Sometimes ya just can’t make it up. Unless, of course, you’re NBC Late Night host Seth Meyers.
Ole Seth, it seems, has his knickers in a knot because Republicans had the nerve – the nerve! – to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King by – gasp! – quoting him. Ohhhh noooo! Targeting Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Meyers, lying less than smoothly, said this:
“Well, today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which means it’s a day full of Republican politicians who support voter suppression efforts and have spent months fanning a crazed right-wing panic over so-called Critical Race Theory.”
He went on:
“Today, for example, Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted this deceptively quoted line from Dr. King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech without any additional context. ‘When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.'”
As NewsBusters’ Alex Christy added:
“Meyers then mocked Rubio for the selection: ‘Did you read any further than that, or did you just pull up the text of the speech and do a control-F for ‘Things that make it sound like he agrees with me’? ‘Cause dude, you’ve got to read just like two more lines, and then you’ll see that the rest of the quote says, ‘This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.’ …In reality, school curricula are not nearly comprehensive enough when it comes to teaching children about the history of systemic racism in this country. The first time a lot of people heard about the Tulsa Massacre was in Watchmen. And as a rule, it’s not great when you learn more from HBO than from your school.”
As Alex Christy correctly notes:
“Nothing Meyers added discredits what Rubio tweeted, but Meyers, who has a habit of attacking Rubio in personal terms, insisted he’s just a pretty-faced con artist:
‘Man, it’s times like these that you just wish Rubio would go back to his old job as the picture that comes with the frame. I know they’re liars and con artists, but Dr. King was essentially saying you made a promise and you didn’t keep it, and Rubio just quoted the ‘You made a promise’ part that would be like quoting “Since U Been Gone,” but not the chorus as Kelly Clarkson said, “And all you’d ever hear me say is how I picture me with you. That’s all you’d ever hear me say.’”
On another occasion Meyers said this of history books on the subject of race: “Most history textbooks either leave that stuff out or it sanitizes it they just go from the Civil War to the Great Depression with a chapter in between that says, ‘Your search returned no results,’ and a shrug emoji.”
Laughably unaware, Meyers is clearly totally unaware that his favorite party, the Democrats have a very, very long history of sanitizing the party’s role in“systemic racism” – and Meyers himself appears to want to ignore that role.
But not to worry. Back there in the stone age of 2008 I took a look at the Democratic National Committee’s website and in particular its history section. And lo and behold I wrote this in The American Spectator:
Democrats: The Missing Years
“Missing: 52 years of history.
Ignored: The other 113 years that take the Democrats from their birth in 1800 to 1965.
As Democrats prepare to nominate Senator Barack Obama to be the first black president, the Democratic National Committee and its chairman Howard Dean have whitewashed the party’s horrific and lengthy record of racism. The omission is in the section of the DNC website that describes the party’s history. The missing history raises the obvious question of whether the Democrats, unable or simply unwilling to put their party on record as taking direct responsibility for one of the worst racial crimes of the ages, will be able to run a campaign free of the racial animosities it has regularly brought both to American presidential campaigns and American political and social life in general.
What else to make of the official party history as presented by the DNC on its website? It is a history so sanitized of historical reality it makes Stalin look like historian David McCullough.”
In other words? It was the official position of the Democratic Party on its own history to, as Meyers now puts it, “either leave that stuff out or it sanitizes it they just go from the Civil War to the Great Depression with a chapter in between that says, ‘Your search returned no results,’ and a shrug emoji.”
That’s exactly what Democrats have done. They love to whitewash their history on race, as Seth clearly loves to do. But to refresh for ole Seth on the history of his favorite party when it comes to race, here’s some of the actual history he and other Democrats (like Joe Biden) prefer to ignore.
*There were 6 Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery, from 1840-1860.
* The number of Democratic presidents who owned slaves is seven, from 1800-1861
* The number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation outright or were silent on the subject is 20, from 1868-1948.
* It was Democrats who created the racist “Jim Crow laws.” These were the post-Civil War laws passed enthusiastically by Democrats in that pesky 52-year part of the DNC’s missing years. These laws segregated public schools, public transportation, restaurants, restrooms and public places in general (everything from water coolers to beaches). The reason Civil Rights heroine Rosa Parks became famous is that she sat in the front of a “whites only” bus, the “whites only” designation the direct result of Democrats.
* According to Columbia University historian Eric Foner the Ku Klux Klan was “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.” University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease’s describes the Klan as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”
* Democrats opposed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth banned slavery. The Fourteenth effectively overturned the infamous 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision (made by Democrat pro-slavery Supreme Court justices) by guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves. The Fifteenth gave black Americans the right to vote.
* Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It was passed by the Republican Congress over the veto of Democratic President Andrew Johnson. The law was designed to provide blacks with the right to own private property, sign contracts, sue and serve as witnesses in a legal proceeding.
* Democrats’ opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses Grant. The law prohibited racial discrimination in public places and public accommodations.
* The Democrats’ 1904 platform, which devotes a section to “Sectional and Racial Agitation,” claimed the GOP’s protests against segregation and the denial of voting rights to blacks sought to “revive the dead and hateful race and sectional animosities in any part of our common country,” which in turn “means confusion, distraction of business, and the reopening of wounds now happily healed.”
* Four Democrat platforms, 1908-1920, were silent on blacks, segregation, lynching, and voting rights as racial problems in the country mounted. By contrast the GOP platforms of those years specifically address “Rights of the Negro” (1908), oppose lynchings (in 1912, 1920, 1924, 1928) and, as the New Deal kicks in, speak out about the dangers of making blacks “wards of the state.”
* The DNC-sponsored Democrat Convention of 1924 is known to history as the “Klanbake.” The 103-ballot convention was held in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Hundreds of delegates were members of the Ku Klux Klan, the Klan so powerful that a plank condemning Klan violence was defeated outright. To celebrate the Klan staged a rally with 10,000 hooded Klansmen in a field in New Jersey directly across the Hudson from the site of the Convention. Attended by hundreds of cheering Convention delegates, the rally featured burning crosses and calls for violence against African Americans and Catholics.
* It was Democrats who segregated the federal government of the United States, specifically at the direction of President Woodrow Wilson upon taking office in 1913.
* Democrats created the Federal Reserve Board, passed labor and child welfare laws and created Social Security with Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and FDR’s New Deal. But these programs were created as the result of an agreement to ignore segregation and the lynching of blacks. Thousands of Democrat local officials, state legislators, state governors, U.S. Congressmen and U.S. Senators were elected as supporters of slavery and then segregation between 1800 and 1965. It was Democrats who made a deal with the devil that left segregation and lynching as a way of life in return for election support for three post-Civil War Democrat presidents, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.
* Three-fourths of the opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Bill in the U.S. House came from Democrats, with 80 percent of the nay vote on the bill in the Senate coming from the Democrats. The opposition included future Democratic Senate Leader (and Joe Biden buddy) Robert Byrd of West Virginia (a former Klan member) and Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., father of future Vice President Al Gore.
* Last but not least Birmingham, Alabama Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who infamously unleashed dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protestors, was in fact — yes indeed — both a member of the Democratic National Committee and the Ku Klux Klan.
So Seth Meyers wants us all not to ignore the history of race in this country. I agree. Dr. King never ignored that history.
So why does Seth Meyers do it?
Hmmmm.
