"Much like the President, I am half Kenyan. Like the President, I’m a Harvard graduate. Like the President, I’m from Illinois. And, like the President, I’ve been on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. I got a message for him. ‘Dude, it’s time to grow a pair. A lot of people who put you in office put you in office to fight for them; to fight against the Tea Party; to fight against this bullshit in Congress; to fight against those sons of bitches who are attacking the working class and the poor in this country.’ And he hasn’t done any of it.
At the same time, I’m not waiting for him. I’m with the people in Madison. I’m with the people who are occupying Wall Street. That’s what my music’s about. When progressive, radical or even revolutionary changes happen in this country, it’s come from below. When women got the right to vote, when lunch counters were desegregated, it was people you do not read about in history books who stood up in their place and their time for what they believe.”The dude is right on. Absolutely people shouldn't wait for the president to act. Idle hands have never made history or changed the world.
My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.
[...]
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.
More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
This is not the first time I’ve seen the president quoted as expressing those views, and I’ve heard similar things myself from his lips. The invocations of Carter and Clinton, if anything, seem to me to illustrate what’s wrong with it. Clinton succeeded precisely because he was a policy wonk.I have to disagree. Bill Clinton succeeded precisely because he was a master politician. Not to cut him down on his policy skills because he surely had that too. But his political ability is unmatched by anyone alive today. Clinton played politics. He played it the old way. He won. He wasn't afraid to benefit from his opponents being wrong. And he certainly wasn't afraid to kick them while they were down.
The reason Obama is in trouble is because too many people don't have jobs, and one of the reasons too many people don't have jobs is that the asshole commentariat thinks "unity of purpose" is more important than "jobs."
What is batshit here is that Keller is utterly oblivious to his own role in this nonsensical disaster. Obama is a creature of the Sensible Consensus. He is the Bill Keller President.You'd be surprised how much unity is created when people have money in their pockets. You think Clinton unified any sort of purpose? Heck no. But unemployment was 4.6% and that's all anyone cared about. Go unify your tree hugging doggy day-camp friends and leave the rest of us alone.
Therefore, his political advisers should know that when the country is still reeling from unemployment and foreclosures after nearly two years, the passage of an inadequate stimulus bill, which unrealistic benchmarks and a giddy victory party ensured would be the only chance they got, the only people who will consider that a "success" would be beltway insiders. They should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of progressive purpose to an exhausting farce. They are expected to be able to predict that financial reform without accountability for what's gone before, combined with the administration's unwillingness to confront the civil liberties abuse of the last administration -- indeed expanding on them in some cases -- would show a lack of fundamental concern for justice among those who care about such things.I think that about sums up the last 18 months. You come in on a wave of populism, a huge progressive victory backed up by the largest majorities in a generation and you give us tepid policies designed to not step on the toes of the people responsible for the mess you'd been rebuking for 4 years.
Tea partiers, Republicans, and Republicans masquerading as tea partiers are rallying against health care reform this morning on Capitol Hill at an event they're billing as "Code Red."That's right, the entire event this week is entirely Republican. There isn't a chance in all of human history Democrats would be able to get away with organizing something like this and not take the credit for it. This is the first time I've seen this extent of grouping the whole lot together from TPM. In the past they relate the two but shy away from fully describing it as Republican. I'm their biggest critic when it comes to failing to make the connection. We welcome the new trend.
This rally is being organized by the more establishment side of the tea party movement -- or co-opted side, depending on your point of view. The sponsors include the Tea Party Express, founded by Republican operatives in California, and FreedomWorks, the corporate-funded outfit run by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Accordingly, the list of speakers is dominated by elected Republicans, albeit some of the more whacked members of the GOP caucus: Reps. Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Joe Wilson, and Phil Gingrey.
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