Michael Gaynor
September 30, 2005
Today it's despicable Dems "waving the bloody shirt"
By Michael Gaynor

"Waving the bloody shirt" is political slang for a Republican political tactic used successfully after the Civil War for winning votes, particularly black votes. The shirt being, for example, the shirt of a black man, freed by the Civil War, thanks to the righteous Republicans, but whipped to death in the reconstruction South, by despicable Democrats. Republicans enthusiastically "waved the bloody shirt," both figuratively and literally. In 1868, Republican Representative Benjamin Butler took the floor of the House of Representatives to display the bloody shirt of an IRS tax collector who had been whipped by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.

The Republicans put the bloody shirt away long ago. Now it is the Democrats who furiously wave the bloody shirt of race, lest America's black voters realize that voting Democrat reflexively is not in their best interest.

Should Americans, especially America's blacks, take as Gospel or suspect the emotionally charged words of a black woman who bears the names of the Confederacy's two top generals and a black man whose name is a homonym for wrangle, meaning "to dispute angrily or peevishly"?

Only the Gospel is the Gospel.

Sheila Jackson Lee is a Congressperson, a Democrat, a black, a beneficiary of the practice of the overwhelming majority of America's blacks to vote Democrat, and a race baiter determined that blacks continue to vote as a block, for the sake of Democrats like her. Even if she has to poison the political atmosphere and deceive many of America's blacks "for their own good."

So Representative Jackson Lee is trying to deceive blacks into blaming President Bush and his administration for Hurricane Katrina problems, out of respect for Dr. Martin Luther King.

Saith she: the Bush administration's slow response to Hurricane Katrina is the result of minority votes being suppressed and the Democrats' presidential candidates losing the last two elections.

What slow response? The slow federal response resulting from the lack of cooperation by dysfunctional Louisiana's Democrat Governor (a white woman) who wouldn't cede control to the federal government, and New Orleans' Democrat Mayor (a black man), who would not order mandatory evacuation earlier and use the buses in New Orleans to transport poor blacks or supply the Superdome to accommodate them?

What suppression of minority votes in 2000 and 2004? It was Dan Rather who suppressed the Bush vote in Florida in 2000, by falsely calling Florida for Gore, while the polls in Florida's strongly Republican Panhandle remained open.

Representative Jackson Lee's specific words: "Watching family members and others cling to rooftops in Hurricane Katrina, I wonder whether or not the absence of attention [to the recovery effort] is attributable to the loss of a vote in 2000 and 2004."

And: "The pain of disenfranchisement is still very fresh for those African Americans who were shut out of the voting process in 2000. It was a sheer travesty. We know America is smarter and better than that."

We think that Representative Jackson Lee knows better, but finds it politically expedient to pretend otherwise, because she wants blacks to hate Republicans and vote as a block against them and for demagogue Democrats like herself.

And so she insists that the federal government's hurricane response gave her the feeling of "deja vu," being reminiscent of the fabricated Republican Party attempts to undermine the black vote in the last two presidential elections.

Some black Democrat politicians seem to fear that their base will learn that they have been ill served and desert them. New Orleans is an overwhelmingly black city, with a black mayor, a black city council, a black led and mostly black police department. Not a place where suppressing the black vote would be doable. And a place where, as a result of Hurricane Katrina, the people may have learned that the blacks they put in charge were incompetent at best, and perhaps corrupt as well.

So, Democrat demaguges hurled scurrilous charges of racism, to deflect attention from the absence of a workable disaster plan for New Orleans and the failure of many New Orleans first responders, including police who fled and perhaps some who looted.

Representative Charles Rangel, a black New York Democrat who is secure in his Harlem district, absurdly compared President Bush to the notorious Birmingham, Ala., police commissioner and segregationist from the 1960s, Bull Conner.

And it was suggested back in the 1950's that Senator Joseph McCarthy had no shame.

Anyone who thinks that Bush and Bull are alike is blind to reality. And character assassins peddling that poison are unfit for any public office.

Representative Jackson Lee appears to be vying with Representative Rangel to see who can plumb deeper depths in playing the reverse racism game.

Representative Jackson Lee compared Hurricane Katrina's devastating effects on New Orleans blacks with the often violent struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, stating that in 1965 in Montgomery Alabama, "the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was attacked by state troopers, beaten and jailed ... This overt violation of human and civil rights, took place live on national television in front of the entire world, as did the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Who knows what [effect more African American] votes could have brought about in both of those instances."

All this because, in Representative Jackson Lee's words, "we are so concerned about voting rights. They impact yesterday, today and tomorrow."

No acknowledgement, of course, that the Republicans passed the Fifteenth Amendment protecting voting rights and provided the necessary votes to pass Voting Rights Acts that Democrat Senators like Al Gore Sr. voted against.

HOW STUPID DO REPRESENTATIVES JACKSON LEE AND RANGEL THINK THAT AMERICA'S BLACKS BE?

What IS noteworthy, and encouraging, is that an African American group condemned Representative Jackson Lee's comments as a "travesty":

"[Jackson Lee] is correct. It is a sheer travesty, but the travesty is that she and those like her would use a catastrophic hurricane to spew forth their patented brand of commercialized race baiting," said Project 21 member Mychal Massie in an interview with Cybercast News Service.

"Comparing Dr. [Martin Luther] King's beating to what took place in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is an unfathomable stretch in any sense of the imagination in anyone's mind except for Jackson Lee and those like her," Massie said.

"To America's credit, America is smarter and is indeed better than that because they see her and those like her for what they are, a contumacious (rebellious), malevolent person who sees nothing good in America," he added.

That says it all!

© Michael Gaynor

Comments feature added August 14, 2011
 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
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Michael Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member... (more)

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