“Pitiful: Al Sharpton can’t even get a hunger strike right,” Noah Rothman writes at Hot Air:
It is perfectly appropriate that those who are cheapening the moral authority of the hunger strike by invoking it in order to force the Senate to move forward with Loretta Lynch’s stalled nomination are also failing to even commit fully to the practice.
MSNBC host, political agitator, and noted tax evader Rev. Al Sharpton is organizing a hunger strike, “along with female civil rights leaders,” to compel the U.S. Senate to confirm Lynch as the next attorney general. They’re calling it the “Confirm Loretta Lynch Fast.”
“[T]he new tactic is designed in the mold of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Cesar Chavez, organizers said,” a Politico report read. And that’s true, with one tiny exception: Those civil rights leaders actually starved themselves in a display of civil disobedience. Fortunately for them, modern day civil rights activists are not held to such a rigorous and inconvenient standard. According to Politico, “fasters will alternate days abstaining from food until Lynch is confirmed to replace Eric Holder at the Justice Department.”
It’s the return of the rolling hunger strike! We’ve seen this goofy tactic before, haven’t we? On the Fourth of July in 2006, then-Democrat mascot Cindy Sheehan (remember her?) staged an anti-Bush protest involving a few equally preening Hollywood friends, as Agence France-Presse reported at the time:
Other supporters, including Penn, Sarandon, novelist Alice Walker and actor Danny Glover will join a ‘rolling” fast, a relay in which 2,700 activists pledge to refuse food for at least 24 hours, and then hand over to a comrade.
As I wrote in response, I was so moved by their efforts, “I’m going on my own personal thrice-daily rolling hunger strike. That’s right: rather than just one random hunger strike once a year, I’ll eschew all solid foods from 9:00 AM until 12:00 PM. And from 1:00 PM until 5:00 PM. And then just to really stick it to the war-mongering imperialists, I’ll fast from 6:00 PM until 8:00 AM the following day.”
And I’m prepared to do the same every day once again, no matter what happens to the would-be attorney general. Fight the power, err, in this case, for the power, man!
Update: “I would be remiss, by the way, if I did not note that there’s a simple way to get Lynch’s nomination to go forward,” Moe Lane writes in response to Sharpton’s “hunger” “strike:”
Democrats can stop filibustering that anti-human trafficking bill that they’ve been blocking. Once that happens, business can continue. Of course, doing that may mean that fewer minority babies end up being aborted, but the Democratic party leadership can’t have everything that they want.
Meanwhile, Twitchy looks for synergy: “Imagine the weight loss if these hunger strikers would join forces with Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ campaign!”
Perhaps Weight Watchers and/or Gwyneth Paltrow should also get onboard. Or maybe Jamba Juice.
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