The Dodecahedron of Decency and the Wrong Champions
This cartoon by Stilton Jarlsburg from the Travon Martin verdict last year is at once both sad and amusing. The amusing part is the exposure of the meaninglessness of President Obama’s “circle of compassion” speech (and Jarlsburg goes after the “trapezoid of meaningless rhetoric” and “the dodecahedron of decency.” But the sad part, of course, is the fact that this cartoon points to a deep underlying truth: President Obama got involved for all the wrong reasons. Rather than heal, he chose to inflame and divide.
The Wrong Champions
The Left is notorious for making bad choices when they select a “poster child” for one cause after another:
- In the McCarthy communist pursuit in 1954, the Left held up poor little Annie Lee Moss as having been picked on terribly, a case of mistaken identity. She testified under oath that she had never even heard of the Communist Party. The recent movie Good Night and Good Luck (2000) featured this hearing (despite knowing the real story), and the audience cheered when Moss was “exonerated” and McCarthy embarrassed. Of course, Moss really was a Communist, as was later proven (and in fact known at the time), but she was defended with the notion that her new posting handling top-secret documents didn’t matter because they were already encrypted by the time she received them. Yes, that’s the defense. (I have never learned the circumstances of her promotion from dessert cook in the cafeteria to encrypted documents clerk at the Pentagon in a short period, but she certainly was not the only communist involved. In fact, Wikipedia suggests that “Moss most likely had indirect contact with Communists through her cafeteria workers’ union” - and seems to have forgotten her perjury on this point.
I thought Wikipedia’s treatment of the fact that McCarthy was right was interesting. They downplay the idea that he was “vindicated,” because it didn’t change the way McCarthy was portrayed by the media. Thus he’s still effectively wrong. Here’s the Wikipedia statement:
Among some conservative authors, the evidence of Moss’s Communist Party membership has been used as part of an attempted vindication of McCarthy.[24] While some have noted it as showing laxity on the part of the army’s security review board, it has not changed the overall picture of McCarthy and his methods presented by the media.[25] (Bolding is mine.)
Exactly. The leftist media still doesn’t like him, so the fact that he was right (and they were wrong) makes no difference. Interestingly, the truth about Annie Moss was known for years (including by the producers of Good Night and Good Luck), but those producers chose to misrepresent her as an innocent party to audience members. Annie Moss was one more in a line of left-promoted sympathic faces for their causes, and once again, was not deserving of sympathy.
Poster Child Abuse
Hillary Clinton’s poster child for Hillarycare in the early 1990s, a sickly little girl named Jennifer Bush, turned out to be an outrageously tortured victim of child abuse. From a rather downplayed CNN report of the mother’s conviction:
By the time Jennifer was eight years old, she had spent 640 days in hospitals and had undergone more than 40 surgeries. She had had her appendix, gall bladder, and part of her intestines removed due to what doctors believed was a gastrointestinal disorder. She was fed through a feeding tube.
The girl’s plight even attracted the attention of first lady Hillary Clinton, who cited her case as an example of the high cost of medical care.
She was sickly because she needed to be for political reasons, so her mother injected her with drugs (and allegedly, feces) to produce this effect. The mother, Kathleen Bush, ultimately went to jail - after months of little Jennifer Bush making appearances on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s health care initiative. That little girl truly did deserve our sympathy, but for the wrong reasons. And it turned out that at least some in the Clinton organization believed that the girl’s situation was abuse, not illness, and covered this up.
I understand that she recovered completely once separated from her mother and political handlers. But now, the daughter reportedly denies that her mother ever made her ill, and a judge ruled recently that she can see her despicable mother. I’ll bet she votes the same way now.
Not me, please!
It was another poster child for the left, sort of, that started the DeHavelle blog: Barack Obama’s infamous soldier’s bracelet. That was the affair that got me referred to personally by President Obama as “some nut in his mother’s basement”(after being questioned about my article by ABC’s Jake Tapper).
Two things about this reference occurred to me. First, Obama’s information is wrong as usual; my father, were he alive, would have just turned 103. Second, I have no interest in becoming a poster child for an Obama campaign. The fate of such people tends to be poor.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle