If I didn’t know better, I’d think the White House had its fingers all over this. We saw it at work when the president euologized Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii by mentioning himself 63 times and more recently when the he marked the death of Nelson Mandela with a picture of you’ll-never-guess-who.
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and to commemorate the life of the civil rights giant, Joshua DuBois — former Obama adviser on faith-based initiatives — has a musing in the Washington Post that, overtly draws comparisons between Obama and MLK.
The print edition of the paper titles the tribute, “Lessons from King for Obama’s travails,” and has pictures of MLK and (naturally) Obama. Both the print and online versions note that “we usually remember King at his soaring moments, fully in command of the civil rights movement, confident and poised,” but that in fact, he “was not always ascendant” — that his “journey [was] fraught with political and practical failures, challenging relationships and spiritual and emotional depressions.” If you’re not sure which man DuBois is talking about here, you’re not alone.
Later, he writes:
Like King, the president may find that as he holds onto his core ideals without compromise — as we saw him do in the government shutdown negotiations — he’ll be buttressed by public support and inner clarity that the purity of principle brings.
And as the president hits the road this year and surrounds himself with those he’s trying to help — Americans who have lost their health insurance, students desperate for an affordable college education, unemployed workers seeking a lifeline — he may find, like King, that the cheers and admonishments from everyday people can provide fuel for his final years in office. [Emphasis added]
And just like King, the president might be renewed by his inner compass, his sense of purpose, his conversations with God. It was these late-night conversations that allowed King to endure murderous phone calls and official intransigence.
The administration talking points that make up the highlighted portion of the second paragraph are unintentionally hilarious. Take for example the claim that Obama is trying to help “Americans who lost their health insurance.” Remind me, please, who is responsible for their losing it in the first place. And was the fiction repeated dozens of times that Americans could keep their health plans is they chose to an example of Obama’s “purity of principle”?
As for the claims in the third paragraph, Newsbusters’ Tim Graham points out:
The Post can’t imagine reporting the truth that Obama is actually a force against religion and religious liberty, and that DuBois was appointed to put a plastic veneer over Obama’s secular outlook and upbringing. Under Bush, leftists denounced the faith-based initiatives office as a transparent black-outreach program. Under Obama, that was apparently a terrific thing.
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