Posted on 09/04/2010 8:01:18 AM PDT by BreezyDog
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.
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."
King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.
Yet somehow a mistake was made and magnified in our culture to the point that a New England antebellum abolitionist's words have been enshrined in the Oval Office while attributed to a major 20th-century figure. That is a shame, because the slain civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was so eloquent in his own right.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Thank you for the post.
I tried one search for existing threads but I usually give up after one try with that horrible search tool.
When I first read the quote the phrasing did sound a bit antiquated even for King’s style.
Butt at least a wet f**t produces something......
Obama is representative of his culture.
Re-defining shallow daily.
And we taxpayers will get to pay for the new replacement rug. The crap from this ‘man’ never ends...............
Now that there is funny! Did you do it?
The information was out there but to have the comPost criticizing the messiah, well that’s worthy of a thread of it’s own.
And this guy has been acclaimed to be such an intelligent fellow, even by his detractors. How easily people will allow themselves to be fooled. How sad that so many have been spell bound by Obama whose only notable worth is that he can read a speech and arouse his audience into a frenzy. That is ALL he can do.
Obama is nothing more than a good carnival barker getting people to believe they will see a two-headed man if they come into the tent and see the side show. Too bad he wasn't around when P.T. Barnum was alive. Obama would have brought in lots of money for the circus.
This example, however, is only a drop in the ocean of such fallacious claims about America's noble history and the brave men and women who shined the light of liberty across the world and across the generations who followed them.
Whether out of sheer ignorance, or deliberate misrepresentation, this arrogant administration displays a shallow understanding of both the history of civilization's struggle to be free and the magnificent efforts of those who discovered and implemented the ideas of liberty through our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Such a frivolous thing as allowing a quotation to be inaccurately attributed is just another in the long line of examples of failure to "vet," or failure to have all the information needed, before going public with some project.
“Now that there is funny! Did you do it?”
Nope.
Found it on Google Images and borrowed it for the occasion.
Just proves obama is a dumbass.
Actually the Post is wrong. What’s new about reporters being inaccurate.
Parker ( a distant relative of mine) did say something like that, but Martin Luther King, Jr. paraphrased it to the quote used on the rug. He credited Parker a couple times but then incorporated the quote in his speeches.
The original said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” This is from his 1853 sermon Justice and the Conscience
That’s the original source but it’s different from Doctor Kings words when he paraphrased it: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
No it was paid for by a private foundation. No tax payers money was used. The foundation was set up to do this kind of thing and to insure that tax payers funds were not used.
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