Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Courtesy of these folks, who went ahead and endorsed him anyway.

Posted by Al Schumann on Tuesday May 13 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

For your enjoyment, the final two faces of the Democracy's prez-nom campaign in '72, to remind the praeteriti that tarry here what that hag the Hump did to dear old George McG before the final event, the California primary of early June.

Hunter T's words: "Not even Nixon could stoop to Hubert's level, the vicious corrupt old screw."

Yes, that desperate scalded milk-rat of a candidate threw everything he could rip loose at the man from South Dakota. Behind that honest mild Western face was -- a former commie stooge, a progressive party (vintage '48) operative, a bomber pilot turned surrender sissy, a guy who never saw an idling black hand he didn't want to fill with Uncle's long green -- in short, a friend, protector, and sponsor to every bombthrower, child-rapist, drug fiend and deserter America's sick underbelly could produce.

Hubert had help, of course. Here's a couple of mainframe HH shadow bullies:

AFL-CIA chief and cold-war Catholic, George "The Animal" Meany...

... and the king of the cop riots, Mayor Daley the elder.

'Twas a Turkish gauntlet they put dear senator George through, in those runup weeks to the final primary -- but then George won California anyway, and there was the inevitable coming-together after the Hump ran out of tomahawks and votes at the convention.

Ahhh there were giants among us in those days -- real ball-eaters. _________________________________________________________________

Posted by Owen Paine on Saturday May 10 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Is it really white trash that cottons to St Hill?

That phrase -- "white trash" -- I just read on the internet somewhere is a "classist slur".

"Classism" -- now that's an odious jumble of a notion. It seems to notice how an elite might not just exploit, but also also "oppress" another class. "Classism" -- a squishy term -- far more so than 'racist' or even 'sexist'. And 'oppression' -- squishier than 'exploitation', which has a pretty crisp, quantitative meaning.

The St Hill mob is trying to pin the "classist" label on Obie. And of course that's a delight, since between Ob and la Scorpion, calling one or the other 'classist' is straight pot-vs-kettle, isn't it?

In demotic, the better word is 'elitist' either way

I like this old GOP rag. Beyond the obvious delight it gives me to see the dueling identity pols smearing each other with it, the notion seeks to isolate all the obviously embarrassing bits out of our class based society -- but leave the nuggets in place.

The nuggets? Why, exploitation, of course. "Classists" don't exploit the helotry -- they sneer at 'em, they condescend to 'em. They -- escape 'em. And best of all, classists try to -- reform 'em.

So we have a clear choice, as white trash or as blue-collars. We got one party -- the GOP -- of hard exploitation; and another party -- the Jackasses -- who like to deplore "oppression", and leave exploitation out of the picture, unmentioned, unmentionable, perhaps nonexistent.

Posted by Owen Paine on Thursday May 8 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Jeremiah Wright flap provided, what, a week's worth of excitement, but the dreary campaign is back once more on its stupefyingly tedious track. The Note is again full from end to end of soporific, sophomoric inside-baseball wiseacre-y. How long, oh Lord, how long? Who cares, oh Lord, who cares?

The only mildly interesting thing to come out of the Wright-o-machia was a dog that didn't bark. The whole carpet-chewing brouhaha appears to have made very little difference to anybody. Which is actually a phenomenon worth pondering, especially since nothing else of any interest is going on. (The gas tax holiday? Puh-leeze.)

Better a non-phenomenon than none at all.

The pollsters have been busy:

In Poll, Obama Survives Furor, but Fall Is the Test

WASHINGTON — A majority of American voters say that the furor over the relationship between Senator Barack Obama and his former pastor has not affected their opinion of Mr. Obama, but a substantial number say that it could influence voters this fall....

But some of the people polled allow as how the Wright flap might perhaps make a difference to some unspecified other people -- though it's made little or none to them. So that is the news. It hasn't made any difference -- yet. But some people think it might. Stop The Presses! Subjunctive Mood Alive And Well!

Mixed feelings, as usual, seems like the right response. The good news is that the ogreish cartoon of black anger which the media tried to construct out of Pastor Wright doesn't seem to have scared anybody very much. That is unquestionably progress. Score one for the good sense of the public.

The bad news is that Obama isn't utterly disgraced for his weak-kneed response. (Whatever you say, officer! I'll talk!)

One wonders how anybody who ever believed that the guy represented something really new, and hopeful, and positive, can continue to believe that after his barefoot penance at the frigid windswept Canossa where the infallible Papacy of received ideas retired to sulk after the intolerable insults Wright offered it.

But maybe even within the bad news there's a silver lining. From the same Times story:

... nearly half of the voters surveyed, and a substantial part of the Democrats, said Mr. Obama had acted mainly because he thought it would help him politically, rather than because he had serious disagreements with his former pastor.

Which brings us back to the old story -- Obama is the quadrate term of lesser-evillism, the lesser evil of the lesser evils.

But that, ah that, is apparently the inoperable tumor of American political thinking. How do we persuade people to stop caring which evil is lesser?

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Monday May 5 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

From the SF Chronicle:

House Democrats work on huge Iraq money bill

House Democratic leaders are putting together the largest Iraq war spending bill yet, a measure that is expected to fund the war through the end of the Bush presidency and for nearly six months into the next president's term....

Bay Area lawmakers, who represent perhaps the most anti-war part of the country, acknowledge the bill will anger many voters back home.

"It's going to be a tough sell to convince people in my district that funding the war for six months into the new president's term is the way to end the war," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, a leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus who plans to oppose the funding. "It sounds like we are paying for something we don't want."

A poll accompanies the Chronicle story:

Gotta love the Bay Area. But I feel sadly sure that nearly all that 88% who gave the right answer will dutifully trudge to the polls in November and vote for these inexcusable-breachers-of-promise.

Q: How many psychoanalysts does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Does the lightbulb want to change?

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Saturday May 3 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

Scruggs passed along this gem from 'digby':

I have to assume that the telcoms have been secretly monitoring members of congress and the Bush administration's communications and are blackmailing them. There is just no other adequate explanation for this immunity nonsense to keep coming back over and over again.

Here 's Jane Hamsher:

According to the ACLU, there is rumor of a backroom deal being brokered by Jay Rockefeller on FISA that will include retroactive immunity. I've heard from several sources that Steny Hoyer is doing the dirty work on the House side....

They really, really want this to go through. In fact, their insistence is becoming so desperate that there is simply no more reason to doubt they are hiding something..... These corporations must be knee deep in spying on Americans and their corrupt congressional puppets must know it.

The bit about "blackmail" is also rather touching. Does Rupert Murdoch "blackmail" Bill O'Reilly into behaving the way he does? No, Digby, Murdoch is O'Reilly's employer. Now apply that paradigm to Congress and see how well it works!

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Saturday May 3 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's an example of the intellectual range of The Nation magazine:

Nation Poll Will the Jeremiah Wright controversy doom the Obama campaign?

• No. Obama was right to disassociate himself from his former pastor. Now he can adddress the real issues
• Wright's not the biggest threat to Obama--it's how the media and the right-wing spin machine take the preacher's comments out of context.
• Real damage has been done. If Obama's campaign goes down in flames, Wright's incendiary comments will be partly to blame.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Friday May 2 07:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

"Pedagogue," in classical Greek, means a slave who accompanies your kid back and forth to school -- literally, a boy-herder.

The slavish character of the profession has not changed. Examples always abound. Here's one of the more recent:

Rev. Wright's honorary degree canceled by Northwestern

May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Northwestern University withdrew an invitation for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to receive an honorary degree at this year's commencement.

Wright... was selected to be honored at the June ceremony in Evanston, Illinois, on the recommendation of faculty committees, Alan Cubbage, vice president for university relations, said in a statement.

"In light of the controversy around Dr. Wright and to ensure the celebratory character of commencement not be affected, the university has withdrawn its invitation to Dr. Wright,'' Cubbage said.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Friday May 2 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Times' Bob Herbert is deeply upset and embarrassed by one of his landsmen: >

The Pastor Casts a Shadow

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.

Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away.

If there's to be any lasting positive legacy of the Obama candidacy, it's the emergence of people like Jeremiah Wright from their enforced invisibility.

In the neighborhoods and communities where Wright and his colleagues and predecessors have worked for decades -- we might even say, for a couple of centuries -- they've been anything but invisible. In fact, they've been indispensable. But in the social representation sold by the "corporate media" -- as Wright quite correctly calls them -- the Wrights are merely a curiosity when they're noticed at all.

That has all changed. Obama may or may not be toast after this brouhaha, and I for one couldn't care less, one way or the other. But the lasting legacy, let's hope, is that Jeremiah Wright and what he has to say are once again on the agenda.

Dr King and Malcolm put some of these topics on the table, back in the day. Then they got killed, and Malcolm was shoved into the footnotes of official history, while King suffered the equally dire fate of plaster sainthood.

Let's hear it for the return of the repressed, the latent becoming patent, the insistent ineluctability of the plain truth.

And if the truth makes Bob Herbert's head blow up -- along with the heads of every other dreary platitudinous wretch on that arid Sahara of an Op-Ed page -- then so much the better.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Wednesday April 30 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I love the old mediaeval bestiaries, with their thoughtfully moralized natural history. The fanciful tales they tell convey a kind of truth that you won't find in a peer-reviewed journal. Here's the mediaeval take on the beaver, AKA "Castor":

Castores a castrando dicti sunt. Nam testiculi eorum apti sunt medicaminibus, propter quos cum praesenserint venatorem, ipsi se castrant et morsibus vires suas amputant.

[Castor is so called from castration. Because their testicles are useful for medicine, and so when they realize that the hunter is after them on that account, they castrate themselves and bite off their powers.]

-- Isidore of Seville

I spent a very delightful hour today watching, on YouTube, Wright's tour de force before the National Press Club. It reminded me uncannily of the chap from Nazareth turning the tables on the scribes and Pharisees of his day -- though those old scribes and Pharisees threw much subtler and trickier questions at the Galilean Hassid than the "working press" could devise for Wright. In fact it was startling to hear the shallow and puerile schoolyard taunts that were, apparently, the best shot America's journalistic elite could take. Wright, of course, shrugged them off as Leviathan might deal with a jellyfish.

The best moment was a question attacking Christianity as such. Somebody had scribbled on a card a debased modern translation of John fourteen-six: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." The questioner added, "Do you believe that?"

Now Jeremiah Wright has been a minister of the Gospel for what, forty years? Did the smart-aleck who shot this feeble bolt really imagine that Wright hadn't fielded this question before?

Actually, I'm sure that's exactly what he or she imagined -- thinking of him- or herself as Clarence Darrow, pinning William Jennings Bryan to the wall with a contradiction in scripture. (There's a movie scene that needs a revisionist treatment, by the way. Over to you, Owen.) The questioner, undoubtedly a merit-class secularist whose Greatest Conceivable Being is the Scholastic Aptitude Test, felt quite sure that any poor fool who reads the Bible, and prays, actually prays -- like Dante and Milton and other such pitiable imbeciles -- couldn't possibly be any match for the smart-alec's superior research skills.

It was wonderful to watch. As the question was read, a slow small smile appeared on Wright's face. When the pinch-faced, brazen-voiced, squinty-eyed, sheep-haired hag who read the questions relinquished the microphone, Wright leaned in and, without missing a beat, cited an earlier chapter of the same gospel, John ten-sixteen: "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold."

The crowd went wild -- not the deeply illiterate "working press", of course, but the "guests", mostly black, who had actually read the book.

Jeremiah Wright is Obama's real daddy -- a guy who perhaps filled in for the AWOL Kenyan, and gave Obama much of what is real, and appealing, and thoughtful, and humane about him. Because he has, or had, all these qualities.

I'm not quite cynical enough to think it was mere opportunism that got Barack's butt in Wright's pew for all those years. I think he got something in that pew that nourished him and helped make him the rather impressive human being he became.

Until the hunters wanted his balls -- and he bit them off.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Wednesday April 30 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)