Eugene Robinson: "Beck's version of history is flat-out wrong"

[babylonsister]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008270002

Robinson: "Beck's version of history is flat-out wrong"

August 27, 2010 7:13 am ET by Media Matters staff


Today, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes that Glenn Beck's 8-28 rally -- set to take place on the anniversary and at the location of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech -- is "an exercise in self-aggrandizement on a Napoleonic scale" and that "no puffed-up blabbermouth could ever diminish the importance of the 1963 March on Washington or the impact of King's unforgettable words." Robinson further notes that "Beck's version of history is flat-out wrong":

The most offensive thing about the rally is Beck's in-your-face boast that the event will "reclaim the civil rights movement." But this is just a bunch of nonsense -- too incoherent to really offend. Beck makes the false assertion that the struggle for civil rights was about winning "equal justice," not "social justice" -- in other words, that there was no economic component to the movement. He claims that today's liberals, through such initiatives as health-care reform, are somehow "perverting" King's dream.

But Beck's version of history is flat-out wrong. The full name of the event at which King spoke 47 years ago was the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." Among its organizers was labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a vice president of the AFL-CIO, who gave a speech describing the injustice of "a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty."

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), then an official of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the youngest speaker at the march. "We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here -- for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages," he told the crowd. Referring to proposed civil rights legislation, Lewis said: "We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in the home of a family whose total income is $100,000 a year."

WaPo yesterday:

Washington Post Gives Beck Rally Page One Play
http://mediamatters.org/strupp/201008260011

[Joe Bacon]

1. Yet the Whoreshington Post loves Beck

Fred Hiatt is sure seeing to it that the Whoreshington Post is worshipping the ground Beck walks on.

Sad thing is that I can remember when the Washington Post was a real newspaper...

[KharmaTrain]

2. The Corporate Media Gets Played Yet Again...

Not sure which tune or whose playing who, but this weekend's teabagger pottython is generating a lot of PR...just what Dreck and his puppetmasters are hoping for. He exemplifies the new Faux noise slogan..."We bark, you jump". The corporate media just loves all the heat the racism, xenophobia and sexism that oozes not only from Dreck but the entire hate radio and right wing echo chamber...some may say tsk, tsk but they keep showing this rodeo clown and his diversions. He can lie without any concern that even if he's called on it he has to retract...doesn't matter anyway as the right wing game is to start a rumor/lie and let the corporate media chase after it for hours or days. Even if its proven wrong, the retraction is never as loud as the initial lie.

As long as the corporate media obsesses on Dreck the more he'll pull these stunts...especially now with his ratings on the downslide. Of course his version of history is wrong...its deliberate. Telling him or others of his ilk that he's wrong matter nothing to them...he's providing them raw meat and the bile they crave.

:hi:

[polmaven]

3. the event will "reclaim the civil rights movement." ...

Absolutely! Because the rich white males of this country are obviously being oppressed and need to take their country back from all those favored minorities!

[TomClash]

6. It will be reclaimed for Bull Connor nt

[Bitwit1234]

4. So Beck says he isn't subverting Martin Luther King

I got an email from a conservative organization, I don't know how they got my email address by the way, saying this rally of the Mentally deficient Beck was for wait wait.....Jobs and Freedom...... Now if he wasn't trying to make fun of the March in 1963 why is that being used as the name of the march.

Some how Fox has got to be stopped. People are going to have to record ever single second and filter out the lies and slander and file lawsuits, complaints and any thing else they can to bring this organization dedicated to restoring the republican party with its corporate backing to power, out of business.

[TomClash]

5. Yes, "somehow" Beck misses the following in Dr. King's message

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967.

[LiberalFighter]

8. I wonder what Walter Reuther said at that event.

[TomClash]

7. Jon Stewart called this "event"

"I Have a Scheme"