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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (1648)	3/29/2004 12:38:02 AM
From: Neeka	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 35834

I wouldn't call you a "dolt" and I passed this article along to my liberal friends so they have the opportunity to see the light. I believe that he is right when he says that the left doesn't recognize terrorists for what they are.....Islamo-fascist murderers. This is the main reason a Kerry presidency would be disastrous for the USA imo. His economic plan would also be disastrous for securities investors.....one in four voters. He and I are on opposite sides of the fence, but I like this guys writing so much that I found the article he mentioned in his piece: Where Was the 'Values' Crowd When Dr. King Needed Them? (Politics&Opinions) New York Observer, The, Jan 28, 2002 Byline: Ron Rosenbaum Is there anything left to say about Martin Luther King Jr.? Well, for one, I don't think we-many of us, anyway-are grateful enough for him. Sure, his birthday is a national holiday now, but how many take it as more than just another day off? The more I study history, the more I've come to realize just how lucky as a nation we were to have him, even as briefly as we did, and how rare it is in history that someone as redemptive as Dr. King comes forward to rescue a nation from itself. In most cases, it doesn't happen at all. I've been looking for an excuse to say this, to write about Martin Luther King Jr. for some time now. Faithful readers may recall how I shoehorned a reference to Dr. King into a recent column about John Walker Lindh. I'd been recalling the way, years ago in the mid-80's, I'd been badgering my old mentor Dan Wolf (when he was an Ed Koch adviser) about the Mayor's refusal to give city employees Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday off (this was before it became a national holiday). A terrible symbolic error, I thought. (In fairness, I should add that Ed Koch was one of those honorable New Yorkers who risked going down to Mississippi to support the Freedom Riders.) It was the tip of the iceberg of a feeling about Dr. King I'd had ever since I was a kid. My parents wouldn't let me go to the March on Washington to hear him speak, so I listened instead on the radio-and had some dim intimation of how grateful we should be for having had M.L.K. among us. That we might just as easily not have been blessed with as loving and inspirational a leader, healer and prophet. And that, as bad as race relations may seem at times in America now, things might have been immeasurably worse. In fact, we can see just how much worse in the years after King's assassination. But a couple of things have held me back from writing a King column. First of all, there's the drawback to praising virtue: the imputation that you are somehow seeking to seem virtuous for doing it, and I make no claims to being a particularly virtuous person. But as an observant outsider to virtue, I do know it when I see it in others. And second, it's more difficult (for me, anyway) to write about things one admires earnestly than about things one can scoff at ironically. Fortunately, though, I think I've found a way to do both, at least in this column. Praising Dr. King will allow me to question the claims to virtue or at least consistency-to being always on the side of morality and human rights-by some conservative figures. In fact, just about all the ones who preen about morality and human rights now, but were shamefully silent-or, worse, scornfully critical-of Martin Luther King at the time when he most needed support: when he was bringing America's most shameful human-rights issue to the fore. I will totally concede that liberals (or at least many leftists of the Marxist persuasion) have this problem when it comes to their silence about Marxist police states during the Cold War. I recall some lefty prof preening in moral indignation not long ago in the pages of The Nation about the Cold War surveillance of some writers by the F.B.I. Yes, it was bad, but his knee-jerk sneers at "Cold War" this and "Cold War" that as somehow an exclusively American shame were so dishonest-conveniently ignoring the fact that the Cold War was waged against a regime that didn't just keep files on dissident writers, but murdered them and locked up poets in death camps. It didn't just subject dissidents to surveillance, but put millions of them to death. Where was the indignation about those writers and Rest at: findarticles.com I haven't read it yet, but plan on doing so this evening. M