I wept because I had no shoes

I watched footage of former President Carter speak at the funeral ceremony of Coretta Scott King, a week ago. He spoke for quite some time about the current administration as though something sinister were going on behind White House doors -- something James Earl Carter would never, even in his heart, have done. That Carter was the first President to make use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during his own administration, to spy on Americans eventually convicted on evidence gained therefrom, Jimmy never mentioned. But then, I’ve grown accustomed to the peanut farmer’s frequent, blatant hypocrisy and generally blind partisanship. What I haven’t gotten used to is his timing. Everybody else was there to celebrate the exemplary life of Mrs. King, and Carter was there to snipe at the man seated behind him -- a man who had nothing to do with the harm done to the King family in the early, dark days of the civil rights movement. It left a sour taste in an otherwise fine, mostly sweet celebration of Mrs. King’s life.

But then again, Carter is famous for lacking class. After all, he has been abroad to support the terrorist regime, Hamas, in its endeavor to justify driving Israel into the sea. He has supported the theft of election in Venezuela which put our latest nutjob pseudo-marxist despot Hugo Chavez into power. And he wore sneakers and sweaters in the oval office while doing official State business, even though we hadn’t invented Casual Friday, yet. He’s not exactly a Letitia Baldridge exemplar.

Still, he’s not alone: early this week, Albert Gore had the temerity to stand in a foreign country which had created one of freedom’s greatest enemies and badmouth his own country’s security policies, in the midst of wartime. More to the point, he told the Saudi Arabian audience that we should have made our immigration policy even more open, especially to the country from which seventeen fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came. He called our country’s security methods “terrible”, as the administration “indiscriminately rounded up” Saudis -- whose visas had expired, or were here on improper green cards -- “for no reason”, and held them in “unforgivable” conditions. He stood before a crowd in one of the least free, least tolerant, most cruelly indifferent nations on earth and referred to our own administration as being “thoughtless” in its handling of Arabs. In fact, Gore said that, in our security forces tightening up its restrictions -- denying visas for unqualified Saudi applicants and arresting those who are here illegally -- our government was “playing into al Qaeda’s hands”.

Apparently, Al thinks that we made it too hard, even back in the 1990s when he was second in command, for terrorists to get into our country. Further, he is perfectly happy telling this to the people -- and leaders -- of the country which has provided so many of those terrorists. But then, how could he possibly say anything else, since he was speaking to members of the Bin Laden Group (among others) in Osama’s home town of Jeddah? I suppose they must have paid him a handsome thirty pieces of silver.

And then there was the “professional” journalist, Dana Milbank, of the Washington Post, who appeared for an interview on an MSNBC news program flippantly dressed in a blaze orange hat and reflective orange vest -- as though he thought he were a wit at the expense of not only Vice President Dick Cheney, but also Harry Whittington, the man accidentally hit by Cheney’s bird shot. Milbank makes sport of a near-tragedy. At the time I write this, Whittington is still recovering from surgery to examine a piece of birdshot which has lodged in his heart. It’s not funny, no matter what the late night shows may say. It’s doubly unfunny coming from a supposedly serious journalist.

The trouble is, these three are not the only team members in their partisan game. The impression I receive is that they are rather typical of an ever-leftward-sliding group of fanatics, a group whose goal seems more irrational and selfish by the day. In my none-too-jaundiced eye, they seem more concerned with being the center of attention than with securing the welfare of their fellow humans -- let alone the welfare of their nation. As long as the cameras are pointing at them, they’re happy to say and do whatever it takes to keep the cameras there, no matter who gets hurt.

I wept because I had no shoes, and then I met a group who had no shame.


Recommended reading: about those pieces of silver, for example. And, about the trend toward insanity on the left (with excellent links), for another.