Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've previously detailed how conservatives have decided that only conservatives, and not liberals, are permitted to use the plantation as a political metaphor. WorldNetDaily columnist Ellis Washington is an upholder of that standard.
Washington keeps it up in his Jan. 26 WND column chastising an unnamed "preacher" for giving "support to your mistress" -- that is, Hillary Clinton -- "as she, though shorter than you, looked down to you and upon all who witnessed this spectacle." Washington offers no evidence that Clinton "looks down" on blacks. Ellis goes on to add:
Black preachers across America have been in the forefront of controlling black people's political liberty every election year by demanding their flock vote for a political party that has an unashamed history of undermining your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations under the guise of helping you. On this point, Rev. Preacher, you and your colleagues have been like the overseers of the plantation during slavery times. You have been accorded just enough power by "Masser" to keep those in your charge "on the plantation"; otherwise, what use are you to the Democrat Party?
Guess all that conservative outrage over Clinton using "plantation" as a political metaphor was hypocritical and meaningless, eh, Mr. Washington?
In his zeal to bash Democrats, Washington also gets his facts wrong. he writes:
Jefferson's first promise to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence was denied to your people from the beginning by the evil institution of slavery. Later, by Democrat politicians largely from the South and also by their de facto Brownshirts, the Klu Klux Klan. Two of the KKK's most notable members, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, are both proud Democrats – their infamous membership in the KKK never repudiated by the Democrats to this day.
As we've noted, Byrd has, in fact, repeatedly apologized for his Klan membership. As for Black, evidence suggests that he was a member for a couple of years in the 1920s out of a combination of political expediency and anti-Catholic animus, not out of racist sympathies. Anyway, his record of championing civil rights -- which Washington curiously fails to mention -- far outstrips his Klan link; as a review of a Black biography notes, "he wrote a ringing opinion upholding the rights of four southern blacks from whom police had coerced a confession of murder" and "Black more than paid for his KKK affiliation with his support of the 1954 school desegregation decision, which rendered him until almost the end of his life a virtual exile in his home state [of Alabama]."
