Why would the president of the United States give such a vicious demagogue the time of day? Because his re-election prospects are looking shaky….

By JAMES TARANTO at The Wall Street Journal

EXCERPTS:

“Obama will be speaking Wednesday for the first time as commander in chief at the annual convention of the National Action Network and standing with its founder, the Rev. Al Sharpton —

In The Wall Street Journal a decade ago, Fred Siegel described the man with whom the president of the United States is now palling around:

Mr. Sharpton is best-known for the Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he insisted that a 15-year-old black girl had been abducted and raped by a band of white men practicing Irish Republican Army rituals. In fact she had made up the story to protect herself from her violent stepfather.

But at Freddy’s [Fashion Mart, a Harlem store], Mr. Sharpton was even more malevolent. He turned a landlord-tenant dispute between the Jewish owner of Freddy’s and a black subtenant into a theater of hatred. Picketers from Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network, sometimes joined by “the Rev.” himself, marched daily outside the store, screaming about “bloodsucking Jews” and “Jew bastards” and threatening to burn the building down.

After weeks of increasingly violent rhetoric, one of the protesters, Roland Smith, took Mr. Sharpton’s words about ousting the “white interloper” to heart. He ran into the store shouting, “It’s on!” He shot and wounded three whites and a Pakistani, whom he apparently mistook for a Jew. Then he set the fire, which killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one African-American–a security guard whom protesters had taunted as a “cracker lover.” Smith then fatally shot himself.

FULL ARTICLE

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