African American
In reply to the discussion: A friend just sent this me and I see no lies… [View all]pnwmom
(108,990 posts)He could have chosen instead to simply criticize specific policies, but instead he chooses to spew personal diatribes.
He's been seething with jealously ever since Obama rose to the Presidency and didn't give him the recognition he felt was his due. It's pathetic, really.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121550/cornel-wests-rise-fall-our-most-exciting-black-scholar-ghost
NOR HELL A FURY LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED is the best-known line from William Congreves The Mourning Bride. But Im concerned with the phrase preceding it, which captures wrath in more universal terms: Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned. Even an angry Almighty cant compete with mortals whose love turns to hate.
Cornel Wests rage against President Barack Obama evokes that kind of venom. He has accused Obama of political minstrelsy, calling him a Rockefeller Republican in blackface; taunted him as a brown-faced Clinton; and derided him as a neoliberal opportunist. In 2011, West and I were both speakers at a black newspaper conference in Chicago. During a private conversation, West asked how I escaped being dubbed an Obama hater when I was just as critical of the president as he was. I shared my three-part formula for discussing Obama before black audiences: Start with love for the man and pride in his epic achievement; focus on the unprecedented acrimony he faces as the nations first black executive; and target his missteps and failures. No matter how vehemently I disagree with Obama, I respect him as a man wrestling with an incredibly difficult opportunity to shape history. West looked into my eyes, sighed, and said: Well, I guess thats the difference between me and you. I dont respect the brother at all.
SNIP
This is where Congreves insight on love decomposed to rage comes crashing in. West has repeatedly declared that he did 65 engagements for the presidential campaign in 2008, and was offended when the president didnt provide tickets to the inauguration. (Obama later told me in the White House that West left several voice messages, including prayers, from a blocked number with no instructions of where to return the call, a routine with which I was all too familiar.) In a 2011 interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig that appeared under the headline The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic, West recalled his indignation during the Inauguration, when he arrived at his Washington hotel with his mother, and she noted that the bellman had a ticket to the event but not her son. I couldnt get a ticket for my mother and my brother, West said. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, Thats something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you cant get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa. Thus the left-wing critic found it unjust that the workingman and not the professor had a ticket to the inauguration. Only in a world where bankers and other fat cats greedily gobble rewards meant for everyday citizens would such a reversal appear unfair. J.P. Morgan might have been mad; Karl Marx would have been ecstatic.