September 4, 2010

Smartest President in History Botches Oval Office Rug Quote

By Thomas Lifson
Woven into the new presidential seal rug adorning the Oval Office is a misattributed quotation, offering us a perfect metaphor for the Obama presidency. Jamie Stiehm reports in the Washington Post:"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." According to media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.Except it's not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you're fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.A century later, during the civil rights...(Read Full Article)