You said what I wrote is shameful, yet, you didn’t dispute one fact in the piece. So what’s so shameful, that I had the audacity to call out the illustrious Cornel West?

As for why I’ve targeted Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, I made that quite clear in the piece – because they’re trying to pimp the Black community, while at the same time, they’re running all over the country lecturing America on political fidelity. In short, they’re two self-serving poverty pimps of the very worst kind, and the Black community has been suffering from the kind of dysfunction they promote for over 300 years. So it’s time to bring it to an end:

About Mending Fences With Tavis and West

Penguin Board of Directors said:
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Hi Eric,
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Thanks for the resources provided me on and off SmileyandWest on this discourse. I agree that relationships among the personalities mentioned in your write-up could be much better, if for no other reason, but the larger interests of the African-American community that they represent or claim to represent in one shape or form. While I have no qualms about calling a spade a spade, as my records would support, my strong belief is that this estranged situation would come to mend in the foreseeable future. I strongly believe that. As such, I am inclined to sustaining the optimism and fostering the prospects of bringing about that reality in whatever way I can. You are in a similar position to add something to mending the situation, without compromising your passionate pursuit of truth as you see and understand it.
Sincerely.
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Penguin,
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With regard to your comment on mending fences with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, I don’t think the Black community should even try to engage in any mending relations with these two. These two individuals have clearly demonstrated themselves to be self-serving, uncaring, and toxic to the Black community. In addition the disease that they represent is one that has been debilitating our community and culture for well over three hundred years now. So it is essential that we be aggressive in stamping out that disease with dispatch, and in no uncertain terms. We’ve got to make Tavis and West a walking, breathing example of the fact that our Black community is no longer going to tolerate self-serving poverty pimps and turncoats in our midst.
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And further, we’ve got to make absolutely certain that corporate manipulators can no longer use Tavis Smiley as an envoy to the Black community, and the best way to do that is to ensure corporations recognize that he represents a liability rather than an asset to them in our community. That’s beginning to happen as we speak – but of course, Tavis is blaming that on Obama instead of facing reality.
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I predicted last year that Tavis and West were headed in the direction of Amos-n-Andy. They’ve succeeded in making such fools of themselves that they’ll never be able to make a comeback among Black people. So I fully suspect that they’re going to be relegated to the armpit of history in the very near future – and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving pair.
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http://wattree.blogspot.com/2013/03/beneath-spin-eric-l_24.html

Ok, Dr. Cornell is this “bad guy” versus who? So the other Black notables like Rev. Al Sharpton out there running their mouth, are they doing any better? You mention Dr. Cornell West but ignore the collective?

For example, you mention the Wells Fargo scam..did you mention the part that Magic Johnson name was all over that crap and he branded himself with centers for some of those loans? See how you lose credibility sentence after sentence reading this nonsense and you are omitting other people and just want to single out this one guy like he took your girlfriend from you in high school?

Overall, your bullet points and talking points are lame and ineffectual and carry no convincing or strong argument here to target one man instead of the entire collective. That is what is confusing that I think you need to explain – why you targeted just Dr. Cornell West knowing he wasn’t the only one or in most cases, wasn’t the primary culprit.

Since you have so little courage of conviction that you have to hide behind a screen name, I’m not going to even bother to take you seriously. For all I know you could be Joe the Plumber, or a different person every time you post. I don’t believe in ghosts, so having a discussion with one is ridiculous.

The mere fact that people like yourself have been bamboozled into even taking Cornel West seriously as an intellectual is a serious indictment against our educational system. It also show how easily people can be misled. Any faction in this country can take any fool off the street and drop a few letters behind his name and give him a job at Princeton or Harvard and people will follow him over a cliff like sheep.

Cornel West has been in the public eye for over thirty years, yet, he’s never said one thing that most people can quote as a uniquely profound and memorable assessment of reality. The man has been indulging in intellectual rice cake for his entire career. You hear sounds coming from his mouth, but anyone with any kind of intellectual acuity will immediately recognize him as an individual who takes a very long time to say absolutely nothing.

good luck,