Barack Obama CRUSH Puny Malik Shabazz!!

You're supposed to say that in the Solomon Grundy voice from the old Superfriends...

Moving right along, Stanley Crouch thinks the most important thing about Al'Qaeda employing Malcolm X's house slave/field slave analogy, is that shows Obama has crushed Malcolm:

Malcolm X was one of the naysayers to American possibility whose vision was permanently crushed beneath the heel of Obama's victory on Nov. 4. Though his ideas had nothing to do with the ultimate form of nonviolence - voting - those desperate to praise him will pretend now that he was actually a civil rights leader! This has been going on for an unforgivably long time, especially among black academics.

Malcolm X had nothing to do with Obama's accomplishment as did none of the other militants who preached their own version of separatism and gleefully attacked the civil rights movement as offering no more than pie in the sky and misleading black people.

Unforgivably long!!! Misleading black people!! Other Militants!!! Meddling kids!!!!

It may be true that "other militants" had nothing to do with Obama's win. It is certainly true that people who said Obama wasn't black (Stanley Crouch) had even less to do with Obama's win. But as Adam points out, what is literally and demonstrably false is Crouch's claim that Malcom X "had nothing to do with Obama's accomplishment. How do we know this? Because Barack Obama said it in his memoir:

In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even Du Bois' learning and Baldwin's love and Langston's humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art's redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels. Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.

If you are writing columns on the president-elect of the greatest power in world history, who happens to be black and you can't even bother to crack his memoir, than you are more than Leeroy Jenkins. You do not simply fail in epic manner, but more like Palin, Couric and "all of them," like M.C. Hammer hounded by creditors. You are Plaxico at the bar, shooting yourself with your own gun. And in so doing, you ascend to the 37th chamber--the chamber of intergalactic fail. All bow before the master.

UPDATE: Put the link back to Crouch's article in there.

UPDATE 2: Tessa makes an even better point. Crouch's contention that Malcolm's "ideas had nothing to do with the ultimate form of nonviolence-voting" is also factually wrong. Given Crouch's knowledge of that era, I'm tempted to call it a blatant lie. But we'll leave it that. Look there's a lot to criticize Malcolm for, especially in his early days with the Nation. Just like there's a lot to criticize MLK for--his womanizing repeatedly endangered the movement he was leading. All that I ask is that you stick to facts. As Tessa notes, in arguably his most famous speech, The Ballot or The Bullet, Malcolm very specifically addresses the black people and voting:

They're becoming politically mature. They are realizing that there are new political trends from coast to coast. As they see these new political trends, it's possible for them to see that every time there's an election the races are so close that they have to have a recount. They had to recount in Massachusetts to see who was going to be governor, it was so close. It was the same way in Rhode Island, in Minnesota, and in many other parts of the country. And the same with Kennedy and Nixon when they ran for president. It was so close they had to count all over again. Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who's going to sit in the White House and who's going to be in the dog house.

Come on man. Be honest with the people.