interior devastation

Gay Designer Michael Smith Taints Obama’s Oval Office With Stolen MLK Quote

While fancypants interior decorator Michael Smith won’t say how much he spent redesigning (or anything else about) Barack Obama‘s Oval Office makeover, maybe he should reveal where he looked for historical facts. Because that quote he’s got laid in the carpet? The one attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.? It’s kinda doesn’t belong to MLK.

Jame Stiehm corrects the record:

President Obama’s new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it’s not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington. For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you’re fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

A century later, during the civil rights movement, King, an admirer of Parker, quoted the Bostonian’s lofty prophecy during marches and speeches. Often he’d ask in a refrain, “How long? Not long.” He would finish in a flourish: “Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” King made no secret of the author of this idea. As a Baptist preacher on the front lines of racial justice, he regarded Parker, a religious leader, as a kindred spirit.

Which means Obama is now walking around a carpet that has the historical accuracy of Glenn Beck.

Historical accuracy aside, guess who doesn’t like Barack’s new digs? Mr. Mo Rocca.

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