Election 2008. or the Permanent Campaign

Well, I've been silent for a few months, trying to work while watching the lunacy of a presidential campaign that has already gone on far too long. I would like to say that, thanks to the Clintons, the campaign has already sunk to new depths of negativitiy, but that would be unfair. Nasty campaigns are an American artform, reviled by the same people who revel in them. The Clintons simply managed to throw open the outhouse door on this one, opening race as a line of attack, and combining it with charges of incompetence. I half think that the Obama should select the Hills as his running mate, so that every time the McCain'ts reproduce one of the more noxious Clinton charges--the 3 a.m. ad, as in the upstart black man ain't qualified to lead at any time, or that he is "elitest' whereas I, the HIlls, or John the McCain't, am/is--she is trotted out publicly to eat her own vile words. Problem is that the venom flowing from the Republican camp and from Democrats, especially self-professed liberal, pro-Civil Rights white Democrats--and judging from the Reverend Jesse Jackson's expressed desire to castrate the Obama, from blacks, as well--will be so thick and noxious that not even the Hills will be able to absorb it. The New Yorker provided a taste with its by now nearly forgotten cover for July 21--

David Remnick, editor of the magazine, as well as the illustrator and various other staff and defenders have called this "homage to bigotry and ignorance " a "satire" of the noxious attitudes many bigots have toward the Obamas, husband and wife. Putting the kindest face on this propagandistic, anti-Obama campaign poster, we might accept that Remnick, his colleagues and supporters do believe it is satire. It is not. You don't send up someone else's ideas about X and Y by portraying without a trace of irony X and Y as the embodiments of those ideas. This drawing simply says, "Everything you feared about us was, in fact. true--and then some. " A poll released by the AP on July 24, shows that 7 in 10 Democrats feel the cover is a biased, bigotted piece of work that can't be called satire, while 7 in 10 Republicans find it fine--surprise, surprise.

As any number of pundits has observed, there surely are "more" important things to worry about than what a magazine sliding past its glory years into dotage puts on its cover--surging oil prices, a housing market dragging the economy into a black hole, bank failures, American war crimes, not to mention the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--the "Global War on Terriorism." But the sad truth is that this election is about whether America can in 2008 elect a black man president, whether enough people can determine to throw off the weight of America's racist history--the legacy of slavery, the reality of racism in a society that likes to inarcerate its black men--and vote for the Obama. The New Yorker cover and the pieces inside, including a long article on the Obama as a young Chicago politician--I should say ambitious young Chicago politician--are just more evidence of how hard that will be. If not precisely a hack job, theNew Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza is at best a weed whack job, negative in pitch, tone, and direction, perfectly in tune with the cover art.

In discusssing the Obama, many reporters annd commentators in the main stream media and in the blogosphere add those extra, freighted modifiers at every naming--"arrogant," "elitist," "weak," "unproven," "opportunistic," "indecisive.""aloof," "perceived as lacking gravitas," and "lucky." I even heard one talking head--a dead white male--call the Obama an Oreo cookie! The Obama said to be a brilliant speaker, but that is dismissed as little more than play acting. Words don't mean anything, the Hills liked to say, and, indeed, they mean nothing to people who's definition of truth is highly fungible. George W. Bush was less prepared for the presidency than the Obama, and, although he certainly was accused of many things, including arrogance and ignorance, he came in for far less flack--indeed, he did well in the debates precisely because he persuaded the media to give him a "gentleman's C<" plus extra points for every partial al answer. Applied to the Obama, thse words and phrases--whether consciously or not on the part of the writer, and I suspect that in many cases they are unconscious--serve the Obama is an uppity black man, and Michelle Obama is an even more uppity black woman. It's no wonder polls say he doesn't connect with most voters or share their values. My point is that when all of these comments are put in context of race, they spell defeat for Obama and Democrats to a man who is probably less qualified than George Bush to be president and nastier than Bob Dole ever dreamed of being.

Add to that constant background, the media's blind allegiance to the general narrative line it has embraced--in this case that the surge and splurge in Iraq has been a glorious success. Juan Cole thoroughly dismantles that argument in his blog, but few journalists bother with specialists when they can talk to each other. In this case they use John McCain't as their authority and so regularly pound the Obama with a lie for refusing to accept that lie. But that's another blog.

Even my skeptical friends think the Obama can win if he mobilizes a huge vote. I don't think the Obama is anything more than a moderate in terms of policy, but he has charisma to spare, and that might carry him through. I'd rather see him be as bold in terms of policy as he was in undertaking this run for the presidency.

Whose Religion

The news pages and air waves are full once again of verbal hand-wringing and head wagging over Jeremiah Wright, the preacher the Obama chose to repudiate after some of his sermons were uncovered by the Hills's campaign hit team—her "swift boaters," as it were. The chief complaint seems to be that Wright argued that America might have brought the attacks of September 11, 2001 on itself, through its hubris, its mistreatment of other people, and its moral decadence. Much of that sounds like the Reverends Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other evangelical prophets of self-righteousness.

The brief against Wright seems, as well, to include his embrace of 'black liberation theology,' based on the much admired and heartily despised—depends on which side you're on--"liberation theology.” Developed in Latin America in the 1960s and '70s by Father Juan Luis Segundo and others, “liberation theology” says the Church should turn its attention to improving the lives of everyone, especially the poor and downtrodden. The gospel should help liberate people from injustice, suffering and bondage here and now. It should not be the servant of the power structure. The late Pope John Paul II and then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, threw the weight of the papacy behind smashing it.

In the U.S., the Reverend James H. Cone of the AME church and Union Theological Seminary developed a “black theology of liberation” to bring the movement for equal rights for all Americans into the global flow. What the hell is wrong with that? Oh, Wright has also said in a play on "God Bless America," "God damn America." All I can do is point to the scriptures and say let those who have never done the same cast the first stone, and let them swear that were they downtrodden in America, they would never say the same. That's granting for the sake of argument only that saying, "god damn America" is a "crime"--I don't believe it myself. I know I frequently say worse when I view the horror show of Iraq or the repressive oligarchies we back or the torture of prisoners or the singling out for prosecution for one half-assed crime or another young men whose only real crime is having a different skin color--phenotype, as it were.

Today, the fuss focuses on more inane comments Wright has made on his ego-trip tour of national media outlets eager to give him a stage. The media than sling his one-liners at the Obama or wield them like clubs to bash him. 'Repudiate this man,' they demand. Here's a link to the New York Times transcript of the latest Obama dash through the media gauntlet. I wonder why each candidate is not required to repudiate torture and pledge to send the Bushies to The Hague to face war crimes charges. The current frenzy is beyond guilt by association.

What's driving the frenzy in the mainstream media is that these are black preachers and a black man making a serious run at the presidency. I say that because, truth be told, no one has made half the fuss about the white candidates who solicit and lap up the endorsements of white evangelical preachers, nor has anyone—to my knowledge—dug through every utterance of every preacher whose church those candidates have attended. I haven't seen a big deal made of the reactionary Congressional prayer group, commonly known as the Family. that the Hills religiously attends. The Family provides a religious, American cover for the very groups that stand in staunch opposition to "liberation theology"--that is, oligarchs from the worlds of business and politics. For that matter I have seen no major questions raised about the influence the Catholic cult of self-mortifiers, Opus Dei, has on Antonin Scalia.

The reason is that most people understand that parishioners don't agree with every word out of their pastors' mouths, even if the pastor is the priest. A fundamental principle of protestantism, of course, is that a person talks directly to god, without the intercession of the priest. Except in cults and in hierarchical religious bodies presided over by inquisitors, lockstep thinking is frowned upon. (To be fair, the German pope, the former grand inquisitor, could rigorously enforce church discipline only by losing millions of "pick-and-choose followers.")

The Obama's "critics" seem to forget that large numbers of American believers choose a church or shul or mosque or temple for a host of reasons—familial, social, convenience, politics, necessity, as in, it's the only show in town or because they are banned from the church of choice by virtue of their skin color or sexual predilections. Catholic politicians, like John F. Kennedy and Mario Cuomo, to mention only two Americans, have taken positions opposite that of the Catholic Church and proven time and again that a politician is not beholden to a theology, unless he chooses to be.

It's long past time for the media to bury this dead dog, and make no mistake, it is long dead--arguably still born--and make no mistake, the media is keeping it on expensive life support, with more than a little prompting from the Clintons and their paid mudslingers. Were the hand-wringing head waggers to look honestly at what they were nattering about, they would probably not only learn a few things but also decide that there are a lot more important stories to pursue--having to do with war, hunger, health, and justice.

The Obama + Marx, Karl

Pity the Obama--the man correctly points out that working class Americans have seen the life they were taught was the best on earth eroded, degraded, trashed, devalued, moved first South then offshore to Asia to the point where they have almost nothing left and so, in order to prove that they still rule the world, they flex their considerable political clout for gun wingnuts or 9/11 paranoics or representatives of the one true faith, hoping to ride the World Trade Centers through at least one more election cycle, rather than face the real truth that they are being fucked by the same corporate capitalism that has fucked them throughout their lives.

Meanwhile the servants of that coporate capitalism, this time made manifest in Hillary Clinton, John McCain and people who still trudge through the Drudge Report [couldn't resist], have pulled a clever reverses on the usual condemnation as a class warrior anyone who dares to challenge them.This time Clinton and McCain accused the Obama of being insensitive to the working class because he said that many of them have turned bitter over economic losses and so have clung to what they have left--guns [for revolution: my gloss] or to religion or to fear of immigrants, people not like us. They are afraid some alien will come and take the little they have left.

That sounds right, but apparerntly referencing the reinforcer, if not the cause, of nararow-mindedness, bigotry, and fear is not acceptable to certain keepers of the American myth. They couldn't claim the Obama was using class warfare, for fear of waking people up--the rise off the 'race card' early in the last century was related to the white power structures need to keep blacks and poor and working class whites from joining forces politically to make real changes. Better to discredit the Harvard educated Obama, as "elitest." Suddenly John McCain and HIllary Clinton are allowed to be the voices of the working class--only in America do the captains of industry and their lackeys succeed in pulling off this transference so easily.

The McCain-Clinton blather is enough to make a cockroach vomit. It is like the flap over the Obama's pastor's comments--a made up controversy. The reductio ad absurdum of the Clinton-McCain theory--that the Obama somehow endorsed or embraced all the mutterings of his pastor because he continued attending the church--transferred to Hillary Clinton would posit that she somehow endorsed or condoned her husband's philandering because she remained married to him; applied to John McCain the same line of reasoning would portray him as a masochist of overwhelming ambition, hypocrisy and shamelessness. But wait: Those are true statements. Don't they make the first true?

So accept that the Obama is "elitest" and that whether that is good or bad depends on the nature of the elite to which he belongs. Is it an educated "elite" that values basic principles of democracy, justice, fairness, peace over war, equality, and reason? Or is it the self-serving elie of the Bush-McCain_Clinton crew? I think the Obama is the best sort of 'elitist,' who has landed in the soup because he has begun more forcefully to speak truth, and he needs to continue doing so. But instead on Saturday he apologized for speaking in a way that might have discomfitted people. Apologizing when you are not wrong in order to avoid hurting someone's tender feelings is a proper thing to do, but having done it, the Obama needs to move on, recognizing that the people who are going to be offended by his comments on any issue aren't going to vote for him anyway. He seems to be trying to do so.The Obama put the whole matter in perspective in this Terra Haute, Indiana, appearance, picked up in Tallking Points Memo.

That was, I thought, the end of a short blog--silly me. The press, along with McCain-Clinton, and other officials, who can't be bothered to address the important issuues we face--the stinking bloody fiasco in Iraq where the military is now serving as a mercenary force (paid by us) for the Maliki government; a ruined economy; a dysfunctional health care system; and the need to remove war ciminals from the highest levels of government and ship them to the Hague for trial--have seized on the Obama's comments and the charge of elitism in an effort to beat his campaign senseless. If they succeed, and they might, this country will get what it deserves. But it could be that enough people recognize the essential truth of the Obama's comments--could be, maybe--for the twisters of truth to fail.

The Phrase No One Will Utter

Judging from the appearance of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the sole and singular lesson from Vietnam for Senators and bureaucrats caught in a military quagmire is never utter the words "light at the end of the tunnel." The rule is that you can say anything you want that means the same, but not "that." Yet that is precisely the argument of Petraeus and Crocker-conditions are getting better, a wee better, but we have to pause now because it all could turn to crap. The rest is lies and more lies, as Crocker lied to the Armed Services Committee in trying to spin Maliki's licking in Basra into a victory because some made-up group called for an end to outside interference in Iraq, which he defines as Iran--not the U.S. Too many senators on the Armed Services Committee, in part because of time limitations, simply nod along. To her credit, Hillary Clinton was positively presidential.

Well, it's nice to know that our men in "theatre" can spin a whopper as well of the old Vietnam crew. Now, why doesn't someone ask why Iran is "outside" and the U.S. is not, especially since Iran's Ahmadinejad has visited Iraq, like Bush, only unlike Bush, he went where he wished. He was also the first Persian leader to visit Baghdad in more than a millennium, meaning, as my friend, Jeff, observes, this whole extravaganza has made Iraq safe for Iran.

The Foreign Affairs Committee is much tougher this afternoon, wanting specific reasons for continuing what is clearly a failed policy. The only answers they get are vague to the point of absurdity, except for the attempts to blame everything on al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iran. They are all playing to form in their "theatre."

Oncce again this afternoon, Crocker claims the fiasco in Basra last week was proof that Maliki is really a nationalist. The calculus behind this statement--and I predicted this argument last week--is that the Senate in particular and American public in general are too stupid to know the difference.

Defining Moments

Odd Ends to catch up with myself.

Someone who goes by the nom de web "Purdue Matt" has twice sought to post the same comment about my condemnation of torture--"If torturing one person prevents the deaths of thousands of Americans by a potential terrorist attack, then it was worth it [my emphasis]." I ignored this twisted piece of ratiocination the first time it came through, but the second time, with the U.S. pounding Sadr City in Baghdad and Sadrist positions in Basra and elsewhere after attacks by the U.S. trained Iraqi security forces on Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army faltered, I decided to post the thing with a short gloss.

The easy response is to dismiss the comment as hopelessly illogical. There is no way to know in advance that torturing someone will save anyone, and arguably if interrogators know that much, they already have enough knowledge to proceed without torture. But on a practical level, an interrogator is more likely to gain information through skilled questioning, even 'befriending' his or her prisoner, than through torture, as study after study has shown. Indeed, torture usually produces bad information. Moreover, in most moral systems, each life is precious, and the taking of one or the abuse of a person for any reason, with the possible exception of self-defense is unacceptable. Possibly warding off a potential attack that might kill one or more people of a particular group does not constitute self defense. Unfortunately, Purdue Matt is not alone in his adherence to this specious argument, a favorite of the Bushies.

Of course, no one can accuse the Emperor Boy George of clear headed thinking--of any kind of higher order thinking! Certainly, the latest maneuver ranks with the most cynically inane of the occupation. David "Counter Insurgency" Petraeus and Ambassador Rryan "Sugar Coat It" Crocker, due in Washington next month to testify about the results of the surge and splurge, have over the past few weeks made clear that the Maliki government had squandered the relative pause in violence following the splurge, utterly failing to make any political progress toward stabililzing the political situatiion. Much of the reduction in violence, we are told, derives less from American force than from Sadr's decisioin to declare unilaterally a ceasefire and to renew it for six months. That didn't stop the Mehdi Army from making mischief, especially in Basra, where it was one of the militia's dividing the city after the British left, but the mischief was slight compared with the constant harassment of Sadrists by Maliki, Petraeus and company. Despite those continuing lowlife attacks, Sadr held firm, and Petraeus has gladly worn the aura of success Sadr's ceasefire has given him. That success, as I said, served ultimately to focus attention on the Maliki government's dismal political failure.

We now know that the answer to the dilemma--it has the odor of something cooked up in Washington and delivered in person by Dickie Cheney in such a way as to make the US appear out of the Maliki loop, except for those special forces targeting sites in Basra and so on--was to send 30,000 or more of those newly trained Iraqi troops against the Sadrists in Basra. To insure that Americans and Brits understand that Sadr is the devil, the English speaking press always calls him the "radical cleric," meaning he's a badass because he represents the poor and disgruntled and because he considers America an occupying power and because he is a threat to gain power through the ballot box, if the elections in October are fair, according to most knowledgeable observers. Imagine if that happened. To forestall it, Maliki attacked. The assault also was designed so that the Bushies could testify in Congress that Maliki had taken a bold step forward militarily and politically. Jauntily, the Bushbucker in Chief, announced last week that the Maliki attack on Sadr and his followers represented a 'defining moment' in the new Iraq's history.

The moment it defined is not the sort of glorious victory the Emperor Boy George had in mind. Abject failure is more the case--from the Bushies' perspective, anyway. More than anything, the events of last week underscore the absolute absurdity of the American position in Iraq. Unfortunately, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, John McCain, seems clueless to the Bush degree, and he is not alone among the members of Congress, who have failed to bring this surreal absurdity to a halt. McCain alone, except perhaps for the Emperor Boy and his immediate court, believes that Malikii acted without consulting or informing his American handlers and that Sadr's ordering of a ceasefire was a sign of weakness.

Maliki is allied--albeit, sometimes shakily--with another militia, the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq, heavily in thrall to Iran, which also has a stake in not seeing Sadr succeed. Of course, Iran faces the difficult task of trying to keep the Bushies so busy in Iraq that they don't refocus on it while also keeping Iraq calm so the US. will leave. The Iranians might arm the Mehdi Army and harbor Sadr in order to make mischief against their old enemies, the Sunnis and Americans, but they don't want him to prevail over their old friends in the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq, under Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, an enemy of Sadr. That's right, the Emperor Boy George is on the side of his nemesis Iran's president, Mahoud Admadinejad in his support of Maliki and Hakim.

Patraeus proclaims that the Iranians are arming the Mehdi Army while neglecting to add that they also support Maliki and Hakim against the same Mehdi Army. More to the point, the U.S. has now declared itself a full partisan in a civil war and turned its military into a mercenary force, serving a known ally of Iran, adding one more degradation to a long list of despicable acts.

No Torture (Again)!

The editorial in today's New York Times takes a strong stand against torture while calling on Bush not to veto the anti-torture bill--actually an amendment to the intelligence budget bill requiring the CIA and other intelligence agencies to defer to the Army Field Manual--it's a massive file--if there is any question about the meaning of torture. The manual is clear--Bush favorites like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, assault, dogging, hooding and duct taping eyes, exposure to cold are torture. The Bush says that he will veto and probably will because at this point to sign a bill expressively defining treatments of prisoners he ordered as torture would be tantamount to admitting to a war crime. The U.S. would have to fulfill its treaty obligations and send him to the Hague to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. That would be fitting and proper, but is it likely to happen under the presidency of John McCain, who voted against this bill, or of Hillary [Clinton-Barack] Obama, who could not be bothered to stop campaigning long enough to return to Washington to cast a vote?

Where Are They"

The Senate voted yesterday, February 13, to ban waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" known to everyone but the Bushies as torture. The vote was 51 to 43. John McCain flew to Washington to vote, 'no,' because, he told reporters, he didn't t want to keep such brutality out of the hands of the CIA. For a man who was tortured himself and proclaims himself opposed to the practice, it is a bizarre vote that indicates he shouldn't be president. Worse, neither the Hills nor the Obama could jet off the campaign trail long enough to vote--that's right, the two candidates who argue constantly about who can best lead failed to take a stand on the issue of torture by casting their vote. These two candidates clearly lack the courage of the non--convictons they have mastered the art of expressing with passionate equivocation. Who then is left to vote for in this squalid campaign.