Weekend Musings

By Alan Caruba

Assassination Time

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. I remember when it happened and I remember the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy. Like some spasm resulting from the resistance to the Civil Rights movement and whatever other causes the murderers of the Kennedy’s had in mind, one must wonder why there have been no similar assassinations since?

The 60’s seemed to fill the nation’s television screens with scenes of rioting and marches, but the final decades of the last century did not evoke much public disorder. I briefly met Dr. King once, after he had delivered a speech at Drew University. It was a pleasant encounter, but if you had told me there would be a national holiday in his honor I would found that hard to believe at the time. That’s the problem with living through history. You have to look back at it from a distance to understand what happened.

I thought living through the Watergate scandals in the 1970's and the 1990’s disgrace that Clinton brought to the Oval Office was bad, but at least the former produced satisfactory Congressional action that led to Nixon’s resignation and jail for several of the participants, while the latter has given us a bad-boy political rock star and the absurdity of his wife running for the same office. Can you imagine the response if Bess Truman had announced she was running for the presidency?

Gore’s Gall

People tend to forget that Al Gore went from being an undistinguished Senator from Tennessee to Vice President thanks to Bill Clinton. Now he’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner, an Oscar winner, and the very image of a bloated man of wealth bent on getting everyone to do what he says, not what he does. The contempt he must feel for us "little people" must know no bounds.

In many ways Gore and the Clintons are some kind of grotesque cartoon version of what used to be people whom we respected for having served in high office. Truman went back to Independence, Missouri, and stayed out of the spotlight. Other Presidents like Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan did the same, but this newer generation craves the spotlight. Perhaps Jimmy Carter started the trend, forever pontificating on everything after an utterly failed, single term in office. Carter, in turned out, was more stupid than anyone could have imagined.

Now Gore has launched a $300 million, three-year effort to use mass media to convince people that "global warming" is just around the corner. Meanwhile, reputable scientists are telling us that the Earth has tipped into a cooling period since 1998 according to all those satellites that measure such things. There is a cyclical weather event called the "La Nina" that is helping to cool things down.

Obama’s Lies

On a forum where I am one of the moderators there is a list of Barack Obama’s lies on the campaign trail. I think the list was imported from Slate.com. It is a long and very specific list.

We all know the Clinton’s lie all the time, but there was some hope that Obama would bring a fresh, untainted personality to the race for the presidency, but we all initially and briefly forgot that he comes straight out of one of the most corrupt political machines in the nation, Cook County’s Chicago where the dead vote with regularity.

I can’t prove it, but I think that Obama is still a Muslim despite his attendance at an Afro-centric church. In the Sunni Muslim tradition, taqiyyah is dissembling to give a favorable impression of Islam or in situations where being a Muslim or the wrong sect might be dangerous. He may have learned of this in his youth. I think he has been telling everyone anything they wanted to hear in his climb up the political ladder. No doubt he absorbed and learned this well before he got into politics.

If Dr. King was alive, I suspect he would be seriously conflicted over Obama as the presumptive Democrat candidate.