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Archive for May 5th, 2008

The Forest and the Tree’s

It was another tedious and bombastic political weekend with the Republican talking points ringing in our ears — if you want to know what went wrong in this country, listen to them carefully; they drive the dialogue, color our every thought, titillate our every fear and obliterate [yes, I said it] every hope that we can rise above our rabble-consciousness to grab a larger vision of the commonwealth … a project which is absurd since we are, by and large, a liberal nation impatient to be about the business of change. Yet with BushNation suffering an approval rate of 28% we’re STILL defining ourselves by the Righty illusions and projections.

Buzz Flash, who has lost a number of supporters by favoring the Obama form of politics, used this ledeline for an article.

In the alice-in-wonderland world that has become presidential politics lately, it has come to this: Hillary Clinton, who has resided in a chauffeur-driven bubble for the past 20 years, is portraying herself as a man of the people. Barack Obama, raised by a single mother and who paid off his college loans just a few years ago, is the elite snob. And John McCain, married to a beer heiress, charges that Obama is “insensitive to the hopes and dreams and ambitions” of millions of Americans.

A true division in policy by the candidates got a lot of attention in the last days — the gas tax conversation. Over 150 economists gathered to punch holes in the “summer vacation” proposition, producing this ledeline from Hil’s camp: Economists Who Disagree With My Gas Plan Are Elite

And here’s McRib:

“I saw yesterday some additional comments that have been revealed by Pastor Wright,” McCain said. “One of them, comparing the United States Marine Corps with Roman legionnaires who were responsible for the death of our savior. I mean, being involved in that. It’s beyond belief. And then of course, saying that al Qaeda and the American flag were the same flags.”

That’s what 7 years of Bush have given us — an amplification of dumbed-down political expediencies and kick-ass nonsense about what behaviors are acceptable and which issues can be milked for votes. I worried, as you know, that a second term for Dubby would errantly create us in this mold; 7 years is the cycle period for every cell in our bodies, every 7 years we are “re-worked” and what is pouring into our heads from politics and culture defines that product. Yet — lo and behold — this time IT DIDN’T WORK AS USUAL. The pundits keep talking, proposing, projecting, telling us who’s politically dead and who’s potentially viable … and Americans are ignoring them like the false prophets they are.

In an article entitled “Why The Wright Story Stuck,” Steve Young quotes stand up comic Rick Overton, calling him “subtle as usual”:

I can almost forgive a conservative for buying this garbage, but for a Democrat, a Liberal, a Progressive to buy the corporate line is to me, inexcusable. I have nothing but contempt for their betrayal. One side is not supposed to know, but the other is. Of the two groups, only one is the traitor - the morally lazy ‘Progressive.’ The other is the Enemy Combatant, in full uniform. Bottom line - Some people want Hillary, simply to put McCain in office. Others want her because they’re female as well (Hey, I’m bald, but I don’t want McCain in office). These are adolescent reasons for putting someone at the wheel of a nation. It says that we file our lax standards for our leadership under the convenient heading of ‘Pragmatism.’ I hate this process and what the Cancervatives have done to it with the Digressive’s help - (A classic bully and weakling scenario). We are social abuse victims, raped by our symbolic parents. The memory of it is slowly coming back to us. Too slowly for my taste.”

Slowly, yes — from day to day, and especially over the last couple of weeks, all this has taken on a painful resonance that has created angst for progressives, while McRib has been given latitude and lift with his crazy-talk. But let’s remember that we’ve been at this Dem race for just four months [feels like years] and we’ve shaken out a lot of information. When everything was moved up several months, we knew the affair would be protracted — at the time, I mentioned that the only “up-side” of that would be that we’d Really Really get to know these people.

Not that long ago, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were considered an “embarrassment of riches” — two sharp candidates with few deviations in policy. How would we decide, except by cult of personality? It turns out that cult of CHARACTER is what we’ve learned about in these long months — ours and theirs.

I watched Michele Obama on C-SPAN yesterday, giving a stump speech about her husbands character — it was, she said, his own camps responsibility to define him … not Hillary’s or the Rights. It was an impressive speech about who she knew him to be; she said this was hardly the first time, nor the last, that Obama would be attacked and used for cynical purpose nor was it the first, or last, time he would gracefully rise above it because THAT was his character. It punched up that moment for me when he calmly brushed his shoulders off after the PA loss. This is a man who has faced demons and moved one — who knows that tantrums and temper are not “tough” but childish, achieving nothing. And this calm confidence is so alien to our current perception of “politician” as to be revolutionary.

Rising to that next level is what this race is all about — because that’s what these TIMES are all about. We can either do this … or sink into the mire. And what’s fascinating to me is that with all this “unelectable” toxin pumping out like black smoke to make us fearful of losing to John Bush44, Obama’s numbers remain stable while Clinton’s tactics have backfired — she has become increasingly strident and desperate, and now declares that she will use her “nuclear option,” twisting the arms of her Super D’s in the Dem Party’s 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee to allow the FL and MI votes to stand, as is.

Breaking the rules to draw in Michigan and Florida votes, and miring Barack in the “unelectable” me-me is Hillary’s last shot at achieving her dream — and you can’t take down a ‘phenomenon’ without playing very very dirty. A mainstream pundit and former Reagan employee, Richard Reeves wrote some truth here: Face it: “Electability” is just another way of saying Barack Obama is black.

And if Obama is unelectable, why is the Right working so hard for Hillary? Why did Rush declare “victory” in Pennsylvania and is already calling Illinois for her using his Ditto Heads? Could it be that they want to take the Clintons on but don’t want to deal with Obama? Six months ago we acknowledged that the Right would reenergize to turn out in droves to beat back another Clinton — now add those Obama people who might stay home [think hundreds of thousands of youngsters and various of the 98% of Afro-American demographic supporting Barack] if the Super-D’s hand her the nod.

Unelectable my ass! The kind of “hope” Obama talks about is not delusion … and when he speaks of the “promise of America” he’s not talking about the Me! Me! promise of the 1980’s, he’s talking about the We! promise of a new century. That resonates with old and young alike, desperate to find both credibility and ethical conduct in their candidate. He departed from the Rev. Wright not, he said, because he misunderstood what the Reverend was saying but that the Reverend had misunderstood who HE was and how he wanted to change that fiery old rhetoric into something new and workable. I … like you … don’t know if he can do it, but since he is the only one out there crying this possibility into the wilderness, I know what will happen if he doesn’t get a chance to try.

I’ve spoken before about my 9-year old grandson, Wyatt … an extraordinarily bright little bulb. He is following politics carefully, even though his family is not particularly political. His Dad doesn’t like Hillary, as many men don’t — his Mom has been largely undecided until recently. Wy watches the debates; he told his Mom that Barack “tells the truth, even when it’s hard.” He wants a sign for the yard, in his very Conservative neighborhood. Because Wy has been all about Star Wars since he was four, I sent him this Youtube the other day. Great fun — a Must Watch. [And I will remind him that Mrs. Clinton is not actually Darth Vader … that honor goes to Uncle Dick Cheney.]

So, there it is there — the little kid ‘gets it.’ He feels it. The young, especially the intuitive Indigo’s who have been encouraged to think for themselves, all have that antenna waving, pulling in the possibilities. Obama is their JFK … and this is a moment much like that one, when the unrest in the social fabric produces idealism of an extraordinary sort. Some might say that idealism died in Dallas — but mine has lasted me a lifetime, and brought me here to write this. The populism of Obama is not a ploy — it’s a lifestyle; and there are millions of citizens, told to ‘go shop’ for 7 years, waiting to join hands and try for something better. We are eager to ‘entertain angels’ — and find a hopeful future.

The articles and links below are divided into three categories, loosely; there are those that are political, those that are spiritual and the last few are about McCain, who looms larger in his delusion every day. But the thing about Obama articles that differentiate them from Hillary’s IS the spiritual … I hear nothing about how Hillary takes us into the New Paradigm, how she inspires and challenges us, how she moves the chess pieces onto another board entirely. That is the domain of Barack supporters — and that tells me, after four months … or four years or four lifetimes … everything I need to know.

As far as the Rev. Wright chronicles go, the Righty’s can continue to smack their lips with anticipation of pounding out a white supremacist message [what else is new?] but this IS the time for such a debate — actually using the stuff between our ears. There was every justification for liberation theology in the past centuries — Obama wants to take that to another level. We have to decide if we can allow that. We’ve forgotten that the Liberal pulpits of the early twentieth century entertained that same tactic to build a wide and embracing social consciousness. If racism, which is the politics of fear and repression, wins the national conversation over populism and a new class contract in this nation, then we deserve what we get — but that’s not what the numbers are telling us. That’s not what the progressive blogosphere is saying. And that’s not what my heart … and my young Jedi grandarlin’ … is telling me.

Here’s a collection of articles and links — all are informative, some are brilliant. Bill Moyers gives us a Must Read, there’s a Tom Hayden interview [and here’s a link to another piece of his telling us about the radical Hillary of the 60’s who hadn’t yet learned to triangulate to the middle; here’s another from Carl Bernstein talking about her guilt-by-association tactic.] You’ll find a rather remarkable post by Joe Andrew, a former heavy-weight Clintonista who has switched sides, a Frank Rich piece and [gasp!] even one from Tom Friedman. You do not have to hunt around if you want to know where the Progressives are going, today.

I do want to put in a last word about the one thing the Right AND the Left think so absurd about Rev. Wright’s sermon, and why they’ve branded him ‘wackadoodle.’ The AID’s claim. I am empathetic to this proposition — I have very little patience with the mythology that our own government wouldn’t hurt us. As a small child, my Mother, Great-grandmother and myself were subjected to biological experiments loosed on our community in a covert ’study’ … I still suffer the physical consequences. My Father was one of those sailor’s that discovered the first-hand fallout of radiation in the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands … I’m an only child because of it, my Mother miscarrying numerous times.

Here’s what InfoWars has to say about the HIV question:

“There is no doubt that AIDS erupted in the U.S. shortly after government-sponsored hepatitis B vaccine experiments (1978-1981) using gay men as guinea pigs. The epidemic was caused by the “introduction” of a new retrovirus (the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV for short); and the introduction of a new herpes-8 virus, the virus that causes Kaposi’s sarcoma, widely known as the “gay cancer” of AIDS. The taboo theory that AIDS is a man-made disease is largely based on research showing an intimate connection between government vaccine experiments and the outbreak of “the gay plague”"

And from CounterPunch, an article entitled The Search for Ethnic Weapons which tells us:

Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory [resistant] to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease. [Hearings before the House Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, “Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970.”]

Government is not now our friend — perhaps we can change that, perhaps not. But until we wake up on that level, there will be no progress. I propose a program; and I’ll draw on the program that’s the most familiar in our society. These are the original Twelve Steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous. You should open this to read all of them … they’re profound … but let’s just take the first one:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Let’s admit that we are powerless in the face of the narcissism of American mythology, of “love-it-or-leave-it” rhetoric and nationalistic propaganda; let’s admit that our forefathers built this country on the bones of Native Americans and African slaves; let’s admit that our country has been involved in covert plunder and political misadventure for centuries; let’s admit that our sense of ‘exceptionalism’ is something that we should mature out of rather than enthusiastically embrace; let’s admit that even in the best of times, the government is not always ethical or humane, and is institutionally classist, racist and sexist; and let’s admit … for the sake of Iran, the Mideast and the world … that buoying our economy by pumping up the military-industrial-complex is yet another political expediency and short-term error that will give us another century like the last.

If we could just do that, as Rev. Wright can … and resolve to change it, as Barack Obama proposes we can — the shift of pure oxygen would blow away the last of the smoke and we could, finally, see both the forest AND the tree’s.

Jude

Was It Really What Jeremiah Wright Said, Or Was It Because He’s Black?
White preachers are given leeway in politics that Jeremiah Wright wasn’t.
Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal via PBS and Alternet
May 3, 2008

[Watch it here]

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: “Who’s telling the truth over there?”

“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”

That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright.

In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage.

More than 2,000 people have written me about him, and their opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American-hating radical,” one of my viewers wrote. Another called him a “nut case.”

Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw at the National Press Club.

A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist.

Many black preachers I’ve known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I’ve known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the South, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.

I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched.

Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a Constitution that proclaimed: “We, the people.”

Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and Jesse Helms.

Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview.

What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle — forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.

Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences.

My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being.

But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.

Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at least it helps me to understand the why of them.

In this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content.

So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the warmongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins.

But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right.

After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America.

This is crazy and wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?

Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school.

What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship.

We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.

Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race.

It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “beware the terrible simplifiers.” ++

The All-White Elephant in the Room
BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.
FRANK RICH, NYT
May 4, 2008

What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”

Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.

Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.

That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.

None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.

This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.

Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.

For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining) demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.

Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin. ++

Who Will Tell the People?
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT
May 4, 2008
Thomas L. Friedman

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

And us? Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in “downsized labs, layoffs of post docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions.” Today, she added, “China, India, Singapore … have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.” ++

On My Switch From Clinton to Obama
Joseph J. Andrew, HuffPo
May 1, 2008

I have been inspired.

Today I am announcing my support for Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. I am changing my support from Senator Clinton to Senator Obama, and calling for my fellow Democrats across my home State of Indiana, and my fellow super delegates across the nation, to heal the rift in our Party and unite behind Barack Obama.

The hardest decisions in life are not between good and bad or right and wrong, but between two goods or two rights. That is the decision Democrats face today. We have an embarrassment of riches, but as much as we may love our candidates and revel in the political process that has brought Presidential politics to places that have not seen it in a generation, we cannot let our family affair hurt America by helping John McCain.

Here is my message, explained in this lengthy letter that I hope is perceived as a thoughtful analysis of how to save America from four more years of the misguided polices of the past: you can be for someone without being against someone else. You can unite behind a candidate and a vision for America without rejecting another candidate and their vision, because in real life, opposed to party politics, we Democrats are on the same side. The battle should not be amongst ourselves. Rather, we should focus our efforts on those who are truly on the opposite side: those who want to continue the failed policies of the last eight years, rather than bring real change to Washington. Let us come together right now behind an inspiring leader who not only has the audacity to challenge the old divisive politics, but the audacity to make us all hope for a better America.

Unite the Party Now

I believe that Bill Clinton will be remembered as one of our nation’s great Presidents, and Senator Clinton as one of our nation’s great public servants. But as much as I respect and admire them both, it is clear that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process, and a vote to continue this process is a vote that assists John McCain.

I ask Hoosiers to come together and vote for Barack Obama to be our next President. In an accident of timing, Indiana has been given the opportunity to truly make a difference. Hoosiers should grab that power and do what in their heart they know is right. They should reject the old negative politics and vote for true change. Don’t settle for the tried and true and the simplistic slogans, but listen to your heart and dare to be inspired. Only a cynic would be critical of Barack Obama inspiring millions. Only the uninformed could forget that the candidate that wins in November is always the candidate that inspires millions.

I ask the leaders of our Party to come together after this Tuesday’s primary to heal wounds and unite us around a single nominee. While I was hopeful that a long, contested primary season would invigorate our Party, the polls show that the tone and temperature of the race is now hurting us. John McCain, without doing much of anything, is now competitive against both of our remaining candidates. We are doing his work for him and distracting Americans from the issues that really affect all of our lives.

We need to be talking about fixing the economy, not whose acquaintances once said what to whom. We need to be talking about stopping the attacks in Iraq, not stopping the attacks in Indiana. We need to be talking about policy, not politics.

Barack Obama is the Right Candidate for Right Now

While I am a longtime critic of our Party’s rules that created so-called super delegates, we have the rules we have and we must live with them. I am humbled and honored to be a super delegate, and I understand the seriousness of the duty it entails. I recognize that this is a difficult decision for super delegates like me, who owe so much to President Bill Clinton. It is right to be loyal, to be grateful and to be consistent. But it is also right to acknowledge the inevitability of change, right to dare to dream for a better world, and right to know what in your heart is the right thing for the future even if your friends and family disagree. Good things, just like good people, can disagree. But as Democrats, we must disagree with dignity, debate with admiration of each other, and in the end, go forward with mutual respect.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore gave me the opportunity to serve as the Chair of the Democratic Party. I pledged my loyalty to them, and I will never forget Al Gore putting ego aside, gently demurring, and simply asking me to put our country ahead of politics. It is a lesson I will remember forever, and it is what guides me now in this decision. What is best for our Party and our country is not blind loyalty, but passionate support for the candidate who can best correct the misguided policies of the last eight years.

We need a candidate who will re-invigorate the economy and keep good jobs here in America. We need a candidate who will end the war in Iraq. We need a candidate who will provide health coverage for our 45 million uninsured neighbors. We need a candidate who will end our addiction to high-priced foreign oil by investing in renewable energy here at home.

That candidate is Barack Obama.

What was best for America sixteen years ago was electing Bill Clinton. What would have been best for America eight years ago was not only electing Al Gore, which we did, but allowing him to serve as President of the United States. Imagine how the world would be different if Al Gore and not George Bush, would have been President of the United States. Let’s seize the opportunity and vote for someone who like Al Gore, was against the war from the beginning, and who brings a new energy, a new excitement, and a new politics to our country.

Let’s put things right.

Time to Act

Many will ask, why now? Why, with several primaries still remaining, with Senator Clinton just winning Pennsylvania, with my friend Evan Bayh working hard to make sure Senator Clinton wins Indiana, why switch now? Why call for super delegates to come together now to constructively pick a president?

The simple answer is that while the timing is hard for me personally, it is best for America. We simply cannot wait any longer, nor can we let this race fall any lower and still hope to win in November. June or July may be too late. The time to act is now.

I write this letter from my mom’s dining room table in Indianapolis, Indiana. Four generations of my family have argued and laughed around this table. But what I humbly believe today is that we, as Democrats and as Americans, face what Dr. King characterized and what Senator Obama reminds us is the fierce urgency of now. As a nation, we are at a critical moment and we need leaders with the character and vision to see us through the challenges at hand and those to come. I can’t guess what will happen tomorrow, so I can’t tell you what kind of experience our next President will need to have to deal with those challenges. But I can tell you what kind of character and vision they will need to have — and that is what inspires me about Barack Obama.

As Democrats, however, we risk letting this moment slip through our fingers. We risk ceding the field to the Republicans and allowing the morally bankrupt Bush Agenda to continue unabated if we do not unite behind a single candidate. Should this race continue after Indiana and North Carolina, it will inevitably become more negative. The polls already show the supporters for both candidates becoming more strident in their positions and more locked into their support. Continuing on this path would be a catastrophe, as we would inadvertently end up doing Republicans work for them. Already, instead of the audacity of hope, we suffer the audacity of one Democrat comparing John McCain favorably to another Democrat. When that happens, you know it is time for all of us to stop, take a deep breath and unite to change America.

We must act and we must act now.

The Problems of the Process: 2000 and 2008

When Al Gore got a half million more votes than George Bush in 2000, yet the Electoral College elected George Bush President, we saw the absurdity of any system that does not elect the person who gets the most votes. That is why the Democratic Party’s nomination process is flawed. I will continue to fight for a 2012 process where there are only primaries, and which ever Democrat gets the most votes becomes our nominee. Delegates should decide the party platform — voters should decide who our nominee is.

But we are struck with this absurd system for 2008, and, flawed though it may be, we must work within it without betraying the voice of the people. No amount of spin or sleight of hand can deny the fact that where there has been competition, Senator Obama has won more votes, more States and more delegates than any other candidate. Only the super delegates can award the nomination to Senator Clinton, but to do so risks doing to our Party in 2008 what Republicans did to our country in 2000. Let us be intellectually consistent and unite behind Barack Obama.

A New Era of Politics

My endorsement of Senator Obama will not be welcome news to my friends and family at the Clinton campaign. If the campaign’s surrogates called Governor Bill Richardson, a respected former member of President Clinton’s cabinet, a “Judas” for endorsing Senator Obama, we can all imagine how they will treat somebody like me. They are the best practitioners of the old politics, so they will no doubt call me a traitor, an opportunist and a hypocrite. I will be branded as disloyal, power-hungry, but most importantly, they will use the exact words that Republicans used to attack me when I was defending President Clinton.

When they use the same attacks made on me when I was defending them, they prove the callow hypocrisy of the old politics first perfected by Republicans. I am an expert on this because these were the exact tools that I mastered as a campaign volunteer, a campaign manager, a State Party Chair and the National Chair of our Party. I learned the lessons of the tough, right-wing Republicans all too well. I can speak with authority on how to spar with everyone from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove. I understand that, while wrong and pernicious, shallow victory can be achieved through division by semantics and obfuscation. Like many, I succumbed to the addiction of old politics because they are so easy.

Innuendo is easy. The truth is hard.

Sound bites are easy. Solutions are hard.

Spin is simple and easy. Struggling with facts is complicated and hard.

I have learned the hard way that you can love the candidate and hate the campaign. My stomach churns when I think how my old friends in the Clinton campaign will just pick up the old silly Republican play book and call in the same old artificial attacks and bombardments we have all heard before.

Yet, despite the simple and overwhelming pressure to do anything and everything to win, Barack Obama has risen above it all and demanded a new brand of politics. People flock to Senator Obama because they are rejecting the hyperbole of the old politics. The past eight years of George Bush have witnessed a retreat from substance, science, and reason in favor spin, cronyism and ideology. Barack Obama has dared not only to criticize it, as all Democrats do, but to actually reject playing the same old game. And in doing so, he has shown us a new path to victory.

Uniting for Victory

The simple fact is that Democrats need to be united in November to win, and Clinton supporters, in particular, will be vital to victory. We will not convince Clinton supporters to join the Obama campaign, however, by personally criticizing them. We must welcome everyone and avoid doing Republican work for them. It is therefore incumbent on all of us who once supported Senator Clinton to welcome the thousands who should now switch their support to Senator Obama. Similarly, a necessary part of the healing process for our Party is for those who supported Senator Obama early to have the grace and good sense to broaden the tent and welcome newcomers into the fold.

The old players of the old political game will claim that I am betraying my old friend Senator Evan Bayh by switching my support to Senator Obama. I believe that Evan Bayh would be a great President, and therefore a great Vice President. I will continue to argue that he would be a great choice to be on the ticket with Barack Obama. Evan Bayh is uniquely positioned as a successful governor with executive experience who is now a U.S. Senator with foreign policy experience and who is young enough to not undercut the message of vitality and hard work that Barack Obama represents. Part of healing the Party may be to have a Clinton supporter on the ticket, let alone someone who would help with Indiana, Ohio and the moderate Midwest in the general election.

Being for Evan Bayh, however, does not mean that you have to be for Hillary Clinton. The important message to Hoosiers, and to super delegates, is that being for someone does not mean that you agree 100 percent of the time. Regardless of whether Evan Bayh and I support different candidates, I will support Evan Bayh.

We must reject the notion that we have to beat the Republicans at their own game — or even that the game has to be played at all. It is so easy for all of us involved — candidates, campaigns and the media — to focus on the process and the horse race that we forget why we got into it in the first place. Barack Obama has had the courage to talk about real issues, real problems and real people. Let’s pause for a second in the midst of the cacophony of the campaign circus and listen.

In 1992, I was inspired by Bill Clinton because he promised, and delivered, a framework for addressing America’s problems. President Clinton ended a long-running left-right debate in our Party, and inspired millions. He drew giant crowds and spoke passionately for a generation of Americans who often disenfranchised and rarely participated in governing. Today, Barack Obama does the same thing. Winners redefine the game. Winners connect with the American people and not only feel their pain, but inspire them to take action to heal the underlying cause. Barack Obama is that kind of candidate and that kind of leader, which is why he will win in November.

Welcoming Everyone into the Party

We face significant challenges as a nation and as a Party, but time and again, Americans have shown the resilience and determination necessary to overcome even the highest obstacle. We have a difficult road ahead, but I have complete confidence that Barack Obama is the candidate who can lead our Party to victory and the President who can guide us to even greater heights.

Many Democrats know me for one short speech I gave over and over again in the 2000 Presidential campaign. That speech was about welcoming people into our Party and welcoming undecided voters to our campaign to elect Al Gore. Today, we need to welcome Clinton supporters, undecided voters, and all Americans to join Barack Obama’s cause to fight for a better America. My speech ended with these words, which are even more relevant today:

Because Democrats don’t care if you are black or white or brown or a nice shade of green, you are welcome in the Democratic Party.

We don’t care if you pray in a church or a synagogue or a temple or a mosque, or just before math tests, you are welcome in the Democratic Party.

We don’t care if you are young or old, or just don’t want to tell your age, you are welcome in the Democratic Party.

We don’t care what gender you are, or what gender you want to hold hands with; as long as you want to hold hands, you are welcome in the Democratic Party.

We don’t care about the size of your bank account, just the size of your heart; and we don’t care where you are today, just where you dream you want to be tomorrow.

That is your Democratic Party.

That is Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.

That is the Party that will win in November.

Sincerely,

Joe Andrew ++

Atonement
Bud McClure, CommonDreams
Sunday, May 4, 2008

I would rather stand with Obama in defeat, than stand with Clinton in victory. Every once in a while in life and in politics, we get a clear choice to do either the morally right thing, or to continue to cut corners and believe that the end justifies the means. We should have no illusion about this choice after following Bush’s road to the White House in which all of the ugliness and hatred he fostered on the campaign trail followed him and us through the last eight years. Now we are standing at that crossroads again watching the unfolding drama and contrasting styles of two Democratic candidates.

Hillary will get in bed with anybody. She has no internal moral compass. Her only choice is what is politically expedient. Her recent gas tax holiday proposal, an idea borrowed from fellow conservative McCain, is so stupid that I am surprised she can defend it with a straight face. Then I consider that it has no substance, it is just another means to an end for her. There are countless other examples that have made her appear harsh and arrogant, bullying in tone, threatening and menacing, pandering to our fears instead of inspiring our hopes. She knows that this works, and gleefully embraces it no matter whom she harms.

The clearest example of her political calculus was her vote for the war in Iraq. Like Kerry and Edwards who were also anticipating runs for the White House, she jumped on the war wagon, because she thought, like most insiders, it would be over quickly, and her vote would make her a more credible candidate on national defense. It would also make her look tough! But toughness is not something you have to prove; it is formed by a constant adherence to principled positions that form one’s moral center and cannot be buffeted about by political winds. My own senator, the late Paul Wellstone, showed what that center looked like when, in a tough reelection fight, he voted against the war, and for his ourage and consistency of message his popularity surged ensuring his re-election.

Obama has shown this kind of courage, too. He resists the temptation to get in the mud with Clinton when it would be the politically expedient and the expected thing to do. He resists her taunts. He does not infantilize voters. He does not pander to fear and he remains unwavering in his determination to win by the means that he believes will be necessary to govern this country. He is now being tested in this firestorm swirling around him. In the inferno ignited by his former pastor and fueled by the media, Obama has remained teadfast. He is undeterred by the ugliness of racism and continues to move with the confidence of a man who is grounded in a strong and principled sense of self. There is a basic decency about him that one catches in his smile and the spontaneous way in which he interacts with crowds. There is a steely determination reflected in his eyes that gives us a clue to the character behind them. He inspires and speaks to our higher nature, recognizing that underneath our fears and spitefulness we are basically a good and generous people. For these reasons alone, I would rather stand with him and lose, if necessary, than win however possible.

But the most important reason to stand with him is that his election in the fall would give us a chance for atonement, to get back what we have lost over the past 25 years through a politics of division and hatred, where our government has been corrupted for the benefit of the very few; where the common good has been denigrated by a narcissistic worship of individualism and the wealth of our nation has been measured only in economic terms. Moreover, we might make amends to the rest of the world by electing a president who leads with humility and does not need to prove himself by killing others. We could atone for our warring ways, for torturing and terrorizing others, and for promoting hatred around the world. We could talk to our enemies, find common ground, share the world’s resources, promote the general welfare, and regain our place as a country with a basic regard for the well being of all human beings. Rather then talk about Christian principles, we could put them into practice beginning with loving our neighbors. This is the hope and dream that Obama engenders in me. It is refreshing, and even surprising that at the age of 60, I could once again be inspired by a politician. ++

Bud McClure is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

The Fight For Obama Requires Fewer Euphemisms and More Truth
Frank Schaeffer, HuffPo
April 27, 2008

Now we come to it: the real fight for Obama in the harsh light of day. What Obama is up against is essentially the jeering section of the national lunatic asylum. What America is up against is the very real possibility that this jeering section will out shout the rest of us. Beware lest we let them sneer us into oblivion.

The battle lines of the contest for the Democratic Party nomination and the White House are clear. Strip away the euphemisms and we see that the choice before us is not a choice between various candidates and various positions but a choice of historic magnitude about the character of America.

Before saying more let me say that I am an optimist. I believe that Obama will be our next president because his support comes from a widely diverse group of people, from some like me — a white middle class 55-year-old lifelong Republican, now reregistered as an independent — to traditional Democrats, blacks, young people, women and men of all races and beliefs. We are united in our hope for a better future. I believe that our disparate group of individuals outnumber those firmly stuck in the past. We will win if we hang tough together and tell the truth.

At the core of the Obama candidacy is the belief that freethinking openhearted people in America outnumber cretins, racists, the willfully ignorant, the gleefully hate-filled, the small minded, the backward looking, jingoistic morons, the frightened, the addicts of brain-wrecking soundbites, and above all those stuck in a pattern of thinking that leads inevitably to shrunken horizons.

What are the spoken “arguments” against Obama? He doesn’t wear a flag pin… His minister said harsh things… The blue collar vote don’t all like him… In the words of the inimitable George Stephanopoulos; Obama can’t say for sure if his minister is as patriotic as he is…

Since these banalities can’t possibly explain why there is even a discussion about the choice between Obama and the Clinton hack machine what’s really going on?

Here are the real reasons that the Democratic Party has not yet embraced Obama overwhelmingly:

1) This country has a racist streak running through it that is well entrenched in both parties.

2) We include amongst us an undereducated geographically ignorant nation-within-a-nation who are afraid of the world outside of our borders, terrified by the eternal “other,” that perpetual “threat” that takes new forms but never changes — from the late Saddam Hussein to the last Mexican to crawl over the border.

Clinton and McCain cater to those with a bad case of paranoia. Obama does not.

Combine the latent racism that the Clintons so handily embrace when they euphemistically describe the “blue collar” vote as unwinnable for Obama, with the willful ignorance of too many Americans about the world, and the idea of voting for a well-educated, worldly wise, kind, openhearted, unafraid, urbane, hard-to-ruffle, charismatic black man is a scary proposition. He just isn’t scared enough! He just isn’t keeping his place! He is just too decent! He’s just to sane to be “one of us!”

In Obama we have a choice that will set the stage for the foreseeable American future. On the one hand Obama faces McCain; the aging war making enthusiast, the next “prophet” of American exceptionalism, a true believer in military sacrifice as the highest value, even sacrifice for “victory” in unwinnable wars. On the other hand Obama is trying to overcome the perpetually ambitious Clinton machine, fastened to his ankle like a rabid dog, unable to bring him down but very able to distract and draw blood.

Here are the actual choices:

Obama or war without end.

Obama or ambition without moral boundaries without end.

The Clinton/McCain partisans will never say it but they are counting on the worst in the American character in order to “win.” Without the support of the racists, the stupid, the undereducated and the perpetually paranoid neither McCain nor Clinton stands a chance. They count on the worst in our national character in the same way that oncologists count on new cases of cancer — pay lip service is to the cure, but thank God for the sickness! (And by the way the Clinton canard that the blue collar vote is un-winnable for Obama is an insult to most working people.)

This election is a moral test of our national character. If we fail this test, if we allow the mainstream media to derail the process with their insanely tawdry, lowest common denominator soundbites, if we allow the Clintons thinly veiled “I’m more electable” (e.g., more white!) racism to triumph, or worse yet, if we vote for the perpetuation of four (and perhaps eight) more years of the Bush regime reincarnated as McCain, we will have not only turned the clock back but slammed the door on the best chance our country has been given in generations.

It is no accident that the rest of the world is so incredibly interested in this year’s American election. Obama is liked (actually loved) all over the world. What an incredible opportunity for us to elect someone who brings such a favorable worldwide standing with him to day one of his presidency. How do we really make America safer? For a start, put a president in charge who is liked and respected and who changes the way others see us for the better.

It is up to those of us who support Obama to fight like hell and make sure that we do not become infected by the insidious despair inherent in the arguments made by the Clintons about who is “electable,” or by the Republicans, whose bellicose rhetoric presupposes that America will be hated forever.

Which line would you rather be standing in; a line leading to a future where America is liked and respected again, where our president represents the best about us, or the line back to a world where we are disrespected hated and, moreover, hate ourselves?

Let’s state our case openly. Let’s trust most of our fellow Americans to rise to the occasion. The choice is clear. The time for euphemisms is past. Let’s confront our worst national faults head on. This year’s contest for the presidency is between all that is worst about America and all that is greatest.

I believe in America. I believe in Obama. If we hang in there we will win. ++

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of “CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back”

Making the Race One about Spiritual Transformation
Andrew Bard Schmookler, OpEdNews
5/3/08

Amen, Rev. Wright!
Laurie King-Irani, CommonDreams
Saturday, April 26, 2008

Jeremiah Wright’s Pro-Blackness (and the Problem with Pro-Whiteness)
John Ridley, HuffPo
April 25, 2008

Clinton’s strategy: Make Obama unelectable
Tom Hayden: Clinton-Obama battle sending Democratic party into “downward death spiral”
TheRealNews interview
Thursday April 24th, 2008

Author and anti-war activist Tom Hayden tells The Real News Network that the “Nixon-like tactics” of Sen. Hillary Clinton have attempted to make Sen. Barack Obama seem unelectable, but her tactics have also hurt her own campaign, creating a “downward death spiral” for the Democratic party heading into the November election.

Tom Hayden is an American social and political activist and politician, most famous for his involvement in the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Hayden served in the California State Assembly and the State Senate. His books include Rebel: A Personal History of the 1960s; Ending the War in Iraq. [open link for video]

Democrat battle advantage for McCain
Philadelphia, PA

(CLIP BEGINS)
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (D): It’s a long road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and it runs right through the heart of Pennsylvania.
(CLIP ENDS)

TOM HAYDEN, ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR: Well, probably the length of the nominating process, the tightness of it puts people on edge. And increasingly the really negative, Nixon-like tactics of Senator Clinton, who seemed to be collaborating with Fox News in feeding questions to, you know, the ABC debaters suggesting that Obama is not ready, that he cannot be commander-in-chief, that [inaudible] of his pastor, that he has suspicious ties to the Weather Underground, and so on. She has to know that that plays well to the 10 or 15 percent of racist voters and many Reagan Democrats, conservative Democrats. And then she’s going to appeal to the superdelegates that he’s not electable, having rendered him unelectable. But in the process, she becomes swamped with more negative numbers as well, I suspect. And so you have a death spiral, a downward death spiral going on here. But you’d have to be foolish to think it doesn’t give a huge advantage to John McCain if this goes on for 12 more weeks or eight more weeks, which is the Clinton plan at this point.

PALEVSKY: So Senator Clinton seems like she’s getting increasingly desperate as this campaign goes on and she’s not getting enough delegates. And recently she went so far as to say she’d be willing to obliterate Iran if they ever attacked Israel. What is she trying to gain from these comments?

HAYDEN: I don’t know, but I’m very glad that you bring that up. The other news media has utterly failed in this regard. She first said that she would use massive retaliation against Iran in the ABC debate, and she extended the concept of massive retaliation, the NATO doctrine, to the United Arab Emirates, and the Saudis, and another Arab country, an ally of the United States. This was quite shocking. For somebody of my generation, “massive retaliation” means atomic or nuclear weapons. She may not mean that—nobody asked her, including Senator Obama. She seemed to be saying that she would do this unilaterally—there was no discussion of getting the consent of the Senate, the Congress. This is a substantive issue, and Obama can’t fail to have noticed it—it was right in his face. So we’ll see what happens.

PALEVSKY: Tom, do you have any inclination of whom she’s pandering to with these comments?

HAYDEN: No, I don’t. But it’s in keeping with—there’s a slow-burning project for the Israelis, or the Americans, or both, to attack Iran before the end of this presidential election or the Bush administration. You’ll notice when General Petraeus was testifying, he went out of his way—and Ambassador Crocker—several times to say that Iran, the Revolutionary Guard of Iran, was behind the killing of Americans in Iraq, was behind the fighting in Basra, was behind the shelling of the Green Zone. Now, Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman and others voted for that Senate resolution—Obama did not—which designated the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. So it’s all in place. If you have a general testifying that a designated terrorist organization is killing American soldiers that is a pretext for war. So she may be trying to get ahead of the curve, she may be anticipating that there will be a strike against Iran, and she wants to be in a told-you-so mode.

PALEVSKY: So to bring this back to the primary, does it seem like Obama’s missing these current events? Should he be holding her accountable? And is he not defending himself against her attacks as well as he was at the beginning?

HAYDEN: I watched him in North Carolina this week. I was there for three or four days. And he came off that debate where he was like a punching bag, but he was in fine form. He talked for a couple of hours, answered questions; went on to another two-hour meeting, smiling, laughing. He’s going to win North Carolina by 10 or 20 points. He’s going to win or lose Indiana by a close margin. So in two weeks, unless something happens, he will still be marginally ahead, but ahead, in the pledged delegate count, ahead by a half-million votes in the overall vote, well ahead in the number of primary states and caucuses that he’s won. It doesn’t mean that she will surrender; it means that she will become more ferocious in trying to scratch and claw and take him down in order to argue that he’s unelectable. Having done the deed herself, it’s hard for me to understand why the superdelegates will turn to her as the bright and shining hope of the Democratic Party. ++

Top 10 Outrageous Quotes From McCain’s Spiritual Advisers
Katie Halper, Living Liberally
Thu May 01, 2008

Before Jeremiah “Obama’s Pastor” Wright spews even more nonsense, and quotes even more ambassadors, we want to shed some light on the brilliant gems uttered by some of McCain’s own spiritual advisers, Pastor John Hagee and Reverend Rod Parsley. When Hagee endorsed McCain, because he is a man of principle, McCain said he was “very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement.” Reverend Parsley calls McCain a “strong, true, consistent conservative” and McCain calls Parsley “a spiritual adviser.” Because the liberal media refuses to give any credit to McCain, it is up to us to be fair and balanced. So here are the top 10 Memorable Quotes said by McCain’s religious advisers:

1. “Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick. Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist.”
- Pastor John Hagee in his book What Every Man Wants in a Woman (Charisma House, 2005)

2. “The Quran teaches that [all Muslims have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews]. Yes, it teaches that very clearly.”
-Pastor John Hagee

3. “I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans…I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that…There was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades…. The Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment.”
-Pastor John Hagee

4. “The military will have difficultly recruiting healthy and strong heterosexuals for combat purposes. Why? Fighting in combat with a man in your fox hole that has AIDS or is HIV positive is double jeopardy.”
- Pastor John Hagee on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

5. “[Gay marriage] will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”
- Pastor John Hagee

6. “It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality. There is no justification or acceptance of homosexuality…. Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce.”
- Pastor John Hagee

7. “Only a Spirit-filled woman can submit to her husband’s lead. It is the natural desire of a woman to lead through feminine manipulation of the man…Fallen women will try to dominate the marriage. The man has the God-given role to be the loving leader of the home.”
- Pastor John Hagee in his book What Every Man Wants in a Woman (Charisma House, 2005)

8. “I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.”
- Rod Parsley in Silent No More (Charisma House, 2005)

9. “Gay sexuality inevitably involves brutal physical abusiveness and the unnatural imposition of alien substances into internal organs, orally and anally, that inevitably suppress the immune system and heighten susceptibility to disease.”
- Rod Parsley

10. “Only 1 percent of the homosexual population in America will die of old age. The average life expectancy for a homosexual in the United States of America is 43 years of age. A lesbian can only expect to live to be 45 years of age. Homosexuals represent 2 percent of the population, yet today they’re carrying 60 percent of the known cases of syphilis.”
- Rod Parsley ++

McCain finds his own radical friend
Steve Chapman
May 4, 2008

Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology—and who has never shown remorse or admitted error? When the candidate in question is Barack Obama, John McCain says no. But when the candidate in question is John McCain, he’s not so sure.

Obama has been justly criticized for his ties to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, who in 1995 hosted a campaign event for Obama and in 2001 gave him a $200 contribution. The two have also served together on the board of a foundation. When their connection became known, McCain minced no words: “I think not only a repudiation but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people.”

What McCain didn’t mention is that he has his own Bill Ayers—in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk-show host, Liddy spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him.

How close are McCain and Liddy? At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy’s home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator’s campaigns—including $1,000 this year.

Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as “an old friend,” and McCain sounded like one. “I’m proud of you, I’m proud of your family,” he gushed. “It’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”

Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap anti-war activists so they couldn’t disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?

Liddy was in the thick of the biggest political scandal in American history—and one of the greatest threats to the rule of law. He has said he has no regrets about what he did, insisting that he went to jail as “a prisoner of war.”

All this may sound like ancient history. But it’s from the same era as the bombings Ayers helped carry out as a member of the Weather Underground. And Liddy’s penchant for extreme solutions has not abated.

In 1994, after the disastrous federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, he gave some advice to his listeners: “Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests. . . . Kill the sons of bitches.”

He later backed off, saying he meant merely that people should defend themselves if federal agents came with guns blazing. But his amended guidance was not exactly conciliatory: Liddy also said he should have recommended shots to the groin instead of the head. If that wasn’t enough to inflame any nut cases, he mentioned labeling targets “Bill” and “Hillary” when he practiced shooting.

Given Liddy’s record, it’s hard to see why McCain would touch him with a 10-foot pole. On the contrary, he should be returning his donations and shunning his show. Yet the senator shows no qualms about associating with Liddy—or celebrating his service to their common cause.

How does McCain explain his howling hypocrisy on the subject? He doesn’t. I made repeated inquiries to his campaign aides, which they refused to acknowledge, much less answer. On this topic, the pilot of the Straight Talk Express would rather stay parked in the garage.

That’s an odd policy for someone who is so forthright about his rival’s responsibility. McCain thinks Obama should apologize for associating with a criminal extremist. To which Obama might reply: After you. ++

No Country for Old Men
McCain’s age matters; especially if he picks his running mate from the crazy wing of the Republican Party.
Robert Scheer, Truthdig
April 30, 2008

Would President John McCain forget who made that 3 a.m. call to the special White House phone? I suspect that his aides would not just let him nod off back to sleep, even if they were intimidated by the prospect of one of his alleged intemperate outbursts, but might our septuagenarian president be less than fully focused?

Most likely he would be, although as someone born in the same year as the senator, I too bristle at suggestions that age has made me less perfect than I once was. But it has. Sadly, those brain cells do go, and “senior moments” of befuddlement are more than a joke. But that shouldn’t automatically disqualify one of us still-agile silver foxes from the White House, as few of my contemporaries are likely to turn in a worse performance than the much younger current occupant. However, looking at the top two men in the present administration, the age question does make a compelling case for very carefully evaluating McCain’s vice-presidential choice.

That was my point when I raised the age issue on a Los Angeles Times Book Festival panel last Sunday, and my sparring partner, right-wing radio pundit Hugh Hewitt, wanted me instantly voted off the island of constant noise. He compared my “ageist” comment to someone making a racist charge against Barack Obama.

I take his point, as absurd as it first appeared. Absurd because it is obviously true that aging, as opposed to skin color or gender, does have a deleterious effect on one’s physical and mental functioning, and to deny this evident biological reality is as nonsensical as denying evolution itself. The species survives when each generation burns out and is replaced by a hopefully superior one, and while it is natural to want to linger on the scene as long as possible, we cannot insist on our personal indispensability to the continuation of the human experience.

Of course Hewitt was not doing anything of the sort, any more than he would genuinely embrace creationism, summarily dismiss fears of global warming or otherwise honestly endorse the tenet of the sort of phony science that right-wing pundits must from time to time condone. They do so for opportunistic reasons, and that is why the significance of McCain’s age must be denied by those eager to maintain the GOP’s hold on the presidency. They will hold their noses and vote for him despite the sensible positions he has at times had the temerity to advance, impervious to their blackmail. Impervious, that is, until he decided to make a second run for the presidency, leading him to sharply reverse his past principled stances and accommodate torture, tax cuts for the rich, Pat Robertson and other favored fetishes of the Republican base. The right-wing talk show bully boys still don’t trust him, but he’s the only horse left to ride.

While they continue to loathe him for his fatal flaw of occasionally embracing a moderate thought, they are dependent upon his electoral victory to extend their vastly disproportionate political power. They fully expect McCain to betray key points of their cryogenic agenda; on Sunday, Hewitt condemned most of McCain’s Senate performance and in particular his reasonable stance on immigration.

Their hope of retaining influence rests on saddling McCain with a proven rightist as his vice-presidential choice. The hunt is now on for the new Cheney, but such a candidate has to be brought in under the radar because the public is for the first time in modern history keenly aware that the vice president can play an enormously destructive role. That is particularly true if the potential president himself is, actuarially speaking, more likely to kick the bucket. Or, less dramatically, simply underperforms.

Let’s not kid any longer. Age is a factor in this race and nowhere is it so important as in McCain’s vice-presidential choice. If he picks from the very thin ranks of reasonable Republicans, it will be reassuring to more moderate voters attracted to McCain for his independence of thought as reflected in support of campaign finance reform and his opposition to some outrageously bloated military weapons expenditures that he has on occasion done much to expose. But if he turns to the loony wing for a running mate, we must become very concerned about the ability of a man in his 70s to fully perform in the world’s most important office. Is there another Cheney lurking in the wings? ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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