UPDATED: Scott Johnson taps one of his readers to be a new feature post — claiming that Rev. Jackson was [somehow] a horrible man, because he didn’t walk a picket line for the full eight hours(?!) — in San Diego in the later 1990s. Damn.
Our “reader/reporter” claims that because he didn’t have “mommy & daddy’s money” he had to make due on union strike stipends — and so, had to borrow from a roommate to feed himself until the strike ended (and — horror of horrors! he had to punch a clock on the picket line each day!). It galled him that the Reverend (a senior citizen!) didn’t stay with them all eight hours in the hot San Diego sun. Wow. That’s… it?!? [I too paid my own way (every penny) since I was 17 from a large mining family in the mountains — through undergrad, and law school — every single expense — food, light, rent, tuition and books — no car; all by working in a [non-union] hard rock mine, taking student loans and going to less expensive schools — in those summers.]
And so…. this (regrettably) forces me to tell of my not-at-all similar encounters — this being the first of many with Rev. Jackson, over the decades. I was a young law student, and had been staffing a Pro Bono clinic at Cabrini Green on Saturdays, all fall [a now bulldozed high density public housing project very near the law school]. Early Thanksgiving morning that year, on a frigid Chicago gray day, we clinic members, with the funds / backing of our Jesuit law school, were putting on a mass turkey dinner / feeding line — in the main courtyard. Hundreds of families were waiting patiently and politely, some singing gospel music, in line. Others had boom boxes playing Sugar Hill. Rev. Jackson arrived by 8 am, sharp — while we were still finishing set up — but he pitched right in, and stayed serving his fellow humans’ needs — until the food was gone — well after 3 pm. The winds were howling by then — but he stayed, already a senior citizen. Shivering — but he stayed.
Over the coming decades, we hosted him at the ’34 Act company I was Chief Counsel for, and later at our AM 100 law firms, where I was an equity partner. Always gracious — but unafraid to speak truth to power. Always. End, updated portion.
So Mirengoff, a privileged white kid from Baltimore (elite private high school education; Dartmouth undergrad and Stanford Law — white shoe law firm life for his entire career) purports to tell a black kid from Greenville, SC (who goes on to co-lead a US nation-changing civil rights movement, for millions and millions of humans) — circa 1954… how he should “mind that these are… his betters” — and be the “bigger, more noble” person. Damn. This is some deep BS:
…[Rev. Jackson had once said he spat in the food of the all white patrons, when he was a server at a SC country club, in his high school years. To which, Paul burps:] Had I been a black kid raised in South Carolina during the oppressive 1950s, I might well have been bitter enough to have done the same thing.
But this is not the behavior one would hope for in a future leader of a great moral movement. It’s almost certainly not something Martin Luther King Jr. ever did….
Gosh — he’s a full blown reincarnation of Jack Handey. Actually, that SNL character was far more profound.
Out — what a putz. All of this while Paul spent his career trying to limit the EEO rights of people of color — and women — in the US — as a lawyer for the richest one-tenth of 1%-ers out there. Damn.
Powerline Lies... 