about how lovely and wonderful Martin Luther King's approach to other people was. Bob does not think that ordinary people can think for themselves or that they are allowed to, I guess. They were told - by mainstream media that stoked hate for them - how Martin Luther King "loved" them and it was all about his "love" and how churlish they were to not run out to stand next to him and bask in all that "love."

    The Paula Deen business was just awful. Someone abuses the judicial system to sue her and she is honest in a deposition that 20 or 30 years ago she used a bad word in reference to a bastard who put a gun to her head and for that she is ruined. By the mainstream media elites who promote the "love" of Martin Luther King.

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    1. Mr. Somerby. Welcome to your new audience.

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    2. Anonymous, for reasons that I am sure you'll appreciate, I can't get enough of Lionel. Bob is no doubt hard at work on a "joint venture" with him as we speak.

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    3. You're a trip, Lionel.

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    4. Hi Confused,

      I don't know about a joint venture with Bob on this stuff. He's a bright fellow, Harvard and all, I am sure but totally wrongheaded if he is thinking there is some way that King and Mandela approached the "other" and that they were winners. South Africa must be one dangerous place, a place where a lot of people think its very logical one might fire a gun into the bathroom and kill his girlfriend thinking its a dangerous home invasion.

      And then the result of all that instruction to his followers to "love" the white people - murderous black riots all over the country and white people fleeing to create Northern style segregation, i.e., the suburbs.

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    5. That second paragraph about "love" was of course about Martin Luther King and what Bob thinks was his message. Oh, Love! Love your enemies.

      The people in the South who knew Martin Luther King and had figured out that he was a Rolex-wearing womanizing Elmer Gantry charlatan must have really been moved by King's "love" baloney. Hugh Hefner probably thinks' he's all about "love," too.

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    6. There you go, Pastor Bob, you have brought Lionel into your flock. You must be proud.

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    7. It's rather ironic to see Lionel chided for expressing contempt for King's emphasis on love, when several commenters here expressed contempt over Somerby's evoking of King's policy of turning the other cheek, and even suggested that such a sentiment would be naive and ineffective today.

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    8. Would that be "strawman sockpuppet" Lionel, C?

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    9. Lionel, on an on, apparently ad infinitum, you confirm my previous observation that you are
      the stupidest to grace the comment section on this site.

      Delete
  2. When Martin Luther King, Jr., urged his allies on the path that Mr. Somerby here urges on his own (allegedly) liberal allies, did he use the rhetoric and tone that Mr. Somerby uses regularly, including in this post? Compare:

    DR. KING (videotape): Please, dear God, go into the march, to the activities, and I'm with you as much as I possibly can be, but do it with nonviolence. Thank you.

    Somerby's own words, above:
    "Dr. King didn’t do that! Famously, Mandela invited his jailers to his inauguration. But what would those dumb-asses know? They were just the biggest winners of the past century!

    It’s thrilling to learn to hate The Other, especially when we learn to hate them in clumps. But uh-oh! Be careful what you thrill to!"

    Shouldn't we all, Mr. Somerby included, practice what we preach?

    A larger question about this category of posts: is Mr. Somerby suggesting a rhetorical and tonal equivalency in recent years or today between right and left politicians, bloggers, TV talking heads, and citizens who assemble in demonstrations? Anything close to one? Or does he cherry pick from among "liberal" bloggers and others? (He certainly seems to be doing that in the first part of his post, where two professors, whose pieces he distorts somewhat, may stand for the whole of professordom: "If we might borrow from our Dylan, we pity the poor college professor, burdened with students like these!" Bob just doesn't like college professors. How about the thousands of college professors, administrators and most of all students who demonstrated in cities like Boston last weekend for immigration reform? Mr. Somberby might check out their signs, their public statements for rhetoric and tone -- but that wouldn't support the bias he frequently displays against college professors and against students at "elite" schools.)

    I wonder what Mr. Somerby makes of that rabble-rouser and hate-filled Bill Moyers, here linked to via the site of that rabble-rouser and hate-filled Josh Marshall:

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/let-s-call-the-shutdown-what-it-is-secession-by-another-means

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    1. Josh Marshall is crazy. He proved that with the bizarre Ted-Cruz-derangement-syndrome article about how people at college didn't like Ted Cruz.

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    2. Lionel, the link is to an essay by Bill Moyers.

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    3. Bob, your joint venture partner is waiting for you.

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    4. So what if the link is to Bill Moyers???? Josh Marshall is still crazy. Bring him up and I'll say he's crazy.

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    5. Bring on the HATE, right Lionel?

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    6. matty cooper,
      Did you read Marshall's long piece on Ted Cruz in college? Marshall exposed himself. He's nuts.

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    7. Earth to Lionel, Marshall isn't the only one to expose himself as nuts

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  3. If we focus on preparing reasoned arguments to the standard presentations of conservatives instead of vilifying them or their supporters we are more likely to convince more people and accomplish our political goals. I think that is what Bob is suggesting. MLK and Mandela are examples of people who did this and succeeded in situations where opposition was stronger and the temptation to abandon that approach was severe. That's all.

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    1. So how long will it take to prepare these "reasoned arguments"?

      As the famous quote wrongfully attributed to Mark Twain states: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."

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    2. Lindy, I'm suggesting that, if Bob S adopted your tone, he'd be more effective in persuading people to act in the way you have well summarized him as advocating. This disjunction between his overt message and tone has always baffled me about his posts, which I have been reading for several years now.

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    3. Anonymous@2:38: Someone posted an excerpt from Obama's press conference as an example of what Chris Matthews could have said. It is in the comments of Bob's most recent post. Just as the conservatives have a reasonable-sounding standard presentation, we could have a reasonable-sounding position that addresses their statements. It could have been Obama's clear, well-wrought statement but that would require Matthews and others to be aware of what Obama said and to formulate their own version so they too could make clear statements to an audience. It is a kind of work that isn't being done on the left -- as Bob points out. I think it would require pundit staffs to prepare analyses like debate-preparation teams do for their candidates, but on an on-going basis. That is, assuming the pundits don't have time to read and keep up with the news and issues themselves, as they apparently do not.

      mch, Bob's style doesn't bother me. Inconsistencies and hypocrisy are part of being human. Do as I say, not as I do, goes with the territory for anyone trying to teach others anything at all.

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    4. "Truth" be damned. Let's shoot instead for "reasonable-sounding".

      And certainly, journalists should take their cues from politicians.

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    5. "mch, Bob's style doesn't bother me. Inconsistencies and hypocrisy are part of being human. Do as I say, not as I do, goes with the territory for anyone trying to teach others anything at all."

      Spoken like a true member of the tribe!

      Ignore that beam! Look at that speck!

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    6. Lindy,
      That's nice but I rather suspect that your side will not listen to nor be courteous of the (very) well reasoned arguments of the other side. In fact, my take from reading comments by "liberals" over the years is that they don't think the other side reasons at all, sorry to say.

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    7. Anonymous@4:55 -- answers cannot just be true but must also be reasonable sounding because people don't have the patience to get involved with the technical details of any of these issues. Conservatives figure out how to say things succinctly and in a way that appeals to common sense, whether correct or not. We should of course say true things, but they also need to be accessible to the public in the same ways that conservative statements are. Here, I am not referring to the comments conservatives make that are intended to evoke visceral reactions. Both sides make those. Our side seems to be better able to confuse people, even when speaking the truth about an issue.

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    8. Ah. So now truth is a "technical detail" that "people" will never understand.

      We must be more like those "conservatives" who found ways to tell lies that appeal to common sense, while of course saying only "true things".

      I guess that unlike Bob and his tribe, I've never thought that the "problem" has been as simple as marketing.



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  4. I have a rule for visiting Politifact: Ignore the ratings; read the explanations. I also have a rule when visiting salon.com: Breeze through the headlines for a laugh, but only read Michael Lind.

    News surfers must be discriminating.

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  5. "Not a single student recognized the other three names."

    Only problem, Professor: there were 4 names given in addition to Treyvon.

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    1. Yeppers, Cecelia. I noticed that. Kind of like when BOBster says Ripley has "two or three" recommendations then mentions only two. Kind of like when his BOBship says we should look at 9 years of test results when attacking Ripley in one post, then uses only six himself when attacking her later.

      Dumb Professor.

      KZ

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    2. My apologies. When Trayvon was misspelled I just assumed you had been hit with a case of the typo fever.

      KZ

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  6. The case of Siddiqui is interestingly close to the Russian / Caucusus guy interviewed by the FBI then shot to do death for having a gun / broom / curtain rod / nothing. Just happened the 3 other guys had left the room (then later apparently there were only 2 FBI agents, no one else there).
    In this case, Siddiqui becomes Angelina Jolie who can't aim. Bad luck for her, eh?
    But no, we don't care about Muslims - typically doesn't rise so much to ire even on the left. And of course can't blame Obama...

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  7. So, are liberals as (or becoming as) full of hate, or simply unwilling to compromise, as conservatives? Seems like no. Check this out:
    http://prospect.org/article/power-no
    and the links there to:
    http://www.gallup.com/poll/145541/Conservative-Americans-Leaders-Stick-Beliefs.aspx
    http://www.people-press.org/2011/03/03/section-2-views-of-political-leaders-and-compromise/

    Lionel probably has some reason he never reads Paul Waldman or Pew Research polls.

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  8. Lionel,
    Let me know the next time you think I give a fuck about what you think of MLK or Mandella.
    Me? Bring on the funk! Gotta have some funk! We need the funk.

    Crawl back into your (racist) hole and buy yourself a house in an all white neighborhood..

    Ciao,
    LG

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  9. The post repeats the dubious, but oft repeated cliche that liberals "always knows what everyone thinks." Perhaps this is the key to why Bob doesn't want to write about the coverage of the Government Shut Down. For years, the nimrods who are holding our Country hostage have told us quite clearly that this has been their intention. Did having a black President empower these yahoos? Probably but who cares. They are terrible people, just as Dr. King pointed out in the "Dream" speech that George Wallace was a terrible person. Yes, he did it artfully but he did it. Obama played harder, and smarter, than Bob would have had him play in 2012, and he won big. Why aren't people like Bob Somerby stepping forward to support the President in the critical hour?

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  10. Don't forget that Dr. King and Pres. Mandela had the example of a man who walked the earth 2000 years ago.

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    1. Cecelia,
      This is the point (if I can make it) that you and Bob and others here don't get about the folks on the "Other" side: They did not think/believe that King was a good person or that he meant well. (I'm leaving South Africa aside as it has little to do with anything of concern here re education/public discourse/arguments about US policies.)

      The people on the Other side genuinely, sincerely, honestly believed that King was a bad person and that what he and the mainstream media and the federal government were up to was an assault on their "vital" interests and rights. They no doubt believe the proof was in the pudding: the civil rights era ending in black riots across the country.

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    2. "Suffer the little children to come unto me".

      Jesus Christo.

      LG

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    3. Lionel, riots did nothing to indict Dr. King's motives or to sully the philosophy of nonviolence and love as an act of the will.

      On the other hand, segregation was a shameful and tragic bit of history from which we are still reaping consequences.

      Those people were dead wrong in their thinking.

      Do know that I think that you are a strawman sock puppet, and I'm only addressing you because that particular nonsense needed to be addressed.

      Delete
    4. Cecelia,
      If you insist on not knowing what the reasoning of the other side is, its always going to be a mystery to you.

      The people on the other side understood that this "love" stuff (and appropriation of religion) was merely a tactic to demonize and marginalize them. In other words, rather than directing "love" at them, it actually directed hate at them stoked hate for them. The proof was the rioting.

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    5. Lionel, the other side, an apparent euphemism for the dark side, is who? David Duke, the KKK and the American Nazi Party? Please identify who is on this other side, beside you, because as far as I can tell, MLK is universally, and deservedly, considered a great man.

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    6. AC/MA - Which generation of people? At the time in question - the civil rights movement era - obviously there was a large "Other" side, very large, milions of people. There was resistance to a holiday honoring Martin Luther King and it was viciously suppressed with the usual totalitarian "liberal" demonizing that the Other side is bad. You can give blood every other month for 20 years but if you opposed the Martin Luther King holiday, you're a bad person.

      The mainstream media and politicians have promoted a notion that Martin Luther King was a saintly figure and perhaps you are young enough to be of the generation indoctrinated with that notion. I dunno, I'm kind of surprised that people have so little inclination to critical analysis not to see the saintliness/"love" stuff/non-violence (that led to riots) theme as merely a tactic to marginalize and demonize opponents. It seems so obvious and not unique.

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    7. Will to love the people who think that you should enter the back door of homes a d business establishes= marginalizing and demonizing them.

      Hate and disparage those people = marginalizing and demonizing them.

      Thought I had heard all the arguments against the civil rights movement, but this is certainly a unique one (that rings as sincere as a telemarketer.)

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    8. Lionel, i'm a youthful 64. We can debate whether the Tea party or the opposition to Obama is based on racism or not. I personally, in general, agree with TDH, that the way the race card is used by liberals or so-called liberals is invalid and unintelligent. I think the treatment of Paula Deen was ridiculous. I think there was sufficient reasonable doubt in the Trayvon Martin case to justify the acquittal. and I don't think MLK was a saint, but I agree with the consensus that he was a great man. The side back then that hated him were out and out real racists, really ugly, and you come across really badly.

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    9. Cecelia,
      No offense but the only reason those arguments are news to you is that you never brought any common sense critical analysis to bear on what might be in the minds of the "Other" side. You've said a few meanspirited things to me in comments yet still I hate having to say this to you, an anonymous person in a comments section, because you'll take it as a personal attack when it is not: Your attitude is the height of arrogance.

      The proof is in the pudding: black riots because they were stoked up to hate whites and white relocation to suburbs where they could have rational control of their lives whether the elites liked it or not. No need to try to make your argument, just live your life in peace.

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    10. Lionel, I live my life in peace in a region where the civil rights movement was fought.

      Opponents to it have largely died off or changed, but I have heard from the horses' mouths all the arguments against it.

      I am familiar with the song, and your version rings insincere, cobbled, and an act.

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    11. AC/MA
      Do you really think that "the side back then that hated him" was the few hundred people who belonged to the KKK, the Nazi Party, George Wallace and Bull Connor, i.e., people whose images you saw on TV with snarls on their faces? No offense, but I think you were manipulated by images. We all were. If we saw photos of the innocent people Obama has killed with his drones and if that was forced into a national issue day after day after day (Seymour Hersh recently questioned why its not), Obama would look as bad as George Wallace. Did George Wallace kill anyone?

      At 64, you are old enough to remember Clinton talking about a "third way." I don't remember exactly what he was talking about but there must be a third way beyond (1) viciously attacking opponents and (2) grabbing the highhanded mantle of saintliness to yourself. Like, maybe, (3) approaching the opponent with the assumption that he/she has a reasoned point of view.

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    12. Cecilia,
      I don't know where you live but the South is still, surely, very segregated.

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    13. Umm..humm... Ethnic Asians, Hispanics, Indians, and Africian-Americans, we have all representatives in my neighborhood.

      Can't say that the place is paradise. There are the usual grumblings about various remodels and home additions, and some people drive too fast.

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    14. "Like, maybe, (3) approaching the opponent with the assumption that he/she has a reasoned point of view. "

      Reason applied to wrong assumptions leads to wrong conclusions. So far, I've been seeing that you have mistaken understanding about easily verifiable facts about history and current events, leading you to some ridiculous statements.

      You appear to be entirely unwilling to change your views when confronted by evidence that you are wrong. There is nothing reasonable about that. It makes conversation with you a waste of time, so I am signing off and will not bother correcting your mistaken facts in future comments.

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    15. Lindy - there you (I'm making you the spokesperson for "liberals") thinking that your side has presented any evidence. You haven't! It always devolves into name calling and going off in a huff.

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    16. That first sentence should have been "there you go again"

      Lindy - I haven't checked that other thread about poverty and education spending. I gave you very detailed evidence in that thread. Numbers even. 56% of state education spending here in New Jersey goes to districts that have only 5% of the school kids. I'll check to see whether you made any reply to that.

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