Rangel's Bull Connor comment

At a town-hall meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Charles Rangel took the stage and declared, "George Bush is our Bull Connor." This comment is preposterous enough on its own--Bull Connor, the Birmingham politce chief who turned hoses and dogs on civil rights marchers in 1963 and became a symbol of Southern racism, would never have had a black secretary of state. To equate President Bush's failures concerning Katrina with Connor's brazen, unrelenting bigotry is an insult to those activists who endured Connor's persecutions.

But, incredibly, instead of repudiating Rangel, various black leaders have opined that his comparison is insulting -- to Bull Connor. "I think that's an insult to Connor," New York City Councilman Charles Barron told the New York Sun. "What [Bush] did in New Orleans [is] worse than what Bull Connor did in his entire career as a racist in the South." Others agreed, dragging the counversation down to breathtaking lows: Al Sharpton remarked, "We've gone from fire hoses to levees," and Representative Major Owens pointed out that "Bull Connor didn't even pretend that he cared about African Americans. You have to give it to George Bush for being even more diabolical."

There is a rich and horrible irony here: Martin Luther King, Jr. once said Bull Connor "didn't know history." But today Rangel, Sharpton, and the rest of the black leaders -- who claim the mantle of the civil rights movement -- don't know history. Or, rather, they believe bad history makes for good politics. It doesn't. It makes for demagoguery and its shameful and wrong.