Andrew Stiles | Washington Free Beacon
Only death could silence Jesse Jackson. The relentlessly self-promoting culture warrior—who famously threatened to castrate Barack Obama during the 2008 election—finally fell quiet on Tuesday. He was 13 months older than Joe Biden.
Jackson parlayed his brief proximity to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into a semi-notable career as an omnipresent activist, political candidate, and opportunist. He never achieved success at the ballot box—failing twice to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988—but ultimately prevailed on the battlefield of ideas. Four decades later, Jackson’s brand of race-obsessed, Israel-hating grievance politics has entrenched itself as the Democratic Party’s prevailing orthodoxy.
Possessed of a messianic narcissism that alienated friends and foes alike, Jackson pioneered the art of hanging around the podium at press conferences and getting himself on camera in moments of national controversy. He stopped running for office in 1988, but never stopped sounding off. As Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., once said: “Jesse don’t want to run nothing but his mouth.” Truer words have never been spoken by a disgraced crackhead—with the possible exception of Hunter Biden’s eloquent condemnation of the Pod Save America bros.
Running his mouth routinely got Jackson into trouble—but also generated headlines—in a way most modern Democrats would appreciate. After meeting with Palestinian terror boss Yasser Arafat in 1979, he described support for Israel as a “poisonous weed that is choking Judaism.” Shortly after launching his first presidential campaign, Jackson used the derogatory term “Hymietown” to describe New York City’s Jewish population. In 1991, he helped his perennial frenemy, the formerly obese Rev. Al Sharpton, inflame tensions during the Crown Heights riot—the worst outburst of anti-Semitic violence in modern American history.
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Jackson was eager to take credit for Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 Democratic primary, but also struggled to contain his raging jealousy. One month after Hillary Clinton conceded the race, Jackson inevitably disgraced himself when a live microphone caught him lashing out at Obama for “talking down” to black people. “I want to cut his nuts off,” Jackson said between takes during one of his many television appearances throughout the campaign. In a post mourning Jackson’s death, President Donald Trump praised the iconic activist for his thankless effort to elect “Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand.”
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