From the Washington Post:
Al Sharpton, power player
By Dana Milbank, Friday, April 13, 4:12 PM
The Rev. Al Sharpton is lord of all he surveys.
“Check out this,” the flamboyant civil rights leader told me during breakfast at his organization’s annual meeting this week. He flipped through the program until he found a full-page ad with the logos of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. “News Corporation Proudly Supports National Action Network’s 2012 Convention,” it said.
Sharpton grinned. “They bash me on Fox News,” he said. “But they sponsor my conference.”
Everybody wants to be on Sharpton’s good side these days. No fewer than five Cabinet officers and a senior White House official went to this year’s convention to kiss his ring. President Obama spoke at last year’s conference and has sought Sharpton’s advice on policy. Sharpton has a show on MSNBC five nights a week, and he doles out airtime to a procession of politicians and journalists (including me).
Wednesday night brought the sweetest moment yet in Sharpton’s long and controversial career: the announcement that Florida authorities would charge Trayvon Martin’s shooter. Sharpton, at the request of the boy’s parents, had done more than anyone else to bring the case national attention.
Just hours before the announcement that George Zimmerman would be charged with second-degree murder, Martin’s parents held a joint news conference with Sharpton — and a few hours before that, Attorney General Eric Holder, also at the convention, praised Sharpton for his “tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless.”
It was confirmation that Sharpton has pulled off one of the rarest second acts in American public life: from pariah to power player.
“It was a huge moment, because it was the coming together of everything,” Sharpton said, with his trademark vainglory. “We had the attorney general here and one of the biggest civil rights cases of the 21st century, and having to do TV and radio shows at the same time, it was all combined for everybody to see.” ...
On Thursday, the day after his most visible career triumph, Sharpton worked the ballroom at Washington’s convention center, grinning for photographs. Opening up for his breakfast speaker, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Sharpton regaled the crowd with a story of how Obama invited him and Newt Gingrich to the Oval Office and asked them to launch a five-city tour promoting education reform. When Duncan took the microphone, he requested “a huge round of applause for our leader, Reverend Al Sharpton.”
I suspect Milbank will get the message quickly: Ixnay on the Sharptonian Triumphalism (Rev. Al 24x7 is not one of Team Obama's re-election talking points).
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41 comments:
Here is another indication just how much things changed in the past 20 years - in 1990, they even made The Bonfire of the Vanities into a movie, with a huge budget and no less than Brian De Palma directing. Today, such a movie cannot even be made. Instant racist label. Even by Mel Gibson or whoever else is "rogue" in Hollywood these days.
One reason I've canceled my Journal subscription, and switched to the Financial Times. Its liberal all right, but their economics coverage is better (they haven't called Monti the Italian Thatcher like the Journal has) and they know a raw deal (the Euro for Southern Europe) when they see it.
Sharpton's "power" is probably at its peak. Which means he's riding for a fall. Hubris and all that. Whites don't love him, just fear him, and that in turn is based on fear from the media/elites. As the economy turns otherwise sober/staid suburban people into pseudo-hillbillies with nothing to lose, that's going to go away. How much "power" does say, the leader of Egypt's Copts wield (at 10% of Egypt's population roughly analogous in power/resources to Blacks in the US?)
Sharpton for all his blowhardiness, still owes the IRS about a couple of million dollars, and the city of New York about a million or so in back taxes. He's a semi-literate fool who can't see his danger, because he's been fat and happy all his life, as Machiavelli would say, he can't see the snares in waiting for him.
Romney's task is to have his Super PACs (not his fingerprints on it) tie Al Sharpton as tight as can be to Obama. Arguing that Sharpton economics = Whites lose their homes. That's pretty compelling. No one loves or trusts him, and toleration for Black riots in a deep recession is pretty darn low.
That is among the most sinister things I have ever read. We are truly in the grip of evil.
It was confirmation that Sharpton has pulled off one of the rarest second acts in American public life: from pariah to power player.
I've had my eye on Al Sharpton for decades. When was he a pariah? He always had access to TV cameras and was only rarely asked rude questions about his shenanigans.
There are three Americans who have diplomatic immunity within their own country: Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan. They can do pretty much as they please; the government fears them. Must be a cool feeling.
One of Jesse's daughter's got an on-air job at Fox News, presenting racial grievances.
Whatever happened to Jesse Jackson? Wasn't he the alpha dog for a while?
Jackson, for all his flaws, seemed a bit more reasonable of a man I've always found Sharpton to be somewhat of a clown. Says a lot that Sharpton has taken his place.
Oh, yeah. This guy is a Regular Don King of Politics now! He's got a Dead Duck President and Indictable Attorney General fawning over him like coyotes looking over a rooster in a henhouse!
Pride cometh before a Fall! With an Ugly Ass Bitch Prosecutor in Florida setting up an open and shut case of self-defense with his name all over it, he will be basking in the Glory any minute now!
Compare the power, wealth and prestige of the Rev. Al Sharpton with Dr. David Duke.
The Trayvon Martin case is being framed as a civil right and a race case. Poor Zimmerman has been painted as a White racist vigilante. The best defense strategy for him would have been to come out on television and ask for help in Spanish to his Hispanic brothers. "Los negros me quieren matar!" It would have been very ugly and mean, but then he would not be in jail awaiting trial for the murder of an unarmed schoolboy who looks like the President's dream son. Zimmerman will be punished for his unawareness of the central role of race in America and/or his timidity.
Should one laugh or cry at such "progress"?
Is Sharpton a predator, or a parasite? Or parasitoid?
Sharpton was actually a pretty shunned figure during the 1980s and 1990s. Mostly because of his bufoonish persona and anti-semitisim, both of which he's toned down. From around 2001 onward, he's set himself up as the new Jesse Jackson.
Yeah, Fox News hired Jesse Jackson's daughter for commentary.
Harry Baldwin said...
"I've had my eye on Al Sharpton for decades. When was he a pariah? He always had access to TV cameras and was only rarely asked rude questions about his shenanigans.
There are three Americans who have diplomatic immunity within their own country: Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan. They can do pretty much as they please; the government fears them. Must be a cool feeling."
Interestingly, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan are neighbors of Barack Obama's in the Kenwood - Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side (just like that "guy in the neighborhood," Bill Ayers). Most people don't seem to know that, although the media certainly does. It may have only been noted in Chicago circles, but when Obama stayed at his Chicago house over Memorial Day weekend in 2009, some of Farrakhan's bow-tied Nation of Islam guys got into a big brush up with a bunch of Washington reporters who were parked outside Minister Farrakhan's palatial abode as a Chicago businessman named Marty Nesbitt and an ultra VIP buddy watched the NBA playoffs with the good Minister (figure that one out for yourself).
As for Farrakhan being above the law, it's well known that he doesn't pay bills, but still receives all his services "on the house," or "comped." Has never paid for cable or satellite, but still gets VIP treatment when his dish needs servicing (or so I've heard).
Tony Rezko, who was the business manager for the Black Muslims and managed the career of their top convert, Muhammad Ali, is the expert on buying houses in that neighborhood, according to the President.
The media promotes race hustlers like Sharpton and Jackson. Out of all the black reverends and otherwise respectable types out there these are the ones who have been chosen to be reported on, almost breathlessly awaiting their next sound-bite. Without the generous patronage of the media they would be just local people preaching to the wind. So, the question is, why does the media select and promote these characters in preference to others?
As in the Zimmerman case the media does not just report the news, it creates it. It then reports on the news it itself created. We've been hearing about Emmett Till for over half a century now, again through the media. Why? A guy puts the moves on somebody else's spouse and gets killed, a story which happens every single day in black neighborhoods and is so mundane as to be barely notable. Who hands these people the megaphone and why?
It seems to me that Sharpton fits with the broad pattern of 24 hr news channels and TV talking heads shows selecting the loudest and most outrageous people to appear on their shows. The same mechanisms that gave us Jerry Fallwell and Bill O'Reilly gives us Al Sharpton.
As a society, we seek out the loudest and most offensive people and hand them megaphones. Then we give some very timid people with vague guidelines they'll be fired if they cross the other megaphones, to provide the "reasonable, balanced" perspective.
Whiskey, I'm blown away that you cancelled your WSJ subscription. I recently did so as well, but I suspect for different reasons.
Ever since Murdoch took over the WSJ it has become a neocon organ, but in the past 2 years they took off all their clothes and went crazy.
From hysterical editorials every time it looks like a war might be fought somewhere on the planet without the U.S. in the middle (Syria, Iran, central Africa, blah blah) to a front-page article applauding Chipotle's CEO "demanding" access to hordes of docile illegals lest his labor costs rise, the WSJ became the core of the "Invade the World, Invite the World" evil axis.
The final straw for me was a William McGurn editorial going on and on about all the Jews in the US Marine Corps and how "almost every Jew I know" has a family member in the USMC. And asking someone in his family "why is that so many of you Jews are in the Marines?" to which the unnamed family member laughed and said "well, we have to do something when we're not secretly running international finance".
Uh, okay I get it. Your fearless Jewish relatives take time off from voluntarily fighting in our ceaseless wars to puncture unfair Jewish stereotypes. All that was missing was the byline "William McGurn, writing from a different planet"...
Next day this conversation occurred: "hello WSJ circulation? I'd like to cancel my subscription to your absurd fantasy sheet"
Drunk Idiot said..."It's really pretty astonishing that the Zimmerman-as-racist-white-male narrative has stuck."
The gullible American public is tottaly at the mercy of the media... And who control the media???
Wait, you mean THIS Al Sharpton? Must not be the one in the following report since no US attotney general or elected offical would EVER praise this kind of tax cheat. BTW, race-pimping seems to be pretty profitable. I wish I had the income to be able to personally owe $3.5 Million in back taxes.
Rev. Al deep in the red
By ISABEL VINCENT and MELISSA KLEIN
Last Updated: 8:13 AM, December 11, 2011 NYP
Posted: 11:57 PM, December 10, 2011
The Rev. Al Sharpton’s nonprofit paid him nearly $242,000 — even as it carried $1.6 million in debt, according to documents obtained by The Post.
In all, the controversial activist and his empire, including the National Action Network and two for-profit companies, were $5.3 million in the red, public records show.
Most of NAN’s money woes stemmed from more than $880,000 in unpaid federal payroll taxes, interest and penalties. It also paid more than $100,000 to settle two lawsuits, byproducts of the unpaid bills.
And it still owed $206,252 in loans to Sharpton’s for-profit Bo-Spanky Consulting Inc. and Sharpton Media LLC, the records show.
Sharpton drew a $241,732 salary and perks that included first-class or charter air travel, tax filings show. He owes the IRS $2.6 million in income tax, and nearly $900,000 in state tax.
The defunct Rev-Al Communications Inc. owes the state almost $176,000, and Bo-Spanky is $3,500 behind on state-tax liens.
Sharpton has said he is on a repayment plan with state and federal-tax authorities.
I honestly think that people like Sharpton do more harm then good for the black community.
"Daybreaker said...
Compare the power, wealth and prestige of the Rev. Al Sharpton with Dr. David Duke."
Duke is as big a clown as Sharpton is, and he is as much a "Doctor" as is Sharpton a "Reverend".
The fact that FOX News subsidizes Sharpton's conference should give pause to everyone who things that FOX is conservative or in some way "on our side".
HBD and WN advocates can learn something from Sharpton.......never apologize. Never. Never concede your enemies' points. Not one. Not ever.
I don't get it. How? Why? It's understandable that a powerful civil rights rebel rouser would be an entitled, racist jerk with a pathological inability to feel shame or embarrassment. Okay. But how can it possibly be THIS goof? Why are people acting as if this silly buffoon is somehow important? There are many African Americans who are respectably intelligent. I'm sure some of them are sociopaths enough for the job. Is everyone pretending to take this clown seriously because they think everyone else takes him seriously? Or is it, like, a big inside joke?
Sharpton, Farrakhan and Jackson are only "powers" because the MSM chooses to feature them. Sharpton, especially, always seemed more like clownish entertaintment and 100% predictable than anything. You don't even need to know what he says. It's always the same. If he keels over from a stroke, they could stuff him and put a CD in the mouth spouting the usual. Nobody would know the difference. When he was running for president, he was known to stay in the most expensive hotels and run up the highest bills compared to other candidates. I guess people get the candidates they deserve. I just couldn't believe anyone took him seriously. The other two occasionally said things that actually made sense, mostly if they were being said 60 years ago. They are amazingly out of date. They depend so much on blacks being all oppressed and here we have one in the WH and one in the DOJ and one directing NASA (how the hell did THAT happen? The space race is one thing they absolutely did not contribute to except to be spam in a can a few times) and they are still acting like they still got to speak "truth to power." So sickening and repulsive. But it's all the media. Many intelligent black people do not agree and ignore them. Sometimes I think MSM puts these clowns up so that more rational blacks never get heard, because they don't tow the party line; or, it could just be there aren't any other blacks with those larger than life cartoon personalities the media so loves.
General Eric Holder, also at the convention, praised Sharpton
speechless
I don't know about you, but I think Al Sharpton is perfectly representative of blacks in general. The new definition of 'civil rights' is failure to acknowledge black exemption.
Hey, remember this incident with Carl Rowan?
"The 63-year-old Mr. Rowan, who has said that his life had been threatened in the past, has also said that he was confronted by Mr. Smith. He said that he warned the youth that he had a gun, but that the youth lunged at him. He fired what he said was a warning shot, which struck Mr. Smith in the wrist."
Rowan was for gun-control but had an illegal firearm. In self-defense, he shot a white teenager. I suppose that accounts for why black leaders didn't make a fuss over that one. But if Rowan had been a white conservative and if the teen had been black, I wonder how the controversy would have played out.
Maya/el dorado:
Presumably, what the MSM wants in spokesmen isn't intelligence or reasonableness or knowledge. There are plenty of blacks who have all three, but it would not fit the TV/cable networks' needs to put any of those blacks on TV, nor would it fit their agenda to put much of anyone onscreen who was going to go entirely off the reservation w.r.t. race, immigration, Israel, Wall Street, domestic spying, homeland security, impunity for those at the top, drug legalization, endless wars in godawful places most Americans can't find on a map, etc.
If they wanted smart, informed people, they'd have them. If they wanted people who would ignore interest groups and political parties and taboos to get to and report the truth, they'd have such people. Again, plainly, they don't. TV news and political talking heads shows aren't good sources of information or original high-quality thought because that's not what they're designed for--in the same way that McDonald's isn't a source of health food, and Wal-Mart isn't a source of fine luxury items. That's just not what they do.
I'm trying to imagine someone with Sharpton's verbal IQ running a show in his time slot without being Black.
Okay, I can imagine it...
No, Sharpton is self-made rather than media-made. He has an impressive ability to assemble large rent-a-mobs at a short notice. There is no way media can ignore a crowd of black people chanting "no justice no peace". It's almost a physical law. Which means they can't ignore Reverend Al.
For an interesting look at the kind of riff raff willing to be seen in support of him (rather than the covert power base) search up Mark Bowden's article in the Atlantic about his 2004 presidential run. I was amazed at how inept that campaign was. I remember C-SPAN following him around in Iowa--very amateurish, almost surreal to watch him interact with the caucus-goers who barely looked old enough to be college students and simply lacked an approach to socializing with him. The awkwardness to the point of pain was when they tried to discuss ethanol subsidies (or whatever!) with him.
The media counted him out after that, but by God does he manage to do a lot with a little. Everything is shoestring, rather than a huge Romney-style organization he just gets himself onto the right Rolodexes, or whatever is used now instead of a Rolodex.
I'm not so sure Al is the most precise analogue of Rev. Bacon, though the timing of course implicates him. There are still many, many more of that brand of black pastor even in NYC, and probably thousands nationwide. I often reminisce on Hillary's friend down in Atlanta, James Manning. Evidently this is a useful type in The Community.
Rev. Manning actually has a new video out about Rick Santorum's exit which is--well, I can't say I well follow his leaps of logic and oblique parables but it's a worthy example of the campus-protestor/AM-radio hybrid figure that Sharpton also portrays from an alternative, flexible partisan origin. These guys are good at sounding a little loony yet somehow w/o reeking of low-status urban loserdom (think weirdo-at-a-city-council-meeting loserosity).
Sharpton is not that good a publicist. Treyvon was shot on February 26 and it is only a stroke of luck that it displaced the story of the 50 shootings over the Saint Patrick's weekend in Chicago when the story finally appeared in late March. And even then it stunk of Twana Braley.
No, Sharpton is self-made rather than media-made. He has an impressive ability to assemble large rent-a-mobs at a short notice.
self made? :
http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-10-12/news/bigger-and-blacker/
Bigger and Blacker
How the former mayor made Al Sharpton kosher and is winning back the hearts of African Americans
I understand a group of jewish leaders approached Farrakan with a similar offer- drop the 'anti semitic' stuff and we'll give you media access, etc. But he turned them down.
and lets not forget who funded the black panthers and why they suddenly lost interest in them.
and Komment Kontrol, why did you not post this earlier?
The greatest power of the media is the power to define who is the spokesman for each group. Having Jerry Fallwell as the spokesman for all Christians or Al Sharpton as the spokesman for all blacks is a very effective way of controlling what Americans think other people believe. If some common beliefs are never or almost never expressed by these spokesmen, it's easy to convince yourself that nobody really has them.
The media are, among other things, the internal communications of the country with itself. Controlling that gives its owners a hell of a lot of power to head off inconvenient movements by, say, not showing antiwar protests when the powers that be have decided to go to war, not covering the pre-emptive, thuggish arrests of protesters and journalists at the RNC in St Paul, covering Tea Party events by finding the whackjob carrying a gun and with a racist slogan on his T shirt to represent a rally of hudreds or thousands of people, setting up Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck as the spokesmen for these movements, covering the Occupy protests as a joke about dirty hippies and unemployable pupperty majors, absolutely never finding out what the enlisted troops in Afghanistan think about our wars, defining what hispanics think by getting a Puerto Rican politician, a Mexican-American politician, and an angry lady from La Raza to be their spokesmen, etc.
Go look at the polling data from places like the Pew Center some time. The difference between what the media-appointed spokesmen say and what surveys of real people say is striking.
Wait, wait, wait, what am I missing here.
You mean to tell me Sharpton is still a topic of conversation? Do people really still talk about Al Sharpton?
Rlly?
'Is Sharpton a predator, or a parasite? Or parasitoid?'
He's a blackateer* just like those other race hustlers including Obama and Holder.
*'The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering, and it allows for the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes which they ordered others to do or assisted them, closing a perceived loophole that allowed someone who told a man to, for example, murder, to be exempt from the trial because they did not actually do it.'
i bet rupert murdoch isn't even aware of this either. but it show that corporate globalists like the modern US left (they no longer care about increasing wages but rather care about amensty now).
his show on MSNBC is a joke.
"self made? :
http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-10-12/news/bigger-and-blacker/
Bigger and Blacker
How the former mayor made Al Sharpton kosher and is winning back the hearts of African Americans
I understand a group of jewish leaders approached Farrakan with a similar offer- drop the 'anti semitic' stuff and we'll give you media access, etc. But he turned them down.
and lets not forget who funded the black panthers and why they suddenly lost interest in them.
and Komment Kontrol, why did you not post this earlier?"
So the only thing that matters to be a media personality is no be/ or perceived anti-semitic?
Harry,
The only reason Jesse, Al and Louis have diplomatic immunity is that they are tools for the establishment. The Three Black Stooges are useful idiots in stirring up race wars and diverting attention from examples like Geo. W. Obama signing the Natl. Defense Authorization Act which further cements the Fuhrerzenprip into what passes for American constitutional jurisprudence. (Previous to this the first Geo. W. "did the right thing" by signing the "Patriot" Act into law.)
Consequently, any criticism of the agregious aggrandizing of power to the Federal govt. or the executive branch is now either unpatriotic or raciss, if not both.
IOW the establishment didn't call it hope and change for nothing.
When the Dancing Bear routine gets old or useless, our power trio will be dispatched via yet another political show trial or more probably a IRS hitjob and will disappear without even an oilslick to show for it on the face of the Great American Media Mare.
cheers
"How the former mayor made Al Sharpton kosher and is winning back the hearts of African Americans"
Jews are MLK-ing Sharpton.
I think if Sharpton had been around in the 50s, Jews would have groomed him and Sharpton would have played along(at least publicly). And we would have a Al statue in the Mall.
And if MLK had gained prominence in the 80s, he would have acted like Al.
>Someday, there will be Civil Rights reenactments, just like there are Civil War reenactments now.<
A brilliant and probably prescient remark.
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