What Took Him So Long?

The "reverend" Al Sharpton will travel to Crawford, Texas Sunday to give his "support" to Cindy "Bad Hats" Sheehan. Oh, yeah, that'll boost her credibility. Al Sharpton is the Durwood Kirby of the civil rights movement. I can't figure out what it is he does. He's a politician without a constituency, a minister without a church, a 51-year-old man who, as far as I can determine, has never held a job -- unless you count race-baiting as a career. I don't know how he makes his money, but he seems to make a lot of it. Al Sharpton is the Teflon con-man. Nothing seems to hurt him. Al got involved in social activism during his teenage years, organizing several youth protests before he graduated from high school in 1972, and forming a national youth movement, named "National Youth Movement." After two years of college, he dropped out and worked as national touring manager for singer James Brown. Since then, he has led numerous publicity grabbing protests following incidents of racial attacks and police brutality (such as the police assault of Haitian immigrant Abner Luoima) and formed a national action network called "National Action Network" with 20 chapters around the country. He's like Jesse Jackson without a sense of prose. And, like Jesse Jackson, he is a political figure famous for incendiary talk and not much else. In 1983, the FBI videotaped Al Sharpton talking about laundering drug money with former mobster Michael Franzese, a Mafioso-turned-undercover-FBI informant posing as a cocaine dealer. No indictments were issued and the sting operation was never completed. (Whew!) Sharpton made his name and his fame as the one to lead a protest movement after every racially charged incident in New York over the last 30 years (and many elsewhere in the U.S.) Especially early in his career, he seemed content and even eager to inflame racial hatreds at the risk of violence, as long as it gave him publicity and power. Several of these protests escalated to the point of violence, in several cases by those who Sharpton championed. Examples include the Crown Heights riot of 1991, and a 1995 arson attack on a Jewish Harlem jeweler that resulted in 8 deaths. That attack came months after Sharpton made remarks about the "white interloper". And then there was the Tawana Brawley affair. Black teenager Tawana Brawley claimed in 1987 that six white law enforcement officers -- including then-assistant district attorney Steven Pagones -- had abducted and raped her, scrawled racial insults on her body and smeared her with feces. She refused to speak with authorities or the media, but Sharpton and her two other advisers were soon making wild claims. Sharpton compared then-state Attorney General Robert Abrams, a Jew, to Adolf Hitler. All three linked then-Gov. Mario Cuomo to organized crime and the Ku Klux Klan. Within a year, a grand jury announced the story was a hoax and specifically cleared a Fishkill police officer and Pagones. This incident made it clear that Sharpton is simply irresponsible. He will use shaky information to advance his race-baiting. Where there are TV cameras, there is Al Sharpton. But watching the circus at Crawford, I can't help but think someone is missing......hmmmm.....Of COURSE! Where's Gloria Allred????