Doggone. That man cannot do anything right, at all. WOW! 😯
Update: I do believe that the President is worthy of this:
and this:
Via the Washington Post: (…..of all people!!! 😯 )
A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes beyond the beige.
President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.
Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.
For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.
A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
[…]
Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
The president is at minimum well-served by Parker’s presence in the room. Parker embodied the early 19th-century reformer’s passionate zeal for taking on several social causes at once. Many of these reformers were Unitarians or Quakers; some were
"D'oh!"
Transcendentalists. Most courageously, as early as the 1830s, they opposed the laws on slavery and eventually harbored fugitives in the Underground Railroad network of safe houses. Without 30 years of a movement agitating and petitioning for slave emancipation, Lincoln could not have ended slavery with the stroke of a pen in the midst of war. Parker was in the vanguard that laid the social and intellectual groundwork.
The familiar quote from Lincoln woven into Obama’s rug is “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” the well-known utterance from the close of his Gettysburg Address in 1863.
Funny that in 1850, Parker wrote, “A democracy — that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”
Theodore Parker, Oval Office wordmeister for the ages.
I will not take the harsh slams that the other Bloggers on the right are doing. But, man, that is such a stupid screw up.
However, when you have amateur politicians in the White House; one can only expect so much. Just as well, Sarah Palin, being quite the amateur herself could have made the same mistake.
Others: : JustOneMinute, Gateway Pundit, Freedom’s Lighthouse, American Thinker and Outside the Beltway
It’s funny: the article actually shows that, while Martin Luther King, Jr. may have been paraphrasing Theodore Parker, the rug in the Oval Office is–as the Obama administration has suggested–quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. Just as Lincoln was certainly paraphrasing Parker, but the rug quotes Lincoln.
It’s interesting to bring attention to a lesser-known intellectual who obviously had such an influence on his contemporaries. However, it seems rather stupid to me to twist this intellectual history into a chance to call the Obama administration a bunch of “amateur politicians” on par with Sarah Palin. If you understand what the difference between “quoting” and “paraphrasing” is, then you understand that the intended “criticism” of the Obama administration here is just more knee-jerk politics in place of rational thought.
I do. Hence the reason why I didn’t nail him nearly as hard as some did. On the other hand; one would think that Obama would have better researchers in his administration, than the those he does have now. He is, after all, the President.
On the other hand, when you are a socialist President and partly black; one would expect that that you would be better prone to give MLK credit for the saying; than the actual white man, than made it.
I’m just sayin’
It’s the Post’s author who is “wrong” when he says: “Except it’s not a King quote.” There’s nothing whatever to nail. The quotations of King and Lincoln are accurate. What do you expect on the rug, a footnote pointing out that Parker said something similar? This is just ridiculous posturing.
That could be; what gets me, is the post itself published that. 😮
I could see it from the New York Post, Washington Times…. but the Post?
Color me gobsmacked on that one.
Why? The Washington Post’s politics are well to the right of center, and have been for decades. No surprise that they’re sniping at Obama, any more than when they got snippy with the last Democrat in the WH.
I’m always gobsmacked by American conservatives who’ve convinced themselves that center-right media outlets in the US are actually hard-leftists. You need to read some non-American newspapers to get a notion of what left-wing politics really looks like.
If WaPo has any particular bias, it’s in favor of good government / oversight of Executive Branch. That shouldn’t be an exclusively left-wing or Democratic viewpoint, though maybe it is these days.
Maybe it is because the Washington Post was in “Hosanna Mode” about Obama during the election.