Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that’s the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed…and I would make the argument that 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.
It’s difficult to imagine how anyone with a functional sense of decency and humanity could find a way to damn Nelson Mandela with such faint praise. I offer for your consideration American Conservatives, for whom everything is political and who never miss an opportunity to push their agenda an/or denigrate The Black Guy in the White House ©. When I saw the clip of Santorum’s brain cramp, I was speechless- not something that happens often or easily.
Mandela united an entire nation, in the process preventing what could easily have been a long, protracted, and bloody race war. And there’s Santorum saying Mandela did the right thing in the wrong way and then lapsing into his tired, predictable anti-Obamacare riff. It was every bit as offensive as it was thoughtless and inappropriate. There’s a time and a place to push your agenda, and the passing of one of the world’s truly great figures is neither. I’d say that Santorum should be ashamed, but that would presume he’s capable of feeling shame.
Santorum’s desecration represents merely the tip of the spear when it comes to Conservative propagandizing:
[Bill] O’Reilly, for his part, commemorated Mandela as a “great man” despite being “a communist.”
What Santorum and others on the Far Right blithely choose to ignore is the truth about Mandela’s attitude towards health care. Madiba believed that health care is a fundamental human right, and he worked to enshrine that right in South Africa’s Constitution. The country now has a two-year-old universal health care system that will expand to cover every South African by 2026.
(I’d ask Santorum and O’Reilly what’s so immoral about viewing health care as a universal right…and why America can’t do the same thing for its citizens? I don’t want to insert my agenda into the collective eulogizing of Nelson Mandela. That’s a very good question more appropriately left to be asked at another time.)
There are Conservatives who evidently yearn for the days of apartheid, having roasted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Winnipeg) for daring to praise Mandela. Never discount the ability of Conservatives to give free reign to the ignorance and hatefulness in their service of their petty, small-minded agenda, eh?
No, you really CAN’T make this stuff up.
I may despise virtually everything Ted Cruz stands for, but I commend him for recognizing and acknowledging Mandela’s contribution to humanity. The world is a better place for his having been a part of it (Mandela, not Cruz). He fought for freedom and justice for all, even the pinheads who are pissing on his grave.
Not that I’m particularly surprised. This is what happens when your smug arrogance leads you to believe that your ideology is superior to any and all other, and that compassion is a sign of weakness and incipient socialism.
