Rosa Clemente, the hip-hop activist who is now Cynthia McKinney’s vice presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket, made an acceptance speech this weekend during which she offered unequivocal praise for the Weather Underground, Mutulu Shakur (currently serving a 60-year term for his involvement in the BLA’s notorious 1981 Brinks heist) and other supposed paragons of progressivism in America. Clemente also waxed sentimental over the “prophetic” lyrics of dead prez, the rap duo:
tell me who’s got control of your mind and your worldview/is it the news or the movie you’re taking yourself to?
Well, it’s only fair to note who has control of dead prez’s mind and worldview: the extremist cult leader Omali Yeshitela of the African Peoples Socialist Party, who thunders not just against Barack Obama but also Jesse Jackson and Nelson Mandela, and has
declared: “Neo-colonialism not only must be destroyed as a system — the neo-colonialists themselves are going to have to be physically destroyed before Africa can be liberated.”
Clemente says, “I stand on the 10 key values and principles of the Green Party” — and note on the C-Span clip that she can barely say it with a straight face. Because one of those principles, clear in black and white, as I observed in yesterday’s
post, is non-violence.
I
agree with Marc Cooper that not too many years ago,
there were a few patches of Green that seemed semi-rational, even promising. There were candidates, activists and even some low-level elected officials that seemed to reflect a forward-looking, accessible reform politics that based itself on a rejection of the big money corruption of the two major parties. At least at the local level, the Greens seemed a possible option that could cut across partisan lines and embrace a rainbow stretching from lefty liberals to cranky libertarians.
But now, as Marc rightly says, “the Greens have ossified into a tiny, shrill, ‘revolutionary’ cult,” with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist heading the ticket and a hypocrite sloganeer in the number-two slot. This is the radical left’s answer to Obama, who has mobilized millions upon millions with his message of enlightened democratic pluralism. You could dismiss it as pathetic if it weren’t for the fact that Clemente may actually manage to dent Obama’s support among hip-hop youth.
