11 posts tagged “politics”
It's already being suggested that John McCain lifted his "cross in the dirt" moment - recounted at Rick Warren's Mega Church the other day - from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago".
It would be a shame if he did. But I'm willing to allow that the experience could have happened and move on. Or even that McCain conflated Solzhenitsyn's experience with his own after reading "Gulag Archipelago." I really don't care. And I don't want to see the partisan wrangling over whether he lied or just "misremembered."
I think we've got more pressing concerns at this point. Among many other things, I want to know how he or Obama are going to handle Iraq (notice I didn't say "get us out of..." 'cause that's a pipe dream). I want to know how they're going to try and stem the tied of our collapsing banking system. I want to know what emphasis they're going to place on the monstrous rise of HIV (especially in black and gay communities). I want to know how they'll handle Iran, Israel, and Syria (to name a few). I want to know about their long range plans for a sane energy policy.
I've read several commentaries and a couple FriendFeed threads on the "controversial" New Yorker cover featuring Michelle "Angela Davis" and Barack "Osama Bin Laden" Obama (I won't bore you with a pic, it's everywhere). Try as I might, I can't get worked up about it. Perhaps because I'm old enough to remember real radicals? Even met a couple.
The Obamas are far from it. They are as about as upwardly mobile mainstream as it gets. Harvard, Hyde Park, big law firms, impressive political resumes. Remember?
And I think that's the point of the cover. It's so over the top as to be ridiculous.
I'm really trying here, but to say that this plays into the hands of virulent racists is beside the point. They're already virulent racists. This cover won't make them more racist.
As for what's being termed as "hipster racism" (or perhaps more accurately, "Hipster Smugness"), I'm familiar with the phenomenon. It's the coda of the post-ironic world. Everything is tired and passe. I get it. We're all rubes outside of New York.
But I don't get that from this cover, especially when it's juxtaposed against what I hear is one of the stronger themes of the article; namely, Barack Obama is a savvy political insider who cut his teeth on Chicago politics.
But perhaps I'm just not hip enough for the room.
Appropos of nothing, I once had a t-shirt that read, "The Blacker The Barry, The Sweeter The Juice"
My mother was born in 1933. Until she was a teenager, she thought the word "Roosevelt" meant President. She'd only been aware of one in her lifetime.
If Hillary Clinton is elected president in November, we will have completed a 2 decade cycle of a legitimate Bush/Clinton Dynasty. I'm not saying that Senator Clinton would not make a fine president, though her "I Ain't No Ways Tired" bit really makes it hard for me to take her seriously (I notice that it's been pulled from YouTube).
I'm just saying that I'm troubled by the idea of the presidency bouncing between two "royal families." For me this trumps her becoming the first woman president of our country. Which, by the way, leads to some very ... uhm... "heated" dinner table discussion in my household. And you know her husband will not be able to resist sticking his finger in the pie. I do not find this comforting. He had his shot. Let Chelsea run in a few years after we've had time to breathe.
I'm serious.
Anyway, if Senator Clinton is the Democratic nominee, she'll likely get my vote, especially if Huckabee or Romney (shudder) get the GOP nod. I say "likely" as I'm still flirting with McCain even though I believe he may be crazy.
BTW - I voted for McCain in the Michigan
Primary. Before I get cards and letters to turn in my dashiki let me
just say that I had two very valid reasons. 1. The Democrats had made a
monumental mess of their side of things. 2. I was voting against Mitt
Romney rather than for McCain. Unfortunately my vote was in vain.
This is why the people of Michigan (at least the Republicans) are dead to me.
Literary meme via snortinkatz.
Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag 5 different people.
Muskie went the same way to Florida - just as Mankiewicz had predicted forty-eight hours earlier in the living room of his suburban Washington home. "Muskie is already finished," he said then. "He has no base." - from "Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72" by Hunter S. Thompson.
"I'm probably the only candidate who, having won the nomination, can actually redraw the political map," Obama said at the time. "I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I'm the nominee, goes up 30% around the country, minimum. Young people's percentage of the vote goes up 25-30%." - more here
Me, I'm not convinced, particularly of the youth vote. I haven't seen the numbers yet, but I'm guessing the "surge" in Iowa was 12-15% tops. Still a significant number but enough? Meh, I don't know.
What I do know is that we've been waiting for the "youth" to "get fired up" since about forever. If they didn't against Nixon in '68 and '72 why would they now when they've got TiVo and Halo?
And who says the youth vote is all that redeeming anyway? As Unca Hunter said, the youth can be just as gullible and greedy as their seniors (emphasis mine):
If the current polls are reliable... Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam. The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states... This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. - "September," from FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL '72 (Warner Books, 1973), pp 413–414, Hunter S. Thompson
I miss Unca Hunter.
And "The Black Vote", wellll, The Black Vote doesn't matter much until we're in the general election anyway, IMHO. And it's been so cherry picked by the "Faith Based (use Jesus' name and we'll fall for anything) Initiatives" as to be rendered practically irrelevant even then. This is of course, assuming the old political model of black political power as centered in the black church. The Internet changes things.
How much remains to be seen.
From Andrew Sullivan:
The central question is whether the Bush administration has used the U.S. Attorneys as a systematic weapon in targeting the opposition party, rather than rooting out corruption and malfeasance wherever it appears. The natural inference from the evidence so far - and the conflicting stories from the administration - is that the eight fired attorneys were not being partisan enough.
