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A comment by Maynard

If the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” isn’t part of your vernacular, consider this your lesson of the day.

As far as Imus goes…I’ve never paid him any attention, so I’m not in a position to defend or attack him. If I’ve momentarily tuned him in now and again, he didn’t hold my interest.

However, whatever his merits and demerits, Imus is just another media curmudgeon. He’s not particularly responsible for keeping black people down, and taking him out will not do anything to improve the state of the world. Everybody knows this. The firing is just a war trophy for the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton.

I’ll mention the degeneration of the civil rights establishment, but my words hardly matter. That is to say, when we speak of racial issues, emotions trump reason. The facts condemn Al Sharpton as a reprehensible man with blood on his hands, but his star will nevertheless ascend until people get sick of him. His silly little victory over Imus, which most people regard with scorn, may be the beginning of the end.

Sharpton’s best-known transgression was his role in the Tawana Brawley case in 1987. Brawley was a black woman who fabricated a claim of having been abducted and raped by white men. Sharpton jumped in and named Steven Pagones, a New York prosecutor, as the perpetrator. The whole thing was nonsense, and the liars were eventually exposed and ordered to pay damages. Sharpton never apologized for his slander.

More serious, although less widely known, was Sharpton’s role in fomenting the Crown Heights anti-Jewish riots of 1991, and his incendiary speeches prior to the 1995 attack on a New York store that left seven people dead. A summary from this article:

In 1991, Sharpton spoke at the funeral of a black child in Brooklyn. The Hasidic Jews involved in the traffic accident that took the child’s life, Sharpton preached, were “diamond merchants.” Sharpton then led 400 angry demonstrators through the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights, a marcher at his side carrying a sign reading: “The White Man is the Devil.” A Kristallnacht of four nights of rock and bottle throwing at Jewish homes followed. A young Talmudic scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, was surrounded by thugs yelling “Kill the Jew.” He was stabbed to death, but before dying, identified the man who stabbed him. This young black, apprehended with the bloody knife in his pocket, was found not guilty by a racially mixed jury during the administration of Giuliani’s predecessor, New York’s first black mayor, David Dinkins. Dinkins’ Police Commissioner, Lee Brown, declared that “Sharpton came close to the line of inciting [to riot] but did not actually cross it.”

In 1995 in Harlem, when, during a tenant-landlord dispute, Freddy’s Fashion Mart attempted to evict a black-owned record store, Sharpton organized protests against what he called a “conspiracy” by a “white interloper.” It was, as one of Sharpton’s lieutenants told protesters, a “Jewish department store.” After one demonstration, a protester ran into the store, gunned down several employees, and set it ablaze. Seven, including Hispanics and a black security guard, died. As Boston Herald columnist Don Feder wrote of this carnage, “Don’t fault Sharpton for not being inclusive.”

In short, Sharpton isn’t simply an opportunistic liar and slanderer. He played a significant role in inciting violence and murder. He’s not just a man we disagree with; he is evil.

So how did this despicable man become a power broker? What was he doing addressing the Democratic convention in 2004? Why is he treated as if he were respectable when the facts so clearly condemn him?

As I’ve noted, when it comes to politics in general and racial politics in particular, emotions overwhelm reason. So the facts don’t matter as much as they should. Even so, I’m getting a sense of rising disgust directed at Sharpton and all who have allied themselves with him. We haven’t seen the last of his ugliness, and his core supporters will stick with him forever. But he may have peaked, and his descent may eventually weaken the useless, self-serving machine that the civil rights establishment has degenerated into. One can hope, anyway.