"Those who have more should help those who have less."--Former President Jimmy Carter in a taped interview by Al Franken, on Air America, 11-16-2004

And if they don’t, we’ll take it from those who have more and give it to those who have less--by force. Correct?

Is nothing off-limits for the raving maniacal hordes formerly known as the Democrats? Is a memorial service the proper setting for repulsive political attacks? Are you honoring the deceased by using the occasion of their passing to score some cheap political points? Did these low-brow phony baloney moralists learn nothing in the aftermath of the Paul Wellstone funeral turned political rally?

My family emigrated to this country from France during the 1890s and settled in Denver, Colorado. They were well-educated and well-heeled. They wanted for nothing and exploited no one. Being born in the late 50s, for me, slavery and racial discrimination was the stuff of history books for the most part. Yeah, there was some racial tension that I was aware of while living three blocks from the Liberty Street area,--a predominantly black neighborhood--but in all honesty, most of the nastiest stuff that I was exposed to was directed by the younger blacks against the younger whites. As I came to understand it all, they were pissed at us because of what had happened to their kinfolk long before any of us were born. I found that perpetual angst being directed at the lot of us grade school-aged dorks to be both perplexing and frustrating. The way I saw things, I didn’t do nothin’ to nobody. So why it is again that I’ll be beaten if I’m caught on the wrong turf?

I remember playing basketball up at the schoolyard with some of the cooler black kids one afternoon, and every other word they spoke started with an N and ended with an R. A blocked shot? You ni**er! Somebody stole the ball from somebody else? Not in my lane ni**er! Somebody tossed up an air ball? Nice try you ni**er! There was no end to it.

It was a hot day and we eventually took a break and guzzled some water from the fountain. At some point I asked these guys why they could call each other such a thing all afternoon, but if I did I’d be beaten. And, yes, I too used that word that started with an N and ended in an R. Their response to my question was to beat me so savagely my Mom had to rush me to Dr. Haddad’s office. Nothing a few sutures couldn’t fix. But it was the events of that day that convinced me that segregation was definitely in my best interests. The point being, if I stayed away from the black kids I wouldn’t get beat on anymore. And other than that one incident when a switchblade made it’s permanent mark on my lower leg, segregation seemed to work for me.

The civil rights movement didn’t mean too much to me being a white sprat of less than twelve. I heard some rumblings about it on the nightly news every once in a while. And I heard some of the adult males grumbling about it while using the hell out of that off-and-on-again forbidden N word. All I knew was the blacks were hopping mad again, and so were the adult whites. I was too busy with important stuff like Matchboxes and making people toss their Scooter Pies on the puke machine down at the corner playground to worry too much about the state of race relations, but I knew it was always simmering underfoot. Every once in a while we’d make our way to the roof of a nearby apartment building when the black folks were conducting another one of their marches on Liberty Street, but that was strictly for amusement purposes.

The cops would be lined up at one end of the street, while the black folks chanted all kinds of stuff up and down the rest of the street. The blacks did what they felt they had to do and the cops watched very intently, all the while tapping their open palms with the end of their batons. And sooner or later…sooner or later, one of the younger, much more vocal black folks would do something or other to set the cops off on a violent tangent. For us white kids watching from the nearby rooftop, this was less of a racial thing than it was the ultimate spectator sport. I don’t care what the motivation of anyone involved was, for a kid in those days, watching the cops freak out on an angry crowd was better than shooting BBs at the neighbor’s cats.

During the height of all of this mayhem, somebody spoke in New Haven and the sh*t really hit the fan. I think the speaker was Martin Luther King, but I’m not entirely sure. The crowd swelled on Liberty Street once again, the cops formed their line and things seemed a bit more heated than anything that went on in the past. Then somebody tried to slash one of the cops, and a full-blown race riot ensued. One of our crew got the snot beaten out of himself after straying just a little too close to the melee, and he later responded by torching the building where his attackers had resided. In those days, they referred to what he was treated to as reform school. I never saw him again, but I did visit his aunt quite a few years later.

Things seemed to quiet down with the passage of a couple of years, we moved to Wilkes-Barre and I rarely, if ever, ran across a black person in Wilkes-Barre. All of that non-stop racial discord seemed to be behind me. But as we all know, it wasn’t left behind back in Connecticut. No, it followed me here and it’ll follow me wherever the hell I might go. I still maintain that I never did nothin’ to nobody, but some people are still being taught that what happened to their ancestors and by extension--to them--is somehow my fault. I find that frustrating, if not, infuriating, but political correctness demands that I accept the guilt that has been assigned to me by a few politically savvy race warlords. And make no mistake about it, race warlords are both white and black. More specifically, they are exclusively Democrats.

So here I am all of these decades later, and those very same kids that beat the pulp out of me on a basketball court for nothing at all probably still hate me. Why? Because they’re supposed to. That is their lot in life as it has been prescribed by the Democrats. I’m but a common hardscrabble white boy just trying to have some fun, but the Democrats have demonized me and my ilk for the purposes of maintaining their stranglehold over the black vote. It works quite nicely for them. I’m the villain and the Democrats continue to hold sway over an important voting bloc. I fail to see how hating me improves one’s lot in life, but I’m sure those Democrats will explain it all right after they figure out how to blame the HIV virus on Halliburton and George W. Bush.

All I know is, I never did nothin’ to nobody and I grow weary of the Democrat’s vapid arguments to the contrary.

Back to the aforementioned memorial service.

From Mr. Peanut himself, one Jimmy Carter:

In an apparent swipe at the domestic eavesdropping program authorised by Mr. Bush as part of the war against terror, Mr. Carter recalled how Mrs. King and her husband had been the targets of secret government wiretapping. “It was difficult for them personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated, and they became the targets of secret government wiretapping and other surveillance,” he said. Mr. Carter also referred to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as evidence that the struggle for civil rights was not complete. “We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi who are most devastated by Katrina to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans,” he said.

Carter is correct about the King’s having been eavesdropped on in a most illegal fashion. But he did leave out one rather interesting detail. It was a Democratic administration that engaged in the illegal wiretapping. Yup. That was Robert Kennedy’s doing, but you’re only allotted so much time at a memorial service for the purposes of political mudslinging, so you have to keep the low-brow attacks as brief as possible.

RUTRO!!! The Katrina aftermath was my fault, being that I’m too pale-skinned. The struggle for civil rights is not complete? While that may be true to some extent, trust me, the Democrats will never, ever say anything else. They will stay on message no matter how many blacks happen to gravitate to the middle class. And they’ll never admit that an inept mayor, an inept governor, and an inept FEMA chief amounts to anything other than proof of rampant racism. The next hurricane season is but weeks away, but instead of offering possible solutions, they offer even more vacuous charges of racism.

There are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans??? Really? That’s pretty interesting coming from a southern plantation owner who’s family built their wealth on the backs of poor, black sharecroppers.

This is from a review of Carter’s book “An Hour Before Daylight:”

Southern autobiography tends to revolve around the tragic, or a self-conscious sense of being different or oppressed, and family stories lean to the dysfunctional side. Carters autobiography of his childhood, An Hour Before Daylight, comes as a refreshing change. Here is yet another southern rural life, but this one is remarkable in its ordinariness.

We have no gory farm accidents, no graphic accounts of racial violence, no legacies of drunken abuse and no tales of here’s how bad we had it. It does not even follow a chronological narrative. Instead, it records a series of mental snapshots and explanations of the mundane and routine that recall a Walker Evans still life photograph. While the book might lean to the idyllic, it does not romanticize, and we see nothing that might hint of Carter’s greatness other than the values instilled in him by his parents and an enlightened view of the equality of the human race despite an environment of segregation.

The title comes from the ringing of the morning bell to begin the day of farm work. While Carter meticulously describes how to grow peanuts and cotton, gut hogs and keep a farm going, he is much more concerned with the workers who would ring that bell.

Much of the book explains the sharecropping system and what it meant for his family farm. The black laborers who worked for Carter’s father, James Earl, became integral in the young Carter’s life, forming friendships that observed the racial customs of the time. Carter acknowledges the dependency and debt inherent in sharecropping, but stresses the subculture it created and the reasons it was accepted.

But poverty took a financial, mental and physical toll, and Carter’s mother encouraged small gardens for the sharecropping families to alleviate the lassitude, mouth lesions and pellagra that accompanied vitamin deficiencies. The family’s “work wagon never passed an excavated roadside that revealed a chalk deposit without stopping. They would eat chunks of the white mineral and fill empty flour-sacks to carry home to their families. It didn’t taste bad, except for the grit particles embedded in the soft and almost pure calcium carbonate.”

Carter does not portray sharecroppers as totally passive. One September morning in 1940, none of the hands showed up for work. The decision had been made in the black churches to argue for a pay raise of peanut pickers from $1 to $1.25 a day. James Earl and other landowners sternly refused to meet the demands, but after a black community leader who worked for the Carters explained that his family could not survive on existing wages, James Earl agreed to the raise. Other landowners followed his example.

Wow! Talk about reform. A whole .25 a day! Whoopee! We’re going to Disneyland on the back of the bus!

More on sharecropping from a black legacy site:

In order to survive, many landless blacks were forced into a form of mediaeval peasantry. As sharecroppers, they laboured on white men's land and gave them half their crop in return. The sharecropper had to save seed from his half of the produce for the next year. This made it nearly impossible to accumulate any savings, and indeed, most sank deep into debt. It was practically impossible to do anything more than survive.

Sharecropping had another virtue for white landowners. Many had been granted large amounts of land, hundreds of acres in size. However, if the land had not been cleared, they risked having it confiscated under the terms of the land grants. To protect their investment they needed to do whatever they could to improve the land. The obvious solution was to have poor blacks work the land for them, and then farm it themselves once the land was cleared and their title was established.

Try this description of sharecropping:

A practice that emerged following the emancipation of African-American slaves, sharecropping came to define the method of land lease that would eventually become a new form of slavery. Without land of their own, many blacks were drawn into schemes where they worked a portion of the land owned by whites for a share of the profit from the crops. They would get all the seeds, food, and equipment they needed from the company store, which allowed them to run a tab throughout the year and to settle up once the crops, usually cotton, were gathered. When accounting time came, the black farmer was always a few dollars short of what he owed the landowner, so he invariably began the new year with a deficit. As that deficit grew, he found it impossible to escape from his situation by legal means. The hard, backbreaking work led to stooped, physically destroyed, and mentally blighted black people who could seldom envision escape for themselves or their children; their lives were an endless round of poor diet, fickle weather, and the unbeatable figures at the company store. Those with courage to match their imaginations escaped under cover of darkness to the North, that fabled land of opportunity.

So let’s follow this. Your family built their fortune on the backs of poor sharecroppers, decades later that fortune allowed you to ascend to the national political stage, and then…then, you reinvented yourself as the ultimate champion of the downtrodden masses??? And Carter Farms is still sharecropped to this very day??? Isn’t it interesting how those southern folks keep preaching to us northern folks about the evils of racism?

I thought only those evil Republicans got rich by oppressing the common man. (???)

Who knew?

Southern sharecroppers circa 1939

And I don’t care what anybody has to say in direct response, but to have Bill Clinton going on and on about the dignity of women is well beyond repugnant. And his overly ambitious wife stood right next to him shaking her head in agreement. She’ll do or say anything to get herself elected.

"I always really admired her," former President Clinton said as he flew toward Atlanta aboard Air Force One with President Bush. "I liked her very much. I liked being with her. I liked the way she maintained her dignity in the face of all the difficulties she faced."

Whew!

So there you have it. The eulogy was as follows: George W. Bush still sucks.

How low are these people prepared to go?

Say what you will about Bush, but he is the champion of restraint while being vilified day-in and day-out in venue after venue where restraint should never even be a part of the equation. What has Al Gore done to American politics?

All I know is, I didn’t do nothin’ to nobody.

From The Crown, the Kings College student-run newspaper:

Brightening Up Downtown Wilkes-Barre - Kasey Marsicano

When Mayor Tom Leighton introduced the 2006 budget last October, he talked about his plan to replace some of the street lights in downtown Wilkes Barre. The $7 million federal, state, and city funded project just got under way three weeks ago. In the past, some of the lights have collapsed and, in some cases were not replaced. The old seventies style red antique light poles are also in very bad shape.

Can I claim that as a Wilkes-Barre Online “exclusive” merely by linking to it?

Damn!!! I told you kiddies that simplicity works every time it’s tried.

"You cannot explain to me why we have not captured or killed the tallest man in Afghanistan."--Hillary Clinton, referring to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden before a group of bought-and-paid-for Democratic loyalists--unionized auto workers.

Um…does she know something both the CIA and NSA don’t know? Whatever. Who am I to argue with the all-knowing commie babe? If Hillary sez he’s in Africkistan, then he’s in Africkistan. Opportunistic carpetbaggers make it their business to know this ‘portant stuff. If she eventually claims her rightful place upon the throne, I’m sure she’ll capture him within hours of having the White House fumigated.

She’s funny.

More tolerance emanating from south of the Mason/Dixon line. Those moralists from the south sure know how to speak out of both sides of their mouths.

From CNN.com:

Church blazes 'No. 1 priority' for federal agency Investigators looking at race, religion as factors Wednesday, February 8, 2006; Posted: 1:13 p.m. EST (18:13 GMT) BOLIGEE, Alabama (CNN) -- The spate of church fires in rural Alabama is motivated by hate, a state official said Wednesday, but it's not clear whether arsonists are choosing their targets on the basis of race or religion. Referring to the first batch -- five fires in Bibb County -- "Four of the churches were predominantly white churches, the other one was an African-American church," state assistant insurance commissioner Ragan Ingram told CNN. "It's the other way around on this one. These were I believe all African-American churches." This time, four churches burned in rural western Alabama overnight Monday. "Obviously, somebody or somebodies are interested in burning down churches, whether it's hate against a race or a religion in general, we don't know."

Nifty. Only in the south--the hotbed of tolerance and equality. (?)

I gotta go board up the adobe. When the left-leaning folks come to realize that I had the unmitigated audacity to question the all-knowing humanitarian--the president of the Fidel Castro Fan Club--Jimmy Carter, I am likely to be targeted for some of that good old-fashioned southern intolerance. We are not allowed to take issue with the Hee-Haw hicks (See Carter or Clinton) turned above reproach moralists. Only hateful Bush-bashing is allowed in the current political climate.

But Bush did eat my children.

All better now?

Later