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One year ago, America had just elected the First Truly Black President. The long road to equality had been traveled; blacks had smashed the ultimate glass ceiling, and Barack Obama stood ready to usher in the new Promised Land of smooth race relations dreamed of by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On that basis, we suggested that Dr. King would best be honored by retiring his day, his goal having been achieved in full measure.
Well, that didn't exactly happen; unionized workers seldom give up a paid holiday once they get one. Thus it is that we find ourselves once again at Martin Luther King Day. Given that his dream has been achieved, we decided to honor his memory by following his admonition as to how people ought properly to be judged.
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.
Today, his children do live in that nation, or so say our laws and some of our judges. So let's judge accordingly.
During his campaign, Barack Obama famously refused to use racially-divisive rhetoric. This offered the possibility that we could indeed move to a post-racial society just as Dr. King dreamed. When the outrageous and inflammatory rhetoric of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, came to public view, he first rejected the racism while not attacking the racist and then dumped the Reverend entirely.
In between, Mr. Obama delivered a historic address on race calling for everyone to be treated equally and all grievances to be settled amicably. We couldn't agree more with the non-racist position he stated.
Alas, Rev. Wright knew his man better than we did; twenty years of pastoral shepherding of the Obamas must have given him some insights not available to us. He cursorily dismissed Mr. Obama's noble thoughts as being "Just words... just speeches."
Sure enough, once safely ensconced in the Oval Office, President Obama has unleashed his inner racist. In response to a bizarre incident in Cambridge, Mr. Obama's very first reaction without knowing a single fact was to attack a white police officer and defend a radical black professor.
Even when confronted with the fact that a black officer who had been involved in the incident supported the white police officer, he blamed the problem on a history of racist cops. Was what Mr. Obama did in keeping with what Dr. King would have wanted?
Since then, we've gone from bad to worse. Mr. Obama himself has remained above the fray for the most part, but he's allowed his staffers to routinely slander political opponents by saying that their opposition to his policies is motivated purely by racism. From Attorney General Eric Holder's absurd call for "cowardly" Americans to talk more about race to the multifarious slanders against Tea Party protesters, the accusation of "racist!" is the very first weapon Obaminions reach for - so much so that they've cheapened it.
The cry of "racist" doesn't bear the same power any more because it's been overused just as calling everything unpleasant a "holocaust" cheapens the memory of the real Holocaust.
Has Barack Obama exemplified Dr. King's admonition to judge people without regard to their color? Sadly, no; even more sadly, he's made no attempt to require it of his administration. He had every opportunity to set a strong and stellar example along the path to a race-neutral society and chose not to.
In fact, through his latest appointment to the Supreme Court, he's pushing us in the opposite direction. A century and a half ago, in perhaps the most evil Supreme Court ruling ever made, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision that
The negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.
We fought a bloody civil war to end that perversion of justice. One century later, Dr. King struggled through the conflicts of the civil rights era to ensure that all rights, for all Americans, were respected.
By appointing the openly-racist Sonia Sotomayor to the highest court, President Obama is ensuring a return to the wicked bias of the Dred Scott era. No, a return to slavery is not in the cards, but the ideal of "equal justice under law" is now a dead letter.
Swap the colors and genders around, and Sotomayor's oft-expressed belief that a "wise Latina woman" will by virtue of her race and sex inevitably make a better judge than a white guy stems from the same poisonous root of racism that spawned Chief Justice Taney. Like him, she doesn't simply express her bigotry in private with friends; it colors her rulings, as when she blew off the appeals of white firefighters who'd been blatantly discriminated against solely on the basis of their color.
Would Dr. King have appointed Sonia Sotomayor? We all know the answer to that: quite the contrary, he'd have been marching against her and against the blinkered bigot who appointed her and the blinkered bigots who confirmed her.
Surely President Obama has at least tried to help bring about Dr. King's vision that
...little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
Much as we don't like the Obama agenda, it never crossed our minds that he wouldn't endorse this particular goal and that we could applaud as he pursued it. Imagine our shock and horror when exactly the opposite happened right here in Washington, DC!
As serious black leaders from Booker T Washington to Dr. King well knew, the key to advancement of a repressed people is education. A solid education gives people something that can never be taken away and places in their hands the power to better themselves both internally and externally. Unfortunately, the state of American education for most blacks is a criminal disaster.
It's not for lack of money, though - inner city school districts attended by most blacks cost the taxpayers far more money than schools anywhere else in the country. Because of their complete capture by greedy teachers unions, government bureaucracies, and the dead hand of politically-correct education-school fads, however, inner-city schools are riven by violence and illiteracy.
For the racist, blame is easily found: the schools are full of feckless black children, of course they can't be educated. This lie can be trivially disproved by examining any number of private schools, most particularly religious ones, which educate exactly the same deprived inner-city kids on a tenth of the money to standards which equal the best suburban magnet schools attended by the poshest of white kids. Why can't the needy black children all attend such schools?
In Washington, DC, the Republican Congress decided that at least a few of them should: they established a lottery-driven voucher system by which any DC school child could apply to go to a private school at government expense. The list was vastly oversubscribed as parents rushed to provide their kids a way out of poverty. Some years on, the results are in: sending kids to a successful private school does in fact give inner-city kids an excellent education and saves vast sums of money to boot.
What did Barack Obama's Democrats do with this knowledge? They tried to cover up the report and canceled the voucher program.
It's hard to imagine an action more racist in either its intent or its result - nor one more contrary to every word Dr. King ever preached. How could the first black President ever, for even one moment, countenance such villainy? Quite frankly, we still don't understand why he condemned so many black kids to a life of uneducated failure, but do it he did.
Today, on Dr. King's birthday, there are thousands of inner-city black children who might have received a first-class education in a well-run private school, but instead are trapped in the same worthless public schools that failed their parents and grandparents at vast public expense. Meanwhile, the children of Democratic senators and congressmen attend the same private schools, no longer having to sully their precious little lives by exposure to the Great Unwashed.
What would Dr. King do if he knew? The shock and horror probably would cause him to drop dead all over again.
As appalling as these racist acts are, they pale in comparison next to the worst effect of this Presidency, from the point of view of race relations.
When Barack Obama was running for President, the liberal media elites were so enthralled at the prospect of witnessing history that they constantly claimed that racism was the only possible reason anyone could oppose Mr. Obama. This is absurd on its face, of course, but a vast number of white folks voted for him, in part, because they wanted to assuage America's original sin of black slavery. Put a black man in office, they thought, and we can finally lay to rest our racial strife.
Oh, what a totally wrongheaded idea that turned out to be! Starting from Day One of the Obama administration, partisan Democrats attacked their political opponents as motivated purely by racism - and not just professional politicians, they attacked ordinary voters too.
Protesting against the massive increase of the Federal deficit? You're a racist! Complain about the impending government takeover of one-sixth of our nation's economy via a massive, pork-riddled, bribe-infested health-care "reform" act? You're a racist! Americans are sick of being called racist and are beginning to ignore such false and self-serving accusations.
Would that it would end there! Alas, Mr. Obama's minions seem incapable of quitting while they're ahead: they give every indication of riding the "racism" sled all the way down to the very bottom. If the rest of Americans were saints, this wouldn't much matter, but human nature is what it is and stirring up natural resentments is a very dangerous thing.
As I heard a disgusted white man say, "What's the point of electing a black if we're going to be called racists anyway?" This alone is bad enough - surely there are black men well-qualified to be president? Much more and this man may go one step further: "What's the point in worrying about not being racist if I'm going to be called a racist no matter what I do?"
Nobody likes to be called a sinner. People won't put up with false accusations forever. Every elementary school teacher knows: falsely accuse a kid of being a "bad" kid and eventually he'll start being bad for real. As the old saying goes, might as well be hung for a goose as for a gander.
Yes, America had a racist past, but all the slaveowners and Jim Crow politicians are long since dead. Incessantly accusing modern whites of the sins of the past and forcing them to pay a never-ending atonement and obeisance to continually "expunge" their "crimes" causes revulsion and hatred of the accusers.
Don't we have enough racial hatred in our past? Why must we breed more hatred for the future?
When Barack Obama took the oath of office, America's long journey to Dr. King's Promised Land could have been declared complete. Instead, President Obama, via what he has said and what he has permitted members of his administration and his political party to say and do, has done all in his power to drive us away from the justice of racial equality and return us to dwelling in mutually-hateful Balkanized camps.
And for what? For nothing more noble than short-term partisan political advantage.
Those who live by politics must die by politics. The only hope for America is for Americans to utterly reject, spurn, repudiate, and annihilate that racist political party and all its adherents who seek to cynically profit from setting us against each other by tearing down all that Dr. King worked to build. This fall, Democrats must be driven from power; any hope of racial reconciliation, and much else besides, requires that we get rid of them all.
The bellowing voices of political correctness have done their best to make us forget, but Dr. King's message is as true today as it was sixty years ago: there are good black men and bad white men, and also good white men and bad black men.
According to the time-tested judgment of Dr. King, alas, by his actions, President Barack Hussein Obama has shown himself to be one of the latter.