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Mon. May 16, 2005

Response from McKinney?

For years now, my thoughts on Cynthia McKinney have been well known. Just as some will never be convinced Bush is a worthy President (and rant accordingly), or those who felt the same about Clinton, I use my rights of free speech to spout off about my elected representative here in Georgia’s 4th District.

It’s my right.

And, as one might expect, there are times someone comes along who disagrees, and supports McKinney. It’s their right. But there are times the lines appear to blur in interesting ways.

Over at Atlanta Public Affairs, there’s a comment at the bottom of the article “McKinney is MIA on Gay Issues.” It’s a defense of McKinney, and I can’t help but note that the content and tone is very very similar to a comment I got this morning ... also in defense of McKinney.

Now, that in itself isn’t very odd. Atlanta Public Affairs has a link in its comments to the McKinney article on my site, so it isn’t unexpected that their anonymous commenter might follow that link and leave one here, too. And I’ve already replied to the specifics of the comment. Oh, but let’s not spoil it yet by revealing the oddity, let’s look at these two comments on two sites.

Contrast and compare:

There: “Congresswoman McKinney supported gay issues with a 100% voting record yet gays didn’t support her against Majette or Wollard.”

Here: “She has a 100% voting record on gay issues by the Human Rights Commission. YET, gays didn’t support her either against Majette or Wollard.”

There: “She has a 100% voting record on environmental issues according to the Sierra Club, yet they did not support her. She has a 100% voting record on gays yet the Human Rights Campaign did not support her.”

Here: “She has a 100% voting record on the environment, which has been true all of her political life.”

There: “In spite of the non-support from special interests that she has supported all her political life .. she won with an over-whelming and crushing defeat of 4 seasoned politicians with long political records in DeKalb County.”

Here: “If memory serves me well, Congresswoman McKinney won an overwhelming victory against 4 politicians with long records in the 4th district, and she did it without a single vote from the whiners on this site.”

There: “As a HUGE suppoprter of McKinney, the best thing you’ve said is that you will no longer be in her district, which suits the citizens of the 4th district just fine.”

Here: “Hopefully, for both you and the citizens of the 4th district, you’re no longer in the 4th .. but even if you are, there will be even more of us going to the polls in the next election to ensure continued representation by Congresswoman McKinney.”

Remarkably similar, but it’s not odd for one person to use similar phrasing and arguments to make their case. However, I got a little added dose that wasn’t in the comment at Atlanta Public Affairs. First, some partisan slappery: “You want to see the government fund Project Prometheus? You should be a Republican .. and probably are.”

My wife doesn’t “guffaw” often, but that would sure do it.

And then, this: “It doesn’t matter what Congresswoman McKinney does or does not do, she is representative of real black political power in the south, and the haters/whiners of racist Georgia are never going be satisfied with whatever she does.”

“Racist Georgia.” My, who would say such a thing about Georgia? Being an infernally curious sort, I went through my server logs, and found the digital transaction that created the comment in question:

137.18.255.35 – - [16/May/2005:15:05:05 +0000] “POST /article/2673/ HTTP/1.1” 200 9361 “http://photodude.com/article/2673/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12”

If you do a traceroute of the IP number, i.e., the location where the comment was made, we find that 137.18.255.35 is housegate6.house.gov. It would appear that somewhere in the US House of Representatives, there’s a staff member spending their time posting comments on weblogs to defend Cynthia McKinney, and condemn the “haters/whiners of racist Georgia,” i.e., those who oppose her.

This isn’t exactly the kind of digital communication with the office of my elected representative that I’d envisioned, but … whatever. Now that we seem to have each other’s attention, I must sincerely repeat:

“If she wants to stand up for the working poor, if/when she visits her Buford Highway office, she should take a hard look around. It is part of a stretch of a seven lane highway over a mile long that has no crosswalks, and very few sidewalks. Yet thousands of working class poor live in the dozen or so apartment complexes along that stretch of highway. Many of them lack cars and use mass transit to get around. And their feet. Yet they face a dangerously inhospitable environment for pedestrians, where simply getting to the bus stop means navigating the treacherous edges of a seven lane highway where rock strewn human-worn paths perhaps a foot wide substitute for ‘sidewalks,’ and which has no crosswalks whatsoever for over a mile.”

“When you watch families forced to stand in the suicide lane waiting for three lanes of fast moving traffic to clear (after having made across the first three), just so they can get to the bus stop, you have to wonder about our society’s most basic priorities.”

“How about a little concrete and white paint, Representative McKinney? For the poor workin’ home folks.”

As I pointed out in my reply to the original comment, there is indeed federal money for local pedestrian projects. And, regardless, the Representative is supposed to be a voice for those in need in her district, whether she can personally make the funding happen or not. You know, that whole “speak truth to power” thing.

Let me put it another way: this white guy from District 4 who is not a Republican is asking for the Representative’s help for hundreds of Hispanic and African American families who face unnecessary daily danger on the street right outside McKinney’s local office.

And he doesn’t appreciate being lectured about “racist Georgia” for asking.