Democrats’ America beats with heart of racial discord

If it was the dream of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today’s Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message.

Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Pelosi’s House, speaking on the King holiday: “We have a hater in the White House. The birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren chose to honor King’s memory in her way: “Our government is shut down for one reason ... So the president of the United States can fund a monument to hate and division along our southern border.”

At a rally in Columbia, South Carolina, Sen. Cory Booker declaimed “We live a nation where you get a better justice system if you’re rich and guilty than poor and innocent.”

Booker urged the crowd “to apply the ideals of Dr. King” and avoid vitriol in dealing with political adversaries.

But his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders, also in South Carolina, wasn’t buying it. “Today we talk about racism,” said Sanders. “It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we now have a president of the United States who is a racist.”

Joe Biden spoke in D.C. and brought up the 1994 crime bill he shepherded though the Senate, which treated consumption and distribution of crack cocaine as more serious crimes than the use of powder cocaine, and then confessed to the crowd it was “a big mistake.”

Biden then proceeded to slander the nation that has honored him as it has few of his generation: “Systematic racism that most of us whites don’t even like to acknowledge” is “built into every aspect of our system.”

Is America, 50 years after segregation was outlawed in our public life, really a land saturated with systemic racism?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also in D.C.

The mayor’s problem with African-Americans is he pursued a policy of stop-and-frisk with criminal suspects in New York.

So, he sought to find common ground with his audience by relating “a series of events that had shaped his recent thinking about race.”

The mayor said he had “recently learned about the deadly race riots in which white residents destroyed the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and murdered several dozen black residents.”

But why did his honor have to go all the way back to 1921 and Tulsa to find race riots, when Harlem, in the heart of the town he served as mayor for 12 years, exploded in a riot in 1964 that spread to Brooklyn and Queens and lasted six days?

Why did Bloomberg not bring up the worst riot in U.S. history, when Lincoln sent Union veterans of Gettysburg to shoot down Irish immigrants protesting the draft in New York?

But where are black communities threatened by white mob violence in 2019? Was the Watts riot of 1965, were the Detroit and Newark riots of 1967, was the rioting, looting and arson that ravaged 100 cities after King’s death a result of rampaging whites assaulting black folks?

Was the LA riot of 1992, which targeted Koreatown, the work of white racists?

Does there not come a time when the pandering has to stop?

Ronald Reagan preached America as the Pilgrim fathers’ “shining city on a hill.” For Democrats today, America is the heart of darkness.