I think the fact she hit the white cop, then either on her own or in agrement w/ her lawyers decided to paint the victimized cop a racist and bigot. Might imply something about her opinion of white men.Originally Posted by Gold9472
Had it happend before katrina gave every one a case of the race card blues, she just might have got away with it.
I agree, this is what I mean when I say racism towards whites being so easy to brush off. So casual.
A black person playing the race card, what are the odds of that happening.
I'm assuming she believes what she is saying. In that case, in her mind, she was stopped because the cop was white. His whiteness versus her blackness was the inspiration for him tom stop her. Had he been black, or she been white, she'd have been let through. This scenario in her mind assumes that all white men are out to "get" her and put her in her place or something, and she was fully justified in hitting him because he, by preventing someone he didn't recognize from entering capitol hill without going through the metal decectors or showing ID, was intentionally commiting a race crime against her. Of course, if she knows she fucked up and was just saying that to try and get away with hitting a cop, she's a degenerate and should be demoted to street sweeper or waste disposal plant employee.
Tired...
The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney
http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/3903
By David Vest
April 10, 2006 - 1:55pm
A Washington press corps that stood idly by while Bush and Cheney plundered the country, wrecked the environment, spied on Americans without a warrant, tortured civilians and lied the country into a war that will only get worse, woke up one morning and collectively decided: "Let's all play Get Cynthia!"
Let's get her for being too outspoken, bringing up the wrong issue at the wrong time, failing to get with the program, becoming a distraction, leaving House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi beside herself with rage.
Let's get her because, hell, she practically volunteered for it, and besides, she's an easy target, standing practically alone, fired upon at will by Republicans -- who seem to think her story cancels out DeLay, Abramoff, Katrina and Iraq -- and virtually undefended by Democrats, except by the rolling of eyes heavenward, as though to say, "Oh, please! We're not responsible for HER!"
Rep. Cynthia McKinney has now apologized for her part in the face-off at Checkpoint Cynthia. It was not enough to stop the cartooning of the coverage. Already the news wires are spinning her statement as a complete about-face, an abandonment of everything else she has said about the incident. Look, she said there was racial profiling in Washington! Look, now she's apologizing!
Journalists are reporting this story as though it were their job to "get" her, breathlessly revealing that the woman who receives more hate mail than Teddy Kennedy employs a part-time bodyguard, as though it proved something about her mental state.
But note, please, Rep. McKinney did not take back anything she has said about racial profiling in the nation's capitol. And the fact remains that, while each day's mail brings a new wave of personal threats, some of the people charged with protecting her affect not to recognize her. A Republican colleague offered the suggestion that she could announce "I am a Member of Congress" each time she passes a security checkpoint. But McKinney has served for eleven years, not eleven minutes.
Here's a test of media fairness: how many times, over those eleven years, have you seen Rep. McKinney on CNN, NBC, ABC, or CBS, asked to explain her views on Iraq and the Middle East? Not once, you say? Read on for the "why come" of it all.
The leaders of her own party turn their backs while she endures the most vicious racial stereotyping I've seen, since the last time I looked at that old KKK rag called the "Thunderbolt" when a fellow college student stuck a copy in my face back around 1963. "I know it's probably racist," he said, "but it's funny," as if that would have made it all right.
It wasn't funny, it was disgusting, and I don't think what's happening to Rep. Cynthia McKinney is funny now. Much of the commentary seems to have been written by the same sort of people who say they don't agree with Rush Limbaugh, they just listen to him for "entertainment." (Anybody out there who listens to Rush for entertainment, please get your eyes off of my words, I've got nothing to say to you and I sure as hell don't want to "amuse" you.)
Two-party collusion in the destruction of a reputation is the story here, folks. For Pelosi, the affair is "not something we need to focus on." Judging by Dennis Hastert's comments, Checkpoint Cynthia was the biggest national security event since 9/11.
Rep. Tom DeLay called McKinney a racist. Nothing DeLay said would surprise me, and that comment was no exception. What did surprise me was that I couldn't find any stories quoting any Democrats saying, "Tom DeLay called somebody a racist? Tom DeLay?!"
Oh, I know. They didn't want to take the bait, fall into the trap, keep the ball in the air for another news cycle. But really, how can they stand this? How can anybody?
Right wingers, aided by Democrats, are spinning McKinney as "arrogant," "haughty," a "nut-case," even "the madwoman McKinney" -- a woman who, just between us pros, wink wink, doesn't understand how "the game" is played.
She understands the game all right. She just refuses to play it. When CNN's Soledad O'Brien, trying to take control of an interview, said to McKinney, "Let me stop you there," what came back on her was something spoken in a tone rarely used toward a TV personality: "You can't stop me, Soledad."
And you can't control me, she might have added, and you can't dictate your own framing of the issues with me.
How easy it is for people who don't have a history of having their right to be present challenged, to counsel others to be more "calm" and "sensible" when provoked.
How easy it is to imagine a senior party member sitting down with Rep. McKinney, patiently and paternalistically explaining that politics is the art of compromise, sweetie. We all know what's supposed to be meant by that, but what kind of compromise do we really want our elected representatives to make with racial profiling, warrantless wiretapping, torture, and a war founded on lies?
The Democratic Party has already compromised this country into desperate straits, going along to get along with Bush. It has been so long since one of them stood ground on anything, we're all shocked when it happens.
Cynthia McKinney is standing firm, with little visible support, but then she has stood alone before. Like that time when she actually voted to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, when given the chance. She was joined by only two other members of the House. The Republicans dared the Democrats to vote for withdrawal, and the Dems all frantically denounced the maneuver as a trap. McKinney seized the moment and called their bluff. Is that what her critics have in mind when they call her a "nut-case" or even worse names?
If she's a nut-case, then maybe we need to send some more crazy people up in there.
She stood alone in 2002, when power brokers in her own party recruited a Reagan Republican stalking horse to defeat her, after McKinney expressed support for Palestinian rights and was among the first to call for an investigation of the Bush Administration after 9/11. The party line at that time was that "we've all got to stand behind the president" in the Wonderful War on Terror.
And then, when McKinney rose from the political dead and returned uninvited from the oblivion they had consigned her to, and reclaimed her seat without anyone's special blessing, other than the voters of her district, the Democrats in the House celebrated her historic comeback by refusing to restore her seniority.
That was Nancy Pelosi's way of saying, "You will comply."
They wanted to keep Crazy Cynthia away from the microphone, of course they did. Out of sight, out of mind. Can't have our elected officials running around saying the same things the public is saying about the war on Iraq! Makes us look bad! And thus it comes to pass that we get news stories saying things like, "Since returning to Washington, McKinney has kept a lower profile until last week's incident," as if keeping quiet on public matters was her own idea.
The incident with the Capitol Police wasn't about her hair. It wasn't about the identity pin. It's about the fact that when you are female, black, antiwar, and militant, invisibility looks good on you, from where the pro-war Dems sit.
Some of us are old enough to remember that many Democrats accused Martin Luther King, Jr. of "ingratitude" when he began to speak out against the Vietnam War. That was the very moment when, in the eyes of many who had previously and publicly despised him, he was transmogrified into the Great Civil Rights Leader, who had now "gone too far" and "risked" damaging the wonderful "reputation" he had earned, not to mention all the "progress for his people" that (hint, hint) could be rolled back if a "backlash" were provoked.
Vestiges of this view persist today in some quarters. William F. Buckley has said (recently) that he regrets that National Review opposed Civil Rights. He has not, insofar as I am aware, expressed a hint remorse for not supporting King in trying to stop the war in Vietnam.
So now, today, we have Rep. McKinney calling Israel to account, demanding justice for Palestinians, questioning what happened on 9/11, giving no quarter on racial profiling, and voting against the war in Iraq.
How are the do-nothing Democrats supposed to get the benefit of the antiwar crowd, if there are people running around actively voting against the war?
They act as though they believe all the country really needs is not to end the disaster in Iraq but to let the "good guys" run it.
The noble John "Nobody Spins Me" Kerry writes an op-ed calling for not one but TWO deadlines in Iraq (top that, Hillary!) and the whole party has a conniption fit because all anyone can talk about is this uppitty Black woman who won't let security or anybody else, including party leadership, manhandle her.
Nancy Pelosi had her party theme all picked out: we were all supposed to be talking about Tom DeLay and this "Republican culture of corruption," and if anyone pressed us on Iraq, we were to demand, with one mighty voice (are you ready? all together now ...) "that 2006 be a significant period of transition" in Iraq.
The Democratic Party, in splendid unison, calling upon American sons and daughters to hurl their bodies into the immolating fire, for the sake of "a significant period of transition" -- who could resist?
How different from that other voice, that Black voice from Georgia, joined by a handful of others, saying "Bring the troops home. Stop this war. Now."
You begin to get a pretty clear idea why the Democrats have never asked McKinney to give the rebuttal after a Bush State of the Union.
And as for the Republicans, with few exceptions, they don't ever intend to let another person of color claim to be a victim of racism without attacking her credibility. Not one more. (Recall how patiently they explained to us all that what happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina "wasn't about race.")
Let them convene their grand jury and push their polls. Maybe one day a polling agency will call you, to ask what you think about white folks telling people of color that they're wrong to feel that anything, anything, is ever about racism.
Before judging Rep. McKinney, ask yourself, what kind of person would still be in public service, after setbacks and sabotage attempts like these? What kind of person would keep reporting for duty after being consistently disrespected, and repeatedly challenged to "identify" herself after 11 years in Congress? And then to be mocked and attacked for her refusal to meekly "comply" when physically prevented from going to cast a vote.
You got a bit of the answer if you saw Rep. McKinney on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. I liked it when she refused to let him control the conversation, but I have to tell you, we stood up and cheered at my house when she told Blitzer, "Don't even begin to twist my words."
Among the comments at our table that evening was, "Why can't SHE be president?"
Except this is not about her past it is just about the incident at hand, there was no excuse for her actions. You think it is O.K. she punched the cop then played the victim?
That is just it; we can’t judge her any differently just because she is a black woman. What if the situation was reversed white male embattled congress man not using the check point not wearing a pass, a black female cop stops him, he punches her, then cries victim as she is black, a woman and a cop and tries to make it about him being victim of race and gender?
It’s absolutely ridiculous now huh? It should be ridiculous either way but its not.
I am not saying she hasn't been the victim of racism, but is being the victim of racism at some point in your life an excuse to punch white cops doing thier job?
Tired...
The point of posting that is that they mentioned how the press jumped on it, while the President can murder 3000 people, and get away with it.
Her opponents are going to jump all over this, that’s low, but expected. Reminds me of Cheney's little shooting accident. It goes both ways.
What really blows my mind is even if the official story on 911 was the truth our war over 3000 dead American civilians has caused the death of 100,000+ Middle Eastern civilians. No one ever points that out in the press either.
BTW what is your source on the Middle East civilian death toll? I’ve heard 30,000-300,000?
Tired...
New Study Shows 250,000 Civilian Deaths In Iraq As A Result Of The Invasion
Tired...
THE BELOVED CYNTHIA McKINNEY
A White Ex Cop Speaks Out About a Georgia Congresswoman
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/fre...mckinney.shtml
by Michael C. Ruppert
April 11, 2006 1300 PST (FTW) - ASHLAND -Cynthia McKinney is a friend of mine. Until the day I die she will be a friend of mine. More than that, she will be a role model and an inspiration that I don’t ever expect to be equaled, let alone surpassed. Full disclosure.
Out of several dozen Op-Eds, news reports and commentaries on the now-infamous so-called “cop-slapping” event of March 29th, I haven’t seen a single one that, from my perspective, got it right. So right up front, let me say that if I am forced to look at this one snapshot incident, divorced from context and history, then yes, my very good friend messed up. It shouldn’t have become as big a deal as it has and she bears some responsibility for that. But if I look at the event as part of a continuum of the life of congress, or the life of this nation, and (no less importantly) of the life of this woman, things look and feel a whole lot different.
The virulent, spit-dripping, white, racist commentators from Boortz to DeLay and the oh-so-PC and dainty black Democratic pundits, columnists and pols who pick Cynthia McKinney apart—pretending to defend her while putting her black butt on the E-Bay auction block for November—are actually allies. They both want her to go away. They both want the issues that have come too close to public recognition in this case to go away. Leaders from left and right, black or white, cannot bear the thought of actually looking deeper at what happened with Cynthia McKinney and what it means.
Let me give you an historical hint. As a rule wars, are generally started over big events, (e.g. the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Pearl Harbor, North Korea’s Army Crossing the 38th parallel). Revolutions are generally started over less memorable things (e.g. “Let them eat cake,” a tea tax, some government troops opening fire on unarmed demonstrators). People of all colors and political persuasions understand that underlying both wars and revolutions are monstrous icebergs of unresolved inequity. So it is with Cynthia McKinney. And it is her hairdo (new or old, take your pick) that now sits atop an iceberg that both right-wing whites and bought-off blacks would like to go away.
I have walked the halls of Congress with Cynthia McKinney maybe eight to ten times. I have walked into and out of the Cannon and Longworth house office buildings with her. I have walked to hearings in the Rayburn house office building with her. I have walked the underground tunnels from one of those office buildings directly to the edge of the House floor and its anteroom with her. I can tell you one thing for certain because I have seen it and I have felt it. Cynthia McKinney and her staff get treated differently from just about anyone else on the Hill. It’s subtle, but so is the taste of dirt when it’s in your mouth.
ICEBERGS
Between 1974 and 1977, as I prowled the streets of “The Jungle” in South Central L.A. (in uniform and later as a detective and undercover narc) I knew little about being human. The Jungle is the place where “Boyz in the Hood” and Denzel Washington’s “Training Day” were filmed. I was a good cop, a very good cop. I didn’t have any sustained personnel complaints. My rating reports were always “outstanding.” The law-abiding citizens by and large trusted me when they saw me. My liberal education at UCLA had at least partially sensitized me to a world that seemed impossible to understand—a world that scared me just as much as it enticed me with its opportunities for heroism, peer recognition, and self-acceptance. My father had been a war hero and I wanted to know if I was cut from the same cloth.
I was known for being aggressive; eager to embrace danger; a budding, brilliant investigator; and an unmatched report writer. I was a “hard-charger” as they called it in those days. Perhaps the best role model I had as a cop was a black LAPD Captain by the name of Jesse A. Brewer who also taught me about leadership, friendship and loyalty.
I didn’t need to beat up innocent people because the streets where I worked were full of guilty people: robbers, burglars, heroin dealers, wife beaters, rapists, and car thieves. I was on the streets (and not far away) the night the Symbionese Liberation Army were roasted like marshmallows after making the mistake of trying to shoot it out with my brothers in blue. We were all men in those days, no women. I was on the streets for months before and after the time when every LA cop had a fear of making a routine traffic stop and facing an automatic weapon, a rocket launcher, a bomb, or a Molotov cocktail. Tense times.
For several years I averaged between 20 and 30 felony arrests per month—good arrests. Who had time to go after innocent people just because they were black? Also in those days, I also used the word “nigger” about 15 times a day. It was the culture. It was my ignorance. In the 1970s, LAPD reports used the official word Negro to describe African-Americans and before I joined LAPD in 1973 I had seen or talked to only around 20 black people in my whole life: maids, taxi drivers, bellmen—you know “colored people.” I talked like those around me talked. I thought it was cool.
As front-page stories in the Herald Examiner described me in 1981, I was “… a white kid from Orange County in a blue uniform sent to a black ghetto.”
The one thing I could not understand for about fifteen years after that was the maybe half-dozen different black men who had approached me in futility and rage, tearing open their shirts and looking at me with absolute sincerity as they said, “Shoot me. Go ahead, shoot me. I got nothing to lose.” They meant it, and it mattered not at all what the last incident was that had taken place before they snapped with that sublime mix of rage and complete despair. A lifetime of inequalities, social and economic; injustices, past and present; and frustrations, ever present; had pushed those men beyond their breaking point. It took me a while to get to that point, but I got there too, and now I understood something about being black.
Through two decades of 12-Step work, intense spiritual effort and personal therapy I have seen my errors, felt genuine remorse, and made my amends. One of those amends came in 1996 when—in a face-to-face confrontation with a CIA director—I challenged the same government I had once protected for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, where much of it was intentionally routed to the inner cities.
Since then, and on more than one occasion, Black America, and black individuals in America have saved my life. No one rushed to take a bullet for me. No, what was done for me was to give me acceptance, support, friendship, a meal and some soul. You can do a lot with a little bit of soul.
Among all of the African Americans I know—and there are many—Cynthia McKinney stands head and shoulders above the rest. Screw her hairdo; It’s the woman’s mind and heart that need to be considered here.
Flash forward a couple of decades from the late 1970s.
It’s now 2000 and my little newsletter From The Wilderness is steadily growing as we look at issues like US Government covert operations in Colombia, death squads, the global drug trade, the prison-industrial complex, drug money flowing into Al Gore’s presidential campaign, PROMIS software and a then little-known company named Halliburton. My friend Al Giordano of the Narco News Bulletin brought Cynthia McKinney to my attention. I emailed her and she responded almost immediately.
There was an immediate friendship. Cynthia McKinney was the first member of congress I had met (about 15 at the time) who actually seemed to be a human being who actually gave a hoot and who actually comprehended all the government criminality people were talking about. She responded to emails. She took phone calls. She actually cut checks from the Treasury to subscribe to FTW. She bought our videos and reports and…she read them. She handed them out.
She asked questions and didn’t pretend to know everything. She read. She listened. She understood.
And then came 9/11.
There are millions of Americans who still have major unanswered questions about the attacks of September 11th. Some are wives, husbands, and children of the victims. Some, like me, are investigative journalists. Many are just average people who could never swallow the galactic inconsistencies of the government account and who have refused to succumb to pressure for conformity. Cynthia McKinney was the one to ask “What did the Bush administration know and when did it know it?” about the scores of detailed warnings received by the administration in the months before the attacks. Contrary to one account from a black commentator recently, she has never retracted that question.
For that question, she was tarred and feathered in the press. From her long-standing support of Palestinian rights and objections to Israeli strong-arm tactics in the occupied territories emerged a new double-edged motive to remove her from congress at all costs. Cynthia McKinney was an un-American, anti-Semitic supporter of terrorists!
An Oreo black candidate named Denise Majette emerged as lots of money poured from the coffers of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) funded not only a hate campaign against McKinney, but in support of her opponent as well. Illegally, thousands of Republican voters crossed over to vote for the Oreo in the primary while the seat stayed safely Democratic, and all were quietly relieved when Cynthia didn’t even make it to the general election.
Cynthia McKinney will tell you that I and the entire 9/11 movement stayed with her loyally throughout her two-year imposed vacation. And I believe she will tell you that it was in part because we organized fundraisers for her and kept her name out there that she made it back—to everyone’s surprise except ours—in 2004.
Cynthia McKinney had been the only member of congress to ask real questions about 9/11. And she didn’t stop or forget when she got back either. More than that, she continued to do—no matter what—the things that her conscience bade her to do as an African-American woman who is anything but a racist (unless you want to refer to the human race). In hearings she questioned Donald Rumsfeld about the multitude of wargame exercises I had identified in my book Crossing the Rubicon. She asked repeated questions about 9/11 in repeated hearings and no one on the Democratic side backed her up when her questions were brushed aside, ignored and forgotten. She also kept up her support for the rights of the oppressed everywhere and she didn’t change one single note of her sheet music or its cadence.
She held the only hearing on Capitol Hill where investigators, authors, and families questioning the official version of 9/11 had a voice. She invited me, Wayne Madsen and Ray McGovern to act as questioners at that hearing, and she was the only member of congress to sit through that hearing.
She was there for the victims of Katrina and Rita who fled as refugees to Atlanta last fall. She was there to protect black culture and black history through her Tupac bill. She was there for her constituents and for all of the disenfranchised, battered, demoralized, and desperate Americans of all colors who had come to see her as “the politician of last resort.”
End Part I
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