I Hate What You Just Said

Dear Potential Nader Voters:

I’m humbly asking you to reconsider your vote, and to support Barack Obama for President of the United States.  As election day is near, I will try to make my appeal brief.  So, in the spirit of democracy and free exchange of ideas,  I hope that you will consider the following five factors, in no particular order, before casting your vote:

1. The Supreme Court:  John Paul Stevens is 88 years of age, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75, Steven Breyer is 70, and David Souter is 69.  If John McCain is elected, he will likely make at least one, maybe several SCOTUS appointments, and they will definitely be more conservative than any of the four justices mentioned above.  This could have far-reaching influence over our nation for decades, especially since any McCain appointments would be joining the likes of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito to form an overwhelmingly arch-conservative court.

2.  Energy and the Environment:  I’ll leave it to the Sierra Club, who makes the case for Obama in a handy clean-energy scorecard.  The difference between the two candidates is stark.

3. The Iraq War:  We all know the difference:  Obama had the foresight and good judgement to question this war from its inception, and is committed to ending it. 

4.  The Vice-Presidency:   If Obama loses this election, Sarah Palin will be President of the United States if anything happens to John McCain.  Sarah Palin. President.  John McCain is a 72 year-old cancer survivor.

5.  The 2000 Election: (This one speaks for itself).

Thank you for your consideration, and I hope that you will vote for the Obama-Biden ticket.

Sincerely,

JimLarkinsGhost

McCain mouthpiece Michael Goldfarb recently turned in one of the most stomach-turning performances of the entire campaign season.  In this clip, Goldfarb takes the McCain camp’s desperate guilt-by-association strategy to new depths.   Watch:

So, who is this other person? Is it that Goldfarb has no one else to offer, so he is being cryptic to hide his total lack of evidence for Obama’s alleged anti-Semitic ties? Or does he want us to think “ooooh…right…that Jeremiah Wright guy!” (In that case, he would be upholding the letter, but certainly not the spirit of the McCain campaign’s intent not to mention Wright. Wow. Such a sleazy way out). Or were his intentions even worse? Was he being evasive so as to allow viewers to plug in their worst fears? “Maybe it’s Bin Laden!” etc.

Michael - if you have evidence that Obama or anyone else is a racist or an anti-Semite, then share it. Otherwise, your pathetic, sleazy tactics demean your candidate and our political discourse. And they make you look like a sad, hateful, lying coward.

[UPDATE: Michael Goldfarb now officially joins Diane Fedele as a nominee for the Shameful Jackass of the Year Award. Good luck, Michael! (you jackass).]

I connected to the series of tubes this evening to discover that Ted Stevens has been found guilty on all charges. 60 Senate votes is starting to look reachable.

Oily McWar, ever the master of all things relating to foreign affairs, enjoys listing the four five former Secretaries of State who support him (or at least the ones he can remember).

This really inspires confidence in the man, doesn’t it?

Any Republicans out there care to defend this?

Why I’m a Republican

I read in today’s paper what a woman wrote explaining why she’s a Democrat. Let me tell you why I’m not. I’m a Republican because:

I believe in a sovereign God who sometimes gives us what we deserve.

I believe Muslims are our enemies.

I believe in life. A baby is not just a fetus, but a living being no matter where it resides.

I believe there is a good reason for the death penalty.

I believe in fiscal responsibility, for the government and for us.

I believe the government is way too big and rife with greed and corruption.

I believe in the truth. People believe lies because it’s much easier than finding the truth.

I believe in personal responsibility. That includes spanking your children.

I believe American women should raise their own children and American men should be men enough to pay for children they’ve produced.

I believe a man and woman make marriage. Period.

I believe in America first and foremost and we ought to take care of our own people, our own land, and illegal aliens should go home.

I believe in guns and knowing how to use them properly.

I believe war is a fact of life and we should always win.

I believe in lower taxes. I know how to spend money better than Congress any day

I believe in voter ID.

I believe there is a moderate and a socialist in this election. I agree with a two-party system, but Obama isn’t a messiah or a democrat.

He’s a Muslim socialist.

Marcia Stirman, Alamogordo
Alamogordo Daily News

Good luck.

We can thank Rush Limbaugh for reminding us about the longstanding issue of race in American politics and culture. We had almost forgotten. And so on the 150th Anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglass debates, still considered by many to be the high-water mark of American political campaign discourse, we see just how “totally about race” American politics remains.

You see Stephen Douglas thought the 1858 campaign was all about race as well and repeatedly returned to Lincoln’s association with “those people”, especially public enemy #1, Frederick Douglass:

In the extreme northern counties they brought out men to canvass the State whose complexion suited their political creed, and hence Fred Douglass, the negro, was to be found there, following Gen. Cass, and attempting to speak on behalf of Lincoln, Trumbull and Abolitionism, against that illustrious Senator. (Renewed laughter.) Why, they brought Fred Douglass to Freeport, when I was addressing a meeting there, in a carriage driven by the white owner, the negro sitting inside with the white lady and her daughter. (Shame.) When I got through canvassing the northern counties that year, and progressed as far south as Springfield, I was met and opposed in discussion by Lincoln, Lovejoy, Trumbull, and Sidney Breese, who were on one side. (Laughter.) Father Giddings, the high-priest of Abolitionism, had just been there, and Chase came about the time I left. (”Why didn’t you shoot him?”) I did take a running shot at them, but as I was single-handed against the white, black and mixed drove, I had to use a short gun and fire into the crowd instead of taking them off singly with a rifle. (Great laughter and cheers.)

15 September 1858, Third Debate at Jonesboro, Illinois

As you can see, the crowd loved Douglas’s race baiting, especially the cavalier gunplay. “Single-handed against the white, black and mixed drove” Douglas gave us rhetoric worthy of, well, 2008. McCain and Palin may have backed off a bit on the red meat recently at rallies, but the disturbing language of lynching and racial superiority (”kill him”, “sit down boy”) hardly suggests that 150 years of progress in American race relations have yielded as much as we might like to believe. Prejudice has simply changed political dance partners.

Douglas continues:

Now these men, four years ago, were engaged in a conspiracy to break down the Democracy; to-day they are again acting together for the same purpose! They do not hoist the same flag; they do not own the same principles, or profess the same faith; but conceal their union for the sake of policy. In the northern counties, you find that all the Conventions are called in the name of the Black Republican party; at Springfield, they dare not call a Republican Convention, but invite all the enemies of the Democracy to unite, and when they get down into Egypt, Trumbull issues notices calling upon the “Free Democracy” to assemble and hear him speak.

Fitting that Douglas places those subversive Black Republicans down in “Little Egypt” in the Southern tip of Illinois, where it’s much easier to find terrorists to pal around with. That’s right, the Mississippi Nile river runs straight through Cairo, Illinois Egypt, and guess who their U.S. Senator is?

Dude, this election is like totally about race.

Rush Limbaugh tells us that Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama is “totally about race.”

But hey - wait a minute - Rush is voting for McCain, isn’t he? And have you ever looked at those two guys? See what they have in common? Nudge, nudge, wink wink… See what I mean?

Rush Limbaugh’s support for John McCain is totally about race!

Wait - I’ve changed my mind. Have you noticed the other thing Limbaugh and McCain have in common? They’re both men. And men have penises!

Rush Limbaugh’s support for John McCain is totally about his penis!

Rush Limbaugh! Penis!

Penis!

Penis!

This week’s nominee for the inaugural 2008 Shameful Jackass of the Year Award is Diane Fedele, president of Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated.  She sent the image below, via newsletter, to the members of her GOP women’s group.

She sent it.  In a newsletter.  That image.  Barack Obama.  On food stamps.  With watermelon, fried chicken, Kool Aid, and ribs. 

No.  Really.

Then she, you know, apoligized “to anyone who was offended:”

The group’s president, Diane Fedele, said she plans to send an apology letter to her members and to apologize at the club’s meeting next week. She said she simply wanted to deride a comment Obama made over the summer about how as an African-American he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

“It was strictly an attempt to point out the outrageousness of his statement. I really don’t want to go into it any further,” Fedele said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “I absolutely apologize to anyone who was offended. That clearly wasn’t my attempt.”

Fedele said she got the illustration in a number of chain e-mails and decided to reprint it for her members in the Trumpeter newsletter because she was offended that Obama would draw attention to his own race. She declined to say who sent her the e-mails with the illustration [italics added].

The woman who sent out that image finds Barack Obama offensive when it comes to the question of race. 

I just don’t know what to say, except this:  Diane Fedele, you are the first nominee for the SJOYA. 

Good luck!

(p.s. - thank goodness she is apologizing “to her members.”  To her members!)

Here’s a brief video about Oily McWar and his oiliness.  The guy is really oily.

You can find much more about Oily and his energy positions from the Sierra Club here. Their full list of 2008 endorsments is here.

Hey, Oily: Lose, Baby, Lose!

I am almost tempted to post this photo and say nothing else. Apparently acknowledging that you are black is the first step to recovery, the second is to show off your “hip-hop dance moves”. Well, at least it’s a step up from Carl Rove’s performance. Conservatives are reading this “coming out” as an indication of Powell’s imminent endorsement of Obama for president, and of course, yet another sign of the coming apocalypse.

The hidden story, however, is Powell’s complex endorsement of Nigerian 419 scams:

But it doesn’t look as if the former US secretary of state paid too much attention to the lyrics, or he might have discovered that the Nigerian hit is a celebration of that country’s most infamous export, advance-fee email fraud (sometimes called 419 fraud, after the relevant section of the Nigerian penal code). The perpetrators are known as “Yahoo boys” after their email service-provider of choice.

Maintain has claimed his song is social commentary rather than endorsement of a practice that has tarnished his country’s international reputation, but it’s hard to find the critical note in his name-checking of Hummers, dollars, and “Champagne, Hennessy, Moët” as the accessories of a successful fraudster’s lifestyle. As many Nigerians as foreigners have lost their savings to fraud, so how have chancers who sit up late typing random emails requesting peoples’ bank details in the name of “Mrs Maryam Abacha” become anti-heroes?

Partly, says Dan Smith of Brown University, author of a recent book on the subject, it’s the Robin Hood factor. “419 is a reversal of the hierarchies, showing that youths can be as sophisticated and cunning as their former colonial masters.”

The Guardian

So what we actually see here is Powell getting in touch with his inner Jamaican and engaging in a little colonial mimicry. Or is it the other way around and the whole time that we thought he was toeing the line of the Bush Doctrine he was actually mocking Rumsfeld with a healthy dose of counterinsurgent hybridity? This, my friends, is an astounding example of the subversion of imperial authority through the strategic deployment of transcultural liminality masquerading as syncretic nationalism.

It almost makes me feel good about the Iraq invasion, from a theoretical standpoint, of course.

OK - the ominous music in this video is a bit much. But can you imagine if Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or John Kerry, or John Edwards, or Hillary Clinton had a more-than-casual relationship with a secessionist party? How long would it take before the word “traitor” was on Sean Hannity’s iguana-like lips, or belching forth from Rush Limbaugh’s yap?

Palin has never had to answer any serious questions about this.

And we’re told that Obama’s character is questionable because he is friends with a former member of the Weather Underground. Well, Sarah Palin is presumably really good friends with Todd Palin - a former member of the Alaskan Independence Party. Oh - and apparently she also attended four of the AIP’s conferences. And spoke at two of them. And she was their choice for governor.

If she ever has a press conference, maybe someone could ask her about this stuff, no?

In today’s Boston Globe, foreign affairs columnist H.D.S. Greenway provides a brief retrospective on the calamitous reign of Bush the Younger.  Greenway mentions a number of Bush’s greatest hits, including “mission accomplished,” the botched job in Afghanistan, torture, and the current financial crisis.  But the money shot is Greenway’s comparison between the shame of Bill Clinton and the shame of W:

IT IS HARD to believe how far this republic has fallen since President George W. Bush took office. Eight years ago, the United States had a budget surplus, peace and prosperity reigned, and America was universally respected. True, Bill Clinton had besmirched the office of the presidency by his self-indulgence. In his memoir, he would put down his dalliance with a White House intern to the worst of all possible motives. He did it because he could. But that pales in comparison to what Bush has done to the country.

…

When all the various reasons for a preemptive war against Iraq are examined - the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, spreading democracy, helping Israel, etc., etc. - it all boiled down to the worst of all possible reasons: Bush invaded Iraq because he could  [Italics added].

I’ll say it again: draft George W. Bush.