Friday, January 20, 2006

Hillary’s View of the House of Representatives “Plantation”: Typical Overstatement

hillary plantatin
It’s coming to be a Democratic tradition on Martin Luther King’s day that those seeking high office exaggerate, spindle and mutilate the truth for headlines, using a racial tag as a grabber. Nothing recent has tied the Hillary Rodham Clinton statement delivered in a typical scream before a wildly approving black audience than the House of Representatives under Republicans has become a “plantation.” Earlier, Al Gore used a similar forum to shout great doubt that President Bush followed time-honored security procedure notwithstanding that Bill Clinton had done the same. Frenetic partisans are expected to ignore this but those who concentrate on the details see the subterfuge.

As one who labored as a lowly staffer in a House that was run by Democrats for decades, Ms. Clinton doesn’t know what a plantation was. For one thing, the Sam Rayburn House wantonly mistreated one of the two African American committee chairmen, negated his chairmanship and forced him to return to his district where he ran again and was reelected by the voters. That was Adam Clayton Powell who along with Illinois’ William Dawson was one of two black chairmen, Powell of Education and Labor. Unlike Dawson who was a quiet, get-along-go-along player, Powell was a Harlem minister and exciting speaker, a tall, ruggedly handsome, brilliant man with a recklessness in his personal life that proved to be a scandal to the white southern Democratic establishment that ran the House: people who, in addition to Rayburn, involved “Judge” Howard Smith of Virginia who ran Rules and his deputy, Bill Colmer of Pascagoula, Mississippi. I knew Colmer fairly well later in life along with his then chief of staff, a man named Trent Lott.

The married Powell made a habit of running around with white women which was a scandal to the string-tie southerners. After he went to Bimini with one for a vacation, the real plantation owners in the House put up such a howl that the l’affair Powell became grist for the tabloid mill. This along with other fancied indignities led to the Democratic plantation people un-horsing Powell from his committee. He was publicly disgraced and went back to Harlem where he won easily in a special election and returned. But his committee chairmanship was gone and he served not long after that in a kind of purgatory. No one knows about this better than the man who ultimately defeated him, one who usually is very vocal about racial matters, Charlie Rangel. Wonder why he didn’t pipe up about the Republican plantation? Probably because he knows full well the story of the real Plantation where white southern bigots ran the House, reelected in a segregationist south and named people to key chairmanships who sat on civil rights legislation for years. I still can’t get over the chutzpah of Hillary Clinton, who should know this history, getting away with that crack before the amen corner in Harlem!

5 comments:

  1. I really don't think Hillary is planning of running in '08. She makes comments that she know will come back to haunt her in a presidential race. She is either the dumbest broad on the planet, or she isn't gonna run... we'll see which proves true...

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  2. "Earlier, Al Gore used a similar forum to shout great doubt that President Bush followed time-honored security procedure notwithstanding that Bill Clinton had done the same."

    Not so.

    On the January 16 edition of CNN's Larry King Live, Gonzales characterized Gore's speech as "inconsistent" with both the Clinton administration's use of unwarranted physical searches in the Aldrich Ames espionage case and then-deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick's 1994 testimony that the president had the "inherent authority" to conduct such searches:

    KING: General, Al Gore said today that President Bush repeatedly and persistently broke the law with the NSA domestic spying program and he wants a special counsel named to investigate. What are your thoughts?

    GONZALES: Well, I didn't see the speech of the former vice president. What I can say is that this program from its inception has been carefully reviewed by lawyers throughout the administration, people who are experienced in this area of the law, experienced regarding this technology. And we believe the president does have legal authorities to authorize this program.

    I would say that with respect to comments by the former vice president, it's my understanding that during the Clinton administration there was activity regarding the physical searches without warrants; Aldrich Ames as an example. I can also say that it's my understanding that the deputy attorney general testified before Congress that the president does have the inherent authority under the Constitution to engage in physical searches without a warrant, and so those would certainly seem to be inconsistent with what the former vice president was saying today.

    But the unwarranted physical searches conducted by the FBI in the Ames case occurred in 1993, before the 1995 FISA amendment requiring warrants for physical searches, as Media Matters for America has noted. Moreover, there is ample evidence that the Clinton administration's investigation of Ames did comply with the FISA statutes governing wiretapping -- the very laws that the Bush administration chose to ignore.

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  3. "Sam Rayburn House wantonly mistreated one of the two African American committee chairmen, negated his chairmanship and forced him to return to his district where he ran again and was reelected by the voters. That was Adam Clayton Powell"

    According to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Adam Clayton Powell was "excluded from membership in the Ninetieth Congress pursuant to H.Res. 278, on February 28, 1967" http://tinyurl.com/cymcs

    But in 1967 -- according to the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum -- Sam Rayburn had been dead and buried for SIX YEARS. http://tinyurl.com/yi0x

    Sam Rayburn must have been a supernaturally powerful Speaker of the House to rule From Beyond the Grave like that.

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  4. "The married Powell made a habit of running around with white women which was a scandal to the string-tie southerners. After he went to Bimini with one for a vacation, the real plantation owners in the House put up such a howl that the l’affair Powell became grist for the tabloid mill. This along with other fancied indignities led to the Democratic plantation people un-horsing Powell from his committee."

    According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "in the early 1960s [Powell] became involved in a lawsuit with a woman who claimed he had wrongly accused her of collecting police graft. He was cited for contempt of court in 1966 for refusing to pay damages, and in 1967 the House voted to deprive him of his seat."
    http://tinyurl.com/7jds8

    Maybe "running around with white women" was the real reason that Powell was removed from office, but it seems a bit disingenuous to leave out the little matter of an unpaid $246,000 -- $1,400,500 in 2006 dollars -- libel judgment.

    But despite three errors of omission and commission in a three paragraph post, I am sure your underlying thesis is sound.

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  5. http://www.tasinifornewyork.org/issues/iraq

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