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The celebration of racial progress that Obama will hide today
Investors.com / Investor's Business Daily
Andrew Malcolm
7/11/2013
Excerpts:
The year 1963 was the best of times. And it was the worst of times.
Little Barry Obama turned two as his father's Kenya homeland won independence from Britain. Dr. Michael De Bakey implanted the first artificial heart. Then came the first liver transplant. And Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic "I Have a Dream" speech to 200,000 hopeful, black and white American supporters of civil rights.
..............................................
But tucked into those 1963 events of note (Valium was born too that year), came some historic sports events, centered around Loyola University of Chicago.
George Ireland was the coach of that Jesuit institution's basketball team. He had this crazy notion that his Ramblers could win more games by playing its five best players, even if two, three and sometimes even four of them were black.
This directly violated an unwritten NCAA rule of the day: Never play more than three blacks at the same time.
In fact days before 1963 began, Ireland's starting lineup against Wyoming was all-black.
In that season's Division I NCAA Tournament, Loyola was scheduled to play the Bulldogs of Mississippi State. People remember that a Mississippi court banned the segregated public school from competing against another squad with any black players.
The same people tend to forget that those team members from the Deep South, every one of them white, defied the court order. They played Loyola anyway, a rather courageous act in an era when a few months later in the same state four civil rights workers were abducted, murdered and buried in an earthen dam.
Mississippi lost that simple 1963 basketball game against Loyola, 61-51. But the contest and on-court sportsmanship were signs of national social progress that, looking back and glancing elsewhere in the world, is pretty impressive a half-century later.
Loyola went all the way to the NCAA Finals in that 1963 tournament. There, Ireland's boys faced a tough foe, the two-time returning champs of Cincinnati.
For their pioneering teamwork and racial example, this November for the first time ever the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame will induct, not an individual player or coach, but the entire 1963 Loyola team and staff.
President Obama is addicted to photo ops, especially sports ones with happy collegiate and pro champions giving him his own monogrammed team jersey of the sort he never got to wear in actual competition.
The smiling audience and the president basking in the reflected winning glory of athletic champions is a sure-fire, feel-good TV story, especially in summer. Poker aside, there's hardly a national title that Obama hasn't celebrated for photographers at the White House.
You would think that Barack Obama, an adopted Illinois resident, would want to publicly honor that hometown team and celebrate our entire nation's ongoing racial progress, perhaps as proof of his positive impact. Yes, poor people have gotten poorer during Obama's 1,633 days in office. Yes, food stamp recipients have soared 50% under his political rule to nearly 50 million.
And yes, Obama's hometown of Chicago, now run by his ex-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had six dozen shooting incidents last weekend, most of them black-on-black.
But Obama won election in 2008 as the country's first African American president, promising to unite America's diverse peoples and cultures in a new hope and change that would bridge the country's wide social and partisan divides by sincerely working together and putting the national interest ahead of petty personal gain.
In that, of course, Obama has failed miserably. In fact, just saying such a thing now sounds sarcastic.
It is emblematic of this Obama regime's arrogance that the president will, indeed, honor that inspiring 1963 Loyola basketball team today in the White House. He will, according to the official schedule, "acknowledge the key role the Ramblers played in breaking down racial barriers."
Alone.
The man who once promised the most transparent administration in history has decided to celebrate with the aging national champions in the Oval Office by himself. Just him. In private. "Closed press," as they call it, like his CIA intelligence briefings. No public sharing of this good news story with fellow Americans.
View the complete article at:
http://news.investors.com/politics-a...amps-obama.htm
Investors.com / Investor's Business Daily
Andrew Malcolm
7/11/2013
Excerpts:
The year 1963 was the best of times. And it was the worst of times.
Little Barry Obama turned two as his father's Kenya homeland won independence from Britain. Dr. Michael De Bakey implanted the first artificial heart. Then came the first liver transplant. And Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic "I Have a Dream" speech to 200,000 hopeful, black and white American supporters of civil rights.
..............................................
But tucked into those 1963 events of note (Valium was born too that year), came some historic sports events, centered around Loyola University of Chicago.
George Ireland was the coach of that Jesuit institution's basketball team. He had this crazy notion that his Ramblers could win more games by playing its five best players, even if two, three and sometimes even four of them were black.
This directly violated an unwritten NCAA rule of the day: Never play more than three blacks at the same time.
In fact days before 1963 began, Ireland's starting lineup against Wyoming was all-black.
In that season's Division I NCAA Tournament, Loyola was scheduled to play the Bulldogs of Mississippi State. People remember that a Mississippi court banned the segregated public school from competing against another squad with any black players.
The same people tend to forget that those team members from the Deep South, every one of them white, defied the court order. They played Loyola anyway, a rather courageous act in an era when a few months later in the same state four civil rights workers were abducted, murdered and buried in an earthen dam.
Mississippi lost that simple 1963 basketball game against Loyola, 61-51. But the contest and on-court sportsmanship were signs of national social progress that, looking back and glancing elsewhere in the world, is pretty impressive a half-century later.
Loyola went all the way to the NCAA Finals in that 1963 tournament. There, Ireland's boys faced a tough foe, the two-time returning champs of Cincinnati.
For their pioneering teamwork and racial example, this November for the first time ever the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame will induct, not an individual player or coach, but the entire 1963 Loyola team and staff.
President Obama is addicted to photo ops, especially sports ones with happy collegiate and pro champions giving him his own monogrammed team jersey of the sort he never got to wear in actual competition.
The smiling audience and the president basking in the reflected winning glory of athletic champions is a sure-fire, feel-good TV story, especially in summer. Poker aside, there's hardly a national title that Obama hasn't celebrated for photographers at the White House.
You would think that Barack Obama, an adopted Illinois resident, would want to publicly honor that hometown team and celebrate our entire nation's ongoing racial progress, perhaps as proof of his positive impact. Yes, poor people have gotten poorer during Obama's 1,633 days in office. Yes, food stamp recipients have soared 50% under his political rule to nearly 50 million.
And yes, Obama's hometown of Chicago, now run by his ex-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had six dozen shooting incidents last weekend, most of them black-on-black.
But Obama won election in 2008 as the country's first African American president, promising to unite America's diverse peoples and cultures in a new hope and change that would bridge the country's wide social and partisan divides by sincerely working together and putting the national interest ahead of petty personal gain.
In that, of course, Obama has failed miserably. In fact, just saying such a thing now sounds sarcastic.
It is emblematic of this Obama regime's arrogance that the president will, indeed, honor that inspiring 1963 Loyola basketball team today in the White House. He will, according to the official schedule, "acknowledge the key role the Ramblers played in breaking down racial barriers."
Alone.
The man who once promised the most transparent administration in history has decided to celebrate with the aging national champions in the Oval Office by himself. Just him. In private. "Closed press," as they call it, like his CIA intelligence briefings. No public sharing of this good news story with fellow Americans.
View the complete article at:
http://news.investors.com/politics-a...amps-obama.htm