Rep. Charles Rangel is the latest politico who wins The Foot In Mouth Award PLUS our Get A Life Award for one of the most extreme and fatuous comments uttered outside of any Rush Limbaugh broadcast:
WASHINGTON – Comparing President Bush to the Birmingham, Ala., police commissioner whose resistance to the civil rights movement became synonymous with Southern racism, Rep. Charles Rangel said yesterday of the president: “George Bush is our Bull Connor.”
Mr. Rangel’s metaphoric linkage of Mr. Bush to the late Theophilus “Bull” Connor – who in 1963 turned fire hoses and attack dogs on blacks, including Martin Luther King Jr., demonstrating in favor of equal rights – met with wild applause and cheering at a Congressional Black Caucus town hall meeting, part of the organization’s 35th Annual Legislative Conference.
It’s clear Rangel’s comments will be lambasted by Republicans, but it’ll be interesting to see how many independents, independent thinkers and Democrats denounce it. As they should.
This is the kind of verbal tripe that has poisoned American politics — a statement that’s “red meat” to fire up people in a room up but that serves no purpose except to arouse angry passions — and is factually a big heap of this.
Yours truly was alive during the time of Bull Connor. And George Bush is no Bull Connor.
Just as Charlie Rangel is no student of history.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.