Bernie will never get it...and maybe he doesn't want to.

Senator Bernie Sanders’ comments in Jackson, Mississippi commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have been roundly criticized chiefly for his dismissal of President Obama as a ‘’charismatic individual.’’

I tend to stay away from the Twitter threads on Mr. Sanders simply because they usually wind up being circular firing squads about the 2016 election debacle and, for the most part, the threads concerning this speech are no exception.

This morning I ran across a clip of that speech.

x Here's the clip of Bernie's comments tonight where he says "The business model, if you like, of the Democratic Party for the last 15 years or so has been a failure" and simultaneously reduces President Obama to an "extraordinary candidate." He said this in Mississippi. Yeah. pic.twitter.com/YpAtso1cax — Ethan Grey (@_EthanGrey) April 5, 2018

First of all, some Sanders supporters have pointed to the fact that some people were clapping during this portion of the speech with Sanders, again, criticizing the Democratic Party.

Looking at the clip, I have to wonder if Mr. Sanders or, to be more precise, any of his supporters understands the reasons that some Democrats in Mississippi might agree with his sentiments.

I suspect that some Democrats might agree with Mr. Sanders’ comments but for vastly different reasons; I don’t think that Bernie has a clue as far as those reasons.

Second of all, Barack Obama was far more than a ‘’charasmatic individual’’ or an ‘’extraordinary candidate’’

Barack Hussein Obama is the duly elected and reelected 44th President of the United States of America.

Say his fuc*ing name, Bernie— President Barack Obama!

President Obama earned that honorific for the remainder of his life.

And it sounds quite Jim Crow-ish when you don’t say it.

And I would think that an audience in Jackson, Mississippi would know more than a little bit about Jim Crow.

But what really pissed me off in these remarks was Mr. Sanders apparent embrace of a whitewashed American history of the sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968; the event that was the reason that Dr. King was in Memphis in the first place.

On Wednesday night, seated beside Lumumba, the 35-year-old mayor who came into office last year, Sanders talked about King's focus later in life on connecting the fight for integration and civil rights with issues of income inequality. “All of us know where he was when he was assassinated 50 years ago today,” the senator said. “He was in Memphis to stand with low-income sanitation workers who were being exploited ruthlessly, whose wages were abysmally low, and who were trying to create a union. That's where he was. Because as the mayor just indicated, what he believed — and where he was a real threat to the establishment — is that, of course we need civil rights in this country, but we also need economic justice.”

Any cursory readng of the history of the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis can tell you that Dr. King was primarily standing with black sanitation workers.

In fact, the men who went on strike did not want the racial dimensions of their struggle to be erased.

You would expect a man who bases his credentials, in part, on his activities during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, to know such basic history and historical context of said movement.

This history will not be whitewashed...not on my watch.