[J.P.’s Moment of Common Sense on Broad View, KRNG 101.3 FM Reno.  Listen live Saturdays at 11:00 AM Pacific Time.]

Vacation renews perspective and I spent last week on an island with no connection to the outside world—no cell phone, no Internet, no television—so I definitely suffered from fresh perspective when I got home.

I use the word “suffered” because it’s painful to see the depravity and stupidity which are commonplace in modern America.  To see it with increased clarity by comparison to the simple decency of island life was not pleasant.

One of the first voices I heard from my car radio after regaining the mainland was Jesse Jackson—still whining, rasping, and burping about the George Zimmerman acquittal—which reminded me of my first introduction to this race-baiting extortionist lowlife.  It was the early 1980s.  Here in Grand Rapids we had a superintendent of schools accused of abusing his public credit card.  West Michigan is a fundamentally conservative and religious area, and possibly a bit naive about the dastardly tendencies of government employees so people were indignant that their head of schools was using his taxpayer funded credit card to entertain friends and family at Duck’s Restaurant.  An investigation ensued.

But John Dow, the accused superintendent, was a black man so Jesse Jackson was called up from Chicago to investigate the investigators for racial prejudice.  When Jesse arrived at the Grand Rapids airport the reporters were waiting and he immediately gave an interview suggesting that John Dow was guilty of nothing more than being black, the Grand Rapids school board was a group of sheet-wearing racists, and he personally would drag the city through the fires of hell if they treated Mr. Dow hurtfully.

Okay, maybe he didn’t say anything about sheets or the fires of hell but it was there between the lines.  For sure we have a right to question the extent of Jesse Jackson’s investigation since it lasted less than a minute.  He came out of the airplane, he looked around, he saw the television cameras, and his investigation was concluded: Grand Rapidians were racists.

That’s Jesse Jackson from my viewpoint.  But with the fresh perspective gained on Beaver Island (yes, that’s the name of the island where I vacationed and no, your dirty mind is not correct about how it got its name), I suddenly realized how horrible it must be to have Jesse Jackson pretending to be your spokesman.  Imagine what that must be like for black Americans: every time they see a television they see Jesse or Al Sharpton or some other nincompoop inciting hatred, talking stupid, and claiming to represent them.

It must be excruciatingly embarrassing.  Which raises the question: who is picking our spokesmen?

Jesse Jackson is an extortionist creep but Al Sharpton is worse.  Al Sharpton is evil incarnate.  Since the early 1980s Sharpton has been spewing rhetoric designed to incite hatred, create racial strife, and make Al Sharpton famous (thereby putting money in his pocket).  Tawana Brawley, Duke lacrosse team, the Trayvon Martin case: he’s always wrong but always present, taking advantage.  Milking people’s emotions.  As Michelle Malkin pointed out a couple days ago, he has blood on his hands.  Every beating or killing done in Trayvon Martin’s name since the Zimmerman verdict should be laid on his doorstep.  But the blood goes back decades: in 1995, after getting the facts about a business dispute completely wrong and shouting anti-Semitic nonsense to mobs in Harlem, one of his listeners walked into the Jewish-owned store involved in the dispute, Freddy’s Fashion Mart, with a gun and a can of gasoline.

He told all the black people to leave, then burned the store down.  Seven people died.  There was no apology from Al Sharpton.

I’m not black so I can only imagine the embarrassment of having this creep claiming to speak for me, but there are plenty of other examples that do cause me shame.  I’m conservative/libertarian so naturally I want to side with Republicans when it comes to political issues but every time I look up I see John McCain, Lindsay Graham, or John Boehner pretending to be my spokesman.  These old coots are Washington parasites, not conservatives, so who picked them to speak for me?

There seem to be more examples every day of lowlife pretenders consciously dishonestly setting themselves up to be spokesmen for people who roundly despise them.  Liberals who favor abortion and gay marriage calling themselves evangelicals and then pretending to be spokesmen for the evangelical movement, people who know nothing about climate or statistics speaking for climate science, and even a senator from Massachusetts who pretended to be Native American and published a Native American cookbook.

Did you know Cherokees invented mayonnaise?  Neither did the Cherokees.

Here’s my gift of wisdom gleaned from my fresh perspective after a week on an island: we should stop being polite to all the yahoos who pretend to be our spokesmen.  We should send these false spokesmen packing and start speaking for ourselves.

That’s... today’s dose of common sense.

“In the political world, the only position I have is voter.  I’m not a spokesman for anything.” — Tommy Lee Jones

“No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.” — Robert A. Heinlein

“Absolutely committed to spending the rest of my life as a spokesman for the rights of European Americans.” — David Duke

From Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA        Tweet

August 5, 2013 - I believe that many white people will think twice before ever voting for a black man/woman again to run the government! – cali, California

J.P. replies: The idea that Obama would ruin it for legitimate black office seekers is something I predicted early in 2008.  “This is not the guy you want to be the first black president,” I kept saying to any black American who would listen.

August 3, 2013 - It's hard to know where to start. These leeches have been threatening, extorting, and inciting for decades. They are a waste of skin and to make matters worse, they continue to suck up air that others could put to good use. One can only hope they fall of the face of the earth and we no longer have to have our intelligence insulted every time these poltroons open their mouth. – Don L., Missouri