She Works Hard For The Money

(Please note: the above video is not work-safe, school-safe, church-safe, or human-safe.)

Here’s an interesting bit of news. Ms. Randi Rhodes, an on-air host for the liberal Air America network, has been suspended for calling Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Rodham Clinton “whores.” I wonder if this is the “hard-left sexism” Katha Pollitt warned us about? I guess Rhodes thinks she’s doing comedy here, but see for yourself. At any rate, now the libs/progs have an Ann Coulter/Michelle Malkin of their very own. I'm not sure she should have been suspended, since it seems her performance took place on her own time, but it's going to be interesting to watch liberal reactions to the whole schmeer, since on top of everything else she wasn't even going after a Republican, but a Democrat.

Speaking of Pollitt, she has in my judgment gone slightly off the rails in this blog posting, which nearly prompted me to title this posting “Let's Ralph.” Her latest Nation column is unsettling too. Et tu, Katha? Has working for Obama done this to you? I’ve been reading Pollitt’s columns for close to twenty years now, and I’ve never seen her indulge in this sort of raving before. This does not repeat not make me feel any more positive about the November elections, no matter who wins.)

Speaking of La Clinton, if you haven’t read the recent Mother Jones article on her long involvement with a scary far-right Christian group in Washington, it has been linked all over the place lately. Read it. Read some of the attacks on it, such as those you’ll find at Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog. It puts the flap over Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright into perspective.

And speaking of Obama and Wright, I’ve also been seeing quotations from Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 4, 1967 speech against the Vietnam War online, thanks to the 20^th anniversary of King’s assassination. I believe I first heard of this speech in Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. I found it today at The Distant Ocean.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

... In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

This is the King who upset white liberals in his day, and who only became safe after he was safely dead – at which point even the Right began to try to coopt him. Remember, he was vilified while he was alive for saying things like this. Agree or disagree with him, it’s clear who are his real heirs today.