The Poverty Pimp Paints Picture of Racial Tension and Division

I don't think there is a more divisive person on the planet fostering racial hate and tension than Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The Reverend was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace today in full poverty-pimp mode, stirring up hate and fanning the flames of Ferguson even as things begin to settle down.  You see, if things settle down and a community is left to heal its own wounds then people like Jackson become irrelevant and he can't stand that idea.

Jesse Jackson isn't alone in this race-baiting game; he is always joined by Al Sharpton and the media usually joins in as well.  Nobody wants to be irrelevant.

Consider this headline from The New York Times...

Timeline for a Body:  4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street

...as if nobody cared enough about Michael Brown to pick his body up out of the road.  It would seem obvious to most of us that this was a crime scene and anyone with an iota of sense knows that crime scenes must be documented, photographed, and investigated.  Yet there is the New York Times, fanning the flames against the police:

For about four hours, in the unrelenting summer sun, his body remained where he fell. 

The lengthy article ends with:

Mr. Brown’s body was checked into the morgue at 4:37 p.m., more than four and a half hours after he was shot.

You can just hear the writer tsk-tsking as he shakes his head in wonder.

I turned my television off a few weeks ago and seldom have it on anymore, yet one evening this week I tuned in to Fox to see what was going on while I ate supper.  Greta van Susteren was on and she was talking to some young reporter in hipster glasses and a plaid shirt.  The reporter, I forget his name, went on to air on-the-street interviews he had conducted with protesters in Ferguson.

One guy said that officer Wilson "should be arrested and convicted of first-degree murder!"

Ignorant.  Does he even know what the criteria for first-degree murder entails?  And the guy that said that made more sense than anybody else in the hip reporter's montage.  Sickening.

Why would a network air such garbage if not to fan the flames?  I was outraged, but even more so when the reporter cuts back to Greta who shakes her head and proclaims how we don't know the facts of this case yet but....let me just air this bullshit anyway because I don't want to be irrelevant and sensational television has always been my ticket to fame (see:  Natalie Holloway).

But back to the good Reverend Jesse Jackson today who was the guest of Chris Wallace along with Dr. Ben Carson on Fox News Sunday.  Dr. Carson, a man who is always calm and reasonable, offered solutions and sound advice on the situation while Jackson just did his usual smug shtick.

Consider this exchange between Wallace and Jackson:

WALLACE: Well, there has been a contention, the only point that I'd make, that he hit the officer in the face. And there are various unconfirmed reports about how severe that was. There is another report that he was charging at the officer. I mean I guess the question is, if we don't know, why are we declaring a verdict? 

JACKSON: Well, it seems to me that the police acted as judge, jury, and executioner. And even on the worst scenario, if he had hit him in the face, does that require at a distance, I was there where he'd been shot, about 20 feet, does that mean you shoot him six times, four times at point blank range? I don't think so.

One has to wonder how it is that Jackson has lived all these years without realizing that  it is at least possible that a person with adrenaline coursing through his system, as Brown must have been, can be almost superhuman.  It's at least possible that Wilson actually needed six shots to stop Michael Brown as medical experts have suggested based on the autopsy results and order of the shots.

The fact is that still nobody knows.

Yet Jackson has to incite hate against police in general by saying that they "acted as judge, jury, and executioner."

In response, Dr. Ben Carson:

You know, anger issues get in the way. And if you take race out of the issue altogether, and you take a group of young men and you raise them with no respect for authority, not learning to take on personal responsibility, having easy access to drugs and alcohol, they're very likely to end up as victims of violence or incarceration. It has nothing to do with race. So, yes, is there racism? Are there problems? Yes. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. But we need to start looking at bigger issues here. We only have 320 million people in this country. We're on a global stage where we are competing with countries with over 1 billion people. We have to save all of our people. They are all precious. And we have to develop our resources appropriately.

Sounds like pretty good advice to me.

Jackson:

...it seems to me that when blacks kill whites, which is rare, it's swift justice. When whites kill blacks, it's rebellion (ph), when it's black on black, there's a shrug of the shoulders as a kind of (inaudible). Guns in, drugs in, jobs out. Racial disparity and alienation and mistrust are very combustible formulas, factors.

What?  I can't really decipher that in whole, but I do wonder why Jackson isn't in Chicago trying to stop all the killing there?

In the end, I think Victor Davis Hanson said it best this week:

What will save us are not more elite and self-serving “conversations” about racial difference, but a new classically liberal effort to consider race irrelevant in our shared American culture. Perhaps if we started treating people as unique individuals and not as hyphenated and anonymous groups, we could deal with these tragic shootings as individual tragedies rather than collective conspiracies.

It's time for people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to quit race-baiting and pitting us against each other and start working to solve problems.  If the two poverty-pimps need a tutorial on how to do that, I would recommend they watch this video which is full of people of all races who have chosen not to be a victim.

(H/T:  Memeorandum)