ninme

KC Star - Jason Whitlock: Lessons from Jena, La. (Mr Whitlock is black, which I mention because other people being black keeps coming up)

There are undeniable racial and economic inequities in our criminal justice system, and from afar the “Jena Six” rallies certainly looked and felt like the righteous protests of the 1960s.

But the reality is Thursday’s protests are just another sign that we remain deeply locked in denial about the path we need to travel today for true American liberation, equality and power in the new millennium.

The fact that we waited to love Mychal Bell until after he’d thrown away a Division I football scholarship and nine months of his life is just as heinous as the grossly excessive attempted-murder charges that originally landed him in jail.

Reed Walters, the Jena district attorney, is being accused of racism because he didn’t show Bell compassion when the teenager was brought before the court for the third time on assault charges in a two-year span.

Where was our compassion long before Bell got into this kind of trouble?

That’s the question that needed to be asked in Jena and across the country on Thursday. But it wasn’t asked because everyone has been lied to about what really transpired in the small southern town.

There was no “schoolyard fight” as a result of nooses being hung on a whites-only tree.

Justin Barker, the white victim, was cold-cocked from behind, knocked unconscious and stomped by six black athletes. Barker, luckily, sustained no life-threatening injuries and was released from the hospital three hours after the attack.

A black U.S. attorney, Don Washington, investigated the “Jena Six” case and concluded that the attack on Barker had absolutely nothing to do with the noose-hanging incident three months before. The nooses and two off-campus incidents were tied to Barker’s assault by people wanting to gain sympathy for the “Jena Six” in reaction to Walters’ extreme charges of attempted murder.

Much has been written about Bell’s trial, the six-person all-white jury that convicted him of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery and the clueless public defender who called no witnesses and offered no defense. It is rarely mentioned that no black people responded to the jury summonses and that Bell’s public defender was black.

Okay, so, moving back to that first line I quoted:

the “Jena Six” rallies certainly looked and felt like the righteous protests of the 1960s

And the Althouse quote I just put in my twitter:

It’s pathetic that we’re reduced to going to Wikipedia because the mainstream news of a current event is too skimpy.

James Taranto has been on about the MSM’s unfortunate habit of this sort of thing, regarding those idiotic anti-war protests last weekend:

The Times gives away the game when it says, in its lead paragraph, that the event “evoked the angry spirit of the Vietnam era protests of more than three decades ago.” But that era’s protests drew huge numbers of people, many of them young men who didn’t want to get drafted and young women who didn’t want the supply of men curtailed by the draft.

Many of those baby boomers grew up to be journalists, and many of them wish to keep alive the idea that their motives back then were idealistic rather than selfish. So it’s no wonder that the press describes today’s Potemkin “antiwar” movement as if it were the real thing.

And:

Our main criticism, though, was of the journalists who cover these putative protests. A reporter’s job is to describe today’s world, not relive yesterday’s.

Honest to god, people.

Then, while I’m on hte subject, Tim Blair’s been all over this: A little while ago Bush made a perfectly reasonable comment about the rather unhappy situation in Iraq’s political world and its causations, namely,

“where’s Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas. He was a brutal tyrant that divided people up and split families, and people are recovering from this”

And now pretty much everyone who’s ever been paid for putting words to paper (thump, thump, thump) has been putting many, many words to paper showing how utterly retarded they all are.

Actually, you know what this might be? Okay, in comedy, there’s two kinds of jokes: There’s funny because it’s ridiculous, and funny because it’s true. Bush talks funny and often sounds like he’s an idiot. Making fun of him in that way is funny because it’s true. He also made a comment that he doesn’t read newspaper accounts of what he’s up to, which people took to mean that he doesn’t read, which, combined with the way he talks, is also funny because it’s true. However, that joke became the base point of truth, and now people are telling jokes that he is an idiot and that he really doesn’t read which only work because they’re funny because they’re true. Except they’re not true, so they’re not funny. But if the joke’s well-delivered than it’ll still get a laugh and whatever. It’s just laziness. But this laziness has spread and infested everyone in the world’s small little struggling under-developed pea of a brain, and they’re so used to falling back on the “truth” that Bush is an idiot that now they’re making complete and utter asses of themselves because they can’t snap the hell out of it and put two synapses together long enough to realize what the hell is going on in the world.

Bah.