If you've got to explain it...
Clarence Page takes the right wing noise machine to task in this column about Coretta Scott King's funeral and the "controversial" comments by Jimmy Carter and Rev. Joseph Lowery. Of course, the comments weren't controversial at all, unless you find yourself on the responsible end of lies that start wars and wiretaps that break the law.
If you know a little bit about the Kings (like me - just enough to be dangerous), you know that they would've penned much harsher words, given the opportunity to create their own eulogies.
Page is right, of course, in explaining the tradition of the black church as a vehicle for politics and social change. And he's also right in asking the obvious question:
"We weren't burying a rap artist [or] a famous cook," Lowery said in a National Public Radio interview. "We were burying a woman who gave her life to world peace, racial justice, human dignity. ... What did they expect us to talk about?"
What, indeed?
But here's what he's missing. For all the right wing blather about what's "appropriate" for the funeral and Limbaugh's assertion that the Kings would be frowning on such a "spectacle", he skips right by the evidence that the blowhards of complaint know not of what they speak.
If they claim that funerals aren't places for politics, and that Carter and Lowery (and, by extension, the Clintons) were disrespectful and rude and...well, downright Democratic, it's clear they know nothing of the subject matter.
Nothing, indeed.
If you know a little bit about the Kings (like me - just enough to be dangerous), you know that they would've penned much harsher words, given the opportunity to create their own eulogies.
Page is right, of course, in explaining the tradition of the black church as a vehicle for politics and social change. And he's also right in asking the obvious question:
"We weren't burying a rap artist [or] a famous cook," Lowery said in a National Public Radio interview. "We were burying a woman who gave her life to world peace, racial justice, human dignity. ... What did they expect us to talk about?"
What, indeed?
But here's what he's missing. For all the right wing blather about what's "appropriate" for the funeral and Limbaugh's assertion that the Kings would be frowning on such a "spectacle", he skips right by the evidence that the blowhards of complaint know not of what they speak.
If they claim that funerals aren't places for politics, and that Carter and Lowery (and, by extension, the Clintons) were disrespectful and rude and...well, downright Democratic, it's clear they know nothing of the subject matter.
Nothing, indeed.
posted by John at 8:58 PM
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