(ThyBlackMan.com) Cornel was recently on the David Letterman show spewing what has become his boilerplate mantra about President Obama being a baby killer again. Most Americans understand why President Obama think it necessary to use drones in Afghanistan, because they’re thinkers. Cornel West is not – he’s a regurgitator. His entire reputation is built around his ability to regurgitate the words of dead White men. That’s not intellect. Intellect is having the ability to take the information being regurgitated and manipulating it in new and creative ways. Here are a few things that most of us clearly recognize but West is far too bitter, and/or shallow-minded, to see:
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Much like Ben Carson and Tavis Smiley, Cornel West doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s destroyed his public image by allowing his self-serving agenda to take precedence over his common sense. Also like the two gentleman previously mentioned, he’s dropped like a rock from a stellar personality that the Black community pointed to with pride, to a public embarrassment that many Black people wish would simply go away.
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One of the reasons that’s the case with all three of these gentlemen are their public pronouncements that tend to negate the very intellectual excellence in which the Black community took such pride. In the case of West, he’s mortally wounded his legacy in the Black community with his reckless, unscholarly, and unsubstantiated rants about President Obama. He also tends to be inconsistent. For example, while responding to a criticism lodged against him by comedian, Steve Harvey, he said, “When you are trying to talk about issues that affect the people, name calling gets in the way. Name-calling is nothing but another weapon of mass distraction.” Then later, he goes on to call President Obama – the first Black president of the United States – “a drone president, and a baby killer.” So in his own words, he’s become “a weapon of mass distraction” – and one of the GOP’s most effective weapons, a valuable tool for undermining the interests of the very people that he claims to love so dearly.
When Tavis Smiley and Cornel West began to lose the confidence of the Black community, they tried to broaden their constituency by refocusing their criticism of President Obama from poverty to the war in Afghanistan. Time.com reported West as saying in 2012 that he didn’t vote. “I couldn’t vote for a war criminal,” he said, calling Obama’s administration a “drone presidency.”
While I don’t like killing machines either, I’ve had to take into account the fact that Obama is charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that Al Qaeda, ISIS, or no other terrorist group manages to get their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal – and let us not forget that they located Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan living comfortably, and casually, within the shadow of that arsenal. So while West would have us believe that Obama is in Afghanistan just killing people for the hell of it, or for the oil companies, that’s a myth. He’s trying to make sure that YOUR family is not blown up by angry religious fanatics who think that God will bless them if they blow up the United States.
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So while war, and killing, is an ugly business, it is very much a reality in the world we live in. So as I see it, if we have to lob missiles into an area filled with innocent people – since hiding behind human shields seems to be the terrorists’ preferred mode of defense – the drone is a far better alternative than simply firing missiles and such blindly.
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Consider this. If you were an Afghan and lived next door to a terrorist, would want to have someone blindly firing missiles in your direction, possibly taking out your home and family, or maybe even the entire town just to get one man, or would you rather they sent in drones with television cameras where they can specifically target the person they’re after? One drone pilot said that they even wait for the target’s family to leave the house before they fire a missile to take out the target. So the fact is, if you have to go to war, drones often SAVE lives.
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So what is West jumping up and down about? This is one of the reasons that I often question the popular belief that West has such a powerful intellect. It’s one thing to have the ability to remember and regurgitate the words of dead White men, and yet another to be able to think for yourself and connect the dots. So on this issue, West is either grossly uninformed, has an inability to connect the dots, or he’s purposely trying to mislead the people (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/drone-pilots-waiting-for-a-kill-shot-7000-miles-away.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&).
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The problem is, Cornel West has evolved into a bad joke – a raving hypocritical egomaniac and intellectual fraud – and I know that with certainty, because I’ve done over 30 articles on him and his former road dawg, Tavis Smiley, so I’ve become one of the world’s greatest authorities on both of them (If you ever want to know about either one of those two, just combine my name and theirs in Google).
West seems to be so envious of President Obama that it’s driven him out of his mind. I think part of the problem is, West was a big shot Ivy League professor when Barack Obama was a skinny little college student, but then, Obama had the nerve to butt in line to become a senator, and then President of the United States. That drove Cornel West crazy. West can’t stand ANYBODY taking him out of the limelight – he even criticized Jay-Z’s partial ownership of a sports team. How dare Jay-Z be so arrogant! Doesn’t he know that CORNEL WEST is the only Black man with gorilla nuts around here!!!? He’s also gone after just about every Black news commentator on television – Al Sharpton, Melessa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson – and every one of them has more sense than he does. The man is simply a clueless egomaniac who thinks that Moses ordered the Red Sea to scoot over so Cornel West could take center stage. His attitude seems to suggest, “Who do you think you are, trying to upstage me? I’m Cornel West! I’m right up there with White folks, so stay in yo place, boy! – I mean, my dear and precious brother.” He’s become mesmerized by his own myth.
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And what about his reputation as a scholar? A true scholar – or even an efficient-thinking high school student – should know that you never base your opinions on unsubstantiated assumptions. Yet, West is ALWAYS going around talking about what’s on Obama’s mind. How in the hell does he know what Obama is thinking!!!? He can’t read Obama’s mind – unless God gave him that skill as part of West’s “Black prophetic tradition” and didn’t tell anybody. If he was as qualified to think as Barack Obama HE’D be president. But just the mere thought of that is an hilariously bad joke, because just like many Republicans, he carries himself like a recklessly irate child having a tantrum in a supermarket. Agree with him or not, President Obama is a thoughtful adult, while Cornel West thinks with the inefficiency of a irresponsible and reckless child. So he couldn’t possibly know what’s on Barack Obama’s mind.
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I’ve made some serious allegations here, and on the surface it may seem like I’m doing the very same thing to Cornel West that he’s doing to President Obama. But there’s one huge difference. Unlike Cornel, my allegations are not just hyperbole, innuendo, and ad hominem attacks. My allegations and criticism of Cornel West are based on facts that I can fully substantiate, in the fact is, Cornel West is one of the major reasons the poor (who he claims to love so dearly) are in the situation they’re in.
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After Ralph Nader was rejected for the 2000 presidential nomination by the Democratic voters, instead of acknowledging his rejection and falling into line to help defeat the Republicans, Nader went into a petulant snit and ran as a third party candidate. It was clear that he purposely ran as a third party candidate with the mean-spirited intent of sabotaging the Democratic effort, because third parties never win; the only purpose that third parties ever serve is to help elect the people that you like least, because they divide the vote of like-minded people.
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Cornel West joined Nader in this foolish – or treacherous, you make the determination – campaign, and as a result, George W. Bush won the election over Al Gore by winning Florida by a mere 537 votes. The Nader/West coalition peeled off 97,488 votes from Gore in Florida alone. So when I say that Cornel West is more than a little responsible for George W. Bush becoming President of the United States, and thus, your current economic condition, don’t take my word for it – you do the math.
Most people, if they were sincere, would look at the disastrous results of their activities and be devastated. After all, causing Bush to be elected was the worst possible outcome for everything West is SUPPOSE to believe in. So most people would conclude that they had made a grave error, and that they would never do anything to divide the progressive vote again. But not Cornel , he teamed up with Ralph Nader yet again in the 2012 election against Obama, and tried do the very same thing that they’d done in the 2000 election that resulted in Bush’s presidency. The only thing that stopped them was this time the people weren’t buying it.
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So as I pointed out above, either Cornel West is a grossly inefficient thinker, or there’s a more malevolent agenda afoot. Did you hear him calling George W. Bush a baby killer? Hmmm . . .
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On the other hand, where was he and Tavis Smiley during the demonstrations against Tavis Smiley’s benefactor, Walmart? In spite of the fact that Smiley and West profess to be so concerned about the poor that they rode all across the country on a bus ranting about it (again, during the 2012 election, thereby, helping the Republican Party – they tend to engage in this sort of Democratic sabotage every election) they’ve ducked the Walmart demonstrations three (count ’em, 3) years in a row – and one demonstration was being held at a Walmart two blocks from Smiley’s office! And Walmart is THE most egregious abuser of the working poor in America. I predicted, in print, two years in a row, that they weren’t going to show up – and sure enough, I was right:
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And then there was Tavis Smiley’s involvement in the Wells Fargo “Ghetto Scam,” where over 30,000 minorities lost their homes and life savings. The Department of Justice said it was the second largest housing discrimination case in this nation’s history. Wells Fargo ended up having to pay $175 million to settle the case, and Cornel West was attached at the hip with Tavis Smiley during that time. Yet, we didn’t hear a “mumblin word” from West about the scandal ( http://wattree.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-question-for-both-tavis-smiley-and.html).
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So where is Cornel West’s integrity? Both Cornel West and Tavis Smiley have fallen victim to a very basic common-sense principle – Before you point your finger at others, you should smell it first.
