One of the things that's been missed in the manufactured rightist outrage over Coretta Scott King's funeral is the fact that the comments Reverend Joseph Lowery and President Jimmy Carter made were simply not at all harsh and were hardly "cheap shots." As proof, let me offer up their actual quotes.
Rev. Lowery:
"We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor."
President Carter:
"The struggle for equal rights is not over. We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.... It was difficult for them personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and as you know, harassment from the FBI."
Lost in all of this back and forth over this faux 'controversy' is the fact that it was Bush himself who set the standard for talking about WMDs in mixed company. Back in March of 2004, at the Radio and Television News Correspondents Association, Bush presented a slideshow of himself hunting around the Oval Office, looking behind and underneath the furniture. His narration, according to a White House press release, was as follows:
"Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.... Nope, no weapons over there.... Maybe under here...."
Rev. Lowery's main point wasn't weapons of mass destruction. It was poverty. The mention of weapons of mass destruction was a humorous rhetorical device used to call attention to a very serious issue. Why is it that Bush can speak irreverently about missing weapons of mass destruction, but Rev. Lowery can't? You'd think Rev. Lowery had literally started a war over those weapons or something.
And Carter's comments about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were actually not all that different from Bush's own comments, made in his primetime speech from New Orleans' Jackson Square in mid-September:
"As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality."
And as for Carter's surveillance comments, that may indeed have been targeted at Bush. However, it's also a historical fact worth repeating in Mrs. King's eulogy, as it proves that her activism was not without a price. It's not Jimmy Carter's problem that Bush's warrantless wiretapping program recalls the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. That's a problem the program's supporters have to contend with. And attacking President Carter for bringing up a chapter of Mrs. King's life that may draw parallels to current events strikes me as overly defensive and creepy. After all, it was a hero of the Democratic Party -- Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy -- who authorized the wiretapping of the Kings, even if not to the extent exploited by Hoover. So which party was Carter criticizing, if any? Or was he simply eulogizing Mrs. King?
It's also worth noting that Bush stood and applauded at the end of Lowery's eulogy and immediately in response to Carter's comment about the current state of race in America. So if he didn't find anything too objectionable, why should his supporters? The answer is simple. The rightists have been trained to launch into attack mode any time their worldview is even remotely challenged. They don't turn the other cheek or blow it off. They're in a state of constant war with the rest of the human race. And the fact that this happened while the nation was honoring a civil rights leader makes it that much worse for them. Witness the thinly veiled --and not so thinly veiled -- racism seething from the commenters at rightist sites like Red State. They know that everything that reminds the nation of the true legacy of the Coretta Scott King hurts their cause and helps ours, so they're trying to muddy the waters and change the subject. And unfortunately, quite a few in the media seem to have taken the bait.
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