Community Organizers Trade Union launches Palin Protest

Yesterday Community Organizers International Trade Union Staff (COITUS) launched its official protest over Sarah Palin's "demeaning, defactual rhetoric regarding our proud profession."

Spokesman and part-time presidential candidate David Burge stated, "When America's communities need organizing, who will be there to organize them, if not us? Who will fight to make a difference by reaching out and working with communities to raise awareness of the importance of dealing with community issues by referring inquiries to outreach coordinators and making posters advertising interpretive dance and face-painting festivals while ensuring that each and every voter has the right to vote for their Democratic Party candidates who were once community organizers themselves?"

"That's right. COITUS will!"

"We've been fighting these perceptions ever since the 1970's, when right-wing neo-conservative author Tom Wolfe wrote his pro-war tome Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers:

Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job counseling. You be the job counselor. You be the "neighborhood organizer." As a job counselor or a neighborhood organizer you stood to make six or seven hundred dollars a month, and you were still your own man. Like if you were a "neighborhood organizer," all you had to do was go out and get the names and addresses of people in the ghetto who wanted to relate to the services of the poverty center. That was a very flexible arrangement. You were still on the street, and you got paid for it.

In its statement, COITUS also noted that even proud alumnus Barack Obama had once maligned the proud community organizing profession.

Organizing is always a lost cause... community organizing will never allow me to make major changes in poverty or discrimination... you either have to be an elected official or be influential with elected officials.

Burge noted that Obama had since changed his mind: "It's not just council-members and mayors who are in control of our towns and cities, it's the proud back-bone provided by members of COITUS who are the pulsating organs of change in an otherwise flaccid environment."

Hat tip: Larwyn. Linked by: American Digest and Buzztracker. Thanks!