"I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man." So said Dr. King on the day before he was murdered in 1968. The quote appears in a photo caption with today's long, largely uncritical piece on Jesse Jackson in the Rocky. Jackson is seen next to King in that picture. M. E. Sprengelmeyer does a pretty good job of recapping Jackson's epic gaffe from this June when his raging jealousy and resentment of Barack Obama burst out in a comment (unknowingly recorded) about wanting to "cut his nuts off." But the article would be better journalism had it given us those four exact words, instead of the delicate euphemism the writer substituted.
Sprengelmeyer also fails to acknowledge the dark side of Jackson's 40-year career as a race-guilt hustler, with all the vast personal enrichment, prestige, and sexual license which are now uncomfortably contrasted with Obama's moral uplift speeches -- and which face extinction if America elects a black President.
That's the real source of Jesse Jackson's hot-mic indiscretion. Unlike MLK, he's worried about plenty, and he fears one man very much. Hence the castration fantasy. CNN's question to viewers a few weeks ago, quoted by Sprengelmeyer, "Has Jesse Jackson become irrelevant?", is in process of coming true with Obama's nomination, and will take hold with cold finality on Nov. 5 if Obama wins.
Another irony in this fawning three-page spread on Jesse the Great cropped up in the sidebar on lessons he allegedly learned from patching up a welfare-reform dispute with Bill Clinton at DNC 1996: "Set aside differences while the television cameras are on, deal with internal squabbles later." Bet he was wishing he'd taken his own advice on the Fox set, after the firestorm broke earlier this summer.