Obama's Oval Office Rug "Burn"

You can see part of the text at the edge of the rug.

The hat tip goes to Rob, where I saw it first, but the headline was inspired while visiting our own Left Coast Rebel!

It seems that in Barack Obama's newly remodeled Oval Office is a rug decorated with a number of quotes. One of these quotes is attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, may have quoted it, but unfortunately, did not originally write it. From the Washington Post:

A mistake has been made in the Oval Office makeover that goes beyond the beige.

President Obama's new presidential rug seemed beyond reproach, with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. woven along its curved edge.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it's not a King quote. The words belong to a long-gone Bostonian champion of social progress. His roots in the republic ran so deep that his grandfather commanded the Minutemen at the Battle of Lexington.

For the record, Theodore Parker is your man, President Obama. Unless you're fascinated by antebellum American reformers, you may not know of the lyrically gifted Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist thinker who foresaw the end of slavery, though he did not live to see emancipation. He died at age 49 in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.

Just a small note on the passing scene. Nothing of earth shattering consequence, just a reminder that even the most powerful man on the planet can be surrounded by people who think they know more than they really know. Unless, of course, he picked out the quote himself? Then...draw your own conclusions.