King Barack Blows-Off Gettysburg/Doesn't Miss Selma

March 9, 2015

Obama Honors Selma After Ignoring Gettysburg

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Selma: After ignoring the battle that ended slavery under the first Republican president, President Obama at the 50th anniversary of Democrats' blocking the Selma bridge says, "We're the slaves that built the White House."
The parts of American history that this president chooses to commemorate and what he says about them speaks volumes about his view of America and American history.
His America is not only unexceptional, it is perpetually and deeply racist, an overbearing world bully with no right to lecture the world about morality, democracy or freedom.
He reminded us over the weekend that despite any progress since then, "We just need to open our eyes, our ears and our hearts to know that this nation's racial history still casts its long shadow upon us." Or just look at the police department in Ferguson, Mo.?
To Obama, the White House is not the home of the leaders of the world's oldest democracy, but a structure built by slaves.
It's also the place George Washington made beer, he told NBC's Samantha Guthrie in a Super Bowl interview. Problem is, the White House was finished in 1800, George Washington never slept there and the first president to live there was our second, John Adams.
His reference to slaves building the White House came during the observance of the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
It is a significant part of American history and one that deserves commemoration. But it should not be exploited as a springboard for distorting that history or for continuing to paint an America that elected and re-elected an African American president as perpetually and irredeemably racist.
The bridge was named for Edmund Winston Pettus, a Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator from Alabama and grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. He was a Democrat, as were the officeholders in the "solid South" of 1965.
We tend to forget it was Democrats who unleashed the dogs and turned fire hoses against civil rights marchers. It was Democrats who stood in the schoolhouse door and are still there by opposing school choice and trapping minority children in failing schools.
We forget that it was Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former "grand kleagle" in the Ku Klux Klan, who led a 62-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
We forget that the act would never have been possible without Republican leadership, that legislation was not only a personal victory for Illinois Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, then minority leader, but Republicans in both the House and Senate who supported the measure in far greater percentages than Democrats.
Only six GOP senators voted against the act, compared with 21 Democrats.
Speaking at the Selma ceremony, President Obama rightly noted that there "are places and moments in America where this nation's destiny has been decided" and that many "are sites of war — Concord and Lexington, Appomattox and Gettysburg."
Except he never made it to the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, celebrated at a site just 65 miles from the White House built by slaves.
It was an address by the first Republican president to commemorate the battle that saved the Union and ended slavery, at the very high cost of 51,112 men's lives.
President Obama announced his presidential candidacy in 2007 near Lincoln's law office in Springfield, Ill. In 2009 and 2013, he took the oath of office using Lincoln's Bible.
Yet he couldn't make it to Gettysburg, where the long and difficult struggle towards true racial justice and equality really began.
Gettysburg is where we as a nation apologized for slavery.