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Our Bloodiest War 3/17/2015 7:31:14 AM
Poor whites (rednecks) fought the Civil War for the South. Millions died or were wounded. And now they're doing it again, politically. I was thinking about the Shirley Shabbaz speech the other day. Andrew Breitbart, the leader of the GOP dirty tricks division, listened to the first couple of minutes of a speech she was giving, intended for poor blacks and whites, and decided she was a racist.
He quickly lent that information to Glenn Beck for use on his Fox News show. Somebody on Beck's staff was on the ball, for a change; he/she warned him off in time, having listened to enough of the speech to realize it wasn't racist at all.
First off, you don't call a black woman or man a racist. Having held them in captivity since 1608 and segregating them until roughly 1965 and beyond, saying this sort of thing is like the old Pogo cartoon, where he said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." In other words we're the racists and anybody calls a black person one has a whole lot of gall.
Secondly, Shirley's father was murdered by a Georgia cracker over a boundary dispute. If anybody should harbor a grudge against whites, it should be Shirley Shabazz. But she doesn't. In her speech she was trying to convince white Southerners to join up with poor blacks to get better jobs, better education and better treatment generally. I mean these people are part of the 47% that Mitt Romney called lazy for not paying their taxes. They pay plenty taxes. They pay sales taxes, property taxes, and most have income taxes deducted from their paychecks. which they hopefully get back as a refund.
I guess not a lot of poor whites saw Shirley's speech, or if they did, they didn't listen. They keep electing people like Tom Cotton to Congress. Tom Cotton doesn't care about poor white Southerners. He cares about getting elected. I don't really care that Cotton was a lieutenant in the army, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Heck, John Kerry, the man he's criticizing, won two silver stars in Vietnam, and the Swift Boaters called him a coward. Meanwhile his opponent decided he'd been in the National Guard long enough, although he hadn't finished his term, and took off to get his MBA at Yale. Yes, I know that letter that accused him of going AWOL was a phoney, but the general's secretary admitted that what was in it was true.
I keep hearing that Fox News is the most watched and most respected news network these days. Is it curiosity? Is it the cute girls? It's certainly not news. Fox News is run by Roger Ailes a Republican activist since God was a boy and owned by Rupert Murdock. Remember him? His newspaper hacked into celebrity phones in England. He then folded the newspaper and fired the editor. Do you really believe micro manager Rupert Murdock didn't know about the hacking? And what happened to the supposed investigation into possible hacking in America? I suppose they were two busy investigating Benghazi for the sixtieth time, and here they go again. Hillary had her own e-mail account when she was secretary of state. She must've been hiding something. Do you blame her with Edward Snowden and his ilk having access to government info? Colin Powell also admits that he used a private e-mail account at least part of the time, but he assures us that all of his e-mails were saved by the State Department. Why would we believe him and not Hillary? He gave a speech to the United Nations assuring them that Saddam had WMDs.
Now we're hearing that Walmart has made the magnanimous gesture of raising the pay of its cashiers to ten dollars ultimately. Well, that's still not enough to live on. The Walton family is worth 140 billion dollars. How many of them actually work for the company, or any company for that matter?
Would you call them lazy for not working?
Thomas Picketty, author of CAPITAL IN THE 21st CENTURY, is an economist with the largest base of tax records in history. He says the upper ten percent is now as rich as the French aristocrats were, percentage wise, prior to the Revolution. The Republican answer is that Picketty and democrat politicians are causing class warfare. But when we ask the second richest man in America, Warren Buffett, he says its the rich who have declared war on the poor, not the other way around. It's time for poor Southerners to wake up and smell the coffee. Do you really believe Republicans care about your religion? Do you know who Ralph Reid is? He was involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal when Native American casino operators hired Jack and others to lobby for them, and Jack returned the favor by skimming money off the top. Ralph Reid was once the leader of the Christian Coalition, successor to the Moral Majority. Both Jack and Ralph were born-again Christians.
Don't let these people sucker you into voting against yourselves.
