When Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008, Americans had high hopes that he would be a unifying figure based on his campaign rhetoric – and his skin color.  While he was certainly expected to reach across the aisle and work in a bipartisan fashion, most people were focused on the expectation that he would serve as a role model in the black community.

Unfortunately, rather than exemplify the values of Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama has worked tirelessly to set the civil rights movement back decades through divisive rhetoric and racist appointments.  Eric Holder wins the award for the Obama administration’s most obnoxious race-baiter, although Obama himself falls in at a close second with his ridiculous statements and actions in the Henry Louis Gates controversy and Trayvon Martin death.  Both are guilty of encouraging the violent protests we have seen in the wake of the Ferguson and Brown deaths.

But Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Burwell made a shocking and disgusting comment Monday, when she appeared at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network breakfast and praised him for spending “his life fighting for what’s right.”  The Washington Examiner reports:

Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell on Monday morning praised Al Sharpton in a breakfast speech before his National Action Network.

"I’ve had the pleasure of knowing the Reverend for many years, and have worked with him from my time in the Clinton administration to my time at Walmart to now," Burwell said, according to her prepared remarks.

After quoting Martin Luther King Jr., Burwell added, "Reverend Sharpton has spent his life fighting for what’s right, no matter how challenging. I want to thank you for your courage, tenacity and persistence."

The Examiner went on to recall Sharpton’s role in the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, his incitement to murder during the Crown Heights riots, and his anti-Semitic associations and comments, including spouting, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”  Weasel Zippers reminds us of this lovely clip, in which Sharpton yells, “You a punk faggot.”

And, in a blog entitled “Race-hustler, anti-Semite Al Sharpton is Obama's Go-To Guy,” Ed Lasky linked to a Breitbart “best of” compilation of Sharpton’s racial and homophobic rants.  Lasky summarized the Sharpton/Obama relationship perfectly, stating:

President Obama has completed the political rehabilitation of an anti-white, anti-Semitic race hustler whose incendiary rhetoric led to actual arson and murders. 

Another disgraceful -- there have been so many -- action by Barack Obama.

Only in Obama World is someone like Al Sharpton “fighting for what’s right.”  Only in this racist administration is inciting violence considered courageous.  Where does Obama find these people?!  Out of what hole has Sylvia Burwell crawled that she is comfortable standing before the country and praising Al Sharpton?

To say that unity and tolerance were never Sharpton’s forte would be an understatement, but then again, neither were they Barack Obama’s.  And given that Obama has invited Sharpton to the White House over 60 times and anointed him an unofficial advisor on matters of race, I suppose we should expect that anyone who remains affiliated with this administration stands for the same moral corruption that emanates from the top down.

Instead of expecting Barack and Michelle Obama to act as role models in the black community, we should have foreseen the resentment simmering under the surface.  Whether Barack’s claims of having a racist white grandmother or Michelle’s pronouncement that she was never proud to be an American until Barack won the Democratic nomination, clearly these two were angry.

But Americans wanted to believe the promises of the man who represented the end of a very divisive and painful period in American history.  For that, we will all be paying the price for years to come.  The national platform given to the Al Sharptons and Eric Holders of this nation have likely led to Martin Luther King, Jr. turning over and over and over again in his grave.