Washington — Was Martin Luther King a shakedown artist?
Surprisingly as it might sound, he was in the eyes of — get this
— Jesse Jackson. Yes, I know this seems improbable, but so many of
the things the Rev. Jackson has said seem improbable. He is a man
who has risen on the power of his own scandals.
Do you recall his grave appearances at the Clinton White House
to counsel the Boy President on his sex scandal with Miss Monica
Lewinsky? Shortly thereafter it transpired that the Rev. brought
along his very own mistress, and she at the time was heavy with
child. The couple posed for pictures with the embattled President.
Ms. Lewinsky is not in the pictures.
Do you remember the uproar when it was revealed that he paid his
mistress off with monies from one of his charitable foundations?
And do you remember the three pardons this man of the cloth wrested
from the Great Pardoner just hours before the Clinton
Administration was no more? Two of those pardoned were brought back
to the Rev. Jackson’s employment, one a crook who had defrauded the
homeless out of $5,000,000 and another a crook who had been
convicted of soliciting sex with a minor. The chap had been a
member of Congress, so maybe his transgression was
understandable.
At any rate, Jackson hired the ex-Congressman as a consultant on
prison reform. When he did, it put me in mind of Jackson’s response
to O. J. Simpson’s acquittal on charges he had murdered his wife.
Jackson suggested that now Simpson would be an excellent spokesman
in the campaign against wife abuse. I did not make that up.
Now the excellent John McCaslin tells us in his “Inside the
Beltway” column, published in the infallible Washington
Times, that Jackson has taken umbrage to claims made by the
National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) that he is a shakedown
artist. During a public interview Jackson, when asked about NLPC’s
objections to his importunities upon corporate America, exploded,
“These attacks by the policy center, these are unending attacks,”
and more, “Dr. Martin Luther King was called a communist. He was
called a nigger. He was hated. He was killed. This kind of hate
baiting is really a perversion.”
For my part I do not believe the Rev. King’s struggle for equal
rights and racial integration is in any way similar to the Rev.
Jackson’s pursuit of money and favors from giant corporations.
Moreover, though King did find himself occasionally in the company
of leftists, he was not a communist. When he was killed it was a
tragedy for the civil rights movement and for America, though the
Rev. Jackson wasted no time exploiting the tragedy. Within hours of
King’s assassination Jackson was appearing on television, falsely
claiming that King died in his arms. Actually, King died in the
arms of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, of a ghastly gunshot wound.
Jackson was nowhere to be found. Yet in his public appearances he
claimed the blood on his shirt was King’s. The travesty was the
beginning of Jackson’s rise to the top, to Bill Clinton’s side
during his squalid sex scandal, and to the executive suites of the
corporations he now shakes down.
The saga of Jesse Jackson is an amazing one. As Kenneth
Timmerman chronicles in his excellent study of the man,
Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, Jackson began
his career with some genuine achievements capable of easing the
plight of poor and uneducated blacks. But the colossal frauds that
he perpetrated from the start far outweigh the achievements, and
the frauds have continued to this very day. Many of the frauds are
prominent on the public record. Long ago Jackson should have been
hustled off history’s stage as a cheap huckster, but the denouement
has yet to take place. It is typical of our time.
There is an amazing tolerance for corruption nowadays,
particularly if the corrupt are on the left. That is why so many
sectors of the American left are so corrupt. It is also why it now
appears that the American left is in decline. Surely Jackson is in
decline, but he can still draw a crowd and still make a buck. Will
he ever totally exhaust the country’s good will? Will there ever be
for him one scandal too many? My guess is that he will gently shove
off into retirement. It is not likely that he is going to have
another Democratic president to counsel for a long time.
