Receiving this email/column was quite timely considering the current observance of Martin Luther King’s Day and an African American President being inaugurated.
About half, first part, of the column was left off this email. Read full content here: PJB: A Brief for Whitey. Patrick J. Buchanan, maybe, became somewhat of a softy in his senior years. On GPS (Global Public Square), Sunday, he was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria, with a group of other presidential speech writers. Pat was a speech writer for Nixon and Reagan. When asked the worst presidential speech ever, he replied, “The Axis of Evil” by George Bush. I’ve followed Pat for many years, even long before his several attempts at the Republican nomination for president. He has a heart, is gifted and can be levelheaded and very reasonable at times; however, he wrote this while in a political fervor last March. Pat, currently a political analyst on MSNBC, I believe from what I’ve heard out of his mouth in recent weeks, has moved on, for the most part, from the rhetoric of this column, and I would have thought others had also. Pat has in his writings and verbal rhetoric at times has gone over the edge in “selling his soul.” In making his points in this article, he accomplished more mudding of the water, with some fact and many exaggerations. Related to some of the verbiage Pat wrote about here is the interview Don Imus had with Sean Hannity last week on FOX: Imus commented when questioned by Hannity about Rev. Jeremiah Wright: “I would have been furious and extremely angry also if someone told me I could not drink water from the white-water fountain.” In explaining justifiable anger of some of the older, black generation, empathically, he said he would have been killed, to imply he would have been absolutely defiant in those years of race-separation norms. Just the same, he said, it didn’t give Wright the right to employ his over-zealous message. Maybe some white people feel they have been discriminated or even oppressed by certain advantages/accommodations given some African Americans, but I certainly don’t. And I suspect Pat Buchanan would be hard pressed to name more than one or two, if any, cases of whites discriminated against, at least in the comparison to black’s suffering. Given a conversion experience of John Newton, captain of the slave ship who authored the hymn, Amazing Grace, perhaps we might muster a little more empathy for those whose ancestry endured the oppression of slavery. In Forgotten Step Toward Freedom one may learn of history’s parallels, America vs. England, in the abolishment of slave importation.
Our United Methodist Church: Faith In Action has just posted an article with reference to What we learned from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Means and ends are not only inextricably intertwined; corrupt, hateful, or violent means produce corrupt, hateful, violent ends. Only loving, respectful, non-violent means can produce comparable ends — though they may also fail. King challenges and trumps Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary,” which is morally shallow in comparison.” Other civil rights articles are also included in this posting.
Beyond the aforementioned reflections, there is a broader message for those who throw out the, so called, “red meat” (term used in the intro of referenced email) of the National Republican Party. This email, one of the milder red-meat types, is just one of some now being passed on the internet, not to enlighten, uplift, or unify (to be as kind as possible). In comparison it’s modest to one such as the preposterous comments of a Kit Lange. What purpose do these divisive messages serve, especially after an election has passed? They do nothing to ingratiate those moderate conservative Republicans of approximately 12% of the Party and Independents that helped elect Obama. Neither do they boost Conservative Republican ideas, however, noble. Kathleen Parker, the talented conservative syndicated columnist from Camden, SC wrote: “Exit polls conducted by The Associated Press found that one in five voters who consider themselves "conservative" (34 percent of the electorate) voted for Obama.” “Among probable causes for the GOP defection, conservatives might consider the right's tendency these days to banish into the darkness those who were merely looking for the light.”
In deed there is darkness, an ill-political force that’s alive in the National Republican Party’s political execution that’s ethically unbecoming. (So far as I can tell the local and state Republican organizations are mostly void of this style politics. I have voted for many Republicans on the local level in recent years who I believe would not pander to this treachery.)
The leadership of The Republican National Committee over the past many years became infected with an ill-spirit fashioned by Lee Atwater, the chairman who led the second term, reelection, of President Ronald Reagan and the election of George H. W. Bush. That ill-spirit lives on in many corridors and crevices, even blatantly open at times, in political operations to this day. John Brady wrote about Lee Atwater in his book, Bad Boy (first chapter) The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater. Atwater died of a brain tumor at age forty in 1991. While on death bed, he was remorseful, making many apologies to those he had falsely politically scourged. But he could not stop the inbreeding that stretched peripherally in viral winds he had set in motion for decades to come. Another chapter of that book online is I’m Still Lee Atwater.
Erik Kolbell wrote before the election And Atwater Begat Rove, who Begat Schmidt... So Schmidt, the inline successor, Atwater’s protégé following Rove, lead the unsuccessful campaign of John McCain. Kobell instructively begins his column with the question: For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and lose his own soul? -- Luke 7:47
In Kathleen Parker’s recent column Who Will Run the RNC?, she critiques the six candidates vying for the Party’s chairmanship. Her evaluation of Chip Saltsman ( the one who headed Mike Huckabee’s recent run for the Republican presidential nomination): “Young (40), good communicator. Downside: Distributed that CD with the "Barack the Magic Negro" song.” More of the common ill-wind culture!
There are many very good people in the Republican Party, many are young and innocent of the endemic ill-spirit-seeds sown in prior years. Others of an older generation may not have been paying attention over the years, and in fact loyalty to ones foundational beliefs is an abiding strength. No one wants to defect their party, not even a Colon Powell who endorsed Obama. And there are many, such as Colon Powell who see through the thin veil of deceit, know what’s happened to their Party, and as Kathleen Parker would put it, “They are seeking to find light from the darkness.” A part of that darkness is the unashamedly openness of hostility unbridled throughout the nation’s rightwing radio (Include FOX also per Harold Meyerson) from Rush Limbaugh and his little Limbaughs who dominate talk radio. No better evidence of this is Colon Powell’s recent comment on his party: “Do we really need Rush Limbaugh?”
In today’s N&O, With prayers, Obama bows to common good, David C. Steinmetz professor at the Divinity School of Duke University, in commenting on the selections of Rick Warren (becoming even more an open-minded minister) and Gene Robinson to give prayers at the inaugural events: “In other words, Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do. He is confronting liberal and conservative, gay and straight, evangelical and mainline with the common good, the ideal lost in the culture wars and polarized politics of the last 20 years, but essential to the functioning of the American -- or for that matter, any -- democracy that hopes to survive its current crises and prosper long into an indefinite future.” In the name of justice, those forces of ill-spirit, polarization, “selling of the souls” must be confronted wherever they are, Republican, Democrat, Conservative or Liberal. May we find the best instinct of humanity in ourselves, inspired in others; the “common good” will increase as we pray to “The Common God of the Universe” who created all mankind, and in our individually claimed Faiths, my God of Christianity, not to the god that we may often narrowly define in the frailty of our minds.
About half, first part, of the column was left off this email. Read full content here: PJB: A Brief for Whitey. Patrick J. Buchanan, maybe, became somewhat of a softy in his senior years. On GPS (Global Public Square), Sunday, he was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria, with a group of other presidential speech writers. Pat was a speech writer for Nixon and Reagan. When asked the worst presidential speech ever, he replied, “The Axis of Evil” by George Bush. I’ve followed Pat for many years, even long before his several attempts at the Republican nomination for president. He has a heart, is gifted and can be levelheaded and very reasonable at times; however, he wrote this while in a political fervor last March. Pat, currently a political analyst on MSNBC, I believe from what I’ve heard out of his mouth in recent weeks, has moved on, for the most part, from the rhetoric of this column, and I would have thought others had also. Pat has in his writings and verbal rhetoric at times has gone over the edge in “selling his soul.” In making his points in this article, he accomplished more mudding of the water, with some fact and many exaggerations. Related to some of the verbiage Pat wrote about here is the interview Don Imus had with Sean Hannity last week on FOX: Imus commented when questioned by Hannity about Rev. Jeremiah Wright: “I would have been furious and extremely angry also if someone told me I could not drink water from the white-water fountain.” In explaining justifiable anger of some of the older, black generation, empathically, he said he would have been killed, to imply he would have been absolutely defiant in those years of race-separation norms. Just the same, he said, it didn’t give Wright the right to employ his over-zealous message. Maybe some white people feel they have been discriminated or even oppressed by certain advantages/accommodations given some African Americans, but I certainly don’t. And I suspect Pat Buchanan would be hard pressed to name more than one or two, if any, cases of whites discriminated against, at least in the comparison to black’s suffering. Given a conversion experience of John Newton, captain of the slave ship who authored the hymn, Amazing Grace, perhaps we might muster a little more empathy for those whose ancestry endured the oppression of slavery. In Forgotten Step Toward Freedom one may learn of history’s parallels, America vs. England, in the abolishment of slave importation.
Our United Methodist Church: Faith In Action has just posted an article with reference to What we learned from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Means and ends are not only inextricably intertwined; corrupt, hateful, or violent means produce corrupt, hateful, violent ends. Only loving, respectful, non-violent means can produce comparable ends — though they may also fail. King challenges and trumps Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary,” which is morally shallow in comparison.” Other civil rights articles are also included in this posting.
Beyond the aforementioned reflections, there is a broader message for those who throw out the, so called, “red meat” (term used in the intro of referenced email) of the National Republican Party. This email, one of the milder red-meat types, is just one of some now being passed on the internet, not to enlighten, uplift, or unify (to be as kind as possible). In comparison it’s modest to one such as the preposterous comments of a Kit Lange. What purpose do these divisive messages serve, especially after an election has passed? They do nothing to ingratiate those moderate conservative Republicans of approximately 12% of the Party and Independents that helped elect Obama. Neither do they boost Conservative Republican ideas, however, noble. Kathleen Parker, the talented conservative syndicated columnist from Camden, SC wrote: “Exit polls conducted by The Associated Press found that one in five voters who consider themselves "conservative" (34 percent of the electorate) voted for Obama.” “Among probable causes for the GOP defection, conservatives might consider the right's tendency these days to banish into the darkness those who were merely looking for the light.”
In deed there is darkness, an ill-political force that’s alive in the National Republican Party’s political execution that’s ethically unbecoming. (So far as I can tell the local and state Republican organizations are mostly void of this style politics. I have voted for many Republicans on the local level in recent years who I believe would not pander to this treachery.)
The leadership of The Republican National Committee over the past many years became infected with an ill-spirit fashioned by Lee Atwater, the chairman who led the second term, reelection, of President Ronald Reagan and the election of George H. W. Bush. That ill-spirit lives on in many corridors and crevices, even blatantly open at times, in political operations to this day. John Brady wrote about Lee Atwater in his book, Bad Boy (first chapter) The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater. Atwater died of a brain tumor at age forty in 1991. While on death bed, he was remorseful, making many apologies to those he had falsely politically scourged. But he could not stop the inbreeding that stretched peripherally in viral winds he had set in motion for decades to come. Another chapter of that book online is I’m Still Lee Atwater.
Erik Kolbell wrote before the election And Atwater Begat Rove, who Begat Schmidt... So Schmidt, the inline successor, Atwater’s protégé following Rove, lead the unsuccessful campaign of John McCain. Kobell instructively begins his column with the question: For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and lose his own soul? -- Luke 7:47
In Kathleen Parker’s recent column Who Will Run the RNC?, she critiques the six candidates vying for the Party’s chairmanship. Her evaluation of Chip Saltsman ( the one who headed Mike Huckabee’s recent run for the Republican presidential nomination): “Young (40), good communicator. Downside: Distributed that CD with the "Barack the Magic Negro" song.” More of the common ill-wind culture!
There are many very good people in the Republican Party, many are young and innocent of the endemic ill-spirit-seeds sown in prior years. Others of an older generation may not have been paying attention over the years, and in fact loyalty to ones foundational beliefs is an abiding strength. No one wants to defect their party, not even a Colon Powell who endorsed Obama. And there are many, such as Colon Powell who see through the thin veil of deceit, know what’s happened to their Party, and as Kathleen Parker would put it, “They are seeking to find light from the darkness.” A part of that darkness is the unashamedly openness of hostility unbridled throughout the nation’s rightwing radio (Include FOX also per Harold Meyerson) from Rush Limbaugh and his little Limbaughs who dominate talk radio. No better evidence of this is Colon Powell’s recent comment on his party: “Do we really need Rush Limbaugh?”
In today’s N&O, With prayers, Obama bows to common good, David C. Steinmetz professor at the Divinity School of Duke University, in commenting on the selections of Rick Warren (becoming even more an open-minded minister) and Gene Robinson to give prayers at the inaugural events: “In other words, Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do. He is confronting liberal and conservative, gay and straight, evangelical and mainline with the common good, the ideal lost in the culture wars and polarized politics of the last 20 years, but essential to the functioning of the American -- or for that matter, any -- democracy that hopes to survive its current crises and prosper long into an indefinite future.” In the name of justice, those forces of ill-spirit, polarization, “selling of the souls” must be confronted wherever they are, Republican, Democrat, Conservative or Liberal. May we find the best instinct of humanity in ourselves, inspired in others; the “common good” will increase as we pray to “The Common God of the Universe” who created all mankind, and in our individually claimed Faiths, my God of Christianity, not to the god that we may often narrowly define in the frailty of our minds.
