Instead of discussing why an African American state representative opposed legislation requiring Louisiana students to recite The Declaration of Independence, Fox News trotted out a favorite African American black attacker to smear her as racist and anti-American.
The Fox & Friends segment started with cohost Anna Kooiman saying, “The Declaration of Independence is under attack and the person trying to tamp it down, of all people, is a law maker.
An audio clip of Barbara Norton, an African American Democrat in the Louisiana House of Representatives, was played.
NORTON: For The Declaration of Independence, only Caucasians was free. And for you to bring a bill to request that our children will recite The Declaration, I think it's a little bit unfair.
Cohost Tucker Carlson said, “Ooh, that was Democratic Louisiana State Congresswoman Barbara Norton. She fought and defeated a bill that would require kids to recite The Declaration. Her argument: The founding document is racist.”
There was no one to defend Norton. Nobody explained that reciting The Declaration has a loaded history for African Americans because they were forced to recite it in order to vote in the south.
Instead, Kooiman prodded Borelli to start attacking by asking her why Norton got it wrong.
BORELLI: Well this is outrageous. First of all, slavery was before the documents. Our founding fathers created these documents. These documents are the blueprint of our country. For her to be attacking The Declaration of Independence, that is attacking liberty. That’s attacking freedom.
Then Borelli really went over the top:
BORELLI: Why not attack the history of the Democrat Party, which she is a member of? The party of The KKK. The party of trying to keep blacks enslaved and to keep blacks segregated. Why not attack that history? I find it selective outrage on her part in attacking our documents of our country.
Nobody pointed out that the anti-Civil Rights Democrats are now Republicans.
Cohost Tucker Carlson whined, “Isn’t it a little weird, since she’s a representative of the U.S. government? I mean, she’s an elected lawmaker, an official. It’s a little decadent, isn’t it, to attack the founding documents of the country that made your job and all of this possible?”
Borelli agreed. “It’s outrageous. There should be a lot of pushback on this. People should not let her get away with this,” Borelli added.
She also had more “Democrat Party” attacking to do: “When you look at the Democrat policies in our country, the progressive policies that are harming black Americans, that’s what she should be focused on.”
Kooiman chimed in. “How important is it to raise our kids to be patriotic?” she complained. “Even with the Pledge of Allegiance, some schools don’t want you to say, ‘one nation under God,’ and some people don’t want to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the first place.”
Instead of “real history,” Borelli continued, children “are getting this twisted view from people like Representative Norton.”
Carlson ended the segment with a nasty dig. “I bet you my car she couldn’t recite three lines from The Declaration.”
“I’m sure she couldn’t,” Borelli agreed.
Watch the latest edition of the Society of the Perpetually Offended, from the May 28 Fox & Friends, below.
Off topic but related: Yesterday was Memorial Day and the Foxies were in full jingoist mode. With all due respect for those who serve, it was depressing to listen to all that gushing about the nobility of war, especially by people who I suspect would (did?) do everything in their power to avoid serving. About midway through the day, I realised that the foxies sounded exactly like the upper class European idiots who were so eager to go to war in 1910-1914. That’s when they expected to wage war from the back of a horse (which they provided, themselves) or from behind the front line. It was that distance between them and the fighting that allowed them to chant that war was noble and manly. The cannon fodder knew better but nobody had ever asked them to tell their story. During WWI, even the officers got a rude awakening during the slog of slaughter and the return of badly maimed soldiers brought a message to the general public. Was recognised for what it was: stupidity writ large. The world (led by the USA, it must be stressed) started thinking about ways to prevent it. It’s been a long slog but we’ve come a long way albeit only with regard to war between ourselves (with Putin appearing to be the classical exception to the rule). And we’re coming to realise that war in countries that are poor and weak is no more manly or noble than it was during WWI.
Unfortunately, the “distance” between the pundits and the reality of war has become ever wider thanks to the availability of long-range weapons recently culminating in the perfection of drones that can kill and maim from from thousands of miles away. With the convenient excuse of not wanting to offend sensibilities, the media carefully refrain from showing the grim reality of what is actually happening on the ground. As a result, millions of idiots who do not expect to have to go to war, themselves, are back to gushing over the nobility of patriotism and “serving”. All that gushing is making it impossible for veterans to talk frankly about their experience.
One of the most poignant interviews I ever saw was of an American veteran who exclaimed “everybody praises me but nobody wants to hear what I’d like to say!”. That was during the VietNam war, but it’s even more true today.
I’d be willing to bet neither Kooiman nor Carlson know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution.
I’d also love to know how many of the Louisiana legislators who voted for this idiocy can recite the entire thing.
For the record, I copied-and-pasted the text into a Word document. Did you know that there are 1323 words in the full text of the DoI? (The Preamble to the Constitution has only 52 words; it’s hard to determine the number of words in the full Constitution since so much of the original text has been superseded through amendments—the number of words given for the original document, including signatures, is more than 4500. If you include the signatures on the DoI, it increases the word count to over 1450.) To expect a bunch of elementary students to be able to memorize this thing (when most barely have the time to learn anything that’s not on the barrage of standardized tests that schools are required to give) is utterly insane (no wonder a GOPer thought of it).