September 20, 2012

Joy-Ann Reid The Miami Herald

RE: “Those words mean exactly what I want them to mean” - Some comments on your through a looking glass world

Ms. Reid,

What was it that Vice President Curly Biden said about then candidate Senator B. Hussein Obama? Now I remember. He was “clean, bright, and articulate”. That’s you to a tee You and the best President we have share a few traits. One of them is the ability to never let an inconvenient fact, one that is fully larded with truth, interfere with your thesis. A few points before I get to the lie worthy of Bill Clinton.

#1 – “Job creation” – Have you ever been hired by someone poorer than you?

#2 - “Taxes” – Senator Lard Kennedy’s estate is in probate. One of the assets is a trust created in 1936. Don’t you think the 99% have the right to see what’s in it and to share in the honey pot that has been growing untaxed for 77 years? Jeezus Haitch Keerist! His father, that old corsair Papa Joe, having stolen so much money that people considering suicide would ask if they could jump off his wallet, knew some of his sons would be layabouts and wastrels. He thought it a father’s duty to provide for them. 1936? No cellphones, no DVDs, no social media, Joe DiMaggio’s first year with the Yankees, Alger Hiss was working his way up the ladder in the Executive branch of the government, Dixiecrats running Congress, DC3s, Hudson and Packard cars, cream on the top of the delivered bottle of milk, cigarettes without guilt, 5 cent beer, no DH. Would it be fair to say that Teddy spoke like a modern American Liberal and lived like rich, rotten Republican?

#3 – Can you give me an example of any country, anywhere and anytime, taxing itself to prosperity? Take your time. But that’s not why I write. The Great Reagan was right when he said “it’s not that modern American Liberals were stupid, it’s just that there’s so much that they didn’t know”. Consider the following statement in its entirety. “Conservatives bitterly fought against pensions for civil war veterans In the 19th century, and Social Security and Medicare in the 20th.” The Miami Herald Page 11A Today

#4 – The term “Conservative” would not have been used at the time of the American Civil War.

#5 - The Republican Party was formed as the anti-slavery party. Honest. Look it up.

#6 – The Democratic Party did not want to fight the Civil War. Since they weren’t opposed to slavery a strong case can be made for them being in favor of it. The election of 1864, the election that saw the New York Times call Lincoln a “baboon”, the election that saw the Democratic Party candidate campaign on a negotiated settlement with the South leaving slavery in place, the election that was in doubt until Sherman’s “surge” took Atlanta just before the election, was the one where the Democratic Party became entwined with the nascent Ku Klux Klan and with Southern states introducing and enforcing the most anti-Black laws imaginable. By 1916 a Democratic President endorsed both “Birth of a Nation” and the huge Klan parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.

#7 – There was a Republican Congressman from New Jersey, Robert Kean, who earned the sobriquet “Mr. Social Security” because he was the member who made smooth the sharp edges of partisanship in Congress. It is well to note that the same Congress had just passed the Davis-Bacon Act. It was the most anti-Black Federal legislation passed in the 20th century. It still is because it is still the law of the land.

#8 – I suggest you take a closer look at the last paragraph of Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Address. It is where he commits the nation to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan”. It is the one that begins with the words “with malice toward none, with charity for all” You may want to take a peek at the last sentence of the paragraph preceding his call to aid the veterans. He gave it not 6 weeks before he was shot by a Southern sympathizer, a man who had voted for the Democratic candidate the previous November.

The Great Reagan was right about you. “Clean and articulate”, si. “Bright”, no

Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET