After being shamed by CNN and others for not sending anyone in their leadership to Selma to observe the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights march there, Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy will relent and make an appearance.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy will now go to Selma Saturday to join in the 50th anniversary events.
McCarthy tells CNN he considers John Lewis a close friend, and wants to be there to commemorate the historic anniversary.
McCarthy has been to Selma in the past, and he and Lewis worked together to show the movie Selma to all lawmakers in a Capitol auditorium.
For those of you who don’t know, John Lewis is a Democratic congressman from Georgia. He had his skull fractured by a racist Apartheid Jim Crow cop during the march in Selma.
I have no idea how close McCarthy is with Lewis, but evidently not close enough to have prearranged this appearance before being harangued into it.
Outreach!
Yeah, Kevin is super-tight with John Lewis, I’m sure. Jeez, today’s Republican leaders are contemptible.
One of the amusing takes we’ve been seeing frequently in media coverage of the Selma anniversary are the hopeful questions about when Congress will fix the hole in the Voting Rights Act which was created by our horrible Supreme Court majority. This disassociated conversation the media is having with itself and others is very strange.
It’s very clear: a Congress controlled by Republicans will never update the VRA. The GOP base and not a small number of their Congressmembers are unconstructed and barely reconstructed racists who say explicitly and implicitly racist things on a depressingly regular basis, and have a comprehensive set of policy positions which reflect racist world views.
“When are the Republicans going to work to repair the VRA?” I dunno, the same day I can walk out into a raging rainstorm and not get wet?
Yes, a commemoration of an event that glosses over the reason why the event occurred in the first place and current GOP efforts to take the country back to the disenfranchisement of black voters.
The plan apparently:
Decouple MLK, Jr. from all that civil rights stuff and the GOP will honor the preacher man’s birthday. Decouple Muhammed Ali from his religion and draft dodging and we can praise him for his boxing. Decouple Lincoln from his Proclamation Declaration and it’s cool to respect him for kicking rebel butt. Decouple the Fourth of July from the successful Revolutionary War and we could embrace Queen Liz as our queen too.
Even if it’s true that he and Rep. Lewis are bestest buds — ha, ha, I doubt it — it’s pathetic that he doesn’t realize how clueless this sounds.
Well, lord knows they couldn’t send Steve “David Duke did what?” Scalise.
But yeah, I LMBAO at the “my best Black friend” John Lewis…smh
Hey, some of his best friends are blah…
Seriously, if you haven’t seen the movie Selma, it’s really good. This isn’t the point of the movie, but these people were some of the greatest heroes America has ever had.
It’s an interesting contrast between the rote and compulsory adulation for war criming and war mongering foreign Prime Ministers and the feigned amnesia about real american greatness.
Selma is worth seeing. Has a few good moments. The marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge were very well done. Unfortunately, it falls far short of being a good movie. The primary weakness is in the screenplay — too much is stagey or relies set pieces. 42 is a good movie (if we forgive Harrison Ford’s overacting).
Better that he do it even though he was coerced than he not do it at all. Don’t be uncharitable.
Saw an interview with a black pundit/professor on CNN just a few minutes ago and he’s talking about how strange it is that more GOP Congress persons didn’t show up for this event today. How politically easy it was to do.
Actually, I disagree. If you need to get re-elected and therefore must please your constituents, you, as an elected Republican definitely don’t show up in Selma for the events today. That’s the easy thing. It would have taken political courage to be on that bridge today.
Mentioned this in passing to my husband who’s far more of a centrist than I’ll ever be (and we live in the Red South.) He promptly replied that’s exactly why the GOP won’t win the Presidency any time soon and why mostly right wing extremists/nuts are their only candidates.
And guess where Speaker Boehner was today? On the golf course!
Not surprised, but am actually sorta disgusted and angry. Seriously. We are a truly divided country and I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s gonna change that.
Personally I prefer despicable honesty to hypocrisy. Lies are crazy making and less amenable to challenges and change.
In business is was always easier for me to work with older men that had lived most of their lives assuming that women couldn’t do their jobs than men who were my same age-peers and hid their sexism behind PC language. I wasn’t a threat to the old guys who were established in their careers and could also appreciate that I brought something different and new to the profession.
Great speech from the President in Selma today.
I enjoyed all the speakers.
Rep Sewell, a native of Selma, now US Congresswoman for Alabama introduced John Lewis.
Rep Lewis great as always, introduced POTUS after speaking.
And POTUS, who gave his most robust speech on race since 2008. The speech President Barack Obama just gave at Selma is posted at C-SPAN: http://www.c-span.org/video/?3…..nniversary
The whole event did a lot to made the end of my day today better than the beginning.
This morning I went to my local place to get my brake tag (NOLA slang for inspection sticker) for my car.. All I had to do was sit through a semi-rant over how Obama is soon to bankrupt the country cause of his spending (forget about all the spending before him ya know) and how Obama is letting people come in and get passports for free so that they can get health insurance, so they can vote and so they can go home to Mexico to get social security checks mailed to Mexico! Glad I don’t need another for 2 years, and even then, I’ll be somewhere else…geez
Link fix for POTUS Selma 50 speech
http://www.c-span.org/video/?324607-3/president-obama-representative-john-lewis-selma-50th-anniversa
ry
For pity’s sake, I don’t know how you stood that without saying something. I would have had to walk away just to get my BP down.
Was at an out-of-town meeting on Thursday eve with a small group of school alumni. While I’m pretty sure I was the only liberal among the lot, the very Republican one made a disparaging remark about how this good friend of hers who never talks badly about anyone except Obama and Michelle …….. None of the others responded to that remark at all, not even a nod in agreement. It was, frankly, not only not germaine to the matters being discussed, it was in bad taste and intended as an obvious diss of the President and First Lady.
I took it as a good sign that others around me can at least recognize dog whistle racism when they hear it and choose to ignore it. There are others though,(mostly female ones in my experience) who will use every opportunity to make political points, all of them anti-Obama and anti-liberal, into conversations that aren’t political at all.
Pretty much:
http://s1098.photobucket.com/user/CR010411/media/Need%20ID%20to%20cross%20voting%20rights%20and%20fi
fieth%20anniversary%20of%20Selma%20march_zpsjaff2i3w.jpg.html
Yep. It’s a bit of a miracle that Luckovich is still on the pages of the AJC. The paper is not the progressive outlet it once was;lots of conservatives now hold sway on its editorial pages.
ICYMI: Watch the Obamas reenact history by crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. #Selma50
https://twitter.com/msnbc/status/574351507790766080
thanks for links
I got big-time lulz from this post on the appropriately named Hot Air conservative website:
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/07/the-gop-leadership-is-missing-an-opportunity-in-selma-today/
The conservative author of the post levels criticism at the Congressional GOP leadership: “But we also need to accept that there were evils in the past which had to be overcome and recognize those who sacrificed greatly to make progress happen. Paying proper tribute to the Selma march was just one of many easy ways this could be done. Somebody dropped the ball here and we’ll be hearing about this for the rest of the election cycle.” This post has some vile mischaracterizations of recent Black Lives Matter protests, but credit where credit’s due all the same.
The comments thread, predictably, is a real treasure. Here’s portions of the very top comment at the moment: “I don’t know where you have been but every time any of the Republicans try to reach out at a mostly black event they just get called nasty names. So why bother? At least 96% of blacks always vote for Demoncrats no matter what Republicans say or do.
“I have always been a person who accepts others but the events surrounding Ferguson have really opened my eyes and I am appalled at what I have seen. I now realize that many, and probably a majority of blacks hate me just because I am white. Even though my children have had black friends….Our children are now of voting age and will never vote for Demoncrats. My children are as appalled as we are about how much our government gives away to both illegal aliens and people who just will not even try to work.”
Another commenter simply posts without comment a protest letter from Governor Wallace to President Kennedy re. the National Guard’s presence in Birmingham. Many others defend against criticisms of the Confederacy. Not the symbolic Confederacy of today, I mean the real and true seditionists themselves.
Lovely people, really.
The significance of the event seems to have some political power in and of itself to discipline public officials. I find that very interesting. The fact that Kevin McCarthy could not stay away or that he could not turn it into a partisan attack that bolster the slide back into institutionalized white supremacy.
That is totally unexpected. And it is difficult to figure out from what self-interest that restraint of general GOP bigotry-baiting comes in the case of McCarthy.
The President’s speech itself was quintessential New Deal rhetoric salted with the Civil Rights Movements own theological understanding of scripture. It was a statement of how religion relates to government in a system governed by the separation of church and state. In the Civil Rights Movement, a subgroup of Southern black churches used biblical theology and respect for the separation of church and state to move the government to make fundamental formal institutional changes. The biblical framing of their message enlisted a significant, if not large, alliance of white Southern church members and mainstreamed the movement nationally and for a time mainstreamed Southern compliance.
My reaction to the President’s speech is that is was as much a church and state speech as his third major civil rights and race relations speech. My sense is that the White House expectation is that these speeches above others will cast the historical frame for looking at the performance of the first black US President. You can almost hear in some of the lines the expectation of future school children reciting lines to the effect, “And President Barack Obama said,..” followed by one of the rhetorical constructions in this speech.
By proclaming an unquenchable American dissatisfaction with the status quo and impulse to progress, the President makes this a case for progressive ideas in politics if not Progressive ideas in politics.