Saturday, July 28, 2007
Becky O'Malley shows more sense than college protestors
That's not a compliment.
Daily Planet editor Becky O'Malley responds to this piece by Jean Damu and Alona Clifton accusing white lefties of racism in their treatment of John Conyers after he told them to get lost when demanding a pointless attempt at impeachment. One of O'Malley's few accurate points:
Background: some people, with Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin the big names out front, think that the main agenda for activists against the Iraq War is impeaching the responsible parties right now, from Bush on down. On Saturday a group of such people went to the Washington office of John Conyers, chair of the House judiciary committee, to press their point of view, and when he declined to agree with them instantaneously, saying he didn't have the votes, they announced that they wouldn't leave his office until he complied with their demands.
This was all planned in advance—anyone can track the planning on the Internet, on the Daily Kos site among others. And surprise, surprise, when their plans were carried out, the sitters-in were arrested. Now they, or some of their friends, are whining about it.
You know what? It's called civil disobedience. Getting arrested, if you choose to disobey the law, is part of the program. We always told our daughters not to get arrested by accident, but getting arrested on purpose for a good cause is an honorable tactic in some circumstances. Whining after the fact ruins the whole point of the protest. She then proceeds to demonstrate that she's a crazy conspiracy theorist who doesn't know anything about who inhabits the internet with:
One lamebrain web-site, supposedly pro-impeachment but probably hosted by the contemporary equivalent of Cointelpro or perhaps the Republican National Committee, shows his picture with a big X across his face, and calls for defeating him in the next election because the protesters were arrested in his office. Yeah, the folks in power really need to go through the effort to create fake crazies on the internet.
The piece accusing the white leftites of racism is a bit odd, though.
"Conyers has betrayed the American people," bawled Global Exchange and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin. "Conyers is no Martin Luther King," wailed former analyst of the CIA, Ray McGovern. Lefty journalist David Lindorf scribbled, "The shame of John Conyers." All three articles appeared on the July 24 version of the progressive website Commondreams. In addition, Cindy Sheehan, anti-war mom, had herself arrested sitting in at Conyers' office.
Give us a break! It's funny because they used derogatory verbs! No, it's funny because of what follows:
What does impeaching George Bush have to do with ending the war in Iraq? And what gives white, anti-war activists the right to call into question the moral and humanistic motivations of John Conyers because he determined the political will did not exist within Congress to impeach the president? What gives anyone that right? Well, America's freedom of speech, I guess, but the point I'm getting at is what difference does it make on this issue the race of the activists? If they were black activists, could they make these statements? (I'll put the Martin Luther King one aside, for now, and focus on calling someone's motivations into question) Then there's some stuff about how Conyers is a leading advocate for slavery reparations, and how these activists haven't done jack:
But yet, how ironic that these normally progressive whites feel perfectly comfortable labeling John Conyers "a betrayer of the American people." Are there American people besides blacks? Apparently not. Oh, wait, yes there are:
Here is another irony. If white Americans had voted against George Bush by half the percentage points that Black Americans voted against George Bush, Dubya would have never gotten near the White House. Aha! So, I guess since whites as a race voted a certain way, all whites are guilty of that vote, and any criticism of the consequences of that vote is "ironic," even if the criticizer voted a different way. Blacks, of course, have no responsibility for the actions of their fellow Americans, as we all know that blacks and whites don't ever communicate with each other.
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