It appears that the Obama White House is intent on sweeping history literally under the rug after the new presidential rug was found to have a historical quote wrong. The quote attributed to Martin Luther King was actually the words of abolitionist Theodore Parker who will now have his misattributed words walked over by every visitor to the Oval Office.
The quote is “[t]he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King, however, was not the source of these inspiring words. They were the work of a Boston abolitionist and Unitarian minister. Parker was an incredible writer and a tireless advocate for the end of slavery. He never lived to see it. He died at age 49 in 1860 — shortly before the Civil War.
King never claimed to be the author of the words and gave credit to Parker.
The original quote from 1853 was
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
Theodore Parker, “Of Justice and Conscience,” in Ten Sermons of Religion, (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, & Company,1853).
In the end, he would likely take the slight in good fashion. After all, he told people “[n]ever violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.” Amen, Brother.
Source: Washington Post
Jonathan Turley
HenMan:
What is your problem?
My comments are the conclusions of what I see happening around me. And I’m not insane, I see what is going on. I’m not prejudging the results of leftist ideology, I’m judging AFTER the results have come in. How can it be twisting reality to judge the results as they are before me? You act like I’m claiming daylight is moonlight. I’m not. You are just in denial and want to make me out to be nuts: war is peace, etc. That is Obama and left: the war is over and 50,000 soldiers occupy Iraq.
If I regulate the activities of my children–tell them what time they will get up, go to bed, where to go, when to study, what to wear, what to eat, when to go to the dentist, and what kids they may not associate with–I am, by my conduct, assuming the responsibility for their welfare.
And when they are grown, or nearly so, what I have done by assuming this responsibility can be judged in some way or another by the results. Right?
Well, Democrats want to assume a similar type of control over others. They do this by excessive laws and control (at gunpoint, of course). All government has this power to varying degrees but Democrats want totalitarian power over my life. And the health care heist is proof of it. Our government was set up to have the least control over the people, and it not possible for them now to have all the control over my life they now have, and will soon have, without concluding that the control they have is abusive, excessive, arbitrary, absolute, and completely opposite of what our Constitutional allows and our framers intended.
Democrats have chosen to assume this great power and in like manner as the parent and child, we can, and certainly ought to, make judgments about how that worked out in reality. And, for me, the reality is terrifying.
And it is THAT that I am commenting on. I’m not commenting on the good intentions of people on the left, though I don’t think they know too much about goodness.
For example, Democrats/leftists are rightly appalled when live puppies are tossed into rivers, but are not appalled whatsoever that live human organisms not much larger than puppies are tossed into the trash with their approval. Puppies tossed in the river to drown are not much more capable of taking care of themselves than a 6 month old fetus. Puppies tossed into the river feel the injury as much as a 4 month old fetus. Puppies tossed into the river, like the fetus, also just came from a mammalian womb but unlike the puppies, the 2 month old fetus never escaped alive. All because of Democrats and leftists.
This one depravity alone (48 million humans organisms soon to be as precious as a little puppy– snuffed out) shows that leftists have little if any ability to make wise decisions or draw sound conclusions. And none of their PhDs or Ivy League credentials will make up for their tragic moral short-comings. Most judge Nazis as brutes by their one great sin: their absolute inability to recognize cruelty. So no, any other redeeming features are irrelevant.
But that is not really the issue here. The issue is the judgment of about one hundred years of verifiable results. And those results are a corrupt and depraved civilization speeding towards totalitarianism and collapse, and how that leftists (in both parties, but mostly in the Democratic one) contributed and continue to contribute to it..
The truth is that Democrats don’t even talk about freedom and liberty anymore. I remember when they did because I come from a Democratic background. My whole family had been blue collar union Democrats all my life. My grandmother died in her nineties as a loyal FDR Democrat. She even blamed Monica for seducing Bill! That is how far back my political credentials go. Oh wait, grandfather on mother’s side fought in WW1. He was a staunch Democrat as well. That was nearly a century ago.
I am still pink collar, though not union. I did make better money as a union member. But I don’t need the unions to make a better life for me even though I make less. Only union people are upset that I make less. I don’t need them to be upset.
I’ve lived below the poverty level and near the poverty level at other times. I’m on the verge of losing it all right now. I don’t need Democrats or leftists telling me about their concern for the suffering of others when I know first hand what this means. I don’t believe a word of their phony compassion when it means I have to surrender my independence to them.
I want to be free FIRST. That is more important to me. And if I’m free, I can also make my way. But Obama and Marxist thugs like him in his party don’t want me to be free. They want me to depend on them and that is why they put government into everything I do. I see what is happening and I don’t believe the claims by leftists, I only believe the results. I don’t need leftists to tell me how difficult life is. And I see exactly who is making it difficult because difficult is where I live.
I see how they take my money and waste it, and give it to their preferred victims, and then clamp greater chains around my wrists so that I cannot do for myself. Corporations are not doing this to me, Democrats are. Most corporations have benefited my life. Democrats take from it. Pelsoi is standing my way. Obama is. BP is not. BP should be responsible for what lives it ruins and law should be applied fairly to everyone including BP.
I used to try my hand at little shoe-string businesses in the 80s to earn extra money, but that is next to impossible now mostly because of the left’s insane obsession with legislating risk out of living. I want to take risks. I want to buy from others without government butting in. If they defraud me or even kill me, I have faith some how it will work out. We have enough laws to deal this. And there is a final lawmaker above who will in the end deal with the criminals the greedy, immoral, and corrupt lawyers missed. So be it. There are no guarantees in life but life is made miserable by Utopians on left who want one. In the mean time, I want to be free. Democrats have lost this desire. It is completely gone.
A recent example.
I used go in and out of the cottage industry of making crafts. I learned a lot about this sort of thing when I was a back-to-nature hippie. I used to read Mother Earth News and they encouraged independent living. I made things at home and sold them. Later on I used to sell doll clothes. I tried to revive this source of income recently, but, because BIG toy makers left the country to make things, got sloppy, and produced products with poison, I’m now being punished for it.
Big toy makers, the ones who caused the problem, are rewarded. By whom? Well, Democrats supported this law. THEY supported the big over the little, or better, the guilty over the innocent and they claim it is Republicans who behave like that!
I cannot afford the testing for products to sell to children, big toy makers can.
I can go and buy fabric designed for children and make Barbie clothes, but I cannot sell them legally because…because…of what? Because leftists, because congress, has made it impossible. They have helped the big toy makers who caused the problem. I’m injured by this. I’m not whining. I’m just telling you how it is. And this is how it is many things people like me used to be able to do for ourselves.
Now, the toy makers are selling the things I used to sell. They don’t even have to compete with me anymore. Who caused this? Who did government help? It helped big business, the people Democrats say they hate. Democrats supported this legislation and and this takes food off my table. This is what Democrats do. Instead of punishing the culprits, I’m punished.
How do they want to fix this? How do they want to fix all the stupid messes THEY make and lives they injure? They want me to take foods stamps and come begging. And they want to steal from the rich to do it via taxation. They want me to partake in their criminal activities so that I become as corrupt and depraved as they are.
Ms. Pelosi doesn’t want to send me a check from her bank account because of the injury she caused me and others. No. No way. That would be true charity if it came from her directly. She doesn’t want that responsibility though she surely wants the credit for being a humanitarian. So she plunders others to cover her own sins then prides herself in her false charity.
She wants to create a safety net for me. That means: rob someone down the street who makes more than me but less than her. And she calls this compassion. I call it criminal. I call it criminal when government makes it impossible for me to have a small business and to drive me to government charity so they can steal money from the rich, who are fewer in number, in order to gain the votes of the larger group of people who are recipients of the stolen wealth.
The rich would have bought those custom made doll clothes from me. Now, I have no economic exchange with the wealthy who could have uplifted my life PRECISELY because of the leftists in government who claim to care for me cut me off from associating with them. It is not caring for me to interfere in my honest business so much so that I am no longer at liberty to proceed without government handouts. This is what I mean when I say Democrats want me poor. And I know this for a fact.
Idiots like Obama then see that small businesses have problems, so he suggests special programs to give them loans. Great, more dependency on government. More personal debt. More stings tied to greedy power mongers in government. I don’t want another loan; I need LESS regulation. If the problem was China and poison, stop trade with China, punish them. Why punish me for what the big toy makers and a foreign country did? A communist one, by the way.
This sort of thing occurs over and over again. I used to be able to bake and sell goodies. Government steps in and regulates it. I cannot afford government regulations. Government thinks people are too stupid to buy from me. So I am unable get a little business off the ground on a shoe-string. When you read about the history of this country you know that so many properous people started at home (or in a garage) and that is next to impossible now mostly because of the leftist obession with controlling other people. We already have laws enough to punish wrong doers should they defraud in some way, but that is not enough for Democrats. They want more and more and more laws. It is strangling us. Me.
It doesn’t matter to them. They have pretty much achieved most of their cultural agenda (they wanted a Maoist cultural revolution and have gotten one including a murder record as large as Mao’s, i.e. 48 million abortions).
Leftists used liberty and freedom as a club to beat conservatives over the head with in order to achieve their Marxist goals. Leftists said they should be free to have sex with whomever they wanted in or out of marriage.
Leftists should be free to say, film, or print anything obscene. All of this was presented as liberty. They have a right to privacy: keep out of their bedrooms. That mantra was summed up in the chant: hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go. All its values, all its ideas, and especially all its Christianity disrupted their “liberty”. Western Civilization had brought them liberty, and they were going to use it to destroy Western Civilization. That is Obama. That is Pelosi. That is the Democratic Party.
They learned this as our best colleges and universities. They learned to hate their heritage. And not they even commit genocide against it. I do not believe a word when leftists say they love America. They don’t. How do I know? I see what has happened because of Democrats.
Now that they have achieved their desired destruction of our culture and traditions, USING the concept of liberty and freedom to do it, they never talk about them anymore. This is because, as I have now discovered, they never really believed in freedom and liberty in the first place. They only believed in mocking them and using them to destroy that which had honored freedom and liberty: our Constitution.
We were to accept abortion because no one should come between us and our doctor. But now, now that the rich can be plundered, it doesn’t matter that government comes right into the exam room with us. Privacy is tossed overboard. Even the food we put in our bodies in private will have to be regulated or we well be severely punished. You can be sure.
Leftists were to be free to spew all manner of filth in the streets, in film, and in print, but now it is the left that wants to muzzle the most important speech: political speech. They want to limit Rush and the internet. They want to monitor emails. They want government to bail out failing newspapers! Where I come from we have an old saying: He who pays the piper calls the tune”. No one interested in liberty and freedom is going to take government money to publish news and opinion. No one.
It is the left that doesn’t want a free exchange of ideas. The only freedom they intended on supporting is the freedom to say Marxist and obscene things. Important speech is to be tightly regulated by the same people who will promote obscenity without limit if they could!
And when much hated speech or ideas cannot be punished by the left legally, it is then to be characterized as racist, hatred, or insanity.
Leftists never believed in liberty.
I did. I do. And I still want it.
“So the shift is not going to end rich people. Just certain rich people who have put themselves and their private interests ahead of the good of the nation, the general welfare of their fellow citizens, the common defense and domestic tranquility.” (Buddha)
There is a great deal of common sense in those few words.
Swarthmore mom:
It seems as if the people are going for the”okey doke”like they did here in jersey.
Poll: Clear GOP advantage ahead of midterms
Republicans have a nine-point edge among those considered likely voters.
President Barack Obama walks to the Oval Office after returning to the White House on Monday from Milwaukee. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll suggests that the public is more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than with Obama’s performance. By Mark Murray
Deputy political director
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38996574/ns/politics
kARL fRIEDRICH:
So what you are saying is nature gave America territory to grow wheat. The seed becomes wheat and the wheat becomes pizza dough. The middleman of it all is labor?
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/09/07/ariz_foes_call_recruited_candidates_a_gop_dirty_trick/ Republicans are recruiting candidates to run as greens to siphon off votes in several states. Arizona is just one of the states that this is happening in.
BIL:
On your “sin of liberal thinking”comment I hope this comes across right for I think you have done both.
“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)”
The Pyramids stand because of the strength at the widest part of the base, not the capstones.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Is the light starting to dawn, B?
“The sin of liberal thinking is to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism is to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as state-building, liberating and constructive.”
Which is fine provided that state being built is our own. Self-determination is not just a core American value, it may be the core American value considering that self-determination and escaping the control of the British monarchy was the impetus for the Revolutionary war.
But you get a little wobbly here: “We must therefore break the rich politically. The people must be against the political rich, and for genuine affection for America and her true values! They must be against the rich, and for true progressive policies!”
There is a distinction between the rich and “the political rich” in the realm of democratic socialism. There is no issue with people who make money off of enterprise, even to excess provided they pay their fair share of taxes proportionate to the benefits they reap. The issue is when their wealth is based on some sector that either endangers national security or puts lives at risk that no private citizen should have the right to put at risk. The perfect examples of these two no no’s would be energy and health care. Energy because having a stable (note the word stable as in “not up to the whims of a foreign cartel like OPEC to set the prices”) energy is key to national security and the private actors in the industry have proven themselves willing to go to war to maximize their profits no matter the international political damage or the lives lost in the process. This is what happened when Bush and Cheney decided to invade a third country that had not attacked us: they showed they are more interested in their personal profits than national security or indeed preserving America’s once strong leadership for human rights and the rule of law internationally. Those who got wealthy off of health care have concurrently proven themselves to be parasites drawing off excess profits that could be used to treat the ill and injured – a violation of trust as great as that of the Bush and Cheney families in servicing their business partner’s needs in Saudi Arabia over the needs of the American people.
But that’s why democratic socialism has free markets in general and command economies only where required to ensure the greatest good and greatest stability for society as a whole. If the market in question doesn’t relate to national security and social stability, there is no need for it to be nationalized. To whit, the majority of manufacturing businesses and service companies could continue on with profit as their primary goal. But those sectors critical to stability must loose the individual profit motive for their operations because history is proving that the greed of the individuals that run these sectors is running a very real risk of ripping the social fabric of our country. Free markets are a tool, Byron. They have a place in the tool box, just not for every job. There will still be rich people under a socialist economy. Just ask Canada’s Conrad Black (billionaire publisher) or Sweden’s Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA and one of the wealthiest men in the world). That’s right – Ingvar’s Bill Gates rich and he developed his business under a domestic economy that was partially socialized – democratic socialism in action.
So the shift is not going to end rich people. Just certain rich people who have put themselves and their private interests ahead of the good of the nation, the general welfare of their fellow citizens, the common defense and domestic tranquility.
To this end we must first end corporate participation in campaign funding. It is the graft machine that keeps the evil people like Cheney making the rules and above the law. The nationalized health care and energy can come afterwards – in fact – must come afterwards to their corrupting influence being destroyed.
Because if they aren’t?
We’re not going to have democratic socialism or democratic anything, Byron. We’re going to have fascism and more than likely a police state. And that path leads to trouble. Blood in the streets trouble. People being pulled from their offices, both public and private (who through graft enable the public evils), and them being burned in the streets and hung from trees. At an enormous cost of life from both sides. But that’s what fascism has historically wrought, Byron. The price of laissez-faire capitalism and its ultimate expression in the political schools of fascism is paid in blood. I know this because history tells me so. Ask Mussolini. Ask Hitler. Ask Franco. Ask Pinochet. And all those people – many of them wanting no more than a decent life and to be mostly left alone – died for what? So some individual asshole could have gold plated toilet seats and hot and cold running champagne because he went to war for oil? Some half-wit could have a billion dollar yacht with on call hookers because they skimmed money away from health care that could have saved somebody’s life?
Civilized society requires justice. Justice requires equity. Equity requires that the needs of the many be more important than the needs of the few or the one. That is why laissez-faire markets ruin governments and societies – no rules in the market means no rules in the other parts of the system we call civilization that is supposed to provide checks and balances against abuses by bad acting individuals.
Now you’re talking Byron!
Only human labor creates value. Some geologist may take a soil sample and tell you there’s a billion dollars worth of gold in some hill but that gold’s worthing nothing until human labor extracts it.
Speculators may buy shares low and sell them high but that does not create value. That’s only shuffling paper.
Until workers get to meaningfully share the value that they create then there’s an enormous irreconcilable contradiction at the base of society which cannot be shoved under the rug indefinitely.
Tootie:
Karl Friedrichs idea of a workers party is a good idea. Anyone who creates value is a creator, that is, a worker. We should refuse to distinguish kinds of work. The only standard is whether the work serves the whole, or at least does not harm it, or if it is harmful. Work is service. If it works against the general welfare, then it is against the common good.
Tootie:
Socialism is possible only in a state that is united domestically and free internationally. The rich are responsible for failing to reach both goals, domestic unity and international freedom, i.e. from military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq. No matter how patriotic and compassionate this force presents itself, they are against a state which helps the underdog.
We must therefore break the rich politically. The people must be against the political rich, and for genuine affection for America and her true values! They must be against the rich, and for true progressive policies!
Tootie:
The rich are about to leave the historical stage. In their place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until now given the shaft. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission, with national health care and other programs designed to advance working class needs. It is now involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the mechanism of government. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It is not merely a matter of wages, not only a matter of the number of hours worked in a day — though we should never forget that these are an essential, perhaps even the most significant part of the socialist platform — but it is much more a matter of incorporating a powerful and responsible class in the government, perhaps even to make it the dominant force in the future politics of the America. The rich do not want to recognize the strength of the working class. Marxism has forced it into a corner that will ruin it. While the working class gradually disintegrates in the Marxist front, bleeding itself dry, the rich and Marxism have agreed on the general lines of capitalism, and see their task now to protect and defend it in various ways, often concealed.
But was Bob Barr’s stance as wide as Larry Craig’s?
Tootie:
The sin of liberal thinking is to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism is to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as state-building, liberating and constructive.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/obama-special-interests-talk-about-me-like-a-dog-video.php?ref=fpa Is he trying to re-connect with the people that voted for him?
Pst, Tootles.
People have been having sex for years without your approval. Including what you’d call deviant sex.
You know what they’ll be doing under your proposed Christian Sharia?
The same damn thing.
A war on “degenerates” is going to hit the GOP just as bad as the DNC. Maybe worse. For every Patterson or Massa, there is at least one Vitter and an Ensign. Or even better, a Barr. You remember Bob Barr, don’t you? Bob Barr is the Congressman from Georgia (R) who sponsored the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act and said “The flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society, the family unit.” He said this despite the fact he was married three times, paid for his second wife’s abortion and was suspected he was cheating on her. It gets better! He also failed to pay child support to the children of his first two marriages and was photographed licking whipped cream off of strippers.
At his inauguration party.
But at least he wasn’t one of those “filthy homosexuals”, eh, Tootles? Like former Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho (R) and his bathroom shenanigans at the airport. So please, mention the team names again in connection with your insane theocratic vision of cultural purity and how it relates to party affiliation.
It’s really funny.
Funny because it’s insane wishful thinking nonsense.
Like all of the “culture war”.
And let us not forget Newt, Tootie!
From TPMMuckraker
Newt Gingrich’s Second Wife Dishes Hard To Esquire: His Money Woes, His Philandering, His Meltdown
Megan Carpentier | August 11, 2010
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/gingrich_profile_featuring_ex-wife_begets_question.php
Excerpt:
In 1999, after refusing to take the seat he won in the 1998 elections, Newt Gingrich left his second wife, Marianne, for a much-younger staffer with whom he’d been having an almost-ignored affair. As in his first marriage, he did so shortly after Marianne was diagnosed with a serious illness; as in his first divorce, he fought Marianne tooth and nail over any financial settlement. And then he had the Atlanta archdiocese inform Marianne that their marriage was invalid in the eyes of his fiancée’s faith; 9 years later, he completed his conversion to Catholicism.
Given his popularity among Republicans, one would think there is little left to say about Gingrich’s personal foibles that could hurt his political career. But sandwiched in between snippets from his campaign to return to popularity in yesterday’s Esquire profile are tidbits from the still-supportive Marianne that portray Gingrich in a far-from-pleasant light — and hints that his personal foibles took quite a toll on his political fortunes behind the scenes.
Before marrying Marianne, Gingrich presented his first wife, Jackie Battley, with the terms of their divorce as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from surgery for uterine cancer.
Good on ya, Woosty! Bravo!
Swarthmore mom:
The talking heads keep talking about how we the the general public or leaning republican this year,even though I or for the most part people that I know have not been asked by any polling orginization their opinion,but thats another subject altogether.
If the people think nothing is being done now,just wait.
Gingerbaker,
Can I call ’em or what?