Monday, March 09, 2015

ON THE 50TH SELMA ANNIVERSARY, RIGHTIES PAUSE TO REMEMBER THE REAL VICTIMS: GEORGE AND LAURA BUSH

Yesterday, forty thousand people in Selma, Alabama, remembered a day of brutal violence directed at civil rights marchers in that city fifty years ago. It would be nice to think that right-wingers could respond to this commemoration by interrupting their 24/7/365 self-pity party. But no -- for right-wingers, yesterday was all about how they're mistreated. Here's the Media Research Center's Tim Graham at NewsBusters:
NY Times Crops George and Laura Bush Out of Front-Page Photo of Selma Anniversary

MRC's Dan Gainor alerted us that Ben Smith of the Daily Signal tweeted out a shocking visual: the New York Times front page on Sunday cropped George W. and Laura Bush out of its photo of a Selma anniversary march. They cropped it just to include President Obama. (Notice the Bushes didn't try to crowd right next to the president to get into the frame.)


Omigod! The Times couldn't possibly have concluded that it was appropriate to put the president of the United States and the wheelchair-bound marchers accompanying him front and center on the front page. It must have been anti-white racism that motivated the exclusion of Bush ... and, er, the black man who was also cropped between the right edge of the photo and where the Bushes were marching! Yes, that's the only possible explanation!

This is a huge news story, so, naturally, Fox is all over it:



And the lead item at Fox Nation is another story about how mean everyone is to poor George W., a story from Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller:
MLK Lieutenant Refuses To March With George W. Bush At Selma Event

A civil rights leader refused to march across the historic bridge in Selma during the 50th anniversary celebration Saturday because former President George W. Bush was also marching.

Diane Nash, described as a lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr., said she did not wish to march across the bridge in Alabama because she said Bush represented violence -- something she claimed was at odds with the Selma legacy.

Nash became a close associate of King’s and is credited as one of the architects of the Selma voting rights marches. She is also considered one of the only women to have been included in King’s inner circle, according to one local news report.
I'll confess that I enjoy the way Ross doesn't even pretend he knew a thing about Nash until he started Googling: She's "described as a lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr."! And she was one of the only women in King's inner circle -- "according to one local news report"!

Well, that just reflects the knowledge level of the right-wing media's audience, I guess. Here's my favorite comment in the Fox Nation thread:



Yeah, what has Nash done anyway?
In 1960 she became the chairperson of the student sit-in movement in Nashville, Tenn., the first southern city to desegregate its lunch counters, as well as one of the founding students of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1961 she coordinated the Freedom Rides from Birmingham, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi....

Through her involvement with SNCC and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Nash worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr....

Her many arrests for her civil rights activities culminated when she was imprisoned for 30 days in 1961, while she was pregnant with her first child. Undeterred, she went on to help organize the 1963 March on Washington and joined a national committee that promoted passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- to which she was appointed by President John F. Kennedy.

Nash later became active in the peace movement that worked to end the Vietnam War and became an instructor in the philosophy and strategy of non-violence as developed by Mohandas Gandhi.
Yeah, what a lightweight -- right, "capitilismisgood" [sic]?

(UPDATE: Also see the right-wing BizPac Review, where Nash is called a "civil rights 'leader'" -- yes, seriously.)

I'm being unfair, of course -- racism no longer exists, the civil rights laws signed by a Democratic president were all the work of Republicans, and the Bushes suffered worse on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 2015 than the marchers did in 1965. Haven't I learned my wingnut lessons well?
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6 comments:

  1. Glennis9:11 AM

    composition-wise the "cropped" version is much more powerful, as in the other photo version, the focus is drawn to the traffic lights overhead instead of to the marchers.

    And this is bullshit, actually, because in Smith's tweet, it's not even the same photo - the photo on the left is taken from a different point of view, from higher up. If you look at the people, it's obvious that it's two different photo, probably taken by two different photographers.

    So whether the photo on the right was cropped or not, it wasn't cropped from the photo on the left.

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  2. Victor9:38 AM

    Aunt Snow,
    Don't confuse the stupid and ignorant while they're in the middle of one of their rants.

    Getting rabies may be the result.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Glennis9:49 AM

    Yes, the right wing are so sensitive, the outrage du jour is about how a photographer framed his shot.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Philo Vaihinger9:50 AM

    My God, that was one hell of a speech.

    Literally, a beautiful speech.

    Maybe his best.

    It will surely become one of the defining speeches of the progressive, democratic tradition in American politics.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Roger11:55 AM

    They cropped the Clintons and the Carters out of the frame too!

    (This is the up and coming wingnut wanking point.)

    ReplyDelete
  6. anthrosciguy4:34 PM

    The alternate photos in the Twitter complaints are just not a very good photos. If I were a pro assembling a portfolio, I wouldn't include either one. It's just not very good. And given where they were marching, I don't think you could get a very good photo with all of them; way too busy. The Fox tweet photo in particular is hopeless because of the median in the road.

    ReplyDelete