US Representative John Conyers is one of the most noisome sacks of maggots in the carcass of our body politic today. A consistent enemy of liberty in all forms, he has authored or supported bills at various times, in recent years, increasing the scope of governmental powers to seize private property, repressive "single-payer" nationalized health care, and in 2005 (and possibly in the works again now) an attempt at America's first tentative step towards a blasphemy law - one that gave special mention of and protection to of Islam and the Quran.
Conyers has also for decades used a tattered and dog-eared race card to silence opponents of his freedom-robbing schemes.
As it turns out, his wife is made of similar stuff.
Elected, I'm sure ENTIRELY on her own merits and having nothing to do with being the wife of a powerful senior congressman, to the Detroit City Council in 2006, she is now its President.
Detroit is not exactly known as a font of good government, but a recent raucous council featured Ms. Conyers leading something that more resembled a racist lynch mob (irony fully intended) than the deliberation of a democractic body.
From the Detroit Daily News, 3/1/09:
Commentary: Elect a crazy council, get crazy results
Nowhere is Michigan's brain drain on greater display than in the Detroit City Council chambers.My hopes for Detroit's future faded as I watched the tape of last Tuesday's council meeting, the one that considered the Cobo Center expansion deal.
It was a tragic circus, a festival of ignorance that confirmed the No. 1 obstacle to Detroit's progress is the bargain basement leaders that city voters elect. The black nationalism that is now the dominant ideology of the council was on proud display, both at the table and in the audience.
Speakers advocating for the deal were taunted by the crowd and cut short by Council President Monica Conyers, who presided over the hearing like an angry bulldog; whites were advised by the citizens to, "Go home."
Opponents were allowed to rant and ramble on uninterrupted about "those people" who want to steal Detroit's assets and profit from the city's labors.
A pitiful Teamster official who practically crawled to the table on his knees expressing profuse respect for this disrespectful body was battered by both the crowd and the council.
When he dared suggest that an improved Cobo Center would create more good-paying jobs for union workers, Conyers reminded him, "Those workers look like you; they don't look like me."
Desperate, he invoked President Barack Obama's message of unity and was angrily warned, "Don't yousay his name here."
Juxtapose the place and the faces and imagine a white Livonia City Council treating a black union representative with such overt racial hostility. The Justice Department would swoop down like a hawk, and the Rev. Al Sharpton would clog Five Mile Road with protesters.
But in Detroit, dealing with the council's bigotry is part of the cost of doing business. As is dealing with its incompetence. (I'll pause here and excuse from that indictment Sheila Cockrel and Brenda Jones, who supported the Cobo deal, as did Kwame Kenyatta, who although he's an avowed nationalist, most often votes in the city's best interests.)
Emmet Moten, the developer who just opened the Fort Shelby Hotel downtown, was at the meeting and found it appalling. Moten went to Lansing in 1983 on behalf of Mayor Coleman Young to successfully lobby for a regional tax to support Cobo.
"And now we're saying, 'We don't want your money,'" Moten says. "If Coleman were alive today, he'd be outraged. It hurts, it really hurts."
Now, Moten says, "we Detroiters gotta be outraged."
Outraged enough to go to the polls in November and elect a brighter, more responsible council. Moten and others I talked with this week are encouraged that mayoral primary voters picked Dave Bing and Ken Cockrel Jr., the two most rational candidates on the ballot.
The test now will be whether it's those primary voters or the angry council crowd who represent the real Detroit.
As Moten notes, "You can't fix this for us. We have to fix it ourselves."
Nobody can help Detroit if voters again elect a City Council composed of separatists, clueless dowagers and the apparently insaneNote the overt racism on display. As has been noted elsewhere, the left, whether "liberal" or "progressive" is generally incapable of calling this what it is when it comes from anyone other than anglo whites. While it is deeply hypocritical when compared with their own stated views, it IS in fact consistent with rarely stated, but deeply rooted on the left, Marxist structural theories of justice in which what is just depends entirely on who is doing it and who is on the receiving end. That is - if an "oppressed" person does something, it can be OK even if it would be wrong for an "oppressor" to do the same thing. Or, in other words, it is a form of ends-justifying-means thinking.
Don't believe me? How much have you heard about this in the media? How much do you think you would hear if the racial lines were, as mentioned by the writer of the article above, reversed - and to make a better analogy, if it were say, Cindy McCain presiding over and egging it on.
Also - note the sacerdotal treatment of Obama: "Don't YOU say HIS name here". Yes, let we unbelievers and folk of impure blood be barred from saying HIS name in vain. It is going to be a long four years.
There is an old saying that people get the government they deserve. That may be true of those who vote for, fight for, or otherwise support said government. Unfortunately, the rest of us get that government too.