Poor Bill Clinton just can’t help himself. Does anyone find it a little ironic that he can “remember like it was yesterday,” something that was supposed to have happened 50 years ago, when he can’t even remember what he and Monica did together? But to use the platform of Rosa Parks’ funeral to lay the biggest egg of lies on the American people is beyond shameful
He claims, “I remember as if it were yesterday, that fateful day 50 years ago. I was a nine-year-old Southern white boy who rode on a segregated bus every single day of my life.” He goes on to say that it was after Parks refused to give up her seat that he and two friends decided they wouldn’t sit in the front anymore. Hmm, I wonder if his two “friends” have the same memory. There is only one, small problem with his story. Where he was raised and lived until he was in first grade, Hope, Arkansas, doesn’t have public transportation. . . And never has.
Well perhaps it was in Hot Springs, that he remembers vividly riding the bus every day of THAT life. The problem there is that Hot Springs only got public transportation 26 years ago. So what parallel universe was Bill Clinton living in where he not only rode a public bus every day of his life . . . but remembers moving to the back of it?
But there is an old saying, which is “actions speak louder than words.” If Bill Clinton was so incensed by segregation at such a young, tender age, why did he embrace a segregationist as his mentor? A man who, within a year of Bill moving to the back of an imaginary bus, signed the Southern Manifesto with 99 other Democrat segregationists to protest the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education? If he was so abreast of the news to have the knowledge, within a day, of Rosa Park’s arrest, he certainly must have known about his mentor, Senator William Fulbright, and the Southern Manifesto condemning integration.
But since young Bill was such a compassionate lad, concerned about the fate of those his mentor determined unequal and separate, he must have been very upset in 1957 when he was 11, and Democratic Gov. Orval Faubus called out the state National Guard to keep black students from entering Central High in Little Rock. I hope we don’t have to wait for another funeral of another fallen civil rights hero to hear that story
But it is interesting to try and see how the young Bill Clinton’s mind works. His mentor is a segregationist and Democrat. The governor of his own state, that kept kids his own age from attending school, was a Democrat. All of the southern governors who either prevented integration, or closed schools to prevent integration . . .were all Democrats. But, President Eisenhower, who federalized the Arkansas National Guard to prevent Faubus from abusing his power as governor . . . was a Republican. You would think that a young impressionable lad, concerned about the plight of blacks and institutionalized Jim Crow laws, would have been astute enough to see which party represented racism, and which party represented liberation.
Why would someone who is so concerned about the issue, embrace a party that continued years of racial practices that had been a pattern long before the civil war was every fought? President Eisenhower was extremely unpopular in Arkansas when he not only Federalized the National Guard, but he replaced them with the elite 101st Airborne Division, ordering them to protect the nine black students who had chosen to go to Central High. If he had truly been supportive of what Rosa Parks did, he would have been delirious with joy at Eisenhower’s bold, courageous move to make sure his fellow Arkansasians could go to school. In fact a move like that would stir the heart of a young warrior and ignite in that future leader the desire to emulate that type of leadership and switch to his political party, since, by his own admission . . . he was now socially and politically active from the age of nine. But instead, he developed a “loathing” of the military . . . not a deep respect and love for it, nor seeing it as a force of liberation.
Instead of it being Eisenhower who Clinton would align his political star with, he instead chose to follow the leadership of Democrat governors like Marvin Griffin of Georgia who attacked Eisenhower’s actions, praised Faubus and said as long as he held office, “he would maintain segregation in the schools, and the races will not be mixed, come hell or high water.” And certainly he must remember in great detail the next year when Faubus, instead of agreeing to integrate schools just simply shut them down. Isn’t it odd that he can remember in explicit detail moving to the back of a non-existent bus, but has never mentioned the horror of the Democrat Governor literally keeping all kids from attending public schools because he hated little black children so much? Possibly the reason he does not remember it is because the southern Democratic governors who did this, opened what they referred to as, segregation academies, that were run by the state, and allowed white students only.
Interestingly, the modern Democratic Party has discovered another way to stand in the school house door and prevent young black children from getting a quality education and that is to oppose vouchers which would finally give them a chance to compete on equal footing with white children in the suburbs. Where is Bill on vouchers? Where is Bill on ending welfare and integrating every single citizen into the work force with either full employment or business ownership and opportunities? What did the first black president ever really do for blacks in America except further entrench a broken system that does nothing but destroy lives and rob dignity from American citizens who are considered less than capable, entrapped by a stigma of victimization, simply because of the color of their skin?
It is not hard to see why the poverty pimps and race-baiters still embrace the party that has historically oppressed blacks and kept them on one plantation or another. And it is not hard to see why someone who has built his entire career on one flimsy lie after another would choose a historic somber occasion to put one more stone in that crumbling wall. But what is really sad . . . . is to see all those who continue to fall for it and turn a blind to the truth, while these hustlers continue pushing their con game on the country.
Rosa Parks doesn’t need hallow lies and self-serving stories to preserve her memory. Her dignity and that of those who suffered unspeakable persecution at the hands of one political party has served to help liberate millions of people to now make choices as to which ideology they embrace, which party they join, and what candidate they support. And any Democrat today, who would condemn a black for choosing the party of Lincoln is no different than those who condemned all blacks to ride on the back of the bus, or closed school house doors to prevent them from attending. Racism and discrimination should not be tolerated . . . by anyone . . . and that is what Rosa Park’s actions said.
