"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." According to media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.
Except it's not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.
For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you're fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.
A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian's lofty prophecy during marches and speeches.
Apparently, Obama himself believed the quotation to be from King. Stiehm writes:
My investigation into this error led me to David Remnick's biography of Obama, "The Bridge," published this year. Early in the narrative, Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, presents this as "Barack Obama's favorite quotation." It appears that neither Remnick nor Obama has traced the language to its true source.
The error perfectly encapsulates the shallowness of Barack Obama's intellect, and his lack of rigor. Obama is a man who accumulated academic credentials while giving no evidence whatsoever of achieving any depth. He was the only president of the Harvard Law Review to graduate without penning a signed article in that esteemed journal. His academic transcripts remain under lock and key, as do his academic papers.
For the sort of people like David Brooks of the New York Times, who are impressed by fancy degrees and a sharp crease in the trousers, Obama may appear to be the smartest ever occupant of the Oval Office. But, as the old joke goes, deep down, he is shallow. Underfoot, literally, there is woven into his background a prominent vein of phoniness.
Amazing, isn't it?
Most of us didn't need a stupid rug, or a long list of broken promises, nor malapropisms one after another. The fact that he thought there were 58 states was enough thank you very much.
Listen, everybody makes mistakes. Trouble with Barry, he's so congenitally inept he doesn't correct nor learn from his. All kidding or evincing despisement for this man aside, the saddest feature of the entire mess is we finally got to witness affirmative action at its worst.
Bush had a higher IQ than Kerry, but didn't allocate near enough time learning to fawn, huff, posture, or mispronounce the name Genghis. Therefore, the lunatic elite...in their minds only...decided that skin-deep was good enough and began hating the man.
Sarah Palin is going through much of the same. Nice ideas, fresh approaches, seems smart as a whip but ONLY to those who know what to look for when smart searching.
Betcha if she started learning to say Jen-Jhis it'd be a horse of a different color.
Bush had a higher IQ than Kerry, but didn't allocate near enough time learning to fawn, huff, posture, or mispronounce the name Genghis. Therefore, the lunatic elite...in their minds only...decided that skin-deep was good enough and began hating the man.
Sarah Palin is going through much of the same. Nice ideas, fresh approaches, seems smart as a whip but ONLY to those who know what to look for when smart searching.
Betcha if she started learning to say Jen-Jhis it'd be a horse of a different color.
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