That is quite remarkable. What happened in Selma was a great moment for America and for all Americans.
Don’t worry, GOP, you won’t lose a single one of your racist voters by attending ceremonies like this. They have nowhere else to go. You might even pick up a voter or two.
And once in a while, just doing the right thing is very healthy.
I am not surprised or disappointed that the white leadership of the GOP will not participate. SOP. So, when their ‘colored’ folks get up and claim they have the solution for what ails black America, I’m going to try real hard not to break out in laughter.
1 Like
TPM:
“It is very disappointing that not a single Republican leader sees the value in participating in this 50th commemoration of the signing of the Voting Rights Act. I had hoped that some of the leadership would attend, but apparently none of them will,” Butterfield told Politico.
Perhaps it’s better that none of today’s Republicans showed up. If they had, it probably would have been to protest the Voting Rights Act.
The GOP has spent the last two score years running against civil rights, and appealing to the racist vote. It may have started out merely cynical, an attempt by junior Machiavelli’s who didn’t give a shit one way or the other about race to get the racist vote, but two generations of racist appeals is enough time to raise a generation of Republican office holders who are truly racist at this point and to transform it into a race-based party.
So I’m not just being a smart-ass when I say Republicans would have shown up to protest the VRA, if they had shown at all; I’m acknowledging the natural consequences of a strategy they’ve pursued for four decades now. Not showing up or showing up to protest were the only options GOP Congress members could take without enraging their base - and for many of those same GOP members, being racist themselves, the only actions they could even conceive of taking.
4 Likes
First, you have to HAVE a sense of shame.
1 Like
The GOP jumped all over Obama for not going to Paris and participating in the huge demonstration after the Paris terrorists events. Now the GOP won’t go to Selma HER IN AMERICA to recognize the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. How incredibly generous of them.
5 Likes
It is impossible to shame the shameless, especially folks who are proud of their racism. Fuckers!!
1 Like
I urge everyone here to buy and read Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of a Movement. Or check it out of the library. This man is an American hero and his story is elegant, furious, angry, loving, and beautiful. I am in my late 60s now, a Vietnam vet, and a cranky old Jewish guy, and it moved me to tears.
2 Likes
So many people forget that humans are controlled by internal and external guidance. For many in our society, it is the external which often is the last line of defense before the leash is off and the brute is unleashed.
FOX, Talk Radio and the Messaging of the RNC has aided the unleashing. In my opinion, the failure of the MSM to do its job is the greatest culprit.
FOX is more visible, but Todd, Mitchell, Stephanopoulos and Blitzer (just four listed here–there are others) do indescribably greater damage.
1 Like
Of course they won’t participate. They don’t want to upset their racism doesn’t exist and slavery never happened political base.
Furthermore, many of these socially-regressive legislators also believe that the federal government had no business forcing the private sector to allow African Americans in their places of business, right Rand Paul?
1 Like
They already have the solution: Stop acting like victims, which seems to me is very easy for oppressors to say.
…and was it not too long ago that the GOP changed the name of French fries to freedom fries because they abhorred all things French?
They didn’t attend since the Supreme Court already ruled racism is over and besides, people like John Lewis are the real racists anyway according to them.
2 Likes
That i don;t get. It had something to do with 9/11 i think but I’ve been to France many times and as recently as last summer. I have always been treated very very well there. I love the country.
Like a bunch of Portnoy’s out of a Philip Roth novel.
Soon enough, conservatives will say that Democrats are the ones who are racist and trying to enslave blacks to programs…
That (slave) ship has sailed. They started doing that awhile back.
Once upon a time it wasn’t political suicide:
Next thing you know,Priebus or one of the party big brains will be explaining how they simply need to sharpen their message to garner the black,Hispanic,women and LBGT vote. The fact that they are opposed to nearly everything policy wises that benefits these groups has not yet occurred to them.
Golly–and here I thought the GOP loved MLK because he was such an ultra-conservative Republican!
“John Lewis, Black Caucus Shame GOP For Skipping Selma Anniversary”
You cannot shame someone who has no shame.