Barack Obama had displayed boundless grace and composure in winning the presidency, but the gravity he conveyed in his acceptance speech last night for me outdid all that came before it. It was indeed no time to gloat. Darkness has been upon the face of this earth. Our lives and the lives of any future generations lie in the balance and Barack set the perfect tone at this historic moment. How uplifting, how appropriate that as Barack reminded us our work has only begun, tears of joy filled the eyes of those in the crowd. How we have longed to be in this moment, where the crisis we are in and the recognition that we are in a crisis have all coalesced around a leader and our own willingness to do something about it.

 

For those of us who were sitting around our bedrooms in the early sixties, playing Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary albums, drunk with our coffee house idealism and certain that The Times, They Were A Changin', certain that the great tides of history had washed us up upon the shores of a better world, it is sobering to look back at our battlefield littered with lost dreams and wasted opportunities. Forty years. Not since Bobby Kennedy gave hope to our hearts in '68 has this measure of optimism and expectation been in the air. Not since those days have tears of joy been shed by the eager souls of this nation.

 

In deference of those on the right, there are no doubt many in their ranks who felt a great sense of victory and elation when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, but I dare say their elation was purely about victory, not about hope. It was about a nation in retrenchment and shameful over its defeat in the Vietnam War, rising up to reclaim some elusive and long lost glory. It was about nationalism and pride. It was about us versus them. It was about reliving the past, not about embracing mankind's true and evolving destiny.

 

Even for that Camelot dream a nation felt during the thousand days of John F. Kennedy's presidency, his election at the time was never viewed as an historic turning point in American politics. No one felt that we were destined to change the face of the world right then. There were no bloodied battlefields and distant wars. There was little sense of our impending environmental crisis. Setting aside the Cold War, Kennedy was elected at a rather complacent time in American politics. America was basically tired of a President who spent most of his time playing golf. But certainly we felt it eight years later. By 1968, the future of the world seemed to be in the balance.

 

For those who have endured the last eight years of George W. Bush's Presidency, but were not alive or aware in 1968, try to imagine going from the magic of Bobby Kennedy to Richard Nixon taking over the White House. Our dearest hopes were gunned down like a mob hit and we have endured every insult since, from McCarthy being shut out of the '68 convention, to the disaster of McGovern landslide loss to Gary Hart getting caught with his pants down in a speed boat to Dukakis with the helmet in the tank to the infamy of Gore 2000 and Kerry's ineptitude four years later, watching as every frail dream dissipated into the piss pot of American political cynicism. You think finally, oh hell, what's the point in trying. The world always turns to shit in the end.

 

So, how remarkable to see all those faces filled with tears of gladness in the streets of cities all over this country last night. There are those who are no doubt miserable today, but for me it is sweet. It took forty years, but the dream of a better world my generation once envisioned was fulfilled anew last night. And at the same time, America has made one giant leap towards Abraham Lincoln's more perfect union. It does seem that if you wait long enough, hope will always triumphs in the end. The world rejoices to see what we have done. We are a beacon of democracy to the rest of the world once again.

First off, allow me to congratulate the Republicans on their splashy “Hollywood” production last night. With Old Glory waving, and not one Greek Styrofoam column in sight, they thoroughly convinced me of Sarah Palin’s preparedness, at least on this score. From day one of a McCain administration, Sarah Palin will be ready to read from a teleprompter. Of what else I was to learn from her cynical speech last night, I remain unaware. That she can be snarkey and snide? Has there ever been doubt regarding that truth when it comes to the Republicans of our generation?

You know, it has always been part of the American myth to have our hero characters appear out the backwoods in whole cloth. Abe Lincoln splitting rails comes to mind, Paul Bunyan, Andrew Jackson as the unsullied defender of everyday folks. And now we have Sarah Palin appearing suddenly on the American political scene as if made from angelic robes and Lenscrafter glasses. Why, think of it. Just last week she was busy ‘raslin’ beaaars up in Skagit and locking up all those no good frontier rapscallions.

It brings to mind Christopher Lasch’s foreword to the ’73 edition of The American Political Tradition, where he addresses the progressive interpretation of American history popular at the time Hofstadter’s groundbreaking tome first appeared in print. As Lasch put it, a resurgent American cultural chauvinism had taken hold in American letters, a tiresome celebration of the American past, and quotes Hofstadter saying how this had helped bring into being a “literature of hero-worship and national self-congratulation.”

I am well aware of these delusionary notions about our founding fathers. I grew up having them spoon fed to me and have watched the Republican Party pawn off to the same myopic American mythology to public over the past thirty years, until I begin to feel like one of those hapless characters in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Always the flag waving with those folks, this longing to return to a once unsullied American past. It’s George Washington cutting down the cheery tree and Abe Lincoln splitting rails, and more recently, Ronald Reagan riding in on a white horse of conservative principles. Never mind that Reagan was once the head of the Actor’s Guild Union and one hair’s breadth removed from being a member of the Communist Party.

So it is with Sarah Palin. When she tells us adoringly of her sons and nephews going off to war, and speaks of that extra prayer she says for them every night, and gushes warmly about her three daughters, and notes how husband Todd is a lifelong commercial fisherman and a production operator in the oil fields of Alaska's North Slope and a proud member of the United Steel Workers' Union, just an everyday kind of guy, she conveniently leaves out Todd’s roughly decade long stint in Alaskan Independence Party  or her own fling with secession, or that when you peel away her cheap family veneer and their purported Christian values, Sarah Palin and the whole lot of them start to sound more like Desperate Housewives meets Northern Exposure than anything else.

Why is it, I wonder, that Republicans feel forever bound to disparage Democratic principles today, only to idolize one of our members who’s no longer around to defend himself? It wasn’t enough that Sarah Palin hearkened to the memory of her parents growing up in a small Missouri town, and how they had both worked at the local elementary school and how proud she was to be their daughter. No, that had to be a tie-in to a young farmer and habber-dasher from Missouri named Harry Truman, who happened to follow his own unlikely path from a small town to the vice presidency.

Well, to paraphrase the famous words of Lloyd Benson, you’re no Harry Truman, Sarah, and you can bet there was no love lost between our dear Harry and your beloved Republican Party. In case you have any doubts on that score, here’s a direct quote from his acceptance speech in 1948.

“Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it — don't forget that! We will do that because they are wrong and we are right, and I will prove it to you in just a few minutes.”

Yes, Sarah, we’ve all heard how you’re just an average hockey mom, who signed up for the PTA because she wanted to make her kids' public education better, but your claims about running for city council and the mayor’s office and eventually for governor without any thought of focus groups and voter profiles just doesn’t wash. As noted recently online, in your campaign for mayor of Wasilla, you were found to be a “highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.” Yep, by dragging in the state GOP and bringing “big-time politics into a small-town local race" your career as a politician in Alaska got off a lot more like that “pit bull with lipstick” you described in your acceptance speech last night than your friendly community organizer. Even Vicki Naegele, the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, and a person who shared your Christian faith found your methods contemptible. As she recalled, the average friendly small-town race, "turned into something much different…" "I just thought,” Naegele said, “…she should concentrate on roads, not abortion."

And speaking of community organizers, they may not have actual responsibilities, as you suggest, but they do know the duties of a vice-president without asking, and I know one who’s not known for calling people dumbass behind their backs.

Yes, it all sounds very noble, this portrait you create of yourself not being a member of the permanent political establishment, and how you’ll head to Washington to serve the people of this country, not just mingle with the right people and to seek their good opinion. I heard your pledge to continue the same spirit you brought to the governor's office, where you took on the old politics as usual in Juneau and you stood up to the special interests, the lobbyists, big oil companies, and the good-ol' boys network. But in truth, your politics were just the same old game of clashing parties and competing interests. The integrity, good will, clear convictions you swore to uphold went right out the window when someone got in your way.

No, Sarah, there just wasn’t much of anything truthful in that venom you attempted to disguise with a smile last night. You spoke of your willingness to drill anywhere to get that oil, but dismissed your rival as an impediment to energy independence for our nation, when in fact Barack Obama stood up early with his support for a natural gas pipeline in your state, and when in fact you praised him for it. You said Barack Obama had never reached across the aisle and had not sponsored one piece of important legislation, when a simple Google of his legislative career would have proven you a liar.

To paraphrase your own invective, Sarah, you could give an entire speech about wars, and never use the word "humility". In fact, when the cloud of your rhetoric has passed, and the roar of the crowd fades away, and the stadium lights go out, and that Nazi like symbolism of flags waving behind your head is hauled back to some Third Reich studio lot, what exactly is your plan for this country’s future? You didn’t tell us one thing about what YOU plan to do to turn back the waters and heal the planet?

All we know for certain is this. While you’d like to make government smaller, you will without fail make the coffers of your fat cat donors bigger. You will raise the taxes on the poorest of us and lower the taxes on the rich. You will tell us victory in Iraq is finally in sight but never fail to leave the average American cowering in fear. You will make American weaker abroad by dismissing the importance of observing the constitutional rights of others around the world.

Yes, you are absolutely right, Sarah. There are those candidates who will change anything about their beliefs in order to get elected. Who will one day call the religious right “agents of intolerance” then go back and lick their boots the next year. Who will acknowledge the obscenity of giving the wealthiest people in this country a tax break in times of war and then come back and say it’s a great idea. As you so aptly said, there are those who will use their careers to promote change and those who put politics in front of leadership. There are those who have done great things, who are capable of great things and those who are simply in the hands of lobbyists and special interests.

It’s true that John McCain was once a man who did not run with the Washington herd, but that man is nowhere to be found today. He is a man who, unfortunately, lost his gift of "personal discovery" on his way to the American presidency.

The fact is, Sarah, in the cynical house of mirrors that is the Republican talking point machine, you and your minions have made a man’s ability to inspire others a liability. You have made hope an unwanted orphan. You have narrowed the criteria of worthy experience in life to only those who have so-called “executive experience”, thereby relegating to the trash bin half the men who have presided in the Oval Office.

Hey, come to think of it, in attempting to find some way, any way, to diminish the value of your Barack Obama’s life experience, you have left your own ticket open to an unthinkable charge. As the only with “executive experience” in this Presidential race, you’re more qualified than your own running mate.

Last night on the News Hour, and citing unnamed sources close to the McCain campaign, Mark Shields laid out this scenario for how the Palin nomination actually came down. It was Lieberman who was McCain’s first pick for Veep all along, but when the powers that be within the Republican Party learned McCain was actually daring to take that direction, he was told straight off. That’s not going to fly with us. So, ever the supposed maverick, McCain basically says, yeah? I can’t have Lieberman? Well try this one on for size.

 

Don't know if that's true or not, but one can rightfully ask, where was the maverick in McCain’s decision? Why didn’t he tell the party bosses to go ahead and shove it? Pick Lieberman like he wanted, or even Tom Ridge, a Republican with whom McCain is presumably cozy bedfellows? As with McCain’s pandering to the late Jerry Falwell, or his flip flop on the Bush tax cuts, wasn’t this Palin nomination one more display of a man who has no political courage? At the least it was some sort of Rovian ploy. After all, it’s certainly kept the Obama experience issue in play. That’s all you hear from the right wing anymore. You’re questioning Palin’s experience? Well, she’s got more executive experience than Barack Obama.

 

Still, the Palin choice is a gift that just keeps on giving…and giving…and giving. You got Troopergate, Preachergate, Bridgegate, Secessiongate, and lest we forget, Babygate in the oven. I love it. Don’t you? In the famous words of Lewis Carroll, things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser. Where will it stop? Who knows. I saw the betting line on recall was 18% this morning. It’s going to be hour by hour before the week is through.

 

But lost in all the kerfuffle, I suppose, is the question of what’s actually germane to our public discourse. Obama tells all his supporters on Monday. Just back off. Babygate is a private family matter, and under most circumstances I would tend to agree. Let’s take the high road. Certainly all the right wing pundits would gleefully go along. Yet a broader issue is at stake here that I suggest undercuts any attempt to dismiss this pregnancy out of hand.

 

Take Barack Obama’s genesis as an example. He was born out of wedlock to a white mother and African father, but as everyone generally agrees, a woman being pregnant out of wedlock is nobody’s business but her own. Also consider Barack Obama’s association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Rightly or wrongly, if Obama had ever espoused the same sort political views of America, he’d have been damned for saying it long ago. But apparently enough of the public could see through that ruse and decided it was not fair to hold a person accountable simply for sitting in the pews.

 

Conversely, Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she not only embraces her personal pastor’s end of the world revelations, but has taken to the pulpit and espoused virtually the same apocalyptic visions. And just as the Republican Party has preached to us endlessly on the matter of moral issues, laying themselves open to public scrutiny on the subject of moral rectitude, Ms. Palin’s intolerance on personal morality has laid her and her family open to a public scrubbing. When the seemingly placid façade of Sarah Palin’s home life is peeled back and we find it more resembles Desperate Housewives than Ozzie and Harriet, we have a right to inquire more thoroughly. This isn’t a matter of sleaze. This is a matter of holding people accountable to their own standards. And it that’s not possible, we can rightfully ask them to shut up.

 

So, the cry comes from all quarters to leave Bristol Palin alone. Her pregnancy is a personal family matter. Okay. I find that to be admirable, and even appropriate as a political standard. Your teenage daughter got knocked up out of wedlock and you want to keep it from the public domain? You want to railroad this unfortunate young father into a shotgun marriage? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. It’s no one’s business but your own.

 

Conversely, Ms. Palin, I’ll assume you to apply that standard to all and every private decision. A woman gets pregnant and decides she wants an abortion? Don’t come around telling us a woman’s right to choose is any of your business. If one personal trial and tribulation warrants privacy, so does the other. And if you don’t agree, then don’t be surprised to see us go for the juggler on you. After all, we’re being gracious enough as a political body to allow you to set the standard. Now please obey your own rules.

You have to give John McCain credit. He won the news cycle on Friday. Unfortunately, he royally shot himself in the foot while doing it. There went the mother of all political trump cards. The so-called “experience” factor, which for the past two months he has never tired of reminding us.

It has been oft said that the choice of a vice-president is the first presidential decision each candidate will make, and I’m not even going to bother with links and footnotes here. Everyone already knows the story about Palin. McCain met her once. He subsequently spoke to her once on the phone, then made his choice. What does this say about McCain, that he was willing to put this relative novice one heartbeat away from the presidency? I am reminded of Bush’s early comment about Putin. He looked into the man's eyes and could see the man's soul. Well, the ability of John McCain to look into the soul of Sarah Palin has the same incredulous quality about it.

Just as a mind experiment, imagine Sarah Palin to be a man instead, but with the same lack of knowledge in  international affairs. Wouldn’t there be fireworks then? This may not represent the very first case of reverse discrimination in politics but it sure rates right up there. A guy could feel slighted. All women should, to have this sort of patronizing bone thrown in their direction.

But more on all that later…

I had been purposely sitting back this past week, allowing events at the Democratic convention to play themselves out and thinking it was probably best to hold my tongue. There were already enough talking heads picking at the “as yet to be born” carcass. The Clintons were sure to make mischief. That seemed to be the primary refrain, followed closely by is Obama ever going to punch back?

Of course, once the convention actually got under way, the ensuing laments were all too predictable. The whole thing was dull, uninspired. Where were all the balloons and waving flags for God’s sake? And as if to have their cake and eat it too, the pundits couldn’t help but note how the entire affair was short on substance.

Well, lo and behold, though the many hours of speechifying were indeed plodding at times, the seeming chaos slowly progressed towards a measured and well thought out crescendo. From the down to earth chutzpah of Montana’s Governor Schweitzer to the roar of elder statesmen Al Gore, from Hillary hitting it out of the park to former President Clinton’s ringing endorsement, you couldn’t have scripted a more thorough healing of the rift within the Democratic Party, or a more thorough staging for Barack Obama’s speech on Thursday night. And finally, there was Barack, standing astride the world’s stage, the fulfillment of the Martin Luther King’s “promised land” unfolding before our eyes, that more perfect union to which Abraham Lincoln had alluded finally coming to pass. I must confess, I got a little something in my eye.

In all that stunning imagery and historic pageantry, it was all too possible to overlook the most compelling aspect of Obama’s speech. That for the past several months, as the right wing droned on and on about his lack of experience, and everyone on the left wrung their hands over Barack’s unwillingness to fight back, he had been patiently waiting, knowing full well a dramatic moment  awaited him wherein to answer those attacks in an imcomparable fashion.

I marveled and thought. Now, isn’t that the sort of long range strategic thinking we’re looking for in a President?

To those in the center, and even those on the right, I would say, weigh Obama’s measured demeanor against McCain’s desperate Hail Mary in picking Sarah Palin for a running mate. In a sad attempt to shake up a moribund campaign and steal the fire from the Democrats’ thunder, McCain recklessly proposed to a political bride like a drunken sailor in a waterfront tavern. And for that, we got Harriet Myers with beauty pageant credentials, Gale Norton with a chirpy countenance, George Bush in high heels.

There is much giddiness in the air today on the part of the evangelicals, but they may want to stop their gushing long enough to hear the more sober voices in their own party. Gone is McCain’s most important political leg to stand on, that white-haired father figure role, which so comforted all those who trembled at the specter of another 9/11 and would rather their sacrifice constitutional rights than to embody the very ethos to which they hearken as a constituency. Home of the brave. Land of the free.

They might also want to consider, while allowing themselves to wax so giddy. The real possibility exists. After a few more unseemly revelations about Sarah Palin, McCain, the drunken sailor, may be forced to ask his new political bride for that five dollar ring back.

Consider me not surprised. I had been writing a post on that public vetting over at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church on Saturday afternoon when news of John McCain’s subterfuge came over the wire. Well, no wonder, I thought. McCain and his aides were in the limo on the way over and not under the backstage cone of silence, as was intended. They were picking up the particulars of Warren’s questions and Obama’s nuanced answers, allowing McCain to march in and play John Wayne to Obama’s George McGovern. McCain’s going to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell. He’s going to punch all those darned terrorists right in the nose. He’s throwing red meat to the crowd.

Setting aside for the moment Rick Warren’s failure to police these Republican weasels properly, and the fact that we’ve been listening to this same cocksure cowboy bluster about Iraq and foreign policy for the past eight years, I think a broader reverberation from this event may have taken place, the ignoring of which says volumes about what kind of campaign John McCain is running, what kind of President he’d make and confirms for me why I’m so fearful of seeing his finger anywhere near the proverbial red button. Even more to the point, John McCain’s decision to play to the three thousand church members in the audience provided a stunning contrast between Obama’s candidacy and his own and I think offers further hope for our prospects in November. While McCain was willing to gain an unfair advantage by gaming the rules, and was fixated on winning the battle of the pews, he imprudently lost the wider strategic war. Because, let’s face it. Both candidates are preaching to the choir for the most part, until it comes to that ten or twenty percent of swing voters in the middle, and those weren’t the people in the audience.

Understanding this, and displaying all the methodical, farsighted wisdom we witnessed in President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, Obama framed his answers carefully and to the millions of viewers out there in TV land. McCain was channeling General Jack D. Ripper for the front row.

As to the particulars, I found it especially telling when Warren asked “who were the three wisest people each candidate would rely on in their administrations” that Barack immediately mentioned Michelle Obama. Cyndi McCain’s name never came up. McCain instead lauded General Petraeus and mentioned a trip he had made to Iraq last year with Lindsey Graham, blathering on about all those brave soldiers reenlisting to fight for freedom, the same soldiers who happen to be donating to Barack over McCain at a rate of six to one.

McCain then inexplicably threw out Congressman John Lewis’ name as someone he’d seek for advice, I guess just to cover his civil rights’ bases, then went on to laud Meg Whitman, E-bay’s CEO, as a darling of the new economy. Again, McCain had attempted to hit all the high notes, but his thoughts, as always, lacked a coherent thesis, a thing at which he is depressingly like the current President. In contrast, Obama offered this humble but stirring conclusion, proving he remembered the question and actually understood it. The idea of having diverse opinions around you is to be apprised of any blind spots or predispositions a person might possess. Imagine that. Instead of riding out with the cavalry every time new and some unexpected international conflict gets a burr in your saddle, our President might take the time to consider the matter cautiously and make a sound judgment before loading his cannons.

Having downloaded a transcript of the Warren’s event, and pouring over the text the past two days, there are so many points at which I find McCain’s worldview utterly vexing. Where I’m ready to pull out my hair. Where I am reminded that the John McCain of 2000 would never vote for the John McCain of 2008. But more than anything, I found his answer to Warren’s question about evil in this world particularly alarming. Where I had to stop and think, what a jaded and narrow-minded demagogue this old man has become.

Warren had asked, “does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?” Obama answered the first part of the question to the affirmative, went on to explain evil’s many guises, from Darfur to ourselves and our own domestic policies, spoke in terms of “confronting” it but cautioned about the need for humility. A lot of evil has been perpetrated over the years in the name of good.

When asked the same question, McCain, who we now know was peeking from behind the curtain, channels Charlton Heston as Moses in contrast to Obama’s answer. “Defeat it,” he says to a raucous round of applause and with a look as stern as old prophets.

The fact is, McCain never even bothered to address the first part of the question, or to frame his answer in terms other than us against them. It is shocking to think this man can’t get beyond a paradigm in which we are forever at war in this world, today, tomorrow and always. After all, where there is good, there is evil. The fundamental nature of conscious reality is one of duality. Our only hope is to transcend this first cause and to view the world in a brand new way. For there to be any hope, we need to get past this foolish, playground nonsense of us against them, or at least to have a lot less of it.

McCain’s failure to see this or move beyond the worldview of another century is shocking enough, but what really set off my alarms, and should set off alarms in the minds of even so-called devout Christians during this campaign, is that McCain is deluded enough to play God upon the stage of this world.

I refer to the Bible.

See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil. Deuteronomy 30:15.

I don’t mean to be cute here and remain unsure whether or not one can possibly call upon logic in these circumstances, but if evil is God’s handiwork, who are we to think we can rid the universe of it? To take the Bible at face value, as I expect John McCain and most Christians do, isn’t it the worst form of demagoguery to suggest we can undo the very nature of the world as God created it? Better what Obama had to say when asked the same question. All we can do is be God’s humble soldiers in that ongoing struggle.

But what the hell. If John McCain’s going to play at God, why bother with channeling that old fire and brimstone God of the Old Testament. Didn’t Jesus say he had come to fulfill the old law? So let’s hearken to something on the subject that is closer to the true spirit of Christianity.

…Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7

How fitting it would be if a forum held at a Christian church in America today would lead us to love as the proper way to marginalize evil in this world. How miraculous it would be if John McCain could find that part of his Christian soul, instead of offering us more wars and destruction and bellicose words.

I’ve been searching high and low for a clip of Bush during one of his press conferences a few years back, but have been unable to find it, so if you don’t mind, please take my word on this one. It happened.

This was at a juncture when the Iraq War was not going so well at all, a lot worse than it is now, probably around late 2005, early 2006, in and around their second legislative elections. In an attempt to gin up the importance of what those elections meant, and to downplay the horrendous violence then afflicting the Iraqi nation, Bush had said, and I quote him this far with a measure of certainty, "You see, democratically elected people are peace loving people."

There was then this Alfred E. Neuman pause and obligatory dumb grin on his face, as if, in the cobwebby, abandoned attic spaces of his mind, a vague light had gone on.

Oh yeah, democratically elected people equals peace loving people doesn’t equal blowing the shit out of Iraq.

Logic problem, logic problem.

As he fumbled on with his ensuing bullshit and did his best to cover his tracks, I remember thinking, oh boy, are we ever screwed. Nothing could more aptly characterize our loss of moral leverage in this world. Who’s going to listen to us now? How are we ever going to dictate right and wrong to anyone else? People will laugh if we dare to open our mouths.

So it was in listening to Bush warn Putin about stopping the violence in Georgia the other day. It had all the import of a pillow dropping from eighteen stories.

One can argue who’s to blame for starting this whole mess. The answer is muddled at best, no matter whose side you happen to be on. But clearly Russia has invaded Georgia, an international crime that is now exacerbated by the fact that we have no moral grounds on which to demand their retreat. Who are we to demand a cessation of violence? Meanwhile, a breathtakingly beautiful country is being reduced to rubble by Russia’s version of shock and awe.

If you want to see what a lovely, lovely countryside their currently blowing to crap, rent the movie Chefs In Love. You’ll want to sell your house and buy a one way ticket to Tbilisi. Georgia stands as a bulwark against the madness of globalization. It is ancient, pastoral. Gross median income doesn’t mean a damned thing at all. When beauty surrounds you as you walk down a country lane to your home, who gives a damn about gross median income?

Just in the name of peace and sanity, and in the name of humanity itself, you want to throw your body on the ground and say, for God’s sake, please stop the killing. But here it is, one more way in which George Bush’s policies have royally screwed our international standing in the world. We are without an olive branch of peace to hold out with our hands.

This current conflict also demonstrates so well how an Obama Presidency would stand in stark contrast to one with John McCain: imperialism. Only when we have ceased our own invasion of sovereign nations will we have credibility to chastise a weasel like Putin for doing the same.

Well, it should come as no surprise. Give the mainstream media a sordid little story and their inner tabloid is bound to come out. I expect so little of that cast of talking heads, but was aghast yesterday no less to watch pundit after pundit carving poor John Edwards up.

I had been getting my usual afternoon exercise, and my usual dose of drivel from the MSM, but had hardly expected to witness a smut party. All the hand wringing over Edward’s affair drove me to switch back and forth from MSNBC to CNN. I even tried the dreaded Fox News, expecting sooner or later, someone would state the obvious. Let he who is perfect cast the first stone. It was not forthcoming.

There were the so-called liberal operatives getting themselves safely away from the scene of the crime, the right-wing apparatchiks waxing indignant, David Bonior throwing Edwards under the bus. Even the usually level-headed Jack Cafferty was beginning to foam at the mouth. Only Roger Simon of Politico could drag himself to admit that Edward’s statement, released while the shows were in progress, had been a sincere expression of remorse. Everyone else simply got more indignant over the “99%” clause. They’d have put poor Jesus on a cross. 

My heart goes out to you, John, on both accounts. You must suffer the wounds of your own infidelity, and then be dragged around in a form of public lynching.

I have committed many sins of my own, and will no doubt make more, but I come at this today as a man who loves a woman with all his heart. In such a way, that I have never once been tempted to betray her trust. I thank God everyday that I have been given to adore someone in that way. I thank God for these feelings of devotion. I wouldn’t know how to face my sweetheart if I fell from grace in a similar way. 

But that only makes me more compassionate of others, and but reminds me this is about choosing people for public office, and the absurdity of doing so on the basis of their private peccadilloes. If the measure of worthiness is whether or not someone has committed a sexual transgression, we would never have had Roosevelt, or Kennedy. The list goes on and on.

What we’ll always end up with instead is the milquetoast of a Coolidge, the moral rigidity of Reagan and Bush, or a scoundrel like Tricky Dick. People who don’t have to wear a red face during Sunday’s sermon, perhaps, but who will publicly admit they don’t possess that vision thing, who can’t form a proper sentence, who aren’t the best of the best. 

More so, we will forever find ourselves as a nation in this self-righteous Calvinistic, witch-hunting mode, the stones being passed around, preparing to punish the sinner, forgetting that we have, or are certainly capable of, doing the same damned thing ourselves.

As Barack Obama was starting his tour of the Middle East this past weekend, and the policy differences between Obama and John McCain were proclaimed by various pundits to be converging, I could not help but think of a charming, almost tongue-in-cheek scene from the movie, Lawrence of Arabia.

Peter O’Toole, as Lawrence, has just taken Aqaba from the rear, has crossed the Sinai Peninsula on camel and is there in Cairo, in full Bedouin garb, to inform the British Admiralty of this heretofore improbable triumph. Jack Hawkins, as General Allenby, and Claude Rains, as Mr. Dryden from the Arab Bureau, a menacingly benign presence always lurking in the shadows, have greeted Lawrence, congratulated him on his success and are now seated around a fountain in the Admiralty’s Cairo Office, trying to figure out how best to use Lawrence’s talents going forward against the Turks.

Lawrence, at General Allenby’s behest, and as the fatherly Mr. Dryden listens on, commences to explain what will be required to further the Arab revolt. “I’ll need five thousand rifles. And sovereigns. They don’t like paper money. And instructors for the Davis guns. And more money. Much more later on.”

“Right!” the unflappable Allenby says each time with a sidelong glance at Dryden.

“And two armored cars. And field artillery.”

 “Right! Right!”

Lawrence, in his Bedouin garb, is soon dismissed and swarmed by fellow officers, while Allenby and Dryden are seen marching off to more important business, with Dryden expressing his concerns about Lawrence’s requests. “If you give the Arabs artillery, you will have made them independent.”   “Well, then I can’t do it, can I?” Allenby concludes.

And there in a nutshell, you have the policy of the Western world towards the Middle East over the past hundred and fifty years or so; meddling, patronizing and driven by our economic and imperialistic ambitions hand in hand; acting as if we know better how to deal with someone’s sovereign territory than the owner’s of it do themselves.

What makes this scene so especially poignant is the backdrop of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was basically the French and British drawing up control of the Middle East on a napkin, and which one only learns about at the end of the movie.

So there you have Lawrence, playing the role of chivalrous knight in a battle for Arab independence while Allenby and Dryden use him and the Arab army like pieces on a chess board. Lawrence, an exceptionally well schooled man with a deep seated sense of morality, was so sickened by the experience, he spent the rest of his life serving in the British forces under various assumed names, in the hopes he and the whole contemptible episode could be forgotten.

You can bet on this. The people of the Middle East never forgot it. Their feuds and rivalries go all the way back to Saladin battling Richard the Lionhearted for control of Jerusalem. It may seem utterly absurd in our minds to go back a thousand years, but not to them, and it goes to the heart of why a McCain presidency and a Obama presidency would be so very different. As witnessed by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s recent agreement with Obama’s troop withdrawal timetable, the Iraqis are not counting the months and years before we leave, as the press seems to be obsessed with here back in the States. The Iraqis are looking with a wary eye at our long term intentions.

In what was mostly skirted and ignored by the mainstream press over the last five years, the Bush Administration had every intention of keeping permanent military bases in Iraq from the start of its misguided war, a fact that fed in large part to the very insurgency we ended up fighting. It may not stick in the craw of someone on the right, who thinks dictating terms to the rest of the world seems like a grand idea, but you try having a couple thousand Iraqi soldiers parading around your home town, knowing full well they’re building a permanent just down the road. We all know goddamned well every gun toting NRA member would come crawling out the woodwork with his rifle and camouflage gear on. Why should anyone be surprised by the Iraqis’ resentments?

There is not much we can do now about having blundered into Iraq in the first place. And having done so, one can only hope to be, as Obama so aptly expressed, “as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” But the devil is not in the details, as one would normally expect. The devil is in how the Iraqis and the wider Muslim world perceive our long term intentions. And that is why, as a mere matter of perception, an Obama presidency will diffuse so much of the anger directed at us from the Muslim world.

If we finally retreat to the benign role we played between World War I and World War II in the Middle East, we can expect to be embraced once again as friend and honest broker, from Islamabad to Damascus. But if we continue the role of an imperial power, as we have done for the past sixty years, we can expect this “never ending war on terror” on which Bush and McCain’s foreign policies thrive, to go on as long as we all shall live.

First, allow me to confess, I’ve been reading my dog-eared copy of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition recently, and all due credit to Hofstadter, the publisher and any interested heirs. Hofstadter’s tome is without comparison in political writing and I have borrowed liberally here from his chapter on Abraham Lincoln. Though brief, Hofstadter’s treatment of Lincoln provides a searing account of that man’s life, that is equally compassionate and reverential. And unlike Doris Kearn Goodwin’s more recent, A Team Of Rivals, where Lincoln arrives to us almost fully formed, Hofstadter illuminates every step of Lincoln’s excruciating path to our nation’s highest office and fleshes out the sins of a man we now tend to view as pure as driven snow.

 

Also, and perhaps because Hofstadter’s tome had jogged my thoughts of late, I decided to throw my copy of The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart on the old turntable the other night. Surely someone out there still owns a copy? And remembers the Abraham Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue shtick?

 

“Abe, sweetie,” Newhart starts out on the phone. “How’s things in Gettysburg?” and you’re falling out of your chair. In reference to the infamous address, Newhart, the ostensible marketing guru grows abject. “Aw Abe, now why do you always go and change the speeches?” Then flustered, “You’re wondering why four score and seven years… It, it doesn’t make any sense to you... Abe, just trust me on this one. We test marketed that line in Peoria. They loved it.”

 

And if test marketing the Gettysburg Address isn’t funny, I don’t know what is…

 

But to my point, Newhart’s good-hearted jibing got me to thinking about the lofty way in which we venerate Lincoln in our society and to wonder how our 16th President would have held up in today’s world of endless media scrutiny. Not very well, I think. Abe didn’t do so well in his own time. Between the yoke of a civil war, the dragging of his feet on the issue of slavery and the general tendency of Lincoln’ enemies to portray him as a country oaf, you wonder how we ever arrived at a place where, as Hofstadter put it, “The Lincoln legend has come to have a hold on the American imagination that defies comparison with anything else in political mythology.” Simply stated, when we refer to the man in public discourse, we tend to do so in a way that is utterly devoid of analysis.

 

The truth about Lincoln is, whether or not he intended to run for President from the start, his entire adult life was guided by a singular ambition: that of securing public office. As William H. Herndon put it, a man who was familiar with Lincoln and apparently adored him greatly, “Politics were his life, newspapers his food, and his great ambition his motive power…His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

 

 

 

In keeping with this drive, Lincoln immersed himself at an early age in the Whig Party, the equivalent of today’s country club crowd, and made himself quite comfortable among its wealthiest members. It was not without expressed distaste that Lincoln frequented the finest parlors, but the object of securing office came before fighting for abolition. On that hard issue alone, Lincoln left something wanting when it comes to greatness. Consider two of Lincoln’s early quotes regarding Negroes, cited in Hofstadter’s book.

 

“I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, but I bite my lips and keep quiet.”  And  “What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals. My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.”

 

Yikes!

 

The Emancipation Proclamation itself had “all the grandeur of a bill of lading” as Hofstadter noted. William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State is quoted as saying in response to it, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating the slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

 

The instincts of compassion were there in Lincoln, to be sure, but it took him until 1854 to write these words. “As a nation we began by declaring, ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics’. When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

 

And thus Lincoln tiptoed through one of the greatest social and political minefields of all time; from a standpoint of political expedience, and with carefully suppressed passions. I think it is fair to say, the man we credit with freeing the slaves would be considered the ultimate flip-flopper in today’s parlance.

 

Yet for all that Lincoln spoke out of both sides of his mouth, hoping to get elected, and to maintain his office, and his endless prevarications publicly on the subject of slavery, does anyone doubt Lincoln’s lofty place in American history? I don’t. Here was a man, as Hofstadter put it, who bore the sins of an entire nation, gave his life for it, and did so with “malice towards none and charity for all.” As John Hay, another contemporary who knew Lincoln well, said of him, “he was the greatest character since Christ.”

 

It was against the backdrop that I was reading Bob Herbert’s lament on Barack Obama the other day.

 

My God, he’s tacking to the center. He’s abandoned his principles. He’s lost his compass.

 

That seemed to be the essence of Herbert’s abject lament, and one can only imagine how he would have fared had he been alive then and writing about Lincoln’s political masquerades instead.

 

For me, personally, during this current Presidential campaign, I’ve journeyed from being a staunch supporter of John Edwards to a wary admirer of Obama. And I will admit to casting a somewhat more skeptical eye towards Obama in recent weeks. It is not an easy political minefield he walks, but thus goes the dirty little business of getting elected. Lincoln understood it. Perhaps the straight shooting John Edwards did not. After all, the fact that Edwards was forced out of the nomination process early is damning of American politics, not of the man.

 

Sad as it is for this old hippie to accept, there’s an inescapable fan dance to attaining power, so don’t be surprised to see me holding my nose now and then during this election process, but I still put my faith in this simple belief. Like Lincoln, Obama will do the right thing when history affords him the chance. I don’t expect to like every decision he makes, but let’s not confuse the sordid game of politics with a man’s essential character, or with the stature he’ll bring to the Oval Office. To do so would be to say an imperfect man like Lincoln was never capable of greatness .

 

As with Lincoln, hopefully we are buying something deeper with Barack Obama, some inner metal that goes beyond what a focus group will dictate for today; a man who may not speak for all Americans, all of the time, but who will speak for most of us, most of the time. Above all, in Obama, one can sense the potential for greatness, and even more so, the potential to draw out the greatness in us. At the least, the very act of electing Barack Obama President will tell the world volumes about this nation’s character, more than a hundred years of apologies could ever say.

 

Again, I am only speaking for myself, but I fully expect on the day Obama steps up to the nation’s Capitol and gives his Inaugural Address, the tone and timber of this entire nation will change, along with the tone of this entire planet. It is the power we ascribe to Lincoln and other great characters of history, and I dare say, a thought that will never enter the mind when considering John McCain.

Well, as the old saying goes, if you have to explain the joke, it’s no longer funny.

There’s another well known axiom to humor. Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

Obviously, when it comes to the New Yorker’s latest cover featuring the Obamas as closet Al-Qaeda members and/or Black Panther era terrorists, an insufficient amount of time has passed between that elusive “now” and the whisper campaign that is ongoing against them. As to tragedy, the only tragedy in this episode seems to be the way in which the New Yorker has turned a subject matter that hungers for serious political discussion into a mangled, tone deaf and insensible gaffe.

To that point, another axiom of humor. It has to be based in fact. But Michelle Obama has never been seen sporting an Angela Davis style afro, or packing a Kalashnikov. And there are no long lost pictures of Barack wearing a Thaqib on secret weekend outings, never mind the Osama bin Laden portrait and the flag burning in the fireplace. Okay, there was that one picture of Barack adopting local Muslim attire as a courtesy to his African guests, but come on, that’s like mistaking George Bush for a member of the Kankouran West African dance troupe. There’s just no basis in fact for either assumption.

And when it comes to humor hitting the mark, or falling flat, let’s not forget another maxim. Play to your audience. You don’t start your standup routine at a Borscht Belt, Catskill summer retreat by saying, “And speaking of Jews…”

At every level of humor this satire failed. Not enough time has passed, nor cultural equanimity achieved, since the bruising Democratic primary campaign. There was no basis in fact for the joke, only cynicism and innuendo, and the New Yorker made the incredibly preposterous assumption that they were only appealing to their hip, chai chugging West Side audience. That, or it was an attempt at ramping up their circulation. I don’t know which conclusion would be considered the more disgraceful.

Yet, I still see the silver lining. As with the already well vetted attempts by some to portray Barack Obama as just another Jesse Jackson extremist, and the more recent and insidious Fox News attempt to portray the infamous fist bump as some sort of secret terrorist cipher. Barack Obama has survived, and I dare say even thrived under difficult circumstances.

Why? Well, in my opinion it is because, however unsavory these episodes may be, they force our society to face its inner struggle about electing a “black” candidate. The truth is on the table, and the public must fall one way or the other. Either you’re an unrelenting redneck, who will never vote for Obama anyway, or you watch the grace of the man under fire and realize none of this tripe warrants him being discredited. Fortunately, the vast majority of Americans fall into this latter category. Remarkably, resiliently, the public at large has seen through this current absurdity, as it has seen through everything else thrown at the man. And Obama simply becomes a more sympathetic character, the more he strides with grace through the political minefield around him.

In a nod to Richard Dreyfuss and his charming portrait of a lovable Latin American dictator, "People of Puerto Rico, I love you." What more has Hillary Clinton left to say?

 

Well, maybe I shouldn't have asked that question.

In the immediate wake of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, I had made this observation to my better half. "Well, there, it's finally over. Hillary has no path to the nomination now"

"Yeah," my better half had commented dryly in return. “If it weren't for zombie candidates who will not die."

Leave it to an artist to see things in such lovely and graphic terms...

Indeed, even in the wake of Hillary's undoing by the Rules Committee yesterday, the attrition of her own people, and the fact that both the Michigan and Florida Democratic Parties signed off on a compromise, making the math to Hillary’s nomination utterly impossible, and more so, making her ongoing fight on their behalf completely absurd, she's out there, fighting. Who knows to what bitter end.

By the way, when Harold Ickes made his ominous threat yesterday before the Rules Committee. "Mrs. Clinton has told me to reserve her right to take this to the Credentials Committee at the convention," did anyone else see a wide-eyed Barney Fife, tugging nervously at his holsters?

But I digress...

I've been wanting to say this for a long time, and in the spirit of fairness and truth, I'm going to say it right now. Hillary, I would really love to see a woman become President. Hell, women can run the world for the next five thousand years for all I care. Why not? Men have mostly made a mess of it. We'd all do well without all the pent up testosterone in the political mix.

No, it's not sexism, Hillary. My dislike for you has nothing to do with you being a woman. I'd be disgusted with you, whether you were a woman, or a man, or a transsexual, for that matter. You represent something I just can't stand; a lack of moral sincerity. You started out, willing to do anything to become President, and you've done just that, using tactics that resurrect Dick Morris and the reprehensible tactics of triangulation your husband adopted to survive. You know, come to think of it, a case could be made, your husband's use of triangulation is simply George W. Bush's perpetual political campaign machine in its incipient form.

So, here we are, the woman who put her finger to the wind going on six years ago now, and authorized Bush's rush to war, expecting she would have to look tough as a female candidate for President, and wanting to be on the right side of the issue, whether she believed in invading Iraq or not. Ironically enough, Hillary would have looked so much tougher had she voted with her conscience and not her political head. And even more ironically, her candidacy might not have become this bizarre, mirror image to Bush's reasons for going to war. Like Bush, when it was clear Hillary, that you couldn't win this nominating process in a fair and square manner, you were left to change the rules and mileposts. It's about winning the big states, you said, no, the swing states, no, the most popular votes, until finally, I guess, it’s about winning hearts and minds of Puerto Rico.

 

Well, congratulations. It’s over now. Get real.

 

In the end, history will simply record that you were beaten fair and square, and by somebody who played by the rules. Had you won it on those terms, I would have voted for you in November, out of respect for the country and the Democratic Party. Come this Tuesday, I only hope you and your supporters will come to that same graceful and compassionate decision.

Quick Takes

The Week That Was

 
I know it’s a bit of yesterday’s news, but I can’t seem to get James Carville’s Judas comment out of my craw. Judas? Simply because a person’s changed their mind? Simply because someone’s political point of view has evolved? And this from a guy who walked down the aisle with Mary Matalin. Talk about an act of betrayal. Every time I hear the two of them carping at each other on some talking head show, I think, how do you go home to that whiny, drawling, right-wing apparatchik every night? Are your core progressive principles that superficial? Do you love arguing that much? I know love is supposed to conquer all, but this is way too much like our Democratic nominee picking Dick "Shotgun" Cheney for a running mate. And whatever it is, age, karma, something seems to be catching up with Carville. Every time I see his shriveled up head on the tube, it seems a little more shriveled up than before. Honestly, I can’t help thinking to myself. Has this guy had a bad run in with a head shrinker, or what?

Speaking of shrinking heads, Bill Clinton’s legendary temper  is nothing new. An exceedingly intelligent man, I’ve always thought, but lacking wisdom. The McBurger chugging, wide-eyed kid from Hope who never quite grew up. But what was once kind of charming and folksy has taken on this Boss Tweed, arm-twisting air of loyalty enforcement in the current campaign, and gets back to the real frustration behind Carville’s comment. These folks thought this nomination was going to be a cakewalk, and now it’s not, and they’re not a very happy lot.

Which brings us full circle to the biting irony of Hillary’s comment on Saturday in Oregon  It is not a coronation, she says, regarding the nomination process. It is a contest. Ah, but therein lies the problem. That’s exactly what those folks always thought it would be.

So, it’s not been a very good week for Hillary, and one begins to suspect there won’t be many more of them soon. Mark Penn gets caught with his pants down on the Columbian trade deal.  Hillary is caught dodging sniper fire again, this time on the O’Bleness Memorial Hospital tale and there she is up in North Dakota, telling state party delegates, there is no such thing as a pledged delegate. Does anyone in their right mind think her Presidency will be any different?

 

You know, I was once rather fond of Bill and Hillary. I remember thinking in the course of the Whitewater investigation, and the subsequent impeachment fiasco, come on. These folks came out of Arkansas with two cents to their names. There were so many ways the two of them could have lined their pockets when Bill was governor, and to their credit, they didn’t. But as my better half so sagely pointed out to me just last  night, even without the greed, and the seeming simplicity of their political lives back in ’92, there was already an indelible aura of cronyism and favors owed. Never mind the $100,000,000 they’ve made since Bill left office. Never mind that most of their $10,000,000 charitable contributions went into their own foundation, with the usual question marks involved. Never mind that they’ve seemingly gone far a field of the simple roots Bill used to flaunt. Let’s say they deserve every penny they’ve earned. Given all the back scratching and fund raising they’ve done in the last year alone, just how much more cronyism and political favors are going to be owed, if, God forbid, the two of them actually get back into the White House?

First, a confession. I was an avid supporter of President Clinton. Voted for him twice and remember well the day he was first elected. I happened to be living in Seattle at the time and was downtown when the news came over the wire. Clinton is our new President. On a lovely fall day, with Elliot Bay growing dark at dusk, I looked out over the water from Pike Place Market and thought, oh wow. Joy of joys. At long last we’ve elected someone from our own generation.

All right, so the I didn’t inhale thing never sat all that well with me. Seemed pretty lame at the time, as did the Bill and Hillary holding hands for us in front of the national cameras thing that same year, playing the dutiful couple and trying oh so hard to diffuse the Jennifer Flowers affair. Hell, even their choice of campaign theme song turned my stomach a bit. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow. That was the Sixties for lightweights, for people who really weren’t there.

But at least we hadn’t elected one more old geezer. After twelve years of Reagan and Bush the Elder, frankly Nixon was beginning to look attractive to me.

Who knew the aforementioned shenanigans were only a whiff of the dissembling to come? Filegate. Travelgate. Whitewater. Selling the Lincoln bedroom, Paula Jones, the list went on and on. And I’m talking here as a guy who subscribed to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Backed Bill right up to the end, even as the stench from the Monica Lewinsky affair began to pile up and the wasted opportunities multiplied. Bill, having lost all political leverage, had to let things like the CAFE standards, the environment and global warming be thrown under his careening bus.

Bill, I once heard, rued his misfortune of being a President without a great moment in history to stand astride. If only he had been afforded a great war, like FDR, or Lincoln. Yet in fact he had something quite momentous in his lap, a chance to steer the world away from fossil fuels, only the fool was too consumed with triangulation and saving his own ass to do the matter justice.

Well, after standing by you and all your subterfuge for eight years, Bill and Hillary, don’t be surprised to find me so thoroughly offended. Seeing you employ the same right-wing tactics we decried on your behalf, to say I’m insulted simply doesn’t do the matter justice. Your behavior has gone far beyond reprehensible. Simply put, you’ve acted just like the Republicans who so mercilessly attacked you for all those years.

I keep thinking you’ll go home one night, look in the mirror and feel some measure of remorse or shame, but apparently it’s not in you. Like Machiavelli, you believe any tactic is permissible in the acquisition of power. Fair enough, but to turn an old phrase, the end will never be different from the means. If anyone wonders what a Hillary presidency would look like, just watch her campaign. As the old saying goes, if it starts out badly, it never gets any better.

Honestly, distracted by my work and a thousand other things over the past few weeks, and tired down to my soul of this whole, sad spectacle, I’ve been inclined to just crawl in a hole, politically speaking, but found I could no longer sit on my hands. In the face of the Clinton’s nefarious activities, I was compelled to start a serial blog in their honor.

Knowing, sadly, that Bill and Hillary would never fail to provide me with fresh ammunition, I was no less surprised to awakening yesterday morning and read the news.

Rocky?!?

The woman’s living in a fantasy world, I thought. She’s gone completely mad.

Then, in latching onto the Rocky legend, I realized Hillary had made an unwitting choice. Never mind that Rocky was a grade B movie, made by a mediocre actor, about a Neanderthal palooka, who, in all honesty, would have gotten his ass kicked in the real world. Hillary needed a Hollywood ending to her political drama and Rocky seemed to be the perfect fit.

Rocky and I have a lot in common, she says. I never quit. I never give up.

Well maybe, as with that little Bosnia fib you made of late, you’re fudging the truth a bit and ignoring a rather thorny fact. There were all those third rate sequels, and that's what your increasingly pathetic campaign has become. As time goes by, your ratings will continue to plummet. People will only squirm more and more uncomfortably in their seats. Hillary, you’re in a chess game you simply can’t win. You’re only hope is to upset the entire chess board.

There was a time when you could have bowed out gracefully, with the Democratic Party and the country’s best interests in mind, and maybe that opportunity still exists, but as you drag this out to its bitter end, don’t blame us, Hillary, for making the inevitable comparison. You were always going to be Apollo Creed. Remember? The candidacy that was all but inevitable?

You can go ahead and switch roles now, if you like, but again, don't blame us for seeing through the lies. This is Rocky III or Rocky IV, at best. And I, for one, sit here hoping to be spared a remake of Rocky V.

When She Belittles Barack For His Inspiration,
Her Own Campaign Rhetoric Begins to Sound a Bit, Well…Hollow

“My opponent offers speeches, I offer solutions.” Etc., etc.  We’ve all heard the crap. I was listening to it the other day, Hillary droning on…and on…and on…thinking to myself, good lord sweet baby jesus, haven’t you ever read the Gospel, Hillary?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word    was with God, and the Word was God.

 Forgive me for bringing it up. I’m not a religious man and don’t profess to understand precisely what St. John the Christian had in mind at the time, but I’ve always loved that passage and decided to do a bit of research into the Greek. Am I wrong here? Setting aside the “Jesus as Christ” aspect for the moment, it does not seem to me a stretch to interpret the passage thusly.

 We know God through words. God communicates back to us through them.

 

And I’m not talking ten point policy papers here, Hillary, but the ability of words to speak to our hearts, to lift us up from the sometimes senseless drudgery of our daily lives, to call us out from our oft times pitiful mortal limitations and say, hey, why don’t we come together here? Let’s try to make this a better world.

 When Robert Kennedy said during his 1968 Presidential campaign, "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why'? I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not'?" no one took him to task for paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw. That wasn’t the point. He had inspired us, and much has been forgiven those who have used words to inspire us. We don’t think first of the John Kennedy as a womanizer. We think of the man who stood before a nation and said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

 Well, whatever else St. John had in mind at the time, to equate The Word with the very God of this universe was to lend it the same power as that which makes a flower grow up towards the sun. It was to say, plain and simple, one word can hearken to the very best of us. It was to say, one phrase can evoke in us a sudden willingness to roll up our sleeves and do what seemed completely impossible yesterday.

 As a John Edwards man now converted, I am a man who has observed Obama calling out a new generation to serve their country with complete objectivity, and I dare anyone to deny the enthusiasm with which his call to labor has been received. It is the same enthusiasm which John Kennedy once evoked from a nation. It is a hope and enthusiasm that Barack evokes so freely, and Hillary Clinton never will. All she can do is pooh-pooh Barack’s lofty turn of phrase.

 And what can she hope to achieve by this? Ironically enough, if she’s successful in claiming the nomination, it will be the diminution of her own power to inspire. Having resorted to the only apparent tool left in her shed, which is to tear him down, which in turn tears everything and everyone else down, she’ll have won a Pyrrhic victory, and have killed all inspiration in the process. Hillary can hardly slay inspiration now, only to resurrect it when it becomes expedient to her later on. Rather, she will be like the Red Queen, having beheaded everything disagreeable in her sight, with little left over when she’s done, beyond perhaps her hollow words and blind ambition.

 Having lived through the sixties, I saw the Kennedy’s shot, Martin Luther King, too, and I’m here to proclaim. I survived that with my hopes and dreams still intact. I have waited forty years for a new season of hopes and dreams and believe it is now. In fact, I’m getting up to dust myself off today, put my money where my mouth is, make another donation to the Obama campaign and offer up my services to them. Because, Hillary, you were right about one thing. We’ll be just fine. Dreams never die. Dreams never go out of style. Like flowers, they only wait for the right season to revive. Maybe if you and Bill hadn’t spent those early years calculating your every move on the way to the Presidency, you would have gotten the real message of the sixties. It was to believe in our very best selves, which has nothing to do with your Machiavellian ambition to obtain power.

It Wasn’t Just Sound Judgment That Hillary Lacked,

It Was A Total Absence of Political Courage

 
In a not too terribly obscure political fact, when President John F. Kennedy flew to Dallas on November 22, 1963, and to his unfortunate demise, he was in fact on a mission to shore up the so called Dixiecrats in advance of the ’64 election. The Dixiecrats were to the Democratic Party at the time the rough equivalent of what the Religious Right is to the Republican Party today. The Dems were in constant need of placating those antediluvian Yellow Dog southerners on their right, and hoping like hell they hadn’t sold their souls to the devil in the process.

 

Kennedy had won such Dixiecrats with the aid of Vice President Johnson’s significant arm twisting during the ’60 election, but he had grown at risk of losing them again over the uncomfortable political realities of the burgeoning civil rights movement, a struggle towards black equality that had moved inexorably to the forefront of American political consciousness, whether Kennedy liked it or not, and even as he deftly tried to outmaneuver the entire mess. When he was ultimately forced to send federal troops down to Oxford, Mississippi in September 1962, enforcing a court order allowing James Meredith to enroll at Ole Miss, and with his political hands tied in other ways on the matter, the beginning of the end had come and those good old boys down South soon quit playing nice with the Democratic Party.

 

As Nick Bryant chronicles in his book, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality, John Kennedy wasn’t exactly a stalwart of the early civil rights struggle. After the Meredith incident, Kennedy stood before the country and made the drier constitutional point about our need to respect this country’s federal laws. It took Bobby Kennedy to argue the more humane and passionate side of the black civil rights struggle.

 My point is this. A man who is rightly revered by many for his intellect, charm and judgment, me among them, who was verifiably a hero during World War II and who calmly stared down the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis was still a man who at times chose political expedience and survival over his own moral and ethical beliefs. The man who wrote Profiles in Courage was not a man above putting his finger to the wind.

 Against this historical backdrop, Barack Obama’s oft cited 2002 speech against invading Iraq becomes that much more impressive, significant and inspiring. It was not judgment alone that rested in the balance, it was courage, of the sort Jack Kennedy himself had so rightly revered. As we witness Hillary Clinton’s ongoing efforts to swift boat Barack over not being in the Senate when he made the speech in question, let’s at least admit he was considering a run for the Senate at the time and fully cognizant of the political risks involved, a backdrop that only strengthens the case for his speech being a profile in courage. Amidst the ubiquitous flag waving and jingoistic calls for war so prevalent in the wake of 9/11, Senator Obama’s entire political future stood in the balance. Conversely, Senator Clinton, with an eye on her intended run for the Presidency, put a finger to the wind and decided to get on the right side of the issue; in fact on the same side of the issue as John McCain. Yet what had seemed so right in the fervor of that flag waving environment turned out to be terribly, terribly wrong, and it has taken Senator Clinton six very painful and excruciating years to admit this inescapable fact.

 As Senator Obama has so aptly pointed out, and what was echoed by John Kerry this past Sunday on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Hillary Clinton has already had her “the phone’s ringing at 3:00 in the morning” moment. It was the Iraq War vote, and she failed the test.

 Given the challenges we as Democrats face in this upcoming Presidential election, and in fact what all Americans will face together in the years directly ahead, do any of us really want Hillary’s finger on the proverbial button? Given that she was either too blind, too politically expedient or simply imperialistic enough to lead us into this foolish war, not me. I don’t. If anyone really has their doubts about Hillary’s true political instincts, simply refer back to her more recent vote on Iran, where she sided with George Bush on labeling the Republican Guard a terrorist organization, giving George yet one more pretext to lead this country into a senseless war of choice.

 Even if you want to dismiss the cry of hope Senator Obama has brought forth from young and old across this land, his one, historic moment of courage makes him stand far above Hillary on the issues of leadership and judgment, and far above John McCain, for that matter. Let’s face it. If that phone should actually start ringing at three o’clock in the morning, whoever answers it won’t have six long years to get the answer right.