Trump's Situational Outrage & The Real Doug Jones

Addie Mae Collins, Carol McNair, Carole Robertson & Cynthia Wesley: 
killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963

By 10:27am this morning, Donald Trump had already sent out a message via Twitter condemning the horrific terrorist attack that killed at least 235 Muslims who were worshipping at the Al Rawda mosque in the Northeastern Egyptian town of Bir al-Abed during Friday prayers.

He made no Twitter comment about 43-year-old Kevin Neal's shooting spree in Tehama County, California last week that left five dead and ten wounded.

45's preachy situational outrage was also illustrated in the comments he made to reporters on Wednesday as he prepared to leave the White House for Thanksgiving Vacation - when he all but endorsed Republican Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore by flagrantly lying about Democratic Alabama senatorial candidate Doug Jones being "soft on crime". 

As Joan Walsh shrewdly observed in an article in The Nation on Wednesday, Doug Jones was the U.S. Attorney for Alabama who successfully tried and convicted two of the white supremacist terrorists responsible for the heinous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama back on Sunday September 15, 1963.

The bombing killed four girls (pictured above), 11-year-old Carole Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, and injured 22 - including Collins' 12-year-old sister Sarah who lost an eye when 21 shards of glass were embedded into her face during the explosion.

The aftermath of the 16th Street Church bombing

The four girls were in the basement of the church putting on their choir robes preparing for Sunday service when the 15 sticks of dynamite (triggered by a timing device that had been placed under the steps of the church early that morning) were detonated at 10:22am.

An FBI investigation concluded two years after the bombing found that KKK members Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss and Bobby Frank Cherry were all responsible for the bombing.

An FBI informant named Gary Rowe was suspected but never charged.

All four men were members members of a violent KKK faction known informally as the Cahaba Boys - a group associated with other local violent factions associated, and linked with, the KKK (including the Robert. E. Lee Klavern *) that had actively bombed homes and churches as part of a terrorist campaign to intimidate desegregation and voting rights efforts in rural areas of Alabama since the 1950's. 

[* It is of interest to note that some of the militant offshoots of KKK organizations (known as "klokans") in Alabama named themselves after Confederate heroes like Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest in an effort to link the re-emerging white supremacist movement of the early 20th century with the historical legacy of the Confederacy.

As Vox reported back in August, that was around the same time that groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy were actively promoting a nation-wide campaign to try and systematically re-write the history of the Confederacy in school textbooks and place Confederate statues and monuments in towns and cities - even in states that didn't even exist during the Civil War - to reinforce the ideology of white supremacy by creating a mythology that supported and justified it.]

Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss

Even though the FBI gathered thousands of documents and hours of undercover recordings of suspects and witnesses over the course of their two-year investigation into the bombing of the 16th Street Church, Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the investigation closed in 1968 and all evidence gathered by federal agents sealed.

In a reflection of the deep-seated racial bias embedded within the U.S. justice system, it wasn't until November of 1977,  a remarkable fourteen years after the bombing, that former U.S. Attorney William Baxley was able to successfully convict Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss of the murder of Carol Denise McNair.

Chambliss admitted to having purchased a case of dynamite from a local area store two weeks before the bombings took place under the pretext of needing to clear a field.

Baxley had been a young law student when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963, and he actively fought to reopen the case starting in 1971 after becoming a federal prosecutor.

Now to circle back to Joan Walsh's observation in her article in The Nation, when Donald Trump simplistically dismissed current Democratic senate candidate Doug Jones as "soft on crime" last Wednesday, was he aware that Jones was the man who successfully indicted and convicted Thomas Edwin Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry  in 2001?

Jones' efforts were aided by the fact that in 1995, the FBI finally unsealed reams of evidence it had gathered about the bombings in the 1960's.

As Kevin Sack reported in a May 4, 2001 New York Times article, after William Baxley wrote an op-ed in the New York Times accusing the FBI of having intentionally covered up evidence in the 70's that could have aided in his prosecution of the four men, a spokesman for the FBI, Craig Dahle, claimed that the reason the Bureau kept the evidence under lock and key could have been due to
"a combination of possible factors, including changes in personnel and filing systems, the bureau's unwillingness to expose confidential informers, and lingering distrust between federal agents and Alabama law enforcement that dated from the days of Jim Crow." 

Evidence that Doug Jones, then the U.S. Attorney for Alabama, and his office used to indict and convict Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002 months after Cherry's lawyer unsuccessfully tried to argue that he was not mentally competent to stand trial.

The other suspect, Herman Frank Cash died in 1994 before the FBI unsealed the evidence that may well have led to his conviction.

Doug Jones speaks at a dedication of a memorial
for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings in 2011 

Both Blanton and Cherry were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for their roles in a crime shocked the nation and world.

An act that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity."

Given the FBI's suspicious concealing of critical evidence, and the years that had passed between the time of the bombings, Doug Jones' successful indictments and prosecution of Blanton and Cherry to time, patience, guts, prosecutorial skill and a genuine desire to see justice done in what is arguably one of the most heinous crimes in American history.

So how can Trump call Doug Jones "soft on crime"?

Now I don't believe Trump is totally brain-dead, he was 17-years-old when the bombings took place in 1963, so there's no way he doesn't at least understand the horrific nature of what happened.

Given his grandfather's involvement in the KKK in New York and his father's efforts to prevent black people from moving into apartments owned by the Trump Organization, what Trump thinks about those bombings is another story.

Even if he doesn't know Doug Jones' role in bringing two of the killers to justice, at least one of Trump's advisors has made it clear that part of Jones' appeal as a candidate for the senate is his involvement in the case.

Republican senate candidate Roy Moore 

So Trump's decision to back Roy Moore, who is arguably guilty of having committed multiple crimes for having engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with girls as young as 14 and 16 when he was a 32-year-old district attorney, on the grounds that (in part) Doug Jones is "soft on crime" really doesn't hold water.

To paraphrase a recent comment made by a guest on NPR, Trump supporters have a right to vote for him.

But if Trump supporters who live in Alabama are going to compromise their ethics and morals simply to support a candidate who is going to back Trump's divisive ideology and legislative goals - it's a truly troubling sign for modern American politics.

Regardless, Trump has a lot of cojones lecturing anyone about being soft on crime given the slew of his own campaign officials (including Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn) who already have been shown to have broken laws - to say nothing of the fact that he granted a presidential pardon to former Maricopa County sheriff  Joe Arpaio who was found guilty of multiple crimes in a court of law.

Given that the former head of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, filed a complaint against Kellyanne Conway for violating the Hatch Act when she used her non-elected position as a "senior White House counselor" to publicly advocate for Roy Moore, and that the president is the person who would have to hold her accountable, we'll see if his talk about being "soft on crime" is just that - talk.

Seems more likely that it's just another example of 45's selective and situational outrage.

47 Years After MLK's Death, Do the 'Haves' Have It All?

On this day honoring MLK, extreme global economic disparity made headlines with the release of an  Oxfam International report that predicts 1% of the global population will accumulate over 50% of the worlds wealth by 2016 based on current trends.

The richest 80 people on the planet having more collective wealth than billions of people who live on the opposite end of the economic spectrum is troubling, but the positive news is that economic disparity has finally become a serious topic of discussion; even at the highest echelons of global capitalism.

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, will be a co-chair of the upcoming World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting starting this Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland, ensuring that the growing income gap is on the agenda.

There's growing research and data that shows the widening divide between the haves and have-nots is not just inherently unfair, it's a legitimate threat to global economic stability and security.

Some of this data, including specific methods (including manipulating laws, regulations and tax codes) used by a tiny fraction of the human population to conceal immense amounts of hidden wealth, from the 99% of us are pretty sobering.

As Winnie Byanyima was quoted as saying recently: "Extreme inequality isn't just a moral wrong. We know that it hampers economic growth and it threatens the private sector's bottom line."

The upside? If they're talking about it at the World Economic Forum in Davos, then it's going to have to be an issue in the 2016 elections here in the US.

Like climate change, I just can't see how today's Republican party is going to be where the bulk of the world's population is on this issue in terms of the need to address the wage gap here in the US.

But you can bet President Obama will talk about the results of the Oxfam report tomorrow night in his State of the Union Address; his plan to propose revamping the tax code is one of the key components of Oxfam's suggestions to address extreme economic inequality.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's (as well as states like Oregon) efforts to raise the minimum wage to a level that would ensure that workers would be able to pay for basics like rent, food and other necessities is another component of the Oxfam strategy to level the playing field.

I've listened to a number of interesting and insightful discussions on Dr. King's legacy today, but I can't help but wonder what would he think about the Oxfam report.

Considering that he was warning those who would listen about the dangers of economic marginalization and wealth inequality back in 1968, I think he would be disappointed.

In light of all that Dr. King lived and ultimately died for, perhaps aspiring to make all aspects of his dream a reality are motivation enough to support a growing global call to hold local and national politicians accountable to the needs of the 99%.

The idea of a world where 1% control more wealth than billions of others, is simply an unsustainable reality doomed to fail.

As Dr. King himself once said, "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality."

Dr. King - Spiritual Freestyling for Mahalia?

(Photo by Bob Adelman)

I got a spiritual chill tonight while I was watching the Tavist Smiley show on Channel Thirteen this evening and one of his guests was the noted photographer Bob Adelman.

The photographer talked with Tavist about some of the famous photographs he took during the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960's; many of them chronicled in a book called Mine Eyes Have Seen.

Like the photo (pictured left), which was taken by Adelman in Birmingham, Alabama in May of 1963.

It shows black protesters being hosed by members of the Birmingham Police.

Adelman worked with civil rights groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in an effort to use photography to document the struggle for justice and equality in the south.

One of his most interesting stories concerned the infamous black and white photo of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the famous address he gave in front of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC.

Photographer Bob Adelman

Adelman (pictured left) managed to inch his way forward through the massive crowds gathered on the Mall where he shot 3 rolls of film; the most famous photo shows Dr. King as he reaches the apex of the "I Have a Dream Speech".

According to Adelman, after King was at the podium for some time speaking, at about 12 minutes into the speech, he paused as the crowd applause swelled and a woman loudly urged Dr. King, "Tell 'Em about the dream Martin!"

The woman was none other than unparalleled gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who later sang a stirring rendition of "How I Got Over" after King's speech.

Adelman says that in response to  Jackson's urging, Dr. King reached up and removed the sheets of paper with his speech written on them and put them into his pocket.

He then proceeded into the uplifting and hair-raising "I Have a Dream" portion of the speech which is recognized as the apex of the speech; none of it was scripted.

Something about the moment Adeleman described struck me as so profound, so powerful; so full of hope and healing.

I wondered to myself, had Dr. King shared this vision with Mahalia Jackson before the speech? Did he plan to share it with the crowd that day?

What a conversation that must have been. Words like that can only come from the deepest of spiritual places.

Did those words just spill out of his heart?

Watch the speech: