The Huffington Post
November 18, 2008
Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy
by Andy Borowitz
President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.
But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.
"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."
The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate -- we get it, stop showing off."
The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
"Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.
Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.
As I see it, words (in complete sentences) do matter.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
The War on Brains is Over!
The New York Times
Obama and the War on Brains
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 9, 2008
Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.
Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.
We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.
Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.
Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More recently, we’ve had some smart and well-educated presidents who scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual, and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas aphorisms about hogs.
As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.
At least since Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1950s, it’s been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too learned. Thoughtfulness is portrayed as wimpishness, and careful deliberation is for sissies. The social critic William Burroughs once bluntly declared that “intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.”
(It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas. After one of Stevenson’s high-brow speeches, an admirer yelled out something like, You’ll have the vote of every thinking American! Stevenson is said to have shouted back: That’s not enough. I need a majority!)
Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?
Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn’t fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist. But it may also be that President Bush has discredited superficiality.
An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.
(Intellectuals are for real. In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.”)
Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites. Global Language Monitor, which follows linguistic issues, reports that in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level.
As Mr. Obama prepares to take office, I wish I could say that smart people have a great record in power. They don’t. Just think of Emperor Nero, who was one of the most intellectual of ancient rulers — and who also killed his brother, his mother and his pregnant wife; then castrated and married a slave boy who resembled his wife; probably set fire to Rome; and turned Christians into human torches to light his gardens.
James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, Thomas Jefferson was a dazzling scholar and inventor, and John Adams typically carried a book of poetry. Yet all were outclassed by George Washington, who was among the least intellectual of our early presidents.
Yet as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.
Obama and the War on Brains
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 9, 2008
Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.
Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.
We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.
Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.
Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More recently, we’ve had some smart and well-educated presidents who scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual, and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas aphorisms about hogs.
As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.
At least since Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1950s, it’s been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too learned. Thoughtfulness is portrayed as wimpishness, and careful deliberation is for sissies. The social critic William Burroughs once bluntly declared that “intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.”
(It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas. After one of Stevenson’s high-brow speeches, an admirer yelled out something like, You’ll have the vote of every thinking American! Stevenson is said to have shouted back: That’s not enough. I need a majority!)
Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?
Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn’t fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist. But it may also be that President Bush has discredited superficiality.
An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.
(Intellectuals are for real. In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.”)
Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites. Global Language Monitor, which follows linguistic issues, reports that in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level.
As Mr. Obama prepares to take office, I wish I could say that smart people have a great record in power. They don’t. Just think of Emperor Nero, who was one of the most intellectual of ancient rulers — and who also killed his brother, his mother and his pregnant wife; then castrated and married a slave boy who resembled his wife; probably set fire to Rome; and turned Christians into human torches to light his gardens.
James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, Thomas Jefferson was a dazzling scholar and inventor, and John Adams typically carried a book of poetry. Yet all were outclassed by George Washington, who was among the least intellectual of our early presidents.
Yet as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Fox News, a Great Gift to Liberals and Democrats
As I see it, Harold Meyerson has discovered a silver lining in the dark cloud of right wing fundamentalist fantasy and bilious garbage that is Fox News Channel.
Washington Post
You Report, We Marginalize
By Harold Meyerson Wednesday, November 12, 2008
To: Mr. Roger Ailes
President, Fox News
Dear Roger,
You should be sitting when you read this, because I'm writing to apologize.
In times past, I've had harsh words for Fox for its consistent misrepresentation of the news. In 2003, I cited a survey from the Program for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and the Knowledge Network that showed that 45 percent of Fox viewers believed that the United States had uncovered incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had worked together; that we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and that a majority of peoples in other lands supported our war in Iraq. In case these bizarre misconceptions merely reflected the a priori beliefs of President Bush's supporters, PIPA further documented that Bush backers who got their news from other networks had a decidedly firmer grasp of the facts.
Now, I don't in any way retract my judgment that you guys were at the time and still are a constant source of right-wing fantasies. It's just that, at least in today's political environment, I'm no longer sure this is a bad thing.
The election has left the Republican Party reeling, its base shrunk to those Southern, Plains and Mountain West states where rural cultures still predominate. The party's smarter strategists are arguing that the worldviews of the social conservatives and free-market extremists who dominate the GOP are either irrelevant or ridiculous to voters in the middle of the political spectrum. "We can't be obsessed with issues that are not the issues that are important to American voters," Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida GOP, told the New York Times.
But Fox has won its viewership precisely by promoting such obsessions.
During the campaign just completed, you guys focused on Barack Obama's allegedly Muslim and alien roots and socialist ideology; meanwhile, in the real world, unemployment rose, foreclosures soared and Wall Street went flooey. Over the past eight years, you beat drums for such causes as state intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. You demonized undocumented immigrants (okay, CNN's Lou Dobbs gave you a run for your money on that one). You fed the Republican base with a steady diet of bile -- and now that bilious base is the biggest impediment to the Republicans' repositioning themselves so that they can win elections again.
Reach out to Latinos -- the inescapably growing segment of the American electorate that voted overwhelmingly for Obama after four years of GOP immigrant-bashing? Not if Fox viewers have anything to say about it. Not after you've drummed into their heads that the Latino immigrant population is some looming terrorist threat.
Modify that opposition to stem-cell research? Tone down the ridicule of people in public life who have advanced degrees? Call off the Republican war on science that kicks in whenever science runs counter to right-wing fundamentalism in religion or economics? Not if the Hannity faithful can help it.
You're not alone in reinforcing those beliefs that marginalize the Republican right, of course. You've got plenty of help from Rush and all the little Limbaughs who dominate talk radio. But together with your allies, you haul truckloads of troglodyte garbage to your flock.
And the way your flock sees it, the modifications that Republicans need to make to become competitive again in American politics -- acknowledging a need for state intervention to make the economy work, backing off the primitive religiosity, embracing a more tolerant pluralism -- amount to nothing less than heresy.
As an aide to Richard Nixon back in the day, Roger, you were around for the birth of the Southern strategy -- the policy to move all those disgruntled racist Southern whites into Republican ranks. But the party as Nixon would have recognized it ceased to exist after the Republicans captured Congress in 1994. Since then, the national Republican Party has been dominated by far-right Southern legislative leaders -- Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott -- and by George W. Bush. The past two elections, Republicans have grown weaker everywhere but the white rural South -- the region that remains the least educated and least diverse.
And rather than present these voters with a picture of a complex, changing world, you guys at Fox serve chiefly to reinforce their fears, to paint people who hold different viewpoints as alien and threatening.
In that sense, your work remains dangerous and disintegrative to the nation. But it is also, more narrowly, tactically, for now, a great gift to liberals and Democrats. You ensure the ongoing Palinization and marginalization -- electorally, the terms are synonymous -- of the Republican Party.
And to think that you're doing all this not on the Democratic National Committee's dime but on Rupert Murdoch's.
Cheers from your new fan,
Harold
Washington Post
You Report, We Marginalize
By Harold Meyerson Wednesday, November 12, 2008
To: Mr. Roger Ailes
President, Fox News
Dear Roger,
You should be sitting when you read this, because I'm writing to apologize.
In times past, I've had harsh words for Fox for its consistent misrepresentation of the news. In 2003, I cited a survey from the Program for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and the Knowledge Network that showed that 45 percent of Fox viewers believed that the United States had uncovered incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had worked together; that we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and that a majority of peoples in other lands supported our war in Iraq. In case these bizarre misconceptions merely reflected the a priori beliefs of President Bush's supporters, PIPA further documented that Bush backers who got their news from other networks had a decidedly firmer grasp of the facts.
Now, I don't in any way retract my judgment that you guys were at the time and still are a constant source of right-wing fantasies. It's just that, at least in today's political environment, I'm no longer sure this is a bad thing.
The election has left the Republican Party reeling, its base shrunk to those Southern, Plains and Mountain West states where rural cultures still predominate. The party's smarter strategists are arguing that the worldviews of the social conservatives and free-market extremists who dominate the GOP are either irrelevant or ridiculous to voters in the middle of the political spectrum. "We can't be obsessed with issues that are not the issues that are important to American voters," Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida GOP, told the New York Times.
But Fox has won its viewership precisely by promoting such obsessions.
During the campaign just completed, you guys focused on Barack Obama's allegedly Muslim and alien roots and socialist ideology; meanwhile, in the real world, unemployment rose, foreclosures soared and Wall Street went flooey. Over the past eight years, you beat drums for such causes as state intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. You demonized undocumented immigrants (okay, CNN's Lou Dobbs gave you a run for your money on that one). You fed the Republican base with a steady diet of bile -- and now that bilious base is the biggest impediment to the Republicans' repositioning themselves so that they can win elections again.
Reach out to Latinos -- the inescapably growing segment of the American electorate that voted overwhelmingly for Obama after four years of GOP immigrant-bashing? Not if Fox viewers have anything to say about it. Not after you've drummed into their heads that the Latino immigrant population is some looming terrorist threat.
Modify that opposition to stem-cell research? Tone down the ridicule of people in public life who have advanced degrees? Call off the Republican war on science that kicks in whenever science runs counter to right-wing fundamentalism in religion or economics? Not if the Hannity faithful can help it.
You're not alone in reinforcing those beliefs that marginalize the Republican right, of course. You've got plenty of help from Rush and all the little Limbaughs who dominate talk radio. But together with your allies, you haul truckloads of troglodyte garbage to your flock.
And the way your flock sees it, the modifications that Republicans need to make to become competitive again in American politics -- acknowledging a need for state intervention to make the economy work, backing off the primitive religiosity, embracing a more tolerant pluralism -- amount to nothing less than heresy.
As an aide to Richard Nixon back in the day, Roger, you were around for the birth of the Southern strategy -- the policy to move all those disgruntled racist Southern whites into Republican ranks. But the party as Nixon would have recognized it ceased to exist after the Republicans captured Congress in 1994. Since then, the national Republican Party has been dominated by far-right Southern legislative leaders -- Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott -- and by George W. Bush. The past two elections, Republicans have grown weaker everywhere but the white rural South -- the region that remains the least educated and least diverse.
And rather than present these voters with a picture of a complex, changing world, you guys at Fox serve chiefly to reinforce their fears, to paint people who hold different viewpoints as alien and threatening.
In that sense, your work remains dangerous and disintegrative to the nation. But it is also, more narrowly, tactically, for now, a great gift to liberals and Democrats. You ensure the ongoing Palinization and marginalization -- electorally, the terms are synonymous -- of the Republican Party.
And to think that you're doing all this not on the Democratic National Committee's dime but on Rupert Murdoch's.
Cheers from your new fan,
Harold
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
A Veteran's Voice
A Vet's Message To The GOP on Veterans Day -- Shove It
by Bob Geiger November 11, 2008
BobGeiger.com
Being from a distinctly lower middle-class family in central Nebraska, I grew up in a house where we never wanted for food or shelter, but where there was no money for luxuries and where members of my immediate and extended family had little hope of ever going to college. So I went into the military, got the original G.I. Bill -- yes, I am that old -- and decades later enjoy a healthy standard of living based on getting an incredible education and all the doors that has opened for me.
I gave to my country and my country gave back to me.
And, in purely financial terms, I'm also convinced America has more than recouped my educational costs based on 30 years of much higher wages (and associated revenue from my taxes) than I would ever have realized based on my diploma from a rural Nebraska high school.
So Veterans benefits are earned -- and they matter.
Which is why I get so disgusted whenever I see all the faux military-loving Republicans turning up on Veterans Day with their flowery pronouncements of how much we Vets mean to them when they prove at every turn that they really don’t give a damn about the troops, Veterans or military families.
Of course, Exhibit A is Iraq and the Republican party's steadfast refusal to ever allow our troops to come permanently home to their families and their continued desire to keep them bogged down in a war for nothing. But I mention the G.I. Bill specifically because of the following samples of Republican hypocrisy we see every Veterans Day:
“On Veterans Day – and every day – we thank the men and women who have fought to keep us safe and free.” - Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
"We must remember the great debt that we owe veterans and members of the armed services who fight to maintain our freedom around the world. Throughout history, our soldiers have risked their lives to defend our freedom, and we must not forget their sacrifices." - Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
“Veterans Day is our opportunity to honor America’s veterans who have courageously served our country. These brave men and women have fought to keep our nation free and secure, and we thank them and their families for their service and sacrifice on our behalf.” - Senator Bob Corker (R-TN)
"So this day, perhaps more than any other day, is a time to honor them. We owe them our respect and profound gratitude." - Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
What's the common denominator in this crew? They all were among 22 Republicans who voted against the Post 9/11 G.I. Bill, authored by Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) -- a highly-decorated Vietnam Veteran -- and passed with 75 votes on May 22nd of this year.
Webb's bill brought back the full, post-service educational benefits that I and so many other Veterans have enjoyed. After three years of service, it provides tuition and fees for any in-State public college, a stipend for books and supplies and a housing allowance based on actual housing costs in the area. The benefit is extended to both active-duty troops and members of the National Guard and Reserve who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
An opportunity. A way to better oneself after sacrificing much for the country. And a nation expressing gratitude in a meaningful, tangible way.
President-Elect Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) both found time in the midst of their frenzied presidential campaigns to vote for it, while John McCain (R-AZ) couldn’t be bothered to even show up to vote on Webb's bill --probably because he wanted to be president and it would have looked bad when he voted against it.
And this instance of the GOP's true anti-Veteran sentiments, came despite the fact that some old-school and fairly conservative Veterans groups like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars strongly supported the legislation.
So why did these patriots who wear their little flag lapel pins and festoon their SUVs with support-the-troops ribbons vote against the new G.I. Bill?
Because they were primarily afraid that, after serving in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of our military men and women might -- horror of horrors -- actually avail themselves of the benefit they so richly deserve and leave the military. Yes, people like Alexander, Corker, Kyl and Hatch want them to remain in harm's way, not going off on some college campus recovering their lives and bettering themselves.
Here's John Cornyn (R-TX), who also voted against the measure, on the Senate floor in May arguing that point:
"I know it is not his intention, but Senator Webb's bill actually would encourage people not to reenlist by providing a perverse incentive to leave early in order to obtain the benefits they would receive after 3 years of service. We need to make sure we encourage continuation of service, retention in the military in the best interests of our All-Volunteer military force."
"A perverse incentive." Amazing.
But what can you really expect from a Republican Chickenhawk like Cornyn who never served in the military himself but who loves war and considers it a "perverse incentive" to give combat Veterans an opportunity to go to college.
Hillary Clinton said it best on the Senate floor on May 22nd, 2008 when she declared "we often hear wonderful rhetoric in this Chamber in support of our troops and our veterans, but the real test is not the speeches we deliver but whether we deliver on the speeches."
And in that spirit, Senators Alexander, Corker, Kyl and Hatch -- and every other Republican who voted against this important Veterans benefit -- I hope you'll forgive this Vet today when I say that you can take your self-serving, Veterans Day press releases and shove them.
As I see it, Bob Geiger speaks as our veterans' everyman.
by Bob Geiger November 11, 2008
BobGeiger.com
Being from a distinctly lower middle-class family in central Nebraska, I grew up in a house where we never wanted for food or shelter, but where there was no money for luxuries and where members of my immediate and extended family had little hope of ever going to college. So I went into the military, got the original G.I. Bill -- yes, I am that old -- and decades later enjoy a healthy standard of living based on getting an incredible education and all the doors that has opened for me.
I gave to my country and my country gave back to me.
And, in purely financial terms, I'm also convinced America has more than recouped my educational costs based on 30 years of much higher wages (and associated revenue from my taxes) than I would ever have realized based on my diploma from a rural Nebraska high school.
So Veterans benefits are earned -- and they matter.
Which is why I get so disgusted whenever I see all the faux military-loving Republicans turning up on Veterans Day with their flowery pronouncements of how much we Vets mean to them when they prove at every turn that they really don’t give a damn about the troops, Veterans or military families.
Of course, Exhibit A is Iraq and the Republican party's steadfast refusal to ever allow our troops to come permanently home to their families and their continued desire to keep them bogged down in a war for nothing. But I mention the G.I. Bill specifically because of the following samples of Republican hypocrisy we see every Veterans Day:
“On Veterans Day – and every day – we thank the men and women who have fought to keep us safe and free.” - Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
"We must remember the great debt that we owe veterans and members of the armed services who fight to maintain our freedom around the world. Throughout history, our soldiers have risked their lives to defend our freedom, and we must not forget their sacrifices." - Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
“Veterans Day is our opportunity to honor America’s veterans who have courageously served our country. These brave men and women have fought to keep our nation free and secure, and we thank them and their families for their service and sacrifice on our behalf.” - Senator Bob Corker (R-TN)
"So this day, perhaps more than any other day, is a time to honor them. We owe them our respect and profound gratitude." - Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
What's the common denominator in this crew? They all were among 22 Republicans who voted against the Post 9/11 G.I. Bill, authored by Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) -- a highly-decorated Vietnam Veteran -- and passed with 75 votes on May 22nd of this year.
Webb's bill brought back the full, post-service educational benefits that I and so many other Veterans have enjoyed. After three years of service, it provides tuition and fees for any in-State public college, a stipend for books and supplies and a housing allowance based on actual housing costs in the area. The benefit is extended to both active-duty troops and members of the National Guard and Reserve who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
An opportunity. A way to better oneself after sacrificing much for the country. And a nation expressing gratitude in a meaningful, tangible way.
President-Elect Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) both found time in the midst of their frenzied presidential campaigns to vote for it, while John McCain (R-AZ) couldn’t be bothered to even show up to vote on Webb's bill --probably because he wanted to be president and it would have looked bad when he voted against it.
And this instance of the GOP's true anti-Veteran sentiments, came despite the fact that some old-school and fairly conservative Veterans groups like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars strongly supported the legislation.
So why did these patriots who wear their little flag lapel pins and festoon their SUVs with support-the-troops ribbons vote against the new G.I. Bill?
Because they were primarily afraid that, after serving in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of our military men and women might -- horror of horrors -- actually avail themselves of the benefit they so richly deserve and leave the military. Yes, people like Alexander, Corker, Kyl and Hatch want them to remain in harm's way, not going off on some college campus recovering their lives and bettering themselves.
Here's John Cornyn (R-TX), who also voted against the measure, on the Senate floor in May arguing that point:
"I know it is not his intention, but Senator Webb's bill actually would encourage people not to reenlist by providing a perverse incentive to leave early in order to obtain the benefits they would receive after 3 years of service. We need to make sure we encourage continuation of service, retention in the military in the best interests of our All-Volunteer military force."
"A perverse incentive." Amazing.
But what can you really expect from a Republican Chickenhawk like Cornyn who never served in the military himself but who loves war and considers it a "perverse incentive" to give combat Veterans an opportunity to go to college.
Hillary Clinton said it best on the Senate floor on May 22nd, 2008 when she declared "we often hear wonderful rhetoric in this Chamber in support of our troops and our veterans, but the real test is not the speeches we deliver but whether we deliver on the speeches."
And in that spirit, Senators Alexander, Corker, Kyl and Hatch -- and every other Republican who voted against this important Veterans benefit -- I hope you'll forgive this Vet today when I say that you can take your self-serving, Veterans Day press releases and shove them.
As I see it, Bob Geiger speaks as our veterans' everyman.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Failure of the GOP
The Next Right
Republicans deserved to lose
by Jon Henke
November 5, 2008 at 3:47 PM
Dear Republicans,
You earned the beating you took yesterday. You earned every bit of it. It is your fault. Democrats may or may not have deserved to win, but you deserved to lose.
The rebuilding and renewal of the Right will start soon. This will be very important. The Right and the Republican Party are at an inflection point, and there are many directions things can go. The destiny of the Right and the Republican Party will be determined in large part by the decisions you make in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Some of you will say "we have learned our lesson", and then try to pass off cosmetic changes as Reform. You are the problem.
Some of you will say "Republicans need to fight/hold Democrats accountable", as if it is sufficient to be against Democrats. The pendulum may eventually swing back to you, but you won't know what to do with it.
Some of you will say "Republicans need to carry our message to the American people", as if the problem is that Republicans haven't been saying "tax cuts and limited government" loudly enough. The problem is not the inability to communicate; the problem is that you have no idea how to actually deliver on those ideas.
Others will say "Republicans need to be more principled", as if the problem is a mere lack of personal courage and principle by Republicans. Even the best people can't limit government if there is not an effective strategy for implementation - for getting "from here to there". You don't need better people. You need a better strategy.
The problem is not Republican politicians, although many Republicans politicians are a problem.
The problem is not with the basic ideals of limited government and personal freedom, either.
The problem is a movement that plays small-ball and cedes responsibility for infrastructure to business interests, leadership that rewards those who make friends rather than waves, an entrenched Party and Movement support system that mostly supports itself, an echo chamber that has rotted our intellect, a grassroots that is ill-equipped to shape the Republican Party, and a Republican Party that has replaced strategy with tactics, substance with marketing.
These problems can be fixed, but the fix is not cosmetic. The rot is deep.
We do not need reformation of the Republican Party; we need transformation of the Republican Party. That is going to require fresh blood, new ideas, new infrastructure...and perhaps more than a little time in the wilderness.
You have earned the time you will spend wandering in the wildnerness. The land on the other side is not a promised land. It will have to be earned, too.
As I see it, the Democrats deserved to win; the Republicans deserved to lose. Democrats earned a win by organizing an excellent 21st century campaign around a brilliant candidate with a view of the futue, a candidate who could communicate- an inclusive candidate who took the high road. At their own peril, the Republicans took the low road of character assassination. They derided education and alienated the educated as "elitist." Their narrow view of "real" Americans sent a divisive message of exclusion. The Republican's sound drumming resulted from their underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.
"It is a problem for Republicans. As they continue to cater to their culturally conservative rural base, they continue to alienate educated voters," said Rep. Tom Davis, who is retiring and whose Fairfax County district was taken over by the Democrats on Tuesday. "The suburban vote is steadily slipping away, and the party's trying to ignore it and pretend it's not happening."
Republicans deserved to lose
by Jon Henke
November 5, 2008 at 3:47 PM
Dear Republicans,
You earned the beating you took yesterday. You earned every bit of it. It is your fault. Democrats may or may not have deserved to win, but you deserved to lose.
The rebuilding and renewal of the Right will start soon. This will be very important. The Right and the Republican Party are at an inflection point, and there are many directions things can go. The destiny of the Right and the Republican Party will be determined in large part by the decisions you make in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Some of you will say "we have learned our lesson", and then try to pass off cosmetic changes as Reform. You are the problem.
Some of you will say "Republicans need to fight/hold Democrats accountable", as if it is sufficient to be against Democrats. The pendulum may eventually swing back to you, but you won't know what to do with it.
Some of you will say "Republicans need to carry our message to the American people", as if the problem is that Republicans haven't been saying "tax cuts and limited government" loudly enough. The problem is not the inability to communicate; the problem is that you have no idea how to actually deliver on those ideas.
Others will say "Republicans need to be more principled", as if the problem is a mere lack of personal courage and principle by Republicans. Even the best people can't limit government if there is not an effective strategy for implementation - for getting "from here to there". You don't need better people. You need a better strategy.
The problem is not Republican politicians, although many Republicans politicians are a problem.
The problem is not with the basic ideals of limited government and personal freedom, either.
The problem is a movement that plays small-ball and cedes responsibility for infrastructure to business interests, leadership that rewards those who make friends rather than waves, an entrenched Party and Movement support system that mostly supports itself, an echo chamber that has rotted our intellect, a grassroots that is ill-equipped to shape the Republican Party, and a Republican Party that has replaced strategy with tactics, substance with marketing.
These problems can be fixed, but the fix is not cosmetic. The rot is deep.
We do not need reformation of the Republican Party; we need transformation of the Republican Party. That is going to require fresh blood, new ideas, new infrastructure...and perhaps more than a little time in the wilderness.
You have earned the time you will spend wandering in the wildnerness. The land on the other side is not a promised land. It will have to be earned, too.
As I see it, the Democrats deserved to win; the Republicans deserved to lose. Democrats earned a win by organizing an excellent 21st century campaign around a brilliant candidate with a view of the futue, a candidate who could communicate- an inclusive candidate who took the high road. At their own peril, the Republicans took the low road of character assassination. They derided education and alienated the educated as "elitist." Their narrow view of "real" Americans sent a divisive message of exclusion. The Republican's sound drumming resulted from their underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.
"It is a problem for Republicans. As they continue to cater to their culturally conservative rural base, they continue to alienate educated voters," said Rep. Tom Davis, who is retiring and whose Fairfax County district was taken over by the Democrats on Tuesday. "The suburban vote is steadily slipping away, and the party's trying to ignore it and pretend it's not happening."
A Moment of Residual Anger
American Prospect
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Magnanimity is nice, but let's not forget the hideous race John McCain ran
John Aravosis (DC)
I'm watching The View, and Joy Behar is talking about how last night McCain "finally came back to who he was." i.e., he's been kind of an ass for the past several months, and finally started to find his honor again. The token Republican countered with the following:
"I think it's hard because campaigns... really bring out the ugly in everyone on both sides.
It's when you see them in their pure moments, Barack's speech last night, and John McCain's
speech lsat night, that you see these moments of hope that they really have given us."
Horse shit.
After eight years of having Republicans call me an un-American troop-hating, fag-loving socialist, after months of John McCain embracing the hate to a level where his own supporters were calling out for Barack Obama to be assassinated, no one is going to be permitted to tell me with a straight face that "oh you know, both sides do it."
Your side was abominable. Your side was hateful. Your side race-baited. Your side gay-baited. Your side lied like we've never seen in recent presidential campaign history. Your side used a tax-cheat who would do better under Obama's tax proposal to be your everyman on the issue of taxes. Your side, in a veiled effort at race-baiting, said Obama doesn't put his country first. Your side had the audacity to call Obama a socialist. Your side suggested he was a Muslim. Your side suggested he was a terrorist. Your side suggested he was Osama bin Laden.
Spare me the crap about how both sides do it. You people are a disgrace, you've been a disgrace for eight long years, and all your hate and lying and venom and vitriol finally bit you in your collective fat ass.
Democrats don't do nasty, and they certainly don't do it well. Lord knows I wish they did, but they don't. Republicans elevate it to a religion. You are the party of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. Angry, bitchy, bitter and elitist. What do we have to compare? Jesse Jackson, I often hear from my Republican friends. Um, maybe in 1980 when he was relevant. It's been 28 years, got any other examples? Michael Moore, you say? What has Michael Moore said - name one thing - that's comparable to the filth that regularly issues forth from Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter and, of late, McCain and Palin?
Democrats, when they skewer (which isn't often enough), do it with biting truth. Republicans skewer, early and often, with vicious lies. It goes back to a more general philosophy that liberals have: If we just tell them the truth, the people will agree with us. Republicans are far less sanguine. They know that a good lie beats the truth any day of the week.
Except on a Tuesday in November.
As I see it, John nailed it! Bravo!
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Magnanimity is nice, but let's not forget the hideous race John McCain ran
John Aravosis (DC)
I'm watching The View, and Joy Behar is talking about how last night McCain "finally came back to who he was." i.e., he's been kind of an ass for the past several months, and finally started to find his honor again. The token Republican countered with the following:
"I think it's hard because campaigns... really bring out the ugly in everyone on both sides.
It's when you see them in their pure moments, Barack's speech last night, and John McCain's
speech lsat night, that you see these moments of hope that they really have given us."
Horse shit.
After eight years of having Republicans call me an un-American troop-hating, fag-loving socialist, after months of John McCain embracing the hate to a level where his own supporters were calling out for Barack Obama to be assassinated, no one is going to be permitted to tell me with a straight face that "oh you know, both sides do it."
Your side was abominable. Your side was hateful. Your side race-baited. Your side gay-baited. Your side lied like we've never seen in recent presidential campaign history. Your side used a tax-cheat who would do better under Obama's tax proposal to be your everyman on the issue of taxes. Your side, in a veiled effort at race-baiting, said Obama doesn't put his country first. Your side had the audacity to call Obama a socialist. Your side suggested he was a Muslim. Your side suggested he was a terrorist. Your side suggested he was Osama bin Laden.
Spare me the crap about how both sides do it. You people are a disgrace, you've been a disgrace for eight long years, and all your hate and lying and venom and vitriol finally bit you in your collective fat ass.
Democrats don't do nasty, and they certainly don't do it well. Lord knows I wish they did, but they don't. Republicans elevate it to a religion. You are the party of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. Angry, bitchy, bitter and elitist. What do we have to compare? Jesse Jackson, I often hear from my Republican friends. Um, maybe in 1980 when he was relevant. It's been 28 years, got any other examples? Michael Moore, you say? What has Michael Moore said - name one thing - that's comparable to the filth that regularly issues forth from Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter and, of late, McCain and Palin?
Democrats, when they skewer (which isn't often enough), do it with biting truth. Republicans skewer, early and often, with vicious lies. It goes back to a more general philosophy that liberals have: If we just tell them the truth, the people will agree with us. Republicans are far less sanguine. They know that a good lie beats the truth any day of the week.
Except on a Tuesday in November.
As I see it, John nailed it! Bravo!
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Yes, We Did!
Remarks of President-Elect Barack Obama--as prepared for delivery Election Night Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 Chicago, Illinois
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.
I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation's next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House. And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.
To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.
I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth.
This is your victory.
I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers - in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.
Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.
Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.
As I see it, this election represents the best of America- the opportunity to learn from the past and change for the better our future.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.
I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation's next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House. And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.
To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.
I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth.
This is your victory.
I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers - in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.
Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.
Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.
As I see it, this election represents the best of America- the opportunity to learn from the past and change for the better our future.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
America's Choosing Day- November 4, 2008
From The Leaves of Grass (1882)
by Walt Whitman
Election Day 1884
If I should need to name, O Western World,
your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies -
nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone,
with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies,
appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes -
nor Mississippi's stream:
This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now,
I'd name - the still small voice vibrating -
America's choosing day...
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d-sea-board and inland-Texas to Maine—
the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
—Foams and ferments the wine? It serves to purify—
while the heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.
by Walt Whitman
Election Day 1884
If I should need to name, O Western World,
your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies -
nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone,
with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies,
appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes -
nor Mississippi's stream:
This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now,
I'd name - the still small voice vibrating -
America's choosing day...
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous’d-sea-board and inland-Texas to Maine—
the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
—Foams and ferments the wine? It serves to purify—
while the heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Why I Voted for Barack Obama
As I see it, I am in good company.
The Wall Street Journal
"A New Era"
Peggy Noonan
He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.
He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.
Esquire Magazine
What's at Stake: The Rule of Law
Garry Willis
More than any other recent election, we are voting this year not merely for a president but to overthrow two governments. The one we can see is the one in which constitutional order has been defaced, the national spirit degraded, and the country unrecognizable because so much of the best of itself has been sold off or frittered away. The other one is the far more insidious one, a doppelgänger nation of black prisons, shredded memos, and secret justifications for even more secret crimes. Moreover, the current administration has worked hard not only to immunize itself from the political and legal consequences of the government we can see, but it has also worked within the one we cannot see in order to perpetuate itself...
There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John McCain, who has already identified Roberts and Alito as his beau ideals of Supreme Court justices. He has made brave noises about torture and the extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away, begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure in ways that were barely audible. The virus will gestate and spread on his watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility.
Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so. To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you to do so.
The Wall Street Journal
"A New Era"
Peggy Noonan
He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.
He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.
Esquire Magazine
What's at Stake: The Rule of Law
Garry Willis
More than any other recent election, we are voting this year not merely for a president but to overthrow two governments. The one we can see is the one in which constitutional order has been defaced, the national spirit degraded, and the country unrecognizable because so much of the best of itself has been sold off or frittered away. The other one is the far more insidious one, a doppelgänger nation of black prisons, shredded memos, and secret justifications for even more secret crimes. Moreover, the current administration has worked hard not only to immunize itself from the political and legal consequences of the government we can see, but it has also worked within the one we cannot see in order to perpetuate itself...
There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John McCain, who has already identified Roberts and Alito as his beau ideals of Supreme Court justices. He has made brave noises about torture and the extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away, begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure in ways that were barely audible. The virus will gestate and spread on his watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility.
Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so. To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you to do so.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Conservatives Should Vote for Barack Obama
The Atlantic
The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan
The Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote for Barack Obama
10/27/08
10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.
9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won't touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain's plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama's. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.
8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain's knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran's nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush's first term and George W.'s.
7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.
6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.
5. Faith. Obama's fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.
4. A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.
3. Two words: President Palin.
2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today's Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.
1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excrescence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America's reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.
Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.
The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan
The Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote for Barack Obama
10/27/08
10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.
9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won't touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain's plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama's. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.
8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain's knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran's nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush's first term and George W.'s.
7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.
6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.
5. Faith. Obama's fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.
4. A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.
3. Two words: President Palin.
2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today's Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.
1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excrescence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America's reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.
Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
The Frightening Fringe
From John Cole's Balloon Juice
New Definition of the Republican Party
by Michael D.
You might be excused if you said placing an image of Obama’s face on a $10 food stamp with a bucket of fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and Kool-Aid was an isolated act.
(October newsletter; Cheffey Community Republican Women,
Federated, San Bernadino County, CA; Diane Fedele, President)
When a major right-wing network calls Michelle Obama, “Obama’s Baby Mama,” you could dismiss it as as an overzealous producer who just thought it was funny and didn’t mean it to say that black women are just baby machines for black men.
(June 2008, Megyn Kelly and Michelle Malkin, Fox News)
You could, I suppose.
You might even get a pass if you thought a Web site that depicted Obama and the word “Waterboard Him” was just created by an obscure group that didn’t represent all Republicans.
(Sacramento County, CA Republican Party website,
Craig MacGlashan, Chairman)
Although, you would be wrong.
If a picture of Obama was Photoshopped to make him look a little bit like Osama Bin Laden, you could pass it off as the work of a few idiots on the right.
(Virginia Republican Party mailer)
It could be, right?
Supporters who carry racist Obama Monkey Dolls to your rallys are people who don’t represent your campaign. You could argue that.
(McCain-Palin supporter at a rally in Johnstown, PA)
Of course, this is just a moron on the fringe, right?
What about when a high-level Republican fundraiser sends out an email that includes a joke with the punchline, If an airplane carrying Obama and his wife were blown up “It certainly wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”?
(Tampa, FL Republican Party fundraiser, Al Austin)
Sure, you could pass it off as the act of a random dumbass.
If, in response to your question, “Who is Barack Obama?” someone yelled “Terrorist!” you could say that was just one idiot in the crowd and was not indicative of the general sentiment.
(October, 2008 John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies)
It’s plausible.
When a neighbor strings a Halloween ghost labeled Barack Obama upside down from a tree near his McCain-Palin sign on the front lawn, and he tells reporters that "Only white Christians should be in power," you could say it was just one crazy old guy in the neighborhood.
(Mike Lundsford, Fairfield, OH)
It reminds you that you never really know your neighbors.
In fact, you could cite dozens of examples of these racist, divisive, dillusiuonal attacks on Barack Obama and conclude that they are just elements of the fringe and don’t represent mainstream Republicans.
Sooner or later though, you will have to acknowledge that this “fringe” is very widespread. You’ll have to come to grips, eventually, with the fact that this “fringe” has become the very definition of the your party.
New Definition of the Republican Party
by Michael D.
You might be excused if you said placing an image of Obama’s face on a $10 food stamp with a bucket of fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and Kool-Aid was an isolated act.
(October newsletter; Cheffey Community Republican Women,
Federated, San Bernadino County, CA; Diane Fedele, President)
When a major right-wing network calls Michelle Obama, “Obama’s Baby Mama,” you could dismiss it as as an overzealous producer who just thought it was funny and didn’t mean it to say that black women are just baby machines for black men.
(June 2008, Megyn Kelly and Michelle Malkin, Fox News)
You could, I suppose.
You might even get a pass if you thought a Web site that depicted Obama and the word “Waterboard Him” was just created by an obscure group that didn’t represent all Republicans.
(Sacramento County, CA Republican Party website,
Craig MacGlashan, Chairman)
Although, you would be wrong.
If a picture of Obama was Photoshopped to make him look a little bit like Osama Bin Laden, you could pass it off as the work of a few idiots on the right.
(Virginia Republican Party mailer)
It could be, right?
Supporters who carry racist Obama Monkey Dolls to your rallys are people who don’t represent your campaign. You could argue that.
(McCain-Palin supporter at a rally in Johnstown, PA)
Of course, this is just a moron on the fringe, right?
What about when a high-level Republican fundraiser sends out an email that includes a joke with the punchline, If an airplane carrying Obama and his wife were blown up “It certainly wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”?
(Tampa, FL Republican Party fundraiser, Al Austin)
Sure, you could pass it off as the act of a random dumbass.
If, in response to your question, “Who is Barack Obama?” someone yelled “Terrorist!” you could say that was just one idiot in the crowd and was not indicative of the general sentiment.
(October, 2008 John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies)
It’s plausible.
When a neighbor strings a Halloween ghost labeled Barack Obama upside down from a tree near his McCain-Palin sign on the front lawn, and he tells reporters that "Only white Christians should be in power," you could say it was just one crazy old guy in the neighborhood.
(Mike Lundsford, Fairfield, OH)
It reminds you that you never really know your neighbors.
In fact, you could cite dozens of examples of these racist, divisive, dillusiuonal attacks on Barack Obama and conclude that they are just elements of the fringe and don’t represent mainstream Republicans.
Sooner or later though, you will have to acknowledge that this “fringe” is very widespread. You’ll have to come to grips, eventually, with the fact that this “fringe” has become the very definition of the your party.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Washington Monthly blog Political Animal
10/16/08
THE LAST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL
by Steve Benen
When McCain/Palin offer sleazy attacks in a speech, it's easy to hold them accountable. When they offer scurrilous lies in a television ad, it's almost as easy, especially with the whole "approve this message" line and media scrutiny of campaign advertising.
But McCain, Palin, and the Republican Smear Machine save some of their most offensive work for automated robocalls, which fly just below the radar screen. It's obviously abject cowardice, but decency and honor are the last things McCain is worried about now.
The first round of calls was in line with run-of-the-mill Republican nonsense.
The robocalls [in North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, and Wisconsin] hit Obama for attending a celebrity fundraiser in Hollywood while efforts to address the financial crisis got underway in Washington.
A second round of robocalls, also from McCain and the RNC, hits Obama as a tax-hiker, and stops just short of criticizing the big bailout package that McCain has repeatedly taken credit for helping get passed.
The second round cranked up the sleaze a bit.
"Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats aren't who you think they are," the call says. "They say they want to keep us safe, but Barack Obama said the threat we face now from terrorism is nowhere near as dire as it was in the end of the Cold War. And Congressional Democrats now want to give civil rights to terrorists."
And the third round, which is reaching households in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Northern Virginia, Maine, Florida, Missouri, and North Carolina, says a lot more about Republicans than it does Obama.
"You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country."
This isn't just some media stunt, intended to generate free media. It's actually the opposite -- McCain and the RNC are investing heavily in these disgusting calls, hoping to avoid the kind of scrutiny that comes with television ads.
Honestly, what would the Republican Party be without hate, fear, and ignorance? And when will party members with honor stand up and say that McCain and the RNC don't speak for them?
As I see it, we must think for ourselves. We must speak out against hate, fear, and ingnorance.
I voted my voice today.
"People are very hungry for something new. I think they are interested in being called to be a part of something larger than the sort of small, petty, slash-and-burn politics that we have been seeing over the last several years."
BARACK OBAMA, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 11, 2006
"We’ve come to be consumed by a 24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative ad, bickering, small-minded politics that doesn’t move us forward. Sometimes one side is up and the other side is down. But there’s no sense that they are coming together in a common-sense, practical, nonideological way to solve the problems that we face."
BARACK OBAMA, New York Times, Dec. 11, 2006
10/16/08
THE LAST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL
by Steve Benen
When McCain/Palin offer sleazy attacks in a speech, it's easy to hold them accountable. When they offer scurrilous lies in a television ad, it's almost as easy, especially with the whole "approve this message" line and media scrutiny of campaign advertising.
But McCain, Palin, and the Republican Smear Machine save some of their most offensive work for automated robocalls, which fly just below the radar screen. It's obviously abject cowardice, but decency and honor are the last things McCain is worried about now.
The first round of calls was in line with run-of-the-mill Republican nonsense.
The robocalls [in North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, and Wisconsin] hit Obama for attending a celebrity fundraiser in Hollywood while efforts to address the financial crisis got underway in Washington.
A second round of robocalls, also from McCain and the RNC, hits Obama as a tax-hiker, and stops just short of criticizing the big bailout package that McCain has repeatedly taken credit for helping get passed.
The second round cranked up the sleaze a bit.
"Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats aren't who you think they are," the call says. "They say they want to keep us safe, but Barack Obama said the threat we face now from terrorism is nowhere near as dire as it was in the end of the Cold War. And Congressional Democrats now want to give civil rights to terrorists."
And the third round, which is reaching households in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Northern Virginia, Maine, Florida, Missouri, and North Carolina, says a lot more about Republicans than it does Obama.
"You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country."
This isn't just some media stunt, intended to generate free media. It's actually the opposite -- McCain and the RNC are investing heavily in these disgusting calls, hoping to avoid the kind of scrutiny that comes with television ads.
Honestly, what would the Republican Party be without hate, fear, and ignorance? And when will party members with honor stand up and say that McCain and the RNC don't speak for them?
As I see it, we must think for ourselves. We must speak out against hate, fear, and ingnorance.
I voted my voice today.
"People are very hungry for something new. I think they are interested in being called to be a part of something larger than the sort of small, petty, slash-and-burn politics that we have been seeing over the last several years."
BARACK OBAMA, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 11, 2006
"We’ve come to be consumed by a 24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative ad, bickering, small-minded politics that doesn’t move us forward. Sometimes one side is up and the other side is down. But there’s no sense that they are coming together in a common-sense, practical, nonideological way to solve the problems that we face."
BARACK OBAMA, New York Times, Dec. 11, 2006
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Waving the Bloody Shirt
Opinion Journal
My Friend Bill Ayers
Once wanted by the FBI, he's since become a model citizen.
By THOMAS FRANK
Waving the bloody shirt" was the phrase once used to describe the standard demagogic tactic of the late 19th century, when memories of the Civil War were still vivid and loyalists of both parties could be moved to "vote as they shot." As the years passed and the memories faded, the shirt got gorier, the waving more frantic.
In 1896 the Democrats chose William Jennings Bryan as their leader, a man who was born in 1860 and had thus missed the Civil War, but who seemed to threaten the consensus politics of the time. In response, Republican campaign masterminds organized a speaking tour of the Midwest by a handful of surviving Union generals. The veterans advanced through the battleground states in a special train adorned with patriotic bunting, pictures of their candidate, William McKinley, and a sign declaring, "We are Opposed to Anarchy and Repudiation."
The culture wars are the familiar demagogic tactic of our own time, building monstrous offenses out of the tiniest slights. The fading rancor that each grievance is meant to revive, of course, dates to the 1960s and the antiwar protests, urban riots and annoying youth culture that originally triggered our great turn to the right.
This year the Democrats chose Barack Obama as their leader, a man who was born in 1961 and who largely missed our cultural civil war. In response, Republican campaign masterminds have sought to plunge him back into it in the most desperate and grotesque manner yet.
For days on end, the Republican presidential campaign has put nearly all of its remaining political capital on emphasizing Mr. Obama's time on various foundation boards with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weathermen, which planted bombs and issued preposterous statements in the Vietnam era. Some on the right seem to believe Mr. Ayers is Mr. Obama's puppet-master, while others are content merely to insist that the association proves Mr. Obama to be soft on terrorism. Maybe he's soft on anarchy and repudiation, too.
I can personally attest to the idiocy of it all because I am a friend of Mr. Ayers. In fact, I met him in the same way Mr. Obama says he did: 10 years ago, Mr. Ayers was a guy in my neighborhood in Chicago who knew something about fundraising. I knew nothing about it, I needed to learn, and a friend referred me to Bill.
Bill's got lots of friends, and that's because he is today a dedicated servant of those less fortunate than himself; because he is unfailingly generous to people who ask for his help; and because he is kind and affable and even humble. Moral qualities which, by the way, were celebrated boisterously on day one of the GOP convention in September.
Mr. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where his work is esteemed by colleagues of different political viewpoints. Herbert Walberg, an advocate of school vouchers who is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me he remembers Mr. Ayers as "a responsible colleague, in the professional sense of the word." Bill Schubert, who served as the chairman of UIC's Department of Curriculum and Instruction for many years, thinks so highly of Mr. Ayers that, in response to the current allegations, he compiled a lengthy résumé of the man's books, journal articles, guest lectures and keynote speeches. Mr. Ayers has been involved with countless foundation efforts and has received various awards. He volunteers for everything. He may once have been wanted by the FBI, but in the intervening years the man has become such a good citizen he ought to be an honorary Eagle Scout.
I do not defend the things Mr. Ayers did in his Weatherman days. Nor will I quibble with those who find Mr. Ayers wanting in contrition. His 2001 memoir is shot through with regret, but it lacks the abject style our culture prefers.
Instead I want to note that, in its haste to convict a man merely for associating with Mr. Ayers, the GOP is effectively proposing to make the upcoming election into the largest mass trial in history, with all those professors and all those do-gooders on the hook for someone else's deeds four decades ago. Also in the dock: the demonic city (Chicago) that once named Mr. Ayers its "Citizen of the Year." Fire up Hurricane Katrina and point it toward Lake Michigan!
The McCain campaign has made much of its leader's honor and bravery, but now it has chosen to mount its greatest attack against a man who poses no conceivable threat to the country, who has nothing to do with this year's issues, and who cannot or will not defend himself. Apparently this makes him an irresistible target.
There are a lot of things to call this tactic, but "country first" isn't one of them. The nation wants its hope and confidence restored, and Republican leaders have chosen instead to wave the bloody shirt. This is their vilest hour.
From BarackObama.com Fight the Smears
The Truth about Barack Obama and William Ayers
Smear groups and now a desperate McCain campaign are trying to connect Barack to William Ayers using age-old guilt by association techniques.
Here’s the truth: The smear associating Barack to Ayers is “phony,” “tenuous,”– even “exaggerated at best if not outright false.”
William Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with whom Barack served on the board of an education-reform organization in the mid-1990’s.
According to the Associated Press, they are not close: “No evidence shows they were “pals” or even close when they worked on community boards years ago …”
Smear groups and the McCain campaign are trying to connect Obama to acts Ayers committed 40 years ago – when Barack was just eight years old.
Here’s what the New York Times reported on the connection:
But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed
sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who
engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
Barack has publicly denounced Ayers’ radical actions from the 1960’s:
Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does
all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were
active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.
Major publications report--
The New York Times:
“The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. Mr. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.
The Chicago Sun-Times:
McCain misleading public in role Ayers played in Obama political career. If McCain continues to insist that Obama launched his political career from Ayers’ Hyde Park living room, he is misleading the public by overplaying the size and significance of Ayers’ early support.
*Obama’s campaign really was launched when he got the backing of then state Sen. Alice Palmer (D-Chicago), who wanted him to replace her as she was planning a run for Congress. Palmer’s backing gave him entrée into local influential political circles.
The Detroit Free-Press:
A television commercial running in Michigan and several other battleground states by the American Issues Project insinuates that U. S. Sen. Barack Obama sympathizes with terrorists because of his acquaintance with William Ayers, a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This ad is a close cousin of Jerome Corsi’s Obama Nation book, a tome full of fabrications, half-truths, and delusions, penned by the Swift Boat architect himself about the Democratic presidential candidate.
… Ayers was never convicted of a crime. He went on to earn a doctorate, write 14 books and earn the distinction of “Senior University Scholar” and “Distinguished Professor.” People grow and evolve. It is no surprise that University of Chicago Law Professor Obama would cross paths with Ayers in civic organizations as well as in their neighborhood of Hyde Park.
CNN Fact check wrote about Palin’s claim that Obama is palling around with terrorists, “Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now “palling around,” or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are.”
A life-long Republican, philanthropist William Ayers is survived by his wife, Leonore, who endorses John McCain's 2008 candidacy. As I see it, this controversy serves one purpose--character assasination of Barack Obama through guilt by association. There is no there, there.
My Friend Bill Ayers
Once wanted by the FBI, he's since become a model citizen.
By THOMAS FRANK
Waving the bloody shirt" was the phrase once used to describe the standard demagogic tactic of the late 19th century, when memories of the Civil War were still vivid and loyalists of both parties could be moved to "vote as they shot." As the years passed and the memories faded, the shirt got gorier, the waving more frantic.
In 1896 the Democrats chose William Jennings Bryan as their leader, a man who was born in 1860 and had thus missed the Civil War, but who seemed to threaten the consensus politics of the time. In response, Republican campaign masterminds organized a speaking tour of the Midwest by a handful of surviving Union generals. The veterans advanced through the battleground states in a special train adorned with patriotic bunting, pictures of their candidate, William McKinley, and a sign declaring, "We are Opposed to Anarchy and Repudiation."
The culture wars are the familiar demagogic tactic of our own time, building monstrous offenses out of the tiniest slights. The fading rancor that each grievance is meant to revive, of course, dates to the 1960s and the antiwar protests, urban riots and annoying youth culture that originally triggered our great turn to the right.
This year the Democrats chose Barack Obama as their leader, a man who was born in 1961 and who largely missed our cultural civil war. In response, Republican campaign masterminds have sought to plunge him back into it in the most desperate and grotesque manner yet.
For days on end, the Republican presidential campaign has put nearly all of its remaining political capital on emphasizing Mr. Obama's time on various foundation boards with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weathermen, which planted bombs and issued preposterous statements in the Vietnam era. Some on the right seem to believe Mr. Ayers is Mr. Obama's puppet-master, while others are content merely to insist that the association proves Mr. Obama to be soft on terrorism. Maybe he's soft on anarchy and repudiation, too.
I can personally attest to the idiocy of it all because I am a friend of Mr. Ayers. In fact, I met him in the same way Mr. Obama says he did: 10 years ago, Mr. Ayers was a guy in my neighborhood in Chicago who knew something about fundraising. I knew nothing about it, I needed to learn, and a friend referred me to Bill.
Bill's got lots of friends, and that's because he is today a dedicated servant of those less fortunate than himself; because he is unfailingly generous to people who ask for his help; and because he is kind and affable and even humble. Moral qualities which, by the way, were celebrated boisterously on day one of the GOP convention in September.
Mr. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where his work is esteemed by colleagues of different political viewpoints. Herbert Walberg, an advocate of school vouchers who is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me he remembers Mr. Ayers as "a responsible colleague, in the professional sense of the word." Bill Schubert, who served as the chairman of UIC's Department of Curriculum and Instruction for many years, thinks so highly of Mr. Ayers that, in response to the current allegations, he compiled a lengthy résumé of the man's books, journal articles, guest lectures and keynote speeches. Mr. Ayers has been involved with countless foundation efforts and has received various awards. He volunteers for everything. He may once have been wanted by the FBI, but in the intervening years the man has become such a good citizen he ought to be an honorary Eagle Scout.
I do not defend the things Mr. Ayers did in his Weatherman days. Nor will I quibble with those who find Mr. Ayers wanting in contrition. His 2001 memoir is shot through with regret, but it lacks the abject style our culture prefers.
Instead I want to note that, in its haste to convict a man merely for associating with Mr. Ayers, the GOP is effectively proposing to make the upcoming election into the largest mass trial in history, with all those professors and all those do-gooders on the hook for someone else's deeds four decades ago. Also in the dock: the demonic city (Chicago) that once named Mr. Ayers its "Citizen of the Year." Fire up Hurricane Katrina and point it toward Lake Michigan!
The McCain campaign has made much of its leader's honor and bravery, but now it has chosen to mount its greatest attack against a man who poses no conceivable threat to the country, who has nothing to do with this year's issues, and who cannot or will not defend himself. Apparently this makes him an irresistible target.
There are a lot of things to call this tactic, but "country first" isn't one of them. The nation wants its hope and confidence restored, and Republican leaders have chosen instead to wave the bloody shirt. This is their vilest hour.
From BarackObama.com Fight the Smears
The Truth about Barack Obama and William Ayers
Smear groups and now a desperate McCain campaign are trying to connect Barack to William Ayers using age-old guilt by association techniques.
Here’s the truth: The smear associating Barack to Ayers is “phony,” “tenuous,”– even “exaggerated at best if not outright false.”
William Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with whom Barack served on the board of an education-reform organization in the mid-1990’s.
According to the Associated Press, they are not close: “No evidence shows they were “pals” or even close when they worked on community boards years ago …”
Smear groups and the McCain campaign are trying to connect Obama to acts Ayers committed 40 years ago – when Barack was just eight years old.
Here’s what the New York Times reported on the connection:
But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed
sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who
engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
Barack has publicly denounced Ayers’ radical actions from the 1960’s:
Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does
all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were
active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.
Major publications report--
The New York Times:
“The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. Mr. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.
The Chicago Sun-Times:
McCain misleading public in role Ayers played in Obama political career. If McCain continues to insist that Obama launched his political career from Ayers’ Hyde Park living room, he is misleading the public by overplaying the size and significance of Ayers’ early support.
*Obama’s campaign really was launched when he got the backing of then state Sen. Alice Palmer (D-Chicago), who wanted him to replace her as she was planning a run for Congress. Palmer’s backing gave him entrée into local influential political circles.
The Detroit Free-Press:
A television commercial running in Michigan and several other battleground states by the American Issues Project insinuates that U. S. Sen. Barack Obama sympathizes with terrorists because of his acquaintance with William Ayers, a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
This ad is a close cousin of Jerome Corsi’s Obama Nation book, a tome full of fabrications, half-truths, and delusions, penned by the Swift Boat architect himself about the Democratic presidential candidate.
… Ayers was never convicted of a crime. He went on to earn a doctorate, write 14 books and earn the distinction of “Senior University Scholar” and “Distinguished Professor.” People grow and evolve. It is no surprise that University of Chicago Law Professor Obama would cross paths with Ayers in civic organizations as well as in their neighborhood of Hyde Park.
CNN Fact check wrote about Palin’s claim that Obama is palling around with terrorists, “Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now “palling around,” or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are.”
A life-long Republican, philanthropist William Ayers is survived by his wife, Leonore, who endorses John McCain's 2008 candidacy. As I see it, this controversy serves one purpose--character assasination of Barack Obama through guilt by association. There is no there, there.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Out of the darkness, Hope
In this country, justice can be won against the greatest of odds; hope can find its way back to the darkest of corners; and when we are told that we cannot bring about the change that we seek, we answer with one voice - yes, we can."
- Barack Obama, Raleigh, North Carolina, May 6, 2008
- Barack Obama, Raleigh, North Carolina, May 6, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
Crossing the Line
An excellent article from the New York Times by columnist Frank Rich
The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama
The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder.
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 11, 2008
IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.
Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.
“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.
Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.
All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.
What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.
By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.
That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.
We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.
Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.
It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.
From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.
McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.
No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”
This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.
The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.
There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.
Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.
To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.
For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.
But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.
As I see it, Bob Herbert in the NYT says it best:
"For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be."
The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama
The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder.
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 11, 2008
IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.
Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.
“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.
Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.
All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.
What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.
By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.
That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.
We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.
Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.
It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.
From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.
McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.
No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”
This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.
The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.
There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.
Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.
To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.
For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.
But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.
As I see it, Bob Herbert in the NYT says it best:
"For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be."
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Tales of Republican Delusion- ACORN Fraud
Daily Kos
"We could lose, I suppose, if they cheat us out of it" and Other Tales of Republican Delusion
by georgia10
Sun Oct 12, 2008 at 06:31:13 AM PDT
The black guy can't win. The black guy with the middle name "Hussein" can't win. The black guy with the middle name "Hussein" who has "most liberal voting record" in the Senate just can't win. So if and when the terrorist-loving, radical ideology-embracing, "he doesn't see America like you and I see America" skinny black guy from Chicago wins the presidency, the only logical explanation is that he stole it.
So goes the perverted "logic" of the panicked right these days, as the entire right-wing noise machine roars up into another faux frenzy this week regarding alleged "voter fraud."
As McCain's numbers having nose-dived in the last week, some Republicans have dived head-first into the realm of conspiracy theories in order to sow the seeds of speculation that Democrats are going to "steal" this election. This week has provided some news items which they are using as kinder for their tinfoil bonfire.
ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), is an organization which has been registering voters in low-income areas. Volunteers at some chapters have been found guilty of submitting to ACORN fake voter registrations. That, obviously, is a crime.
ACORN is obligated by law to turn over all voter registration forms, even the fake ones, but it flags those it believes are suspicious (Mickey Mouse, John Q. Public, etc.) While the why of the situation remains unclear, ACORN's Nevada office was raided this week in connection with a voter registration fraud probe.
Ben Smith at Politico, like many others across the blogosphere, puts the ACORN story into perspective:
The key distinction here is between voter fraud and voter registration fraud, one of which is
truly dangerous, the other a petty crime.
The former would be, say, voting the cemeteries or stuffing the ballot boxes. This has
happened occasionally in American history, though I can think of recent instances only in rare
local races. Practically speaking, this can most easily be done by whoever is actually
administering the election, which is why partisan observers carefully oversee the vote-
counting process.
The latter is putting the names of fake voters on the rolls, something that happens primarily
when organizations, like Acorn, pay contractors for new voter registrations. That can be a
crime, and it messes up the voter files, but there's virtually no evidence these imaginary
then vote in November. The current stories about Acorn don't even allege a plan to affect the
November vote.
In other words, what is occurring (and what isn't unique to this election) is isolated incidents of voter registration fraud. Fraud is also being committed on ACORN, an organization that is being tricked into paying volunteers for these fake registrations (clarification: ACORN pays its volunteers by the hour, not per registration). Voter fraud has not occurred. Mickey Mouse isn't show up to vote, even if he did "fill out" a registration form. And if someone registered more than once? They can only vote once at the polling booth once their name is checked off.
But pesky facts like that mean little to certain Republicans who see McCain's plunging numbers and who are looking for any reason--other than the failure of conservatism--to blame for a possible crushing electoral defeat.
FOX "News" has graced the nation with almost wall-to-wall coverage of ACORN's "voter fraud", even dragging out former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell (yes, that Kenneth Blackwell, of Ohio voter suppression fame) to cast the outcome of the Ohio election into doubt. Republicans have released ads linking Obama to ACORN's alleged misconduct. And even John McCain's top surrogate has entered the fray, proclaiming that if Obama wins Indiana, the only explanation for such a victory would be cheating:
WASHINGTON - The only way Barack Obama can win in Indiana is to cheat, one of John
McCain's stand-ins said Thursday.
He said votes have already been cast by "people who don't exist" and that a national voter-
registration effort is "trying to steal the election in Indiana."
In an interview before headlining the Indiana Republican Party's fund-raising dinner in
Indianapolis Thursday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Hoosiers are too smart to
vote for Obama.
Democrats, he said, "can't win fairly out here."
Asked if Democrats could win without cheating, Graham said, "No. They can't win fairly out
here 'cause their agenda is so far removed from the average Hoosier.
"We could lose, I suppose, if they cheat us out of it," Graham said of Indiana's 11 electoral
votes. "I think the only way we lose a state like North Carolina or Indiana is to get cheated
out of it."
When the reporter calls him out on the distinction between "voter registration fraud" and "voter fraud," Graham palinizes his response:
Asked to identify non-existent people who have voted in the presidential election, Graham
said: "Have you been following the ACORN investigation out there? They're registering
people who don't exist." He said there are multiple registrations going on. "One lady
registered 11 times. I'm saying that the dynamic out here of voter fraud is something we're
concerned about."
News Hounds brings us the Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's rational take on the matter:
"There has been no fraudulent voting...The people who claim this is a huge problem can
never produce any instances where anyone voted fraudulently. They have registered
fraudulently.
"Anyone who is registering someone who is not a real person should be prosecuted to the
fullest extent of the law," McCaskill said, but she did not accept the accusation that the
apparently bogus registrations were "clogging" the system.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the New York Times reports that thousands of voters are being cheated out of their votes because of bureaucratic bungling:
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the
rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law,
according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be
the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of
mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with
a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.
Still, because Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year,
according to state election officials, any heightened screening of new applications may affect
their party’s supporters disproportionately.
Republicans are pushing the irrational theory that Democrats are "cheating" their way to the White House because for them, the real reason for a possible Republican defeat would be irrational.
This was, after all, supposed to be the age of the "permanent Republican majority." America is a "conservative country" we've been told. Indeed, the entire McCain campaign was premised on the idea that voters do not think Obama is "one of them": But that premise is from many months ago, before the full brunt of the failure of conservative policies has come to the foreground with the resounding "thud" of a stock market collapse. In this atmosphere, maybe having a "liberal" president who favors reasonable regulation and stringent oversight isn't a bad thing after all. And maybe, when voters are worried about how to pay for health care, voting for the Republican who touts the ability of the "market" to deal with the problem doesn't seem that appealing anymore.
The middle class is being cheated. And they know--as much as Republicans would like for them to forget--which party has been in power for the last eight years. And as they flock to a candidate who promises them change from failed Republican policies, panicked Republicans flock to conspiracy theories.
Blaming a possible Democratic victory on "voter fraud" is much easier than acknowledging that a resounding Democratic victory would be a wholesale rejection of Republican governance. And it's easier than admitting that voters--yes, Senator Graham, maybe even voters in Indiana and North Carolia--like what the liberal black guy from Chicago is saying about the middle class.
So let them wrap themselves in tin foil. Let them revel in nuttery now. They can use that tin foil to wipe their eyes if and when--as the polls suggest--they will be wallowing in defeat in November.
Lou Dobbs and other right wing conservative broadcasters have added their voices to the ACORN-OBAMA voter fraud chorus. As I see it, the fat ladies are almost done singing.
Good night, Sarah. Good night, John Boy.
"We could lose, I suppose, if they cheat us out of it" and Other Tales of Republican Delusion
by georgia10
Sun Oct 12, 2008 at 06:31:13 AM PDT
The black guy can't win. The black guy with the middle name "Hussein" can't win. The black guy with the middle name "Hussein" who has "most liberal voting record" in the Senate just can't win. So if and when the terrorist-loving, radical ideology-embracing, "he doesn't see America like you and I see America" skinny black guy from Chicago wins the presidency, the only logical explanation is that he stole it.
So goes the perverted "logic" of the panicked right these days, as the entire right-wing noise machine roars up into another faux frenzy this week regarding alleged "voter fraud."
As McCain's numbers having nose-dived in the last week, some Republicans have dived head-first into the realm of conspiracy theories in order to sow the seeds of speculation that Democrats are going to "steal" this election. This week has provided some news items which they are using as kinder for their tinfoil bonfire.
ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), is an organization which has been registering voters in low-income areas. Volunteers at some chapters have been found guilty of submitting to ACORN fake voter registrations. That, obviously, is a crime.
ACORN is obligated by law to turn over all voter registration forms, even the fake ones, but it flags those it believes are suspicious (Mickey Mouse, John Q. Public, etc.) While the why of the situation remains unclear, ACORN's Nevada office was raided this week in connection with a voter registration fraud probe.
Ben Smith at Politico, like many others across the blogosphere, puts the ACORN story into perspective:
The key distinction here is between voter fraud and voter registration fraud, one of which is
truly dangerous, the other a petty crime.
The former would be, say, voting the cemeteries or stuffing the ballot boxes. This has
happened occasionally in American history, though I can think of recent instances only in rare
local races. Practically speaking, this can most easily be done by whoever is actually
administering the election, which is why partisan observers carefully oversee the vote-
counting process.
The latter is putting the names of fake voters on the rolls, something that happens primarily
when organizations, like Acorn, pay contractors for new voter registrations. That can be a
crime, and it messes up the voter files, but there's virtually no evidence these imaginary
then vote in November. The current stories about Acorn don't even allege a plan to affect the
November vote.
In other words, what is occurring (and what isn't unique to this election) is isolated incidents of voter registration fraud. Fraud is also being committed on ACORN, an organization that is being tricked into paying volunteers for these fake registrations (clarification: ACORN pays its volunteers by the hour, not per registration). Voter fraud has not occurred. Mickey Mouse isn't show up to vote, even if he did "fill out" a registration form. And if someone registered more than once? They can only vote once at the polling booth once their name is checked off.
But pesky facts like that mean little to certain Republicans who see McCain's plunging numbers and who are looking for any reason--other than the failure of conservatism--to blame for a possible crushing electoral defeat.
FOX "News" has graced the nation with almost wall-to-wall coverage of ACORN's "voter fraud", even dragging out former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell (yes, that Kenneth Blackwell, of Ohio voter suppression fame) to cast the outcome of the Ohio election into doubt. Republicans have released ads linking Obama to ACORN's alleged misconduct. And even John McCain's top surrogate has entered the fray, proclaiming that if Obama wins Indiana, the only explanation for such a victory would be cheating:
WASHINGTON - The only way Barack Obama can win in Indiana is to cheat, one of John
McCain's stand-ins said Thursday.
He said votes have already been cast by "people who don't exist" and that a national voter-
registration effort is "trying to steal the election in Indiana."
In an interview before headlining the Indiana Republican Party's fund-raising dinner in
Indianapolis Thursday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Hoosiers are too smart to
vote for Obama.
Democrats, he said, "can't win fairly out here."
Asked if Democrats could win without cheating, Graham said, "No. They can't win fairly out
here 'cause their agenda is so far removed from the average Hoosier.
"We could lose, I suppose, if they cheat us out of it," Graham said of Indiana's 11 electoral
votes. "I think the only way we lose a state like North Carolina or Indiana is to get cheated
out of it."
When the reporter calls him out on the distinction between "voter registration fraud" and "voter fraud," Graham palinizes his response:
Asked to identify non-existent people who have voted in the presidential election, Graham
said: "Have you been following the ACORN investigation out there? They're registering
people who don't exist." He said there are multiple registrations going on. "One lady
registered 11 times. I'm saying that the dynamic out here of voter fraud is something we're
concerned about."
News Hounds brings us the Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's rational take on the matter:
"There has been no fraudulent voting...The people who claim this is a huge problem can
never produce any instances where anyone voted fraudulently. They have registered
fraudulently.
"Anyone who is registering someone who is not a real person should be prosecuted to the
fullest extent of the law," McCaskill said, but she did not accept the accusation that the
apparently bogus registrations were "clogging" the system.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the New York Times reports that thousands of voters are being cheated out of their votes because of bureaucratic bungling:
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the
rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law,
according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be
the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of
mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with
a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.
Still, because Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year,
according to state election officials, any heightened screening of new applications may affect
their party’s supporters disproportionately.
Republicans are pushing the irrational theory that Democrats are "cheating" their way to the White House because for them, the real reason for a possible Republican defeat would be irrational.
This was, after all, supposed to be the age of the "permanent Republican majority." America is a "conservative country" we've been told. Indeed, the entire McCain campaign was premised on the idea that voters do not think Obama is "one of them": But that premise is from many months ago, before the full brunt of the failure of conservative policies has come to the foreground with the resounding "thud" of a stock market collapse. In this atmosphere, maybe having a "liberal" president who favors reasonable regulation and stringent oversight isn't a bad thing after all. And maybe, when voters are worried about how to pay for health care, voting for the Republican who touts the ability of the "market" to deal with the problem doesn't seem that appealing anymore.
The middle class is being cheated. And they know--as much as Republicans would like for them to forget--which party has been in power for the last eight years. And as they flock to a candidate who promises them change from failed Republican policies, panicked Republicans flock to conspiracy theories.
Blaming a possible Democratic victory on "voter fraud" is much easier than acknowledging that a resounding Democratic victory would be a wholesale rejection of Republican governance. And it's easier than admitting that voters--yes, Senator Graham, maybe even voters in Indiana and North Carolia--like what the liberal black guy from Chicago is saying about the middle class.
So let them wrap themselves in tin foil. Let them revel in nuttery now. They can use that tin foil to wipe their eyes if and when--as the polls suggest--they will be wallowing in defeat in November.
Lou Dobbs and other right wing conservative broadcasters have added their voices to the ACORN-OBAMA voter fraud chorus. As I see it, the fat ladies are almost done singing.
Good night, Sarah. Good night, John Boy.
One Voice
"In this country, justice can be won against the greatest of odds; hope can find its way back to the darkest of corners; and when we are told that we cannot bring about the change that we seek, we answer with one voice - yes, we can."
- Barack Obama, Raleigh, North Carolina, May 6, 2008
- Barack Obama, Raleigh, North Carolina, May 6, 2008
Dumb-bell Palin Rings Hollow
Daily Kos: There seems little doubt that Palin is still the darling of a huge section of red state America. But what works for the Republican base no longer works for the country as a whole.
Sarah Palin: The view from Alaska
Amid “Troopergate” and other government scandals, including killing wolf pups, an Alaskan writer explains why the Palin phenomenon rings hollow in his home state.
By Nick Jans
Oct. 11, 2008 JUNEAU, Alaska — I sat on the bank of the Kobuk River in northwest arctic Alaska on a mid-September morning. Upstream somewhere, wolves were howling — their chorus filling the silence, close enough that I could hear the aspiration at the end of each wavering call. Behind me, the slate-gray heave of the Brooks Range spilled off toward the north, the shapes of some peaks so familiar I’ve seen them in my sleep. The nearest highway lay 250 miles away. This is the Alaska where I spent half my life, and the only place that’s ever felt like home — the land of Eskimo villages, waves of migrating caribou and seemingly limitless space.
Though I was beyond the reach of the Internet and cellphones, and life was filled with rutting bull moose, incandescent autumn light and fresh grizzly tracks, I knew that thousands of miles to the south, the rest of the country was getting a crash course on our governor, Sarah Palin — someone who believes that climate change isn’t our fault; is dead set against a woman’s right to choose; has supported creationism in the schools; and was prayed over by a visiting minister at her church to shield her against witchcraft.
How was I to explain to all my lower 48 friends and writing colleagues how such a person could have been elected to lead our state — let alone been chosen to possibly become vice-president? Truth be told, I was as startled as anyone when I heard the news. At first I thought the McCain campaign’s announcement was some sort of bad joke.
In the broadest sense, Palin is a poseur. Alaska is too large and culturally diverse (it’s only a bit smaller than the entire lower 48 east of the Mississippi, and once was divided into four time zones) to be summed up by some abstract, romanticized notion. And even if it could be, it sure wouldn’t be symbolized by Palin. “The typical Alaskan? She couldn’t be farther from it,” says Alaska House Minority Leader Beth Kertulla.
Still, Palin is a genuine Alaskan — of a kind. The kind that flowed north in the wake of the ’70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality.
Palin’s Alaska is embodied in Wasilla, a blue-collar, sharp-elbowed town of burgeoning big box stores, suburban subdivisions, evangelical pocket churches and car dealerships morphing across the landscape, outward from Anchorage, the state’s urban epicenter. She has lived in Wasilla practically all her life, and even now resides there, the first Alaska executive to eschew the white-pillared mansion in Juneau, down on the Southeast Panhandle.
Folks in the Mat-Su Valley, as the area is known, overwhelmingly support their favorite daughter’s policies — including a state-sanctioned program where private pilots chase down and kill wolves from small aircraft, and another that favors oil drilling offshore in the arctic sea ice and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These same voters forage at McDonald’s and Safeway in their hunter camouflage, and make regular wilderness forays up and down the state’s limited highway grid with ATVs, snowmobiles and airboats in tow behind their oversize trucks. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the roar echoing across the state, all the way to the upper Kobuk, where easements for the highways of tomorrow are already staked out across the tundra.
Like many Alaskans, I resent Palin’s claims that she speaks for all of us, and cringe when she tosses off her stump speech line, “Well, up in Alaska, we….” Not only did I not vote for her, she represents the antithesis of the Alaska I love. As mayor, she helped shape Wasilla into the chaotic, poorly planned strip mall that it is; as governor, she’s promoted that same headlong drive toward development and despoilment on a grand scale, while paying lip service to her love of the place.
As for that frontierswoman shtick, take another look at that hairpiece-augmented beehive and those stiletto heels. Coming from a college-educated family, living in a half-million-dollar view home, basking in a net worth of $1.25 million, and having owned 40-some registered motorized vehicles in the past two decades (including 17 snowmobiles and a plane) hardly qualifies Palin and her clan as the quintessential Joe Six-Pack family unit — though the adulation from that quarter shows the Palins must be fulfilling some sort of role-model fantasy.
Palin can claim to know Alaska; the fact is, she’s seen only a minuscule fraction of it — and that doesn’t include Little Diomede Island, the one place in Alaska where you actually can see Russia. So she can ride an ATV and shoot guns. Set her down in the bush on her own and I bet we’d discover she’s about as adept at butchering a moose and building a fire at 40 below zero as she is at discussing Supreme Court decisions. And that mountain-woman act is only the tip of a hollow iceberg.
Palin, and by extension, the McCain campaign, has hijacked our state for political purposes, much to the chagrin of the tens of thousands of Alaskans who loathe what she stands for. Her much-touted popularity among residents has eroded over the past six weeks to somewhere in the mid-60s — not exactly what you’d expect in support of a home girl making a White House run.
There are no doubt a variety of reasons for this decline, but many Alaskans are embarrassed — not just by her, but for our state and for ourselves. What’s with the smug posturing, recently adopted fake Minnesota accent, and that gosh-darn-it hockey mom pitch? Maybe it plays well in Peoria (and presumably Duluth), but it’s all an act. “She’s definitely put on a new persona since she’s been a vice-presidential candidate,” says Kertulla, who has worked closely with Palin for the past 18 months. “I don’t even recognize her.”
Affectations aside, there’s plenty about Palin we Alaskans do recognize, and all too well. She’s already proven to us that her promises of transparent government, attendant to the will of the people, are bear pucky. We know about her private e-mail accounts and her systematic obstruction of the Alaska Legislature’s investigation of the so-called Troopergate scandal. But let’s turn to her environmental record, where a similar pattern of obfuscation continues.
First, Palin pushed hard, along with sport hunting and guiding interests, to help defeat a ballot initiative that would have stopped the state’s current aerial wolf control program, which had been criticized by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council for flawed science. Now her administration has pointedly refused to respond to repeated public information requests (I’m one of the petitioners, and a potential litigant), regarding the apparently illegal killing of 14 wolf pups at their dens on the Alaska Peninsula this spring by state personnel, including two high-level Department of Fish and Game administrators. A biologist at the scene admitted to an independent wolf scientist that the 6-week-old pups were held down and shot in the head, one by one. This inhumane practice, known as “denning,” has been illegal for 40 years. But a simple request for information on the details of this operation, including to what extent the governor was involved in the decision, has resulted in a typical Palinesque roadblock and a string of untruths.
Our I-love-Alaska governor was also instrumental in defeating a ballot initiative to stop development of a gargantuan open-pit mine incongruously known as Pebble near the headwaters of the most productive salmon watershed in the state, Bristol Bay. The current mine design calls for building the world’s largest earthen dam to hold back an enormous lake of toxic waste — this in a known earthquake zone. Crazy stuff, yet Palin openly opposed the initiative, in lock step with international mining corporations that invested millions of dollars in a misinformation campaign.
But Palin’s certified anti-environmental whopper is her lawsuit against the Bush administration (of all outfits) for listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. She claimed Alaska’s own experts had completed a review of the federal data and concluded that the listing was uncalled for. The truth was, state biologists had come to the opposite conclusion. But that report was never released, and her researchers had a gag clamped on them. Palin simply didn’t want anything to get in the way of offshore oil drilling in moving pack ice — where there is no way to contain, let alone clean up, catastrophic spills.
Whenever science or rules get in Palin’s way, she blows them off. Says homesteader Mark Richards, co-founder of the Alaska Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (a moderate conservation group), “Palin, like Governor Murkowski before her, is part and parcel of the good-ol-boy network that says, ‘Alaska is open for business.’”
Want to talk to Sarah? As governor, she has been accessible only on her carefully chosen terms, a trend we’re now witnessing on the national stage. And how about those Katie Couric moments when she drifts just a skosh off a well-rehearsed script? Are those a recent phenomenon, brought on by all this new information, pressure and the liberal-gotcha media? Nah. She’s been spouting “political gibberish” (to quote gubernatorial opponent Andrew Halcro) since she arrived on the Alaska scene. Yet somehow she continues to get away with it.
In the end, Palin’s attempt to cash in on the Eau d’Alaska mystique as she supports its destruction sickens those of us who do love this land, not for what it will be some day, after the roads and mines and pipelines and cities and malls are all in, but for what it is now. What we see before us is the soul of an ambitious, ruthless, Parks Highway hillbilly — a woman who represents the Alaska you probably never want to meet, and the one we wish never existed. That said, we’re all too willing to take her back. The alternative is just too damn frightening.
Sarah Palin: The view from Alaska
Amid “Troopergate” and other government scandals, including killing wolf pups, an Alaskan writer explains why the Palin phenomenon rings hollow in his home state.
By Nick Jans
Oct. 11, 2008 JUNEAU, Alaska — I sat on the bank of the Kobuk River in northwest arctic Alaska on a mid-September morning. Upstream somewhere, wolves were howling — their chorus filling the silence, close enough that I could hear the aspiration at the end of each wavering call. Behind me, the slate-gray heave of the Brooks Range spilled off toward the north, the shapes of some peaks so familiar I’ve seen them in my sleep. The nearest highway lay 250 miles away. This is the Alaska where I spent half my life, and the only place that’s ever felt like home — the land of Eskimo villages, waves of migrating caribou and seemingly limitless space.
Though I was beyond the reach of the Internet and cellphones, and life was filled with rutting bull moose, incandescent autumn light and fresh grizzly tracks, I knew that thousands of miles to the south, the rest of the country was getting a crash course on our governor, Sarah Palin — someone who believes that climate change isn’t our fault; is dead set against a woman’s right to choose; has supported creationism in the schools; and was prayed over by a visiting minister at her church to shield her against witchcraft.
How was I to explain to all my lower 48 friends and writing colleagues how such a person could have been elected to lead our state — let alone been chosen to possibly become vice-president? Truth be told, I was as startled as anyone when I heard the news. At first I thought the McCain campaign’s announcement was some sort of bad joke.
In the broadest sense, Palin is a poseur. Alaska is too large and culturally diverse (it’s only a bit smaller than the entire lower 48 east of the Mississippi, and once was divided into four time zones) to be summed up by some abstract, romanticized notion. And even if it could be, it sure wouldn’t be symbolized by Palin. “The typical Alaskan? She couldn’t be farther from it,” says Alaska House Minority Leader Beth Kertulla.
Still, Palin is a genuine Alaskan — of a kind. The kind that flowed north in the wake of the ’70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality.
Palin’s Alaska is embodied in Wasilla, a blue-collar, sharp-elbowed town of burgeoning big box stores, suburban subdivisions, evangelical pocket churches and car dealerships morphing across the landscape, outward from Anchorage, the state’s urban epicenter. She has lived in Wasilla practically all her life, and even now resides there, the first Alaska executive to eschew the white-pillared mansion in Juneau, down on the Southeast Panhandle.
Folks in the Mat-Su Valley, as the area is known, overwhelmingly support their favorite daughter’s policies — including a state-sanctioned program where private pilots chase down and kill wolves from small aircraft, and another that favors oil drilling offshore in the arctic sea ice and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These same voters forage at McDonald’s and Safeway in their hunter camouflage, and make regular wilderness forays up and down the state’s limited highway grid with ATVs, snowmobiles and airboats in tow behind their oversize trucks. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the roar echoing across the state, all the way to the upper Kobuk, where easements for the highways of tomorrow are already staked out across the tundra.
Like many Alaskans, I resent Palin’s claims that she speaks for all of us, and cringe when she tosses off her stump speech line, “Well, up in Alaska, we….” Not only did I not vote for her, she represents the antithesis of the Alaska I love. As mayor, she helped shape Wasilla into the chaotic, poorly planned strip mall that it is; as governor, she’s promoted that same headlong drive toward development and despoilment on a grand scale, while paying lip service to her love of the place.
As for that frontierswoman shtick, take another look at that hairpiece-augmented beehive and those stiletto heels. Coming from a college-educated family, living in a half-million-dollar view home, basking in a net worth of $1.25 million, and having owned 40-some registered motorized vehicles in the past two decades (including 17 snowmobiles and a plane) hardly qualifies Palin and her clan as the quintessential Joe Six-Pack family unit — though the adulation from that quarter shows the Palins must be fulfilling some sort of role-model fantasy.
Palin can claim to know Alaska; the fact is, she’s seen only a minuscule fraction of it — and that doesn’t include Little Diomede Island, the one place in Alaska where you actually can see Russia. So she can ride an ATV and shoot guns. Set her down in the bush on her own and I bet we’d discover she’s about as adept at butchering a moose and building a fire at 40 below zero as she is at discussing Supreme Court decisions. And that mountain-woman act is only the tip of a hollow iceberg.
Palin, and by extension, the McCain campaign, has hijacked our state for political purposes, much to the chagrin of the tens of thousands of Alaskans who loathe what she stands for. Her much-touted popularity among residents has eroded over the past six weeks to somewhere in the mid-60s — not exactly what you’d expect in support of a home girl making a White House run.
There are no doubt a variety of reasons for this decline, but many Alaskans are embarrassed — not just by her, but for our state and for ourselves. What’s with the smug posturing, recently adopted fake Minnesota accent, and that gosh-darn-it hockey mom pitch? Maybe it plays well in Peoria (and presumably Duluth), but it’s all an act. “She’s definitely put on a new persona since she’s been a vice-presidential candidate,” says Kertulla, who has worked closely with Palin for the past 18 months. “I don’t even recognize her.”
Affectations aside, there’s plenty about Palin we Alaskans do recognize, and all too well. She’s already proven to us that her promises of transparent government, attendant to the will of the people, are bear pucky. We know about her private e-mail accounts and her systematic obstruction of the Alaska Legislature’s investigation of the so-called Troopergate scandal. But let’s turn to her environmental record, where a similar pattern of obfuscation continues.
First, Palin pushed hard, along with sport hunting and guiding interests, to help defeat a ballot initiative that would have stopped the state’s current aerial wolf control program, which had been criticized by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council for flawed science. Now her administration has pointedly refused to respond to repeated public information requests (I’m one of the petitioners, and a potential litigant), regarding the apparently illegal killing of 14 wolf pups at their dens on the Alaska Peninsula this spring by state personnel, including two high-level Department of Fish and Game administrators. A biologist at the scene admitted to an independent wolf scientist that the 6-week-old pups were held down and shot in the head, one by one. This inhumane practice, known as “denning,” has been illegal for 40 years. But a simple request for information on the details of this operation, including to what extent the governor was involved in the decision, has resulted in a typical Palinesque roadblock and a string of untruths.
Our I-love-Alaska governor was also instrumental in defeating a ballot initiative to stop development of a gargantuan open-pit mine incongruously known as Pebble near the headwaters of the most productive salmon watershed in the state, Bristol Bay. The current mine design calls for building the world’s largest earthen dam to hold back an enormous lake of toxic waste — this in a known earthquake zone. Crazy stuff, yet Palin openly opposed the initiative, in lock step with international mining corporations that invested millions of dollars in a misinformation campaign.
But Palin’s certified anti-environmental whopper is her lawsuit against the Bush administration (of all outfits) for listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. She claimed Alaska’s own experts had completed a review of the federal data and concluded that the listing was uncalled for. The truth was, state biologists had come to the opposite conclusion. But that report was never released, and her researchers had a gag clamped on them. Palin simply didn’t want anything to get in the way of offshore oil drilling in moving pack ice — where there is no way to contain, let alone clean up, catastrophic spills.
Whenever science or rules get in Palin’s way, she blows them off. Says homesteader Mark Richards, co-founder of the Alaska Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (a moderate conservation group), “Palin, like Governor Murkowski before her, is part and parcel of the good-ol-boy network that says, ‘Alaska is open for business.’”
Want to talk to Sarah? As governor, she has been accessible only on her carefully chosen terms, a trend we’re now witnessing on the national stage. And how about those Katie Couric moments when she drifts just a skosh off a well-rehearsed script? Are those a recent phenomenon, brought on by all this new information, pressure and the liberal-gotcha media? Nah. She’s been spouting “political gibberish” (to quote gubernatorial opponent Andrew Halcro) since she arrived on the Alaska scene. Yet somehow she continues to get away with it.
In the end, Palin’s attempt to cash in on the Eau d’Alaska mystique as she supports its destruction sickens those of us who do love this land, not for what it will be some day, after the roads and mines and pipelines and cities and malls are all in, but for what it is now. What we see before us is the soul of an ambitious, ruthless, Parks Highway hillbilly — a woman who represents the Alaska you probably never want to meet, and the one we wish never existed. That said, we’re all too willing to take her back. The alternative is just too damn frightening.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Lobbyists for McCain
Crooks and Liars
McCain's Lobbyists -- And His Judgement
by Cernig Saturday, October 11, 2008
There's an interesting and little talked about article this weekend from the National Journal which sets out the lucrative relationships some of John McCain's campaign advisers, in their alter-egos as super-lobbyists, have with some very questionable oligarchs in Russia and elsewhere - leading to some serious questions about McCain's judgement and the company he keeps.
There's Christian Ferry, McCain's deputy campaign manager, who also works for the lobbying firm of McCain's campaign manager and longtime GOP apparatchik Rick Davis.
In Montenegro, Davis Manafort helped push a referendum on independence from Serbia that narrowly passed by popular vote in May 2006. In Ukraine, Ferry was part of a Davis Manafort team that advised Victor Yanukovich, the country's then-prime minister, whose pro-Russian party made gains in the 2006 parliamentary elections. (In 2004, Yanukovich lost to the U.S.-backed candidate, Victor Yushchenko, in a hotly contested presidential race.)
Sources say that Davis Manafort received multimillion-dollar fees from each country. "Ferry was on the ground in both countries and talked about it a great deal," said one source with knowledge of the McCain campaign and of the firm's electoral work in Ukraine. The source added that Ferry acted as "Rick's implementer."
These overseas efforts underscore not only how closely Ferry's career has been linked to Davis but also the extent to which the upper ranks of the McCain campaign include lobbyists and consultants who worked for foreign clients.
And then there's Randy Scheunemann, who has lobbied for Georgia (as we know), Latvia, Macedonia and Taiwan.
And Charles Black, who has worked for the "corruption-plagued nation of Equatorial Guinea and a Moscow think tank run by Leonid Reiman". The latter used to be Vladimir "K.G.B. Eyes" Putin's telecoms minister and has been linked to allegations of money laundering by German authorities. Black, of course, was also one of the folks who arranged Rev. Sun Yun Moon's coronation as "King of America".
And Davis himself, who involved McCain with Raffaello Follieri, "who in September pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to money laundering and defrauding investors of more than $2 million" in what was a part of what has become known as the Vati-Con Scandal. Davis also got McCain sit-down meetings with Oleg Deripaska, whose fortune has been pegged at $28 billion and who was a close ally of that same Vladimir Putin's.
For someone who claims to be a maverick, McCain has an awful lot of people around him who have done the bidding of foreign governments or other foreign interests," says Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
But that doesn't really get to the heart of the problem.
Earlier in the week, McCain's association with the US Council for World Freedom , home to Iran-Contra conspirators, anti-semites and organisers of Latin American death squads, and it's parent body - the World Anti-Communist League. The parent group began as the Asian People's AntiCommunist League formed by followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church. One was a war criminal, another a plain criminal. Moon still he boasts about it on his own website - along with how he uses the Washinton Times and UPI Wire Service to push those group's agendas. (And hey, we're back to Moon again. Small world.)
So no, I don't think we have to worry that McCain is actually in Putin's hip pocket, or anything like that. The USCWF are as wild-eyed a bunch of "bodily fluid" purists as ever hated a commie and McCain's entirely in the tank for them (which explains his hatred of Putin and all things Russian). But it does suggest that he's been played for a patsy by lobbyists using his name and status to make a buck for themselves, by trotting him out like a tame poodle for luncheons and meetings. And not only has he been too naive to notice, he's given those lobbyists key positions in his campaign.
Now, is that the kind of judgment you can trust?
As I see it:
John McCain and Sarah Palin represent a first in the history of U.S. Presidential elections. Both candidates have been reprimanded for abuse of power in office--McCain by the Senate for the Keating 5 Savings and Loan Scandal and Palin by the State of Alaska for the Troopergate Scandal.
McCain's Lobbyists -- And His Judgement
by Cernig Saturday, October 11, 2008
There's an interesting and little talked about article this weekend from the National Journal which sets out the lucrative relationships some of John McCain's campaign advisers, in their alter-egos as super-lobbyists, have with some very questionable oligarchs in Russia and elsewhere - leading to some serious questions about McCain's judgement and the company he keeps.
There's Christian Ferry, McCain's deputy campaign manager, who also works for the lobbying firm of McCain's campaign manager and longtime GOP apparatchik Rick Davis.
In Montenegro, Davis Manafort helped push a referendum on independence from Serbia that narrowly passed by popular vote in May 2006. In Ukraine, Ferry was part of a Davis Manafort team that advised Victor Yanukovich, the country's then-prime minister, whose pro-Russian party made gains in the 2006 parliamentary elections. (In 2004, Yanukovich lost to the U.S.-backed candidate, Victor Yushchenko, in a hotly contested presidential race.)
Sources say that Davis Manafort received multimillion-dollar fees from each country. "Ferry was on the ground in both countries and talked about it a great deal," said one source with knowledge of the McCain campaign and of the firm's electoral work in Ukraine. The source added that Ferry acted as "Rick's implementer."
These overseas efforts underscore not only how closely Ferry's career has been linked to Davis but also the extent to which the upper ranks of the McCain campaign include lobbyists and consultants who worked for foreign clients.
And then there's Randy Scheunemann, who has lobbied for Georgia (as we know), Latvia, Macedonia and Taiwan.
And Charles Black, who has worked for the "corruption-plagued nation of Equatorial Guinea and a Moscow think tank run by Leonid Reiman". The latter used to be Vladimir "K.G.B. Eyes" Putin's telecoms minister and has been linked to allegations of money laundering by German authorities. Black, of course, was also one of the folks who arranged Rev. Sun Yun Moon's coronation as "King of America".
And Davis himself, who involved McCain with Raffaello Follieri, "who in September pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to money laundering and defrauding investors of more than $2 million" in what was a part of what has become known as the Vati-Con Scandal. Davis also got McCain sit-down meetings with Oleg Deripaska, whose fortune has been pegged at $28 billion and who was a close ally of that same Vladimir Putin's.
For someone who claims to be a maverick, McCain has an awful lot of people around him who have done the bidding of foreign governments or other foreign interests," says Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
But that doesn't really get to the heart of the problem.
Earlier in the week, McCain's association with the US Council for World Freedom , home to Iran-Contra conspirators, anti-semites and organisers of Latin American death squads, and it's parent body - the World Anti-Communist League. The parent group began as the Asian People's AntiCommunist League formed by followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church. One was a war criminal, another a plain criminal. Moon still he boasts about it on his own website - along with how he uses the Washinton Times and UPI Wire Service to push those group's agendas. (And hey, we're back to Moon again. Small world.)
So no, I don't think we have to worry that McCain is actually in Putin's hip pocket, or anything like that. The USCWF are as wild-eyed a bunch of "bodily fluid" purists as ever hated a commie and McCain's entirely in the tank for them (which explains his hatred of Putin and all things Russian). But it does suggest that he's been played for a patsy by lobbyists using his name and status to make a buck for themselves, by trotting him out like a tame poodle for luncheons and meetings. And not only has he been too naive to notice, he's given those lobbyists key positions in his campaign.
Now, is that the kind of judgment you can trust?
As I see it:
John McCain and Sarah Palin represent a first in the history of U.S. Presidential elections. Both candidates have been reprimanded for abuse of power in office--McCain by the Senate for the Keating 5 Savings and Loan Scandal and Palin by the State of Alaska for the Troopergate Scandal.
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