Fresh off yet another paean to Ronald Reagan, and not long after trashing his own minister for saying that racism and illegal US wars exist, Barack Obama chose the 40th anniversary of the most tragic assassination in American history to make nonsense of the life and struggles of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Here’s Obama’s general explanation:
The struggle for economic justice remains an unfinished part of the King legacy because the dream is still out of reach for too many Americans.
So, in other words, Obama’s version boils down to this: Once you’ve reached “economic justice” for yourself, you’ve “reached” MLK’s dream.
What misrepresentation, in both directions. Not only does Mr. Obama shrink Dr. King’s inherently collective dream of a fair, egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful society down to the size of a raisin the sun, but, by making the “dream” about mere personal economic comfort, he once again does exactly what his massively over-rated “race speech” did — it lets the smug and the comfortable off the hook for their own share of our collective situation. “I’m comfortable, so Dr. King’s dream is real for me!”
At best, this reduces MLK’s dream (which was actually a challenge, if you have an ear and a brain) to the long-running, insipid, selfish “American dream” propaganda line. That particular dogma has always been designed to get people to take their suburban possessions as a reason to abandon all but the most stupid and apathetic form of ethics and politics.
But, wait. As always with the “major” candibots, it gets worse. Not only does Obama want to shrink MLK down to his own puny scale, but he blatantly tries to get you to believe that his own past, present, and future sell-outs are somehow compatible with anything MLK ever said or did. King called for democratic socialism and honest racial reconciliation in America. Meanwhile, here’s what Obama would have you think he called for:
[T]hat we’ll be able to find a job that pays a decent wage, that there will be affordable health care when we get sick, that we’ll be able to send our kids to college, and that after a lifetime of hard work, we’ll be able to retire with security.
“Affordable” health care? Seriously? No wonder Obama feels compelled to call MLK’s prescriptions — demands for a society-wide “radical redistribution of economic power” and genuine, practical repair of the crushing damages of racial slavery and Jim Crow — “modest dreams.”
But, wait. It gets even worse than this! It couldn’t possibly be a speech by an aspiring “mainstream” politician without this steaming pile of de rigeur excrement, could it?:
While Obama talked about increasing the number of police on the streets, expanding after-school and other programs and rebuilding the economy to give young people alternatives to crime and hope for the future, he also told the public that government can’t do everything.
“Men, you have to take care of your children,” he said, noting that his own father left him and his mother when he was two.
Echoing an issue that former Vice President Dan Quayle was ridiculed for when he raised it in the early 1990s, Obama said that parents must marry.
Here, the words won Obama a standing ovation.
“One of the forgotten aspects of Dr. King’s legacy is how he demanded personal responsibility as well as societal responsibility,” Obama said.
From the mountaintop to the toilet bowl…