Friday, September 05, 2008

...And A Word In Support of Community Organizers

Please don't be surprised at the attempts to disparage Barack Obama's work as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago after he finished law school. Rudolph Giuliani, or 9/11 Man as he wishes to be remembered, laughed at the thought of a Harvard law grad wasting time helping people thrown out of work by Republican corporate overlord-types seeking greater profits by moving their factories to foreign countries at the expense of working Americans. Barbie also dismissed Obama's work, likening it to a small town mayor's job, only "mayors have real responsibilities." In my little neck of the woods, towns of about 8,000 people don't even have full-time mayors. But I digress.
Of course, Republicans will never understand why a brilliant young man would spend several years of his life helping the unemployed, the underemployed, the desperate and the despairing. Republicans like Giuliani sit back and laugh when the people who do the real work in this country, paving the streets, staffing the assembly lines, waiting the tables and cleaning the mayor's $5,000 suits, find their jobs disappearing because of the policies of George II. Suburban blight like Sarah Palin run as far away from the real problems and suffering in this world as they can possibly get, and then pretend that they are being persecuted when one of their kids acts like a kid. Look, madame governor, it's your boys, the Bill O'Reillys and Rush Limbaughs of this world, who have built careers screaming about the irresponsibility of parents who let their little girls get pregnant out of the traditional family order of things. Community organizers have the courage and the passion for people that takes them into the very neighborhoods that people like the good governor try to avoid, to look the problems in the eye, and pursue solutions. And it is precisely us awful Liberals who have developed and implemented all of the programs to help young women in the position your daughter is in, and children coming into the world as your grandchild is. Prenatal healthcare, Headstart, school breakfasts and lunches, day care and afterschool care, public education; that's all courtesy of your friends, the Liberals. And mostly through the initiative and efforts of those awful community organizers you think so little of. They are the people who deliver the change that you Republicans strive so hard to avoid or squash.
You're welcome. You lying jerks. Why don't you go quote some more of that scripture that you love to toss around so much, but understand not one bit, for instance, how we treat "the least of these" is how we really feel about God!

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