On this Veteran's Day, honor those who have served their country by giving some badly needed money to Jim Martin, Democrat for Senate in Georgia (and Vietnam vet, BTW) who is running against the odious Saxby Chambliss (a draft dodger) who defeated another decorated Vietnam vet, Max Cleland, six years ago in one of the ugliest campaigns in modern American political history. Mr. Cleland is also a triple-amputee, but he didn't lose his limbs in surgery, rather he left them on a battle field in South East Asia, a place Mr. Chambliss went 39 years after others of his generation gave their last full measure of devotion there. Mr. Chambliss played a round of golf.
Let's render Mr. Chambliss unemployed as soon as possible by honoring our vets, something Saxby knows nothing about.
In case anyone has forgotten just how sleazy Chambliss' attacks on Cleland were, here's a YouTube of the ad in question:
Politics matters not just to corporations and to the military, and not just corporations and the military deserve to have its interests addressed by effective government, because that is fascism. It matters to people, to individuals, and who does it and the way it is practiced matters, too, in a democracy.
Politics matters.
Just watch this video. It's called "When Charles meets Barack":
Got it from fivethirtyeight.com and, considering how cock-eyed our electoral system is as a result of the Electoral College, it looks like a doozy.
Indiana? Toss-up?
Nevada? Blue?
Montana, North Dakota & Georgia, soft on McCain?
I hope this is true. It will depress my father beyond measure and will potentially cause my mother to lock herself in the basement (if they had basements in Texas) in quivering, FOX-induced fear of the rampaging brown hordes that will surely be roaming the streets with unchecked impunity in B. Hussein's America looking for soft, white female faces to carve letters into.
Well, I must get my marching orders from Hussein HQ, so I'm heading down there tomorrow. So much defiling to do, I need clarification where to start.
Even apart from the violence and threats of violence at McCain/Palin rallies, the vandalism at offices of the demonized ACORN, the eliminationist rhetoric spewing from the puke-holes of Limbaugh, Hannity, et. al., we must all say again and again and again that the ugliness of the politics of the last forty years, particularly the last twenty, has real consequences.
Very real consequences.
My parents won't come visit me here in New York City because a spread-the-wealth communist/islamo-fascist/terrorist-loving/elitist celebrity/muslim "fake" christian/inner-city Chicago Harvard-educated thug like Obama will be our next president and they can't bear to visit me in such an "anti-American" part of America where so many people can and do support such a person. The subtext? Such a "negro" person who will "bring back all those problems from back then, after they had been getting so much better these last few years." That is a direct quote.
I wish I was kidding.
When I asked my mother if she thought I was a traitor, she said (after a very long pause) that she thought I was "misguided." Maybe sometime after January 20th, she said, but they were depressed about all of it and scared about what was going to happen when "that person" took office. They probably couldn't bring themselves to visit me even then, and maybe not ever again.
So, in order to garner votes, in addition to all their other crimes, the Republican Party is also guilty of destroying my relationship with my parents.
Sorry for the online therapy session, folks, but politics isn't the mere game the Karl Roves of this world take it to be.
The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't "I’m not an addict."
The last lie a junkie tells himself is "My being a addict doesn't matter."
And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.
Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.
Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.
And they hated him for it.
Why?
Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.
And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.
Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.
Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.
So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?
That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:
“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”
Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.
It is the lie the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…”
It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.
It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.
Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.
They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.
Which is why November 4th is so much more than an election.
November 4th is an Intervention, because the junkie-pusher spiral of the Republican rank-and-file and their leaders has finally hit bottom: we need to heal this country or lose it, and arguing -- "reasoning" -- with wingnuts and their enabling shills and hacks is as pointless as trying to reason with addicts and dealers.
The only way this country is going to be saved is by taking it away from them, school board by school board, city council by city council, congressional district by congressional district, state by state, election by election until they are driven back into the political sewers from whence they came.
My parents are hate junkies and, like any junkie, if you can't save them you have to be willing to cut them out of your life. This has been a long time coming. I didn't name this blog Expatriate Thoughts in a fit of pique. I meant it then and I mean it now.
One day following a storm, a man was walking along a beach. The beach was scattered with clams – all victims of the storm. There must have been thousands, if not tens of thousands of clams just on this stretch of beach. The man felt bad – but what could he do?
Farther down the beach, the man saw a young boy – running, bending, and throwing. As the man got closer, he saw that the boy was picking up one clam at a time and throwing it back into the ocean.
As the man got close to the boy, he stopped him and asked -
“What are you doing?”
“I'm saving them” - the boy responded.
“There's far too many to make a difference”
The boy reached down and picked up another clam, hurling it as far out into the water as his young arm could throw. He smiled, looked back at the man and said:
“I just made a difference to that one”
I volunteered for the Obama campaign yesterday. I went to their offices in lower Manhattan and made phonecalls to the good people of Pittsburgh. Cold-calling people who might yell at me or call me an ugly name was WA-A-A-A-A-A-AY out of my comfort zone, but I did it because it needed doing.
Please consider doing the same.
If you live in a state that is fully "in the bag" for one or the other, then spend some time calling another state that may be at a tipping point. What possible difference could that make? Well, because I called yesterday, an 83-year old woman named Frances who just had surgery and "don't get around so good anymore" but really wants to vote for that guy named Obama is going to get a ride to the polls on election day.
How 'bout that?
Volunteer.
We can't let the thieves, thugs and sociopaths who've been running this country for the last eight years have four more to finish stripping the place bare.
This is no longer just the whimpering of a few disaffected ex-hippies and assorted leftist student groups. The country is disintegrating after 40 years of Rethuglican "leadership" and the foot-soldiers who enabled and reinforced the Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II regime are reverting to type as the failure of all their most-cherished tropes and assorted other lies bespeaks their own personal failure and it makes them angry and prone to seek a scapegoat. Like Germany in the 1920's & 1930's. McSneer and Moose-a-lini are doing everything they can to solidify the racist, persecution-complexed middle of American society. Note that I didn't characterize it as "underbelly" or some such. It isn't. This putrescent hatred is interwoven in the very fabric our national character. It is the legacy of a nation built on genocide and human chattel slavery.
I'm not sure what they think will come of it, but the way I see it, McCain is a rich, grumpy, entitled old man who doesn't understand why the world won't just give him what he wants by dint of his gender, skin color, pedigree and resume and if he has to dip his widdle-footsie into the stinking, sulphurous, seething pool of evil that bubbles in the heart of the political right, then so be it, it can't possibly stain him because so doing furthers his ambitions and thus must be for the greater good; not the greater god of all Americans, mind you, but the greater good of the good Americans, the pro-Americans, his friends & family & business partners. His denials of the actual ugliness of his campaign's behavior stem, I think, from his pathological inability to see the wrongness of the underlying worldview that drives the behavior. In other words, the rabble who advocate violence are only doing so in the name of defending John McCain's America. As another senator from Arizona said at the beginning of the Right's nightmarish march to political hegemony (just before going down in defeat to the last Democrat to preside over a national consensus):
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
Which, in light of how utterly without principle or scruple they've conducted their political affairs since reads now like marching orders for a movement. Rethuglicans have seen every action through that lens and John McCain is no different, which is why the souring tone of his rallies doesn't phase him and the preposterousness of his distortions of fact and outright lies simply don't compute for him. His moral compass is broken, his internal ethical radar calibrated to different priorities.
Sarah Palin lies on the other side of McCain's cynical political calculations. She is a dimwit and a demagogue, but she is not a leader, good or bad. She is just another slack-jawed, Kool-Aid drinking rabble who got herself fast-tracked up the ranks through sheer pluck, luck and a total absence of core principle. If she were smarter, she'd be like Karl Rove - a collaborating member of the proletariat who knows his place on the food chain and instead assists the plantation masters in keeping the other slaves in line to earn favors, priviledges and access. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is too stupid to know that she isn't one of them, but rather is the type of manipulative social-climber who takes any apparent lack of social status as merely a failure of perception to be remedied by MILF-y charm, will to power or a well-timed shivving. She is the shiny new face of the same old blood-thirsty, Dixie-anchored rump of an electoral coalition McCain's approaching defeat will reveal.
By "Dixie-anchored" however, I don't mean geographically, although that will be true as well. The Solid South will remain so, even if the city-fied transplants from DC and other dins of iniquity further up the Eastern Seaboard make Virginia and North Carolina swing back and forth over the next few election cycles. No, I mean the mindset and values of The South, the mythical south of the redneck NASCAR "Lost Cause" Sunbelt sprawling cookie-cutter suburb & mega-church popular imagination. THAT South, the one that gets weepy when Lee Greenwood sings "Proud to be an American," is nationwide. And the policies of the ruling class over the last 40 years - enacted through the vigorous machinations of their pet political party, the GOP - have made their lives immeasureably worse through regressive taxation, crony capitalism, a self-justifying military-industrial war-making complex , industrial sell-off, rigging of the financial system and a relentless culture war. These are the ways that a greedy, pernicious ruling class maintains its power not just in America, kiddies, but everywhere in the world. They create a politics, through violence or bribery or both, that will eventually come to resemble the political Right in any country anywhere at any time in history for they are all the same in their fundmental desire to protect power & priviledge and supress the masses for fun & profit. Sometimes this is called monarchy, sometimes a dictatorship or a banana republic or a fascist state, sometimes it is "The People's Republic of..." and the plutocrats mouth communal doctrines of the "for thee not for me" variety, but the desire to constrict, restrict and suppress is an impulse of the political right.
Billmon, who vanished for a few years before re-surfacing recently back over at Daily Kos, wrote about the American variety of this eternal theme on his now-defunct blog (hence - no link):
If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology), libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government. . . .
Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. Post Civil War industrialization and financial colonization produced the Populists -- both good (Mother Jones) and bad (Tom Watson and Pitchfork Ben Tilman). The waves of 19th and early 20th century immigration spurred the rise of the Know Nothings and the modern Klu Klux Klan. The New Deal and the civil rights era incited the John Birch Society and Goldwater conservatism. And now the blowback effects of globalization (what conservative ideologues sneeringly deride as "multiculturalism") coupled with the patriotic and xenophobic passions unleashed by the war against Al Qaeda, have turbocharged the traditionalists into declaring something close to all-out war on the modernists -- as symbolized, at the moment, by the traitorous New York Times. . . .
The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.
A running topic on his blog was the Spanish Civil War, which he persuasively argued was a strong analog to the type of war we're going to have when our Civil War 2 breaks out. The Spanish Civil War was a brutal affair that pitted neighbor against neighbor, neighborhood against neighborhood. It was not a matter of armies blue and gray (or is it blue and red?) ranging against each other across open fields. It was fought with meat cleavers and clubs in alleyways and in the streets. The Nazis helped out with planes and guns, which gave us "Guernica", but that conventional 20th Century-style warfare was the exception. The rest of the war was vicious and rife with atrocities.
I think this time in our history is comparable to the years leading up to our previous civil war in the hostile balkanization of the political camps. Back then, it was about slavery. BTW, never let anyone argue that our Civil War was ever about anything else but whether or not we would be a nation that allowed the ownership of human beings. Anyone who does argue thusly is a southern apologist merely muddying the waters to dilute their own reflected regional culpability.
So, I think we are barreling toward a civil war, something like the Spanish Civil War, a war lacking in front lines, where neighborhoods fielded partisan gang armies against the gang armies other neighborhoods, where neighbors hacked their next-door neighbors to death, where not even churches could offer safe harbor against murderous mobs. I fear for this country because predominant regional political differences as expressed by congressional representation belie deeper cultural differences that have more to do with religious affiliation, level of education and line of work and union affiliation and exist everywhere all at once apart from larger political culture. I am thinking, for instance, of true-blue Austin, an island of education and cultural sophistication in deep-red Texas, a sea of menacingly willful ignorance, hostility to cultural diversity and easy violence. I am also thinking of the fact that the police force in this bright blue city (to say nothing of the firefighters, or even blue-collar union members in general - the number of IATSE stagehands who LOVE George W. Bush is both sickening and shocking - and the entire Borough of Staten Island) are a bright shade of scarlet because red-ness & blue-ness is not an expression of regional difference, but rather of deep-seated cultural impulse. Police in general, NYPD in particular, are always on the side of authoritarianism. As metaphive once pointed out to me - for the police the whole civilian population is divided into two groups: perps and sheep. For police it is not about "protecting and serving" but rather maintaining order first and protecting property second, and serving people only insofar as it reinforces the first two items.
When the shit hits the fan, in Austin I would fear for the safety of the community that has grown up around the University at the hands of an armed and culturally resentful wider population with a collective chip on its shoulder - the animosity between Texas A&M and UT-Austin is only good-natured to a point. In New York, the police are also armed and deeply sympathetic to the racist, violent, and culturally resentful impulses normally attributed to the dark side of Jeff Foxworthy's America. Up to this point, NYPD and their blue-collar fellow-travellers have reached a kind of truce with the liberal forces that dominate this city, but unleashed by widespread social unrest, who knows what kinds of ugliness could ensue.
That is why I argue that the next Civil War, as murky as the lines of our previous war of brother against brother were, won't be even as well-defined as that one.
And, sadly, the fascists won in Spain. They were never defeated and Franco died in his bed of Parkinson's on November 20, 1975. If Obama wins this one, I fear an epic outbreak along all the traditional social and cultural and class lines in this country that could escalate, spurred on by rhetoric from the hate-spewers on talk radio, into a gradually-escalating civil conflict. Their side doesn't view any Democratic administration as a legitimate governing body. Add to that the racial component brought on by Obama's skin color, intensified by the cultural bigotry of his odd-sounding name, amid an economic crisis and a deeply unpopular war abroad, and you have the Ruling Class' Frankenstein's monster going off the rails in a likely violent national social upheaval.
I fear for the health of the candidate and that of our nation.
No time for a really decent post, but I want to highlight two things. One, I think digby gets it exactly right when she argues that "Conservatism Is A Luxury":
When things are going well, people have the luxury of being able to argue over lipsticks on blowjobs and whether a blastocyst has more rights than a stem cell. When they aren't, they don't want the blastocyst and lipstick people in charge.
Why would they? Essentially Republicans are entertainers. When times are good, they bring you fun homegrown culture wars and violent foreign shooting wars. (Let's go shopping!.) People barely pay attention and when they can't help watching, as with the impeachment or 9/11, it's turned into a media porn spectacle: Shock And Awe starring Jenna Jameson. It's very cathartic.
But they don't actually govern the country because they don't believe in government (at least for anything but helping them wage their wars for profit and skimming from the taxpayers.) So, when people's lives actually start to become affected by their malfeasance, it's only natural that they get serious. They may just get serious now.
The absence of such compliments to McCain is refreshing, and conveys a real confidence from Obama. Back when Obama was prefacing all of his attacks on Obama with a statement on how much he deeply respects John McCain's service to America, frankly it made what he said afterward sound like he was walking on eggshells. Honestly, apart from repeating McCain's message, and apart from irritating many of his own supporters, paying tribute to John McCain before attacking him just made the criticisms that followed sound weak and wimpy. These attacks, by contrast, sound confident, on message, and sharp. [snip]
I like Democrats when they talk like this. Makes me proud. Wish I would see this side of them more often.
So, while I knocking together my last post and not watching the Sunday morning bobblehead shows, Howard Dean and his Mighty Band of Fightin' Democrats 2.0 fanned out across the airwaves and started doing exactly what I advocated in my last post.
They started to hit back.
And hard.
Howard Dean on FOX, against Chris Wallace. (via C&L):
Dean: Chris, the Republicans…for the last 30 years, the Republican (play)book has been to race bait and to use hate and divisiveness. In 2006, the American people said no to that; I think they’re going to say no to that in 2008. It is true that the economy, the war and healthcare are more important to the American people. They are tired of the divisiveness of what the Republicans have done to them. And that’s why the Republicans are in trouble. Deep trouble. Another four years of George Bush is not what we need…
Wallace: Governor, are you suggesting that bringing up Jeremiah Wright is “race-baiting” and hate and divisive?
Dean: Yeah, I am suggesting that kind of stuff. I think when you start bringing up candidates that have nothing to do with the issues…uh when you start bringing up things that have nothing to do with the candidate, nothing to do with the issues, that’s race-baiting. And that’s exactly what it is. Just like Willie Horton was race-baiting so many years ago. I think we’re going to take…we’re going to turn the page on this stuff. I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on issues, but the biggest issue of all is we don’t use this kind of stuff. We never have used this kind of stuff and we’re not going to start now. America is more important than the Republican party and that’s the lesson the voters are about to teach the Republicans.
And, Charlie Rangel (my congressman, BTW) a Clinton supporter (also via C&L):
Blitzer: The criticism of Barack Obama is that what Jeremiah Wright said at the National Press Club, Congressman Rangel, was no different than what he’s been saying for some time, and he should have known that these controversial remarks would be made. Is this explanation that Senator Obama is making good enough for you?
Rangel: It’s disgraceful that he has to make any explanation for anything. The intrusion of the media and Republicans into the sacred relationship that worshipers have with their spiritual leaders I think is going to come back to haunt us. To think that we have to go into the lives and the beliefs of Rabbis and Priests and ministers and Imams is absolutely ridiculous. We’ve got a war on. We’ve got an economy that’s splintered. I think the media should be more responsible and start dealing with those issues. I don’t think many people care what reverend Wright thinks and I don’t see why any candidate should have to explain what ..
Blitzer: But Congressman, even Senator Obama last Sunday said this was a legitimate issue given the nature of — He wants to be President of the United States. If there’s a right wing politician, let’s say a Republican politician that has an extraordinarily close relationship with a pastor who is making outrageous statements has been a member of that church for 20 years. Wouldn’t that be fair game?
Rangel: Of course not. Of course he’s a candidate. He doesn’t want to take all of you on and I’m probably over the hill but the truth is that you guys know that his beliefs have nothing to do with someone that went to the church, and if we’ve got to get into the Jerry Falwell’s and into the Robertson’s and to the number of people who have what appears to other religions to be bizarre beliefs we’ll never get to the issues that Americans were concerned about. I know that every American is more concerned with who is going to be a better Presidential candidate and a better President more than they are on anything that happens in the church that Senator Obama went to
This is the kind of party we should be, not Hillary and her husband's capitulating horde of Republican-Lite quislings.
As all of you know, I just love me some big, juicy conspiracy theory. I think it must have something to do with being born and raised in the cradle of modern American conspiracy theory: Dallas, Texas - November '63 and grassy knolls and magic bullets and all of that - so, as I see it, rich & powerful white men pretty much invade, assassinate, blow up and destroy at will under the guise of what we normally call "politics." They rig elections, intimidate voters and generally undermine the opposition as often and as maliciously as any common thug or tyrant in any third-world banana-republic backwater. Money and global influence just make their actions seem less like outright crimes against decency and humanity and more like, a-hem, respectable official government policy.
But they still don't want the wrong people voting, that's for sure. Or having actual input into the process.
So, despite my paranoid mindset, I can actually be correct enough to sometimes have someone respectable say the same thing, but with proof and all that fancy, journalistic stuff, and man, I just love it when I'm smart enough to anticipate the more nuanced and articulate points of someone smarter and more gifted with the language.
Sara Robinson is one of those people. She is a sometimes contributor to the brilliant and incisive "big picture" blog Orcinus, as well as writing for the Campaign for America's Future. This week she takes on the Jeremiah Wright non-story story.
She explains it all to you, about why the media just won't let this one go - basically because they are under orders from on high to destroy a respected and vocal critic of the "Word of Life" prosperity gospel charlatans. You know who these people are, those transparently crooked Chri$tian operators who, by way of preaching that "God helps those who help themselves," makes it the fault of the poor for being that way and wealth becomes its own proof of virtue.
Thus, by their solipsistic logic, the private jets and exotic golf trips and luxury cars of the church leaders become evidence of fealty to God's Good Word (paid for with the accumulated tithes from desperate widows on fixed incomes, BTW) and something to strive for, while if you're poor it's your fault for not believing hard enough in Jesus. It's a gospel tailor-made for the "I've Got Mine" ethos of Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun's modern Church of the GOP. Government attempts to help the poor interfere with God's Will. Wealth proves God's Love.
Wright has been a visible and articulate critic of the GOP's new pet theology over the years -- one of a noisy clutch of ministers who've made no bones about the mischief inherent in this new theology. He's also a respected and insightful proponent of black liberation theology, holding (Martin Luther) King's torch high in the face of unscrupulous preachers who think they're helping poor people by cajoling them to vote away their safety net and toss their government checks in the offering plate.
Beyond that: unlike the vast majority of these ministers, most of whom attended small Bible colleges of dubious accreditation (if they attended seminary at all), Wright has degrees from Howard University and the University of Chicago Theological Seminary. It's gotta go down hard that he's a black man who is far better-educated than they are, and can argue circles around them about the Bible or anything else. Take it as a whole picture, and it's not hard to see that Wright is very sharp thorn in these people's sides. As long as he and his friends are out there, their 30-year investment in the whole Word of Life movement is at risk. Obama's candidacy put him in the spotlight, and thus magnified the threat. So now he has very powerful enemies on the religious and political right.
Yet, the media - with all the depth and subtlety one can portray in a five-second sound-bite - get to depict this educated and articulate man as some kind of buffoon, a dancing clown hardly above the level of a minstrel show, thereby undermining his dangerous message by killing the messenger. Rod Parsley, John Hagee and their fellow band of thieves are truly enjoying watching their long-time critic be dismantled. Hence:
turning Wright into a national demon was a two-fer. They could not only tank the Democrats' front-runner; they'd also take down a serious and persuasive theologian who's been calling them out hard on one of their longest-running and most successful efforts to sell the conservative worldview to the very people who stand to be most harmed by it.
So, Wright is correct when he says that an attack on him is an attack on the black church. And I was correct for agreeing with him. Although, in all fairness, my assertion was that this whole kerfuffle was an attack on the black church generally as a center of stability and independent power within the Democratic coalition (which frustrates and pisses off the Reich-wing collaborators within the Dems) rather than a coordinated attack from The Right on a threat to their prosperity and power.
I guess it seemed a little too obvious to think it was somehow, once again, related to the Rethugli-bots. Over-compensating for fear of sounding like a broken record, I was just looking in the wrong place. Although, in my defense, wide swaths of the Dems are nevertheless still willing to capitulate to yet another attack from the GOP goon squad, laundered as it is through a compliant media.
Like I said, this one is going to get ugly. These people have had a collective chip on their shoulders about the wimmin-folk and the uppity neeg-ras and the Lib-ruhl "coastal elites" for about, well, the entire history of the republic. Or thereabouts. Every so often, they get the upper hand in politics and the last four decades, they have been ascendant. The old-money GOP has successfully leveraged the anger of the rubes' and shit-kickers' since the Goldwater debacle in '64 into electoral success, which serves their ultimate purpose of undermining anyone who truly threatens their privileged lifestyles as some form of the "dirty fucking hippie," fear and loathing for whom is the only thing that unites the disparate Coalition of Hate in the GOP.
Some within the coalition have been itching for a race war since the 1960's. Some have been itching for a religious war since the 1960's. Some have been itching for a class war since the 1960's.
If all of this race-baiting and ecclesiastical hornet's nest-whacking goes deeply, terribly wrong (as playing with fire usually does), especially as the other looming catastrophes mature into actual news stories as opposed to the end-of-broadcast curiosities they are right now (I'm referring of course to Peak Oil and Climate Change), then they may just get all of those wars. All at once. It could turn into a Lockean war of all-against-all, which is the natural end-point of their asinine "libertarian" philosophy anyway. Until some hayseed nazi arises as a strong-man dictator to put a stop to all the violence, kind of like, well, any other thug or tyrant in any other third-world banana-republic backwater.
And if he's a good, Christian thug, then he'll get to have Blackwater as his private, Christian shadow army, shadow navy and shadow air-force - and secret police - all the better for keeping order.
But, then again, maybe it will all magically work itself out for the better.
I think Hillary Rodham Clinton is politically radioactive and always has been. I don't think it is all entirely her fault, nor her husband's, but the fact remains that for a complex cocktail of reasons, she is a lightening rod for large swaths of the voting public and though the vastly greater part of their hatred for her is stupidly irrational, misogynistic, bigoted and unevolved, it is not entirely without some basis. She demeanor is off-putting. From anything except a red state street-cred building perspective, her voting record in the Senate hovers somewhere between mixed and shameful. She and her husband together may make for a rockstar pair when allowed to be the unchallenged king and queen of the Democratic prom, but their survival mechanisms are truly ugly to behold when they have to defend their status.
As one of her constituents - a constituent who has voted for her twice, mind you - I still see her as a coldly calculating political operative who is incapable of having an honest emotion, other than a raw thirst for power. Up to now, that's been fine. I knew what she and Bubba were up to when they selected New York for their post-White House life. I've just been glad she wasn't on the other team and as far as bringing it home for New York, apart from larger more statesman-like concerns, she has represented The Empire State just fine.
But she does have some very steep negatives.
In other words, I kinda, sorta buy into a diluted, de-fanged version of the Washington-insider/Rethugli-bot/Rush Limpblob caricature of her as a the type of person to cold-bloodedly murder Vince Foster and then cover it up. No, I don't actually think she's a murderer or any of the other inhuman things the Reich-wing blowhards accuse her of (without actually believing it themselves - it's just to tap the lizard brains of the rubes and shit-kickers), but I do think she's a coldly calculating manipulator, just as is her husband, if slightly less skilled. As is, frankly, any politician who is any good. Including Obama.
In the face of an unrelenting assault from the right, and the inevitable and equally relentless capitulation on the part of the Dems, for the last several, well, decades, the Clintons may have been imperfect warriors, but they were our warriors. I was not a fan of Bill Clinton's, but I would never admit to anyone from across the aisle that I didn't like him or his wife, because then it would seem like we agreed that he deserved what was happening to him. My reasons for not liking Bill Clinton were precisely the 180ยบ opposite of theirs. They hated him because he was not enough like them - too smart, too cultured and right about Vietnam and Civil Rights; for me he was too much one of them - too quick to appease the hell-hounds of The Right, to sell out his left-wing and otherwise affect a good ol' boy persona in an attempt to keep the haters from hating him too terribly much. In other words, a phony, a suck-up and a striver. But he and his wife were the best we had in a difficult situation.
Until, that is - amid a deepening BushCo dystopian winter - a broken and defeated Al Gore emerged, phoenix-like, from the shadow of the Clintons to cleave to Howard Dean and become something almost more than human at the same time that the inter-webs resurrected a moribund progressive movement by way of a hivemind army of bloggers and activists. Something new was emerging and this flawed man and his equally flawed wife, who had been the storm wall The Left needed as a bulwark against the hurricane of eliminationist, single-party-state Reich-wing power that reached landfall during his administration, began to appear as surviving relics from another, darker era. Impeachment had been the hammer blow which expended the hurricane's energy. That the two of them remained standing amid such fury is worthy of mine and everyone else's respect, but the world has changed and Hillary has not.
In many ways, the very character traits that allowed the Clintons to weather Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" storm, traits baked into the very porcelain of their political shells by decades in Arkansas politics, are exactly not what America and the Democrats need now - traits that manifest as DLC/centrist/"third-way" triangulation. Survival tactics of the abused, not a vision with an actual corresponding strategy. Hillary, like her husband, is a reflexive dinosaur, a relic from another era when cackling neanderthal Dixiecrats and unreconstructed Nixonite operatives colluded with their pearl-clutching financiers in the hippie-hating Old Money crowd to remake the stodgy GOP in their image while the Dems for the first time in their 150-year history were forced to learn how to hold on to power without a Southern Wing. Hence, they developed a fetish for drawlin' white southerners.
It has been a steep and painful 40-year learning curve for everyone involved, including the electorate. The object portion of the lesson for them has yet to truly endeth, BTW, as the repercussions for decades of believing GOP hype are just now starting to make themselves felt. As the economy craters and our infrastructure crumbles and the oil runs out and the planet heats up, those lessons will echo down for generations to come. At any rate, despite the fact that he had the second-best progressive bona fides in the Democratic field (and I supported him for it), the era of the white male with a Southern drawl as the only viable Democratic candidate ended ironically when John Edwards exited stage left.
Obama was traveling inside a protective shield made up of the Beltway Insiders' Clinton-hatred. As is becoming clear, once she's out of the way, that shield will be powered down. Obama will be just the Democrat running for President and if there's anybody the Insiders' loathe and despise nearly as much as they loathe and despise the Clintons it's any Democrat who runs for President.
The longer the primary campaign has gone on the more lessons Obama has had to learn about what it's going to be like in the fall.
---It's infuriating the Beltway Insiders.
They have been rooting from the beginning to see Clinton humiliated. Way back when, when the show was just getting started and they were declaring that her nomination was inevitable, they were consoling themselves with the hope that Rudy Giuliani would mop up the floor with her in November. Then they saw that Obama had a chance to give them what they wanted a lot sooner, with the bonus of giving them another Democrat whose humiliation in November they could root for and aid and abet.
They've wanted nothing more than to be able to laugh at her in defeat and declare that it proof that the country had rejected...Bill Clinton, at long last.
It's always been about Whitewater.
Yes, Lance, that's true. And yes, I am somewhat guilty of being too invested in the whole thing to be truly objective about who should or should shouldn't leave the race. I follow it every day. The only ones really suffering from "Clinton-fatigue" are the Washington insiders who have always hated Hillary and the political junkies who follow this stuff every single day. But Ma & Pa Peoria don't know and don't care. For them and the average Democrat in "fly-over country," the race has been invigorating and a real-life, real-time extension of Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy. For the first time in most of their political careers, and especially in the entire lives of the young and enthusiastic who are the life-blood of any campaign's ground game, what they think matters and someone in power cares to learn what that is.
I don't think it is Pollyana-ish to think that all of this could actually be good for the party. Washington insiders are the ones who always proclaim - no matter what "it" is - that "it" is good for Republicans and bad for Democrats; heads the GOP wins, tails the Democrats lose. The media have become a self-policing spin-zone for Rethugli-bot talking points. That comfortable bubble is being invaded by history (reality having a well-known liberal bias) and even if Obama may not be as progressive as I and many of my fellow-travellers on The Left would like, he is so much more the Man of the Moment than his opponent - who is burdened by baggage not entirely of her making, but for which she nevertheless liable.
I maintain my belief that this campaign is being driven by seismic forces in the political firmament that transcend personality. This isn't 1972 or 1984 or even 1988, no matter what people say. The Democrats aren't running against Republican incumbents or even a popular Republican predecessor. The economy is rapidly deteriorating. We are in the midst of a moneypit, quagmire overseas and there actually are terrorists out there who require attention. Oh --- and the US is now considered to be a force for evil in the world due to the fact that we kidnap people off the streets of foreign countries, torture them and keep them in prison without trials or any hope of being set free. Oh, and we invade countries based on lies.
We are in a hell of a mess and the country knows exactly who is responsible for it. They will logically vote accordingly. But with the economy now a huge part of the equation, I don't think political reform is the best campaign theme for Democrats. It's early enough for him to pivot off reform and put some meat on the bones of the Hope and Change message. But he should do it soon. The Democratic candidate can ride to victory on a tsunami, but he or she still needs to stay with the wave.
All of which is to say, I think this whole nomination fight has been a tough one because it had to be. We are fighting for the soul of the party and we are fighting for the life of our beleaguered nation. Such transitions are never pretty or clean or bloodless. Nor should they be. If they were easy, they wouldn't be powerful enough to actually change things for the better (I'm looking at you, you starry-eyed Reagan-Revolutionaries).
Bottom line: I am resentful that I find myself once again via a vis the Clintons with a political opinion that superficially resembles one held by my mortal enemies in the Reich-wing. I don't really hate Hillary Clinton, I just think her time has passed. My fear that she is damaging the party could very well be just so much Chicken-Little-ism, but I grant that I could be just buying the hype.
Joe Scarborough is MSNBC's Bill O'Reilly in that they have the same schtick. Both are transparently neo-con sympathizing Rethugli-bots, but they both maintain that they are somehow independent-minded tough-guys just calling 'em as they sees 'em... It just so happens that Joe, like Bill, always seems to land his calls on the side of the GOP. Kind of like those detestable Gang of 14 fence-sitters ("Spooky" Spectre, "Huckleberry" Graham, "Maverick" McCain, "Joe-nertia" LIE-berman) who always make a bunch of noise about having misgivings and grave concerns or whatever about some matter at hand and who make loud proclamations of their independent-mindedness and how they're not going to just go along to get along... and then they reliably vote to give president Cheney whatever he wanted in the first place. Joe's like that, too, (sans actual voting power) but he's just a grossly over-paid bobblehead who always sides with authoritarian overreach.
Well, guess what, Joe? That makes you a Rethugli-bot. And Rachel Maddow? She is one of those Fightin' Dems I've been longing for since, well, since I left Texas to get away from the very culture that stole the White House and have been trying to institute One Party Rule since the 1960's.
Rachel (and I met her once - briefly - so I can call her by her first name, right?) is most certainly accomplished in her own right. I have been listening to her radio show for years and was a fan long before Keith Olbermann brought her into his orbit, but I must say a huge thank you to Keith for using his celebrity to protect the incubation period of her television career long enough for her have the juice to smack down Joe Scarborough hard enough to make him walk off set without getting herself summarily fired.
Oh, did I give something away? Watch this video and listen for the mic rustling at 2:47, which had to be Joe storming off set:
Sweet, right?
I just love seeing Joe's beady little eyes go cold as he realizes he's getting called out. I love even more the s-l-o-w-a-n-d-s-t-e-a-d-y way he pedantically attempts to explain to Rachel what misapprehends to be his position, as though she's retarded. All the while, you can see his blood pressure rising.
