Prometheus 6

Hat tip to reader PTCruiser.

Long but worthy quote of note:

Rice and McKinney are roughly the same age. Both can point to significant academic accomplishments. Both have had prominent careers in public life.

But they are very different in the most fundamental of senses. While each woman came of age in the South at the time when the civil rights movement was entering its most critical stage, Rice was never an activist while McKinney was.

While Rice left her native Alabama for California and began to move in conservative political and corporate circles, McKinney stayed deeply rooted in her native Georgia and became one of the state's best-known African-American figures. While Rice was appointed to increasingly powerful positions by her patrons in the Republican Party, the corporate world and the Bush family, McKinney won election to the state Legislature and then to five terms in the U.S. House.

But while conservatives hail Rice as an "accomplished African-American" woman who is above reproach, they have shown no qualms about reproaching, attacking and dismissing Cynthia McKinney.

John Nichols: Many Rice defenders hypocritical
By John Nichols
November 24, 2004

Conservative apologists for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the most thoroughly discredited nominee for secretary of state in memory, are trying to thwart criticism of her selection by suggesting that they are aghast at the notion that liberal cartoonists and commentators would aggressively challenge the record of this "accomplished African-American woman."

Certainly, conservatives have a right to object when they see or hear racial stereotypes. There ought to be broad ideological agreement that the legitimate debate about Rice's nomination is warped by the casual use of phrases such as "Aunt Jemima" and "Uncle Tom."

But the notion that conservative outrage over attacks on Rice is rooted in respect for the accomplishments of African-American women is a stretch. Barely two years ago, the same people who are now defending Rice were busy attacking Cynthia McKinney - despite the fact that McKinney, then a member of Congress, was by most reasonable measures a far more accomplished African-American woman than Rice.

McKinney was battered throughout the early months of the 2002 election season by right-wing political operatives and their allies in major media - as well as conservative Democrats - because she dared to ask tough questions about what members of the Bush administration knew before Sept. 11, 2001, about the threat of terrorist attacks.

As we now know, McKinney's questions were troublingly appropriate - since it has turned out that Rice and other Bush aides knew more than a month before the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network were determined to launch devastating attacks on the United States.

McKinney's "crime" was to ask the right questions at the wrong time - i.e., before official Washington had decided it was appropriate to examine how and why the Bush administration had failed to respond to pleas from former White House anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and others for a more aggressive response to an increasingly obvious threat. Her punishment was ridicule, political abandonment and defeat for re-election in the 2002 Georgia Democratic congressional primary.

Rice and McKinney are roughly the same age. Both can point to significant academic accomplishments. Both have had prominent careers in public life.

But they are very different in the most fundamental of senses. While each woman came of age in the South at the time when the civil rights movement was entering its most critical stage, Rice was never an activist while McKinney was.

While Rice left her native Alabama for California and began to move in conservative political and corporate circles, McKinney stayed deeply rooted in her native Georgia and became one of the state's best-known African-American figures. While Rice was appointed to increasingly powerful positions by her patrons in the Republican Party, the corporate world and the Bush family, McKinney won election to the state Legislature and then to five terms in the U.S. House.

But while conservatives hail Rice as an "accomplished African-American" woman who is above reproach, they have shown no qualms about reproaching, attacking and dismissing Cynthia McKinney.

Ultimately, however, it is McKinney who will get the last laugh.

Voters in Georgia re-elected her to Congress on Nov. 2. And she says she is coming back to the Capitol to battle against "the war machine," "the corporate propaganda machine" and the conservative political machine.

McKinney will again be challenging the Bush administration's lies and misdeeds. And you can bet that the same conservatives who are so busy defending Rice's "honor" will be slandering McKinney.

That's because the only accomplishment that seems to matter to the conservative chattering class is learning to say "yes" to George W. Bush.