Op-Ed malicious intent

There are , in the Villages Daily Sun today (9/6/2012) two op-ed pieces shot with glaring errors of fact and bad intent. Again!

In Thomas Sowell's column, ("Obama's.....Doubt") he tries to refute the president by equating  slavery existing before the African Slave trade with the wave of African slavery that followed the (re) discovery of America in the 1400s. As an African American of intellect, he shames himself. The reason for the success of the African slave trade for over 300 years was precisely the assumption, encouraged by the Church, of the racial and spiritual inferiority of Blacks.  Prior to that, and in fact  among Africans,  the basis of slavery was social disadvantage, such as being taken prisoner, debt, loss of kinship network, etc.  Specific race based slavery contingent on difference of skin color and origin was a new and far more insidious (and obscenely profitable) institution.  One expects a more scholarly  approach from  a  Harvard/Columbia/Chicago PhD.

In Mona Charen's  "GOP remains Party of the Big Tent" of the same date, she implies that the real party of tolerance and racial harmony is and has been the  Republican party all along. One could almost laugh and ignore it if not for the fear that there are actually those who will read it, and by doing so put it into their mental storehouse of fictionalized history.  Lincoln, the first republican President, actually had no intention of Emancipation in slave states, until the expected quick victory in the Civil War proved illusory. When he did it, he announced his intention to do so three months before it went into effect, specifically to allow border slave states to "come back" and retain slavery.  Following the close election of 1877, (in some ways a presage of the election of 2000, look it up!)  The Republicans, true to form, chose business over people, ended Reconstruction, and allowed Jim Crow to spread his wings over the former Confederacy.   

In the modern era, The Republicans have been the party of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and countless others some of whom, while initially retaining the official party designator of Democrat, left the party specifically because of its espousal of Civil Rights. Neither major American party is without sin in this area, but to hold up a Condi Rice or  Bobby Jindal and proclaim themselves the party of racial harmony is to ignore the state level Republican legislative attempts to trim the voter rolls of the poor who have neither driver's license or passport. It is to ignore the shouting down at their own national convention of a delegate from Puerto Rico because of her accent. It is to ignore the harassment by delegates of a Black CNN camerawoman.   In fact, it is to ignore the religious history of their candidate, whose Church taught until the latter half of the 20th century that Blacks were cursed and whose black skin was the "mark of Cain."   All one needs to know about Mona Charen can be found in her article crucifying President Obama  for "abandoning"  blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng  while Obama's SecState, Hillary Clinton was doing what adult diplomats do - negotiating his release under mutually acceptable conditions.  Claiming the big tent now, is demonstrably false, claiming it historically is maliciously ignorant and morally bankrupt.