April 28, 2008
In the course of less than one hour this morning, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., did more damage to Barack Obama than any ten of his lunatic “God Damn America” rants from the pulpit.
Even the Obamaniacs are upset — yes, even the ones who have been screaming “Wright is RIGHT!” and “Obama could NOT disown his pastor” and “This is just a tempest in a teapot, a manufactured controversy, a non-issue — Wright won’t have any effect on Obama’s candidacy,” and all the rest of the “Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah“ garbage that, these days, has about as much effect on those of us rooted in reality-based thinking as dragging one’s foot to stop a 747.
Well, guess what? The unending Wright story is not a tempest in a teapot — and now that virtually every MSM outlet in the country is leading with headlines suggesting big trouble for the Obama campaign, now the Obamaniacs are getting it. Now they’re screaming, “OMG, Obama’s got to DO something! Obama’s got to completely, totally disown Wright, right NOW!”
How the band has changed its tune.
(The only thing that hasn’t changed: When one Obamanut expresses even a single, rational, independent thought, the rest of the Obamanuts eat their former comrade alive. But that’s the usual reaction when the collective cognitive dissonance of a cult is threatened.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. In short, Wright did the unthinkable: he opened his mouth again. And this time, he may have sunk Barack Obama for good.
Reflects WaPo’s Dana Milbank:
Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama’s presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered — and added lighter fuel.
Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks (”God damn America”) and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.
In front of 30 television cameras, Wright’s audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama’s vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio’s April Ryan, confirmed that Wright’s security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.
Not that you haven’t heard Wright’s rantings about all these things (and worse, much worse) before, nor should it come as a surprise that he and Farrakhan are still the best-bestest of buddies. So what? So this: Just when you thought Wright couldn’t make things any worse for Obama, Wright dropped a bombshell, expressing what those of us not awash in Jesus Juice Obama-flavored Kool-Aid have been thinking, and saying, about Obama all along: Obama was forced to distance himself from Wright solely for the sake of politics, and if those Wright sermons hadn’t become public, Obama would still be calling Wright his “spiritual mentor”:
Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. “He didn’t distance himself,” Wright announced. “He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American.”
Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, “We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.” The minister continued: “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”
Joe Fitzgerald of The Boston Herald picked up on something similar Wright said to Bill Moyers: “He [Obama] says what he has to say as a politican. I don’t talk to him about politics.”
Fitzgerald’s reaction (more valid than ever in light of Obama’s characteristically pitiful attempt at damage control during a “hastily gathered” press conference this morning):
Please. When a man spends 20 years absorbing another man’s sermons, it’s reasonable to conclude his beliefs and values will be informed and shaped by what he hears; if not, the man doing the preaching must be woefully ineffective.
So take your pick: Either Obama is showing the electorate a face that’s insincere, or Wright showed the viewers a leader who’s inept.
Is Wright trying to sink Barry? “Maybe,” muses Amy Sullivan of Time, “Barack Obama skimped on his contribution when the offering plate came past at Trinity United Church of Christ. Or perhaps he nodded off during one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. It’s hard to think of another reason why the Illinois Senator’s former pastor would put on the kind of performance this morning at the National Press Club that can only be described as a political disaster.”
Or maybe Wright’s ego is so swollen from the roaring cheers bouncing off the walls inside that echo chamber known as Trinity United Church of Christ, he thinks the outside world is no different from the insulated little cocoon he’s built around himself.
Sorry, Rev. Nobody who heard you this morning is shouting “Amen!” this time.
Per Jeff Greenfield of CBS:
If you had a chance to listen to Rev. Jeremiah Wright — at his NAACP appearance in Detroit, or in his talk at the National Press Club — you came away with two impressions: first, Rev. Wright is a learned, compelling, often hilarious speaker; second, he is a genuine threat to the presidential hopes of Barack Obama.
His NAACP speech was shaped around the theme that “different does not mean deficient.” He talked about how blacks and whites were “different” in everything from language to music to religious worship. He interposed his speech with snatches from speeches, songs — at one point, brilliantly imitating the sharply different styles of marching bands. Michigan State, he demonstrated, simply did not move on the field the way the Grambling Band did.
He also offered a highly inclusive vision of the change America needed — rejecting exclusionary thinking whether it was white vs. black, black vs. white, straight vs. gays, Christians vs. Jews. There was nothing in that part of the speech that was objectionable or offensive.
Now, wait a minute. Wright emphasizes how “different” blacks and whites are, then waxes poetic about “inclusion”? I thought the goal was to appreciate our differences, while focusing on how we’re really all the same under the skin — yet Wright, in his comparison of two marching bands, makes fun of the way white people can’t dance? Hm.
Or, as the hard-right National Review put it — which will give you a good idea of how well this Wright business is going over with the tighty-righties Obama thinks he’s going to win over — in a piece titled “Jeremiah Wright May Have Just Sunk Obama’s Campaign:
And since then, it’s gotten worse, even with a Bill Moyers interview that wasn’t softball so much as it was Nerf Tee-Ball. We’ve heard Wright compare the Roman Legions who punished Jesus to the U.S. Marines, we’ve heard him argue that the U.S. and al-Qaeda are doing the same acts under different flags, etc.
Now we hear Wright analyzing the differences between white and black brains (!)…
Back to Greenfield:
So what’s the problem for Senator Obama? In his National Pres Club speech, we saw another side of Rev. Wright — utterly unrepentant about any of the things he has said, and insistent that the wave of criticism aimed at him was really “an attack on the black church.”
That argument is familiar — even pervasive. When a visible member group that has suffered exclusion is challenged, that individual is frequently heard making that argument. Senator Huey Long argued that attacks on his honesty were really attacks on the poor for whom he spoke; Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton both argued that attempts to hold them accountable for misconduct were really attacks mounted by their political enemies.
No kidding. If I had a nickel for every time an Obamanut called me racist for criticizing what Obama says and does, or went into a mindless rage at Hillary Clinton for something Obama said or did (what, did she cast a spell over Barry to make stupid remarks fall out of his mouth?), I would have a lot of nickels.
In wrapping himself in such an argument, Rev. Wright never even seeks to confront the core of the criticism: What did you mean when you said what you said? Why tell your congregation that AIDS was a government conspiracy to commit genocide on African-Americans?
Jake Tapper of ABC caught that, too:
[Wright] didn’t distance himself from any of the sentiments underlying the clips shown on television. Indeed, the former pastor embraced the most controversial items he has said.
On his contention that the U.S. government had created AIDS as a method of committing genocide against African-Americans, Wright referred to a hotly-disputed 1996 book “Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional?” by Leonard G Horowitz, which contends that AIDS and the Ebola viruses evolved during cancer experiments on monkeys.
He also referenced “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” by Harriet Washington, and said based on the Tuskegee experiment — in which the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a 40-year study on 400 poor black men in Alabama with syphilis whom they did not properly treat — “I believe our government is capable of anything.”
Greenfield again:
More broadly, Rev. Wright’s counterattack reframes the argument in starkly racial terms: “Attack me, attack the black church.” It is exactly the opposite what Senator Obama has been arguing throughout his campaign; that it is past time for the United States look beyond race. Indeed, Wright’s vision of this controversy strikes at the heart of Obama’s view.
Greenfield concludes — correctly — that Wright is stuck in a moribund mindset, seeming “not to believe that the United States has in any serious way come some considerable distance — and one of the surest signs of that is the plausible presidential candidacy that Wright’s comments have so seriously harmed.”
I’ve never dismissed the fact that racism still exists in this country — but Wright and his flock appear utterly unable — or unwilling — to process the fact that all whites are not stuck in the 19th-century.
Jeremiah Wright, however, is. He’s soaking in it. And for whatever unresolved personal issues he has with whites, his “ministry” appears to dedicated not to empowering disenfranchised African-Americans in any positive, progressive, forward-looking way, but to keeping the hate — and his own “us vs. them” mentality — alive.
Jeremiah Wright is not a stupid man, but one wonders if he suffers from some sort of incurable amnesia — and if he enjoys that amnesia, deliberately induced or not.
To wit (quoted from Tapper):
“Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy,” Wright said, since Farrakhan had not enslaved Africans and brought them in chains to the U.S.
Wright argued that his fiery nature was appropriate since the leaders of the U.S. have never apologized for slavery or racism.
Oh, really now? I know what President Bill Clinton said in 1998 — and it sure sounded like an apology to my ears:
“Surely every American knows that slavery was wrong, and we paid a terrible price for [it], and that we had to keep repairing that.
“And just to say that it’s wrong and that we are sorry about it is not a bad thing.
“That doesn’t weaken us.”
What does Wright want, for every U.S. president, past and present, to get down on his knees? (In Clinton’s case, yeah, probably.)
That’s just another example of Wright’s deliberate blindness and stubborn insistence to remain entrenched in a view of a United States that has long since progressed beyond Wright and his antiquated — and divisive, damaging, dangerous — ideas.
One last thing: In demanding an apology for slavery, Wright said: “Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country’s leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I’m not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I’m still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?”
Yeah, capisco, loud and clear. What’s funny is that Wright would stoop to using the language of us “garlic noses” to make his point.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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Barack Obama,
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April 27, 2008
First, let’s review:
• Barack Obama says that in 2000, he was so broke, his credit card was declined when he tried to rent a car at LAX;
• Michelle Obama (who pisses and moans constantly about how rough she had it, skipping through life from private charter school to Harvard) says she and Barry were still heavily burdened by debt (specifically, by student loans from 1988 and 1991) until Barack’s book sales took off in 2005.
Despite these facts:
• In 1993, the Obamas put a $111,000 down payment on a $277,500 condiminum;
• In 2000, the Obamas earned a combined household total of $240,000.
With that in mind, get a load of what’s come out in this morning’s L.A. Times — “Obama donor received a state grant“:
After an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2000, Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama faced serious financial pressure: numerous debts, limited cash and a law practice he had neglected for a year. Help arrived in early 2001 from a significant new legal client — a longtime political supporter.
Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell Jr. paid Obama an $8,000-a-month retainer to give legal advice to his growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange. It allowed Obama to supplement his $58,000 part-time state Senate salary for over a year with regular payments from Blackwell’s firm that eventually totaled $112,000.
A few months after receiving his final payment from EKI, Obama sent a request on state Senate letterhead urging Illinois officials to provide a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin.
Killerspin specializes in table tennis, running tournaments nationwide and selling its own line of equipment and apparel and DVD recordings of the competitions. With support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, the company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its tournaments.
Obama’s staff said the senator advocated only for the first year’s grant — which ended up being $20,000, not $50,000. The day after Obama wrote his letter urging the awarding of the state funds, Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell.
Uh, isn’t this sort of thing illegal?
Oopsy-daisy! My mistake! Apparently, this is just Chicago-style — or at least Illinois-style — politics as usual:
Business relationships between lawmakers and people with government interests are not illegal or uncommon in Illinois or other states with a part-time Legislature, where lawmakers supplement their state salaries with income from the private sector.
So, it’s not illegal. But you know what? It should be.
Now, you take this Blackwell wheeling-and-dealing (and there’s plenty more about it at the LAT link) along with Obama’s questionable dealings with Tony Rezko, and the way Obama got where he is today — plainly put, he was kicked upstairs by another close ally, the powerful Emil Jones, Jr., whom Obama rewarded with pork-barrel earmarks of “more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’ Senate district” — and you’ve got to start asking just how “transparent” Barack Obama really is.
It shouldn’t matter a whit if Barry’s Peter-Pays-Paul dealing is legal; the question is: Is it ethical?
I say it isn’t.
I say it all just plain stinks.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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April 22, 2008
While scanning today’s headlines, two op/eds jumped out at me; seemingly unrelated, they say exactly the same thing: We — The Left — have lost control of the Democratic Party to the “liberal elites,” the rich, triangulating Third Way DLCers who talk a great talk, but have never walked the walk — and really don’t give a damn about your walk.
The first piece, by Dana Milbank at WaPo, profiles an impoverished Pennsylvania couple who are voting for Hillary Clinton today, and — despite the silly notion that they may not “even think [Barack Obama is] American,” and the extremely disturbing racism prevalent among a few other vocal locals) — their practical, economically-based reasons for refusing to vote for Obama, even if he gets the Democratic nomination (and this couple are Democrats).
The second piece is by Chris Hedges, about whom I’ve written before in these pages; Hedges is the author of one of my favorite and most dog-eared books, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, which explains in clear, if excruciating, detail just how the Radical Religious Right has managed to embed itself into U.S. politics — and, most importantly, why religious fundamentalists of all stripes believe what they believe, and do what they do.
Make no mistake: Hedges is not the radical leftist secularist of the Right’s worst nightmares. The son of a minister and seminary graduate himself, Hedges is equally critical of atheists as he is of religionists; in his newest book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, he makes it clear that his belief in God and conviction that sin is real, and the barometer of morality, is steadfast:
We have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believe in sin. The concept of sin is a stark acknowledgment that we can never be omnipotent, that we are bound and limited by human flaws and self-interest. The concept of sin is a check on the utopian dreams of a perfect world. It prevents us from believing in our own perfectibility or the illusion that the material advances of science and technology equal an intrinsic moral improvement in our species. To turn away from God is harmless. Saints have been trying to do it for centuries. To turn away from sin is catastrophic. …
We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril. …
The question is not whether God exists. It is whether we contemplate or are utterly indifferent to the transcendent, that which cannot be measured or quantified, that which lies beyond the reach of rational deduction.
Hedges’ credibility established, let’s turn our attention to the first op/ed that caught my eye today, by Dana Milbank:
In This Forgotten Town, Obama Can Forget About It
The Monongahela River Valley lost its steel mills in the ’80s and, a quarter-century later, this sad town in the heart of the Mon Valley still hasn’t recovered. Its downtown is a collage of crumbling buildings, and its once-proud landmark, the 102-year-old People’s Union Bank Building, has signs in the window: “Bank Repo Sale. Excellent Deal. Eight stories. Priced to sell!”
It is, in short, just the sort of place Barack Obama was talking about when he said he wasn’t getting the support of blue-collar workers of the industrial heartland because they “cling” to guns and religion out of economic bitterness. It is also the place Obama chose to visit on Monday night, on the eve of Tuesday’s primary — and the reception here explains why Obama, the national front-runner, is expected to lose Pennsylvania. …
The Norgrens, who backed Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, will vote for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. And if Obama wins the nomination, these Democrats say they’ll vote for Republican John McCain, even though they want an end to the war in Iraq, where their soldier-son is about to start his third tour.
If Hillary Clinton wins Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary — and polls forecast that she will do just that — it will be because of white, working-class voters like the Norgrens. Yet the blue-collar voters poised to keep Clinton’s candidacy alive are also the reason she is losing the national race to Obama: Though still in charge here, they have lost control of the Democratic Party to the wealthy and better-educated. …
The average household in McKeesport earns less than $30,000 a year, barely half the U.S. average. Its population has shrunk and aged with the loss of the mills, and the average home here sells for a mere $45,000. …
The antipathy toward Obama isn’t necessarily logical. Outside the Giant Eagle … Edward Norgren listed his reasons: Clinton’s ad accusing Obama of taking oil-company money; Michelle Obama’s suggestion that she hadn’t been “proud” of her country; Obama’s provocative former preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And, of course, there was the “bitter” remark. …
Now, on to Chris Hedges:
The left has lost its nerve and its direction
The failure of the American left is a failure of nerve. It has been neutralized and rendered ineffectual as a political force because of its refusal to hold fast on core issues, from universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans, to the steadfast protection of workers’ rights, to an immediate withdrawal from the failed occupation of Iraq to a fight against a militarized economy that is hollowing the country out from the inside.
Let the politicians compromise. This is their job. It is not ours. If the left wants to regain influence in the nation’s political life, it must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party, even if Barack Obama is the nominee, and back progressive, third-party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves. …
The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us. …
The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. … Human beings are not, despite what the well-heeled Democratic and Republican apologists for the free market tell you, commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope. …
The failure of the left is the failure of well-meaning people who kept compromising and compromising in the name of effectiveness and a few scraps of influence until they had neither. … The left has been transformed into anguished apologists for corporate greed. They have become hypocrites. …
Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage to challenge the corporate state that is destroying our nation, we will have squandered our credibility and integrity at the moment we need it most.
The message is the same — the Democratic Party has forgotten its core values, and we, the left wing of the (formerly-)left wing, have let the party get away with it. Of course, they’ve got the money — but we have the votes. The party can spend all the money in the world trying to schmooze us, but at the end of the day, when it’s your job that’s disappeared, and your kid who goes to school without breakfast, you have to decide what your loyalty to the party has gotten you.
The answer lies within the Democratic Party itself, in both its official platform (for which DNC has deemed the top three “key Democratic Party ideals” as prosperity, peace, and progress), and, more telling, in its simple, clear mission statement, “The Democratic Vision“:
The Democratic Party is committed to keeping our nation safe and expanding opportunity for every American. That commitment is reflected in an agenda that emphasizes the security of our nation, strong economic growth, affordable health care for all Americans, retirement security, honest government, and civil rights.
What’s telling is that, in this statement, national security comes first — and is the first issue mentioned, again, at the beginning of the second sentence — and civil rights comes last, with the economy and vague, imprecise language about “expanding opportunity for every American” and “strong economic growth” jammed in between.
But you have to ask: What do those things mean? What do they mean, in practical terms, to you and your family?
If you take the time to read the full Democratic Party platform, you’ll see that “prosperity, peace, and progress” still take a backseat to more than 18 pages’ worth of discussion about defeating terrorism and strengthening our military.
As essential as it is to prevent another 9/11, the fact remains: If you’re hungry or homeless, you’re not going to give a damn about anything except food and shelter. That’s why the economy is the number-one issue on voters’ minds: We’re talking survival. And a whole lot of us aren’t surviving.
The latest Hightower Lowdown arrived in my mailbox yesterday; the entire issue is dedicated to spelling out, in many simple but terrifying tables, “What 8 years of BushCheney have done to our economy.” I won’t get into the whole thing here; it deserves to be read, and digested, in full. Suffice to say, if you’re not rich, you’re in trouble.
Nevertheless, you may be surprised to learn that economic fears are apparently not affecting votes:
With growing layoffs, tight credit and an ailing housing market, 67 percent say the economy is an extremely important issue, up from 46 percent in November. Gasoline prices follow close behind at 59 percent.
The war in Iraq — the dominant issue for several years — stands at 48 percent. …
Yet those who have become extremely concerned about the economy since last fall show no significant difference from everyone else in backing a presidential candidate. Both groups divide about evenly between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, and between McCain and the other Democrat, Hillary Rodham Clinton. …
People calling the economy extremely important lean toward the two Democratic presidential contenders, while those less concerned prefer McCain. The partisan divide helps explain that, as does income. Of those most worried about the economy, people earning under $50,000 a year prefer the two Democrats over McCain, middle-income earners are divided evenly, and McCain wins the most affluent.
Democrats divide between Obama and Clinton about the same whether or not they are extremely concerned about the economy.
While I’ve long believed (and still do) that a Hillary Clinton administration stands a far greater chance of restoring economic health in the U.S., it appears that voters see so little difference between A) the two Democratic candidates, and/or B) the two parties, that the most pressing issue — the economy — isn’t having much effect on voters who were going to vote Democratic (or Republican) anyway.
And that begs the question: Is there any longer a truly significant difference between the parties, on this or any other urgent issue on which the very survival of our people, and thus our nation, hinges?
Not that I’m advocating anyone vote Republican, mind you — that would be utter insanity. No; what I’m asking you to think about is just how far to the right the Democratic Party has shifted (on every issue, not just the economy), and, more importantly, what you are going to do about it.
Can the Democratic Party be fixed from within? That’s one option. But that’s what we’ve been trying to do all along, isn’t it? We’ve been holding our noses and voting a straight Democratic ticket, because we have no other choice — or so we’ve been told. And while we’ve been gritting our teeth and waiting for our party to return to the core values that made this country great, the big-money types keep dragging the party further and further to the right — and us along with it.
You know the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results every time.
I just can’t do the insanity thing anymore. Where I go from here, I don’t know. The Greens, God love ‘em, cling too stubbornly to the idea that they can run a presidential candidate every term before building the party from the local and state level up (like the Republicans did — quite successfully, if you’ve noticed). I’m not a Libertarian (although, honestly, if Mike Gravel wins the LP nomination, I will be voting Libertarian for the first time in my life). What about the Socialist Party? As noble as Socialist goals are, no, I’m not so idealistic as to believe society can be rebuilt from scratch.
All I know is that I never left the Democratic Party — the Democratic Party left me.
Posted by: Sapphocrat
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