This Burris Fiasco is the Most Laughable Political Theater!

It sickened me when I heard Representative Bobby Rush from Illinois defend the Burris appointment by embattled Gov. Rod Blagojevich using language such as calling the U.S. Senate "the last bastion of plantation politics." I shook my head in disgust when I read that the same U.S. Representative asked the public not to "hang or lynch" Burris because of the charges against Blagojevich. But the clincher was Bobby Rush on Hardball last evening which has to be seen to be believed. Try to repress your gag reflex!


Hardball, 7 January 2009

The idea of Rush's that Obama's seat must be held by an African-American is laughable in light of Obama himself. If Blacks want to be elected to statewide office they must do the hard work necessary to win statewide office. Let the people decide who their representatives ought to be, and let the candidates make their case. There should not be a minority set aside or quota for Senate seats. Those who earn that privilege have all the more credibility for having done so the hard way (witness President-elect Obama). But to taint Burris's appointment with the canard that anyone chosen would have to be African-American is as sickening as it is wrongheaded.

We have seen writ large the internecine conflicts of Chicago politics, but here's a refresher of some of the ironies according to the same Washington Post article linked to above:

1. Bobby Rush defeated Barack Obama in the 2000 Democratic primary for the Congressional seat Rush now holds, dismissing Obama as an "educated fool" and an outsider to Chicago.
2. Obama endorsed Burris in the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary over Blagojevich. Blagojevich won and then went on to win the governorship.
3. Burris claims to have introduced Obama to Blagojevich and then to have persuaded the governor to endorse Obama to become Illinois Senator in 2004.

The madness only seemed to continue this week with Burris showing up to be seated as a Senator but then getting turned away in the rain. Most galling is Rush's comparing Burris's treatment to schoolchildren having dogs sicced on them in the overheated days of the 1960s civil rights movement. That analogy, like all such outsized comparisons, is an insult to the people who had to endure actual dogs and firehoses being turned on them while at the same time trivializing the very real struggles Rush actually lived through. Perhaps former Black Panther Bobby Rush ought to ask fellow Congressional Black Caucus Representative John Lewis if he thinks Burris's treatment was as bad as the beatings Lewis sustained in Selma, Alabama trying to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

What is equally galling about this whole fiasco is how the media seem quite comfortable in drawing on the worst imagery of the civil rights era (dogs and firehoses) to paint a picture of Burris being denied access to the Senate floor. Howard Kurtz did so this morning in the Washington Post, and the punditocracy is following through in lock step, unable to resist trying to appear sensitive to race, but having the simultaneous problem of seeming insensitive to reality. The greatest difficulty Burris had at the Capitol was trying to maneuver among the crush of cameras and journalists trying to document his being turned away from the Senate. Does anyone think we should have called out the National Guard?

The whole thing sickens me because it is antithetical to where the country is at the moment when we are about to inaugurate Barack Obama. But then again maybe this is part of that moment, the old way of thinking vs. the new. Even the Congressional Black Caucus is trying to redefine itself in the era of the first black president of the United States, first noncommittal on Burris's nomination, then after Reid and Durban relented, the CBC finally came up with a full-throated endorsement. Not exactly nominees for profiles in courange! Happy though the CBC members may be at this milestone in history, they must also acknowledge that the locus of power on black issues is moving from Capitol Hill to the White House in a way none of us has ever witnessed before. Hopefully, Bobby Rush's brand of politics will cede to a new way of getting things done sooner rather than later.

Middle East Conflict

This has to be the most logical and humanitarian view point I have heard. I agree 100%.