We can obviously tell a lot about a person by the way he/she responds in a stressful situation. But you can also tell a lot about how they handle themselves in times when a certain measure of decorum is called for. Do they pause to reflect and then choose their words carefully or are they Rush Limbaugh all the damn time?
Let me say that I believe that Nelson Mandela was the last great person of my lifetime. I don’t see any more on the horizon, including, quite sadly, none in America. (Pope Francis is making some interesting noise, but he’s 76 and may not be around long enough to effect any great change.) Mandela was a truly great man, one who used love to battle hate and responded to oppression with forgiveness. Who among us could have done what he did?
And yet praise for Mandela upon his passing a couple of weeks ago was far from universal. Blowhard Bill O’Reilly called Mandela a communist. Super-duper-blowhard Rush Limbaugh had attacked Mandela for years, claiming that the South African president had been “bankrolled by communists” and adding, “When Nelson Mandela or one of these terrorists sees America, they ask, ‘How did they do this in less than 230 years? We’ve been around for centuries and we can barely muster working toilets.'”
Then, after Madiba (as he was known to his people) died, Limbaugh got really nasty by suggesting that Mandela “had more in common with (Supreme Court Justice) Clarence Thomas than he does with Barack Obama.”
I’m surprised that Mandela didn’t sit up in the box and say, “Aw, hell no!”
Former Vice President Dick (who lives down to his name on a daily basis) Cheney called Mandela a “terrorist.” Cheney then defended the 20 or so votes he made while in Congress back in the 1980s, votes against the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa and, in effect, in favor of keeping Mandela in prison for no real crime other than being against brutal, institutionalized racism. President Ronald Reagan also opposed the sanctions.
By far the most outrageous remarks came from former Republican Somebody Rick Santorum, who said that Mandela stood up to injustice. But then (quite horrifyingly) Santorum added, “We have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that.”
Yes, Folks, apartheid and low-cost health insurance. Potato, po-tah-to. At least Santorum can rest easy at night knowing that he’s not the absolute most despicable person ever to come out of Penn State University.
Now, here are a few more remarks that you probably didn’t hear of (mostly because I made them up):
• From the Goldwater Institute—While our patron saint, Barry Goldwater, probably voted repeatedly to keep Nelson Mandela in prison, we mourn his passing and honor his socialist leanings, which serve as a template for our attempts to help people who can already afford it send their kids to private school with other people’s money.
• Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin—Making him spend 27 years in prison would have been bad, but Dick Cheney said that Mandela was a terrorist so he probably deserved it. Besides, prison isn’t as bad as slavery, which, as we all know, is the moral equivalent of running a budget deficit.
• Head of the Republican Party Reince Priebus—Remember, Martin Luther King was a registered Republican. He, too, was a Negro. I’ll leave it to you to connect the dots.
Heading back into reality and giving credit where it is most certainly due, blind squirrel Ted Cruz praised Mandela and then even pushed back when some Tea Party crazies (if you’ll pardon the redundancy) criticized Cruz for having done so. Good for him.
Cruz got a lot of publicity for turning away when the TV cameras were on Raul Castro of Cuba. I just have to say that I don’t get it with all the hate from former Cubans and their progeny. You guys act like previous dictator Fulgencio Batista was a great guy. That Mafia house boy was robbin’ y’all blind and (ahem) jailing political prisoners who dared speak out against him. Sound familiar?
Fidel Castro was no prince, but I can name at least a dozen U.S.-supported tinhorn Latin American dictators over the past half-century (Anastasio Somoza, Augusto Pinochet, et al.) who were way worse than Castro. You guys should have made book with Castro (he couldn’t have been worse than Batista) and we could have avoided all this nonsense.
Finally, big, BIG ups to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who was steadfast in his praise for the South African leader and took Tea Party knuckleheads to task for their thoughtless and often racist attacks on Mandela.
It makes me think that maybe there’s still a little hope out there.
This article appears in Dec 19-25, 2013.
I’m sad to know that my child will only know of Mandela in a historical sense like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Apartheid was as close to slavery as could be legislated in the 20th century. For Republicans in this era to not understand this shows how far they have come from the party of Lincoln. Lincoln killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and if the south would have one would have been called a terrorists.
I ask you to start by re-reading Pulitzer Tommy’s opening paragraph. Decorum? Choose their words carefully? Blowhard. Super blowhard. Blind squirrel. Tea party crazies. Me thinks Tommy needs to practice what he preaches. I honestly thought that it being the Holiday season that both sides would pull back and chill for a few weeks. Guess I was wrong. There he is Mr. civil liberal, Lord of the Losers himself, Pulitzer Tommy throwing jabs, snide remarks and his usual dose of hateful, factless remarks. Talk about a phoney. I’d bet my bike that he’ll be front and center at midnight mass on Christmas Eve, making sure that everyone sees him. I’d rather be homeless than be him. Well, I was going to be a good boy for a few weeks,but if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. As far as vice president Cheney goes, I’d rather be Dick than dickless.
P.S. Signed up yet, Tommy?
Typically I disagree w/CW13’s comments. Yet his first 6 sentences are on point. Mandela was one of the worlds great heroes and Danehy’s comments today, much like the talking heads and politicians he aptly criticizes bring more attention to himself and his poor writing on the topic. Mandela’s life speaks for itself and deserves to be celebrated, not pontificated. Mandela deserved better from this paper. Thanks a lot, Danehy for putting me in the position of me agreeing at least in part with my usual idealistic foe. CW13 who I tend to disagree with often speaks with good sense and respect even though I usually disagree. I do not dislike Rush and his conservative ilk for expressing their conservative ideals, it’s the delivery that is annoying, arrogant and aggressive. In this column Danehy’s delivery is dangerously close to those he despises.
Thank you, ronko. Happy Holidays to you.
CW13
Egualamente, mi amigo.
I wish the man Happy Holidays and get a dislike. It ain’t easy being me. Grasias, ronko.
CW13
As I try to rise above the strange dislikes…reaching across the aisle so to speak. WTF is up w/these readers. I always liked the Weekly for its generally liberal stance. Liberal defined by my Macbook means generous, open to a broad sense of ideas, etc. Here, two generally opposing views come together on a single idea, which is a rare commodity in our culture, and we get negative reviews for it. CW13…it ain’t us this time. Perhaps it’s time to read other weeklies, or papers. This one is getting difficult to take seriously.
Institutions like the New York Times and the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal are institutions because they treat their subject matter with respect, whether one agrees with their stance or not. I like a paper that can be edgy, prosaic, conversational, or even hip. But in my opinion at times the Weekly tries to be too hip w/rants, vulgarities, etc and credibility begins to erode. CW13, my conservative friend/foe, let’s grab an adult beverage sometime, and rise above the slag.
Don’t feel bad, Amigo. It’s me, not you. I’ve been doing this for 2 years now and have become the token, much hated right winger. All some people have to do is see my picture and they click dislike without even reading what I wrote. You can’t imagine some of the hatred sent my way. Last year a rather civil fellow, Allan Bartlett wrote about using his loaded penis on my mother. When I pointed out that it was impossible as she is no longer with us, I got 10 dislikes. Go figure. Last month Juan something wished me to get into an accident on my bike. I’ll never give up on the Geekly because I annoy the Hell out of these stooges and love every minute of it. I’m up for a beer after the Holidays are over. I just hope this works out better than the last time I got friendly with a ” foe”. The person I speak of is the one and only Mr. Danehy. Alot of people who read this hate me because I rag on him. Even Gibson the editor recently put his 2 cents in. My first e-mail to Tom ended with me callng him an atomic asshole. I was wrong and down the road admitted it to him. Over the years we learned to accept each other for who we are. We rarely agreed, but learned to discuss our differences in a civil way. When a reader brought his weight into a discussion I went to bat for Tom and defended him. We actually became friends. A while back Tom said in his column that was still waiting for one example of a man with a gun preventing a crime. The monthly N.R.A. magazine has a column called the armed citizen which has just that. I sent some to Tom and he hasn’t spoken to me since. All because I won an arguement with him he blew me off like I never existed. O.K. let’s start the dislikes !!
It’s just so much more fun to hit dislike. I log in to mulitple computers just to hit dislike as often as I can. It’s like the old meme of repeatedly calling a wrong number and yelling “asshole”. I’m just waiting for Facebook to get a dislike button. Then the real fun will begin.
meme? Have you considered psychiatric help ?
CW13: Just because I asked you a question about your motivations doesn’t mean I dislike you. My feelings don’t run that strongly either way about you other than my general appreciation that you visit our website relatively frequently.
Ronko: More info about these “rants and vulgarities,” please.
I misspoke. What I meant is that even the editor himself weighed in on my anti Dehaney rants. I do have a legit reason as I explained. You have to admit I do keep things interesting. If that picture is you and your son, I’m going to give you some advice. It looks like he’s got his thumb and forefinger like a gun. You may want to discourage that. I’d hate to see the young man do that at school and get expelled. I’d wish you a happy hoilday, but I’d only get more dislikes.
CW13: You’re taking the like/dislike thing too seriously. It doesn’t go on your permanent record or anything.
It would seem that Tom has been into the Christmas grog a bit of late, given the disjointed and illusionary triad he has written. I am sure he will be displeased to know the photo he chose to illustrate Mandela is of a larger-than-life bronze statue in the Sandton Mall in Sandton, an affluent suburb of Johannesburg, which is the fanciest, most upscale shopping mall in the whole of Africa. A true capitalist haven if there ever was one.
On numerous occasions, I have had the opportunity to admire this rendering of a truly great man from my hotel room in the Michelangelo Hotel and marveled at the good he brought South Africa; including the shopping mall and many fine restaurants that surround his likeness in Mandela Square. A lesser, vindictive man would have destroyed the country and things like the Sandton Mall would never have come to be.
Where Tom truly goes off the rails is in the effectiveness of the sanctions as he riles about the Republicans who opposed them. It was the many, many poor Africans who suffered for years because of this particular set of poorly conceived and applied sanctions. This I saw during the many trips I made to South Africa during what is still called “sanction times,” when recalling the economic difficulties for most. The Republicans and many others of the time knew who would be hurt and were against them for this reason – not as a support for apartheid. In my world view, if such sanctions truly worked, Cuba would have been free years ago.
Did these sanctions help end apartheid? Perhaps, but if so in a minor way as the country was changing dramatically under the forces from within – with the majority of the white population, including the Afrikaners supporting an end to apartheid. To be sure, any help in changing a bad political system is important. This is why I was quite happy with how Pinochet sorted out Chile’s problems (a bit of a barb at Tom).
Importantly, Tom do not despair, there will be great men and women in the future, just as there have been in the past. People like Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher will arise and perhaps a Mandela-like person will lift the Middle East out of its perpetual despair someday. Have faith Tom, history has shown that there are good, brave people amongst us and they will respond to the call. Now, if we can just find someone to undertake the repair of our own failed government when Obama is out, life will be ever so good.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!
Danehy needs to stick with girls basketball, charter schools and insulting German foreign students.
Maybe he should check to see what the crime rate is now in South Africa. It’s about six times the USA rate. or two times the rate in Chicago.
Don’t forget ragging on the Tea Party. Dan, I appreciate your concern, but don’t worry about it. Taking things seriously is something I just don’t do. I know a wife and 3 or 4 Pima County supervisors that would attest to that.
Tom dares to call others a blowhard, he defines the term