Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Holy Cow. Just visited Rick Perry’s website– it looks a LOT like Barack Obama’s ’08 site.

If Obama Were White

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

I, and I suppose, many African Americans have been asking myself, lately, is our support and, increasingly, defense of President Barack Obama would be the same if the president were white. I mean, white-skinned. We are, after all, specifically if not exclusively referring to the quality of pigmentation in the man’s epidermis. This insanity, of how tan a person is, has been the basis for centuries of violence, hatred, social unrest and oppression. Taking race out of the equation, I see a man with lofty, perhaps naïve goals, and a gang of irrational, extremist nuts out to kill him. I see his friends caving in and turning against him out of cowardice and opportunism. I see people obstructing important and vital legislation, and causing severe further damage to the nation’s economy over the idiotic debt limit fight. I see a man trying to save America and I see people willing to go to any lengths to stop him, up to and including making things worse, provably and demonstratively as a direct result of their single-minded agenda to unseat the president.

I see good and I see evil. I support the president, not because he’s black but because any man who can inspire this level of sheer hatred, focused on one man and to the exclusion of serving their nation during a time of national crisis, must be onto something good. He must be a simply amazing individual. Abandoning him for one of the GOP Muppets would be utterly ridiculous.

 Complete Essay Is Here

Christie

Friday, September 30th, 2011

The minute he gets in, he sinks like a stone. The minute this thing gets real and stops being a GOP circle jerk, we’ll get to see this extremely entertaining bully whose act will wear thin on both the crackpots Christie so despises and the independents he can’t win without. This is exactly the same thing these people did to Perry: he jumps in and he’s today’s darling, a man’s man who can take the fight to the president. And, almost immediately, they’ll turn on him and leave him sputtering by the side of the road as Romney goes on to win the nod. Getting in bed with these people is a terrible idea and Christie knows it.

How this man can see what these folks did to Rick Perry and think, “Yeah, these are the folks I wanna hook up with,” is beyond me. Long before the DNC starts playing the very amusing collection of Christie clips saying he’s not ready, he doesn’t want it enough, suicide jokes, etc., Romney, Bachmann and the Statue of Liberty Foam Hat Crowd will eviscerate this guy and destroy his chances for gubernatorial reelection.

Christie knows saying “yes” to this is a zero-sum game. He’s wanted to be NJ governor all his life. If he gets in now, by February, March the latest, he’s done in politics. This is a completely idiotic idea, not because he’s not qualified—I mean, like that even matters anymore—but because the GOP is a snake pit right now, full of incredibly wacky types who turn on you in a heartbeat.

Unless Christie comes in and cleans house completely—I mean denouncing the wackos straight off and executing a coup d’état seizing total control of the party—he will be destroyed. Christie, the guy who appointed a Muslim judge while ridiculing wingnuts hollering “Sharia Law!” has denounced these folks too many times to walk back now.

He is not these people’s friend and they know it.

The Stim

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

The nation’ s future is in the hands of White America. The novelty of the first black presidential nominee is well behind us, now, and Black America harbors muffled discontent at the administration’s seeming indifference to their disproportionate economic suffering. Which isn’t to say we won’t support the president, but the house-on-fire urgency of 2008 is long gone. The Republicans are unlikely to nominate anyone who will be in any way attractive to Black America, so the only real question is how offensive an Uncle Fester the GOP will pick. They simply don’t have anybody yet who would beat Obama in the general if the economy wasn’ t in the tank. And these nutty cartoon characters the GOP keeps rolling out consistently put their feet, both of them, in their mouths. They are offensive not only to black people but to thinking people, many of whom will simply hold their nose and choose the devil they know rather than roll the dice with one of these buffoonish ideologues.

This is, perhaps, the only campaign strategy left to the president: hope the GOP nominates a nut.

Wave This Flag Or Else

Sunday, September 18th, 2011

9/11 coalesced the nation, but coalesced it around distinctly white, middle American values and did so in an extremely megalomaniacal way. Good ol’ boys, huge garrison flags anchored to gun racks in their Ford trucks snapping in the breeze. God Bless America and all of that national pride. For me, and for many of my friends, most of that was a spectator sport. Heartwarming, like a Jimmy Stewart movie, but Blacks weren’t starring in Jimmy Stewart films, Jimmy Stewart films were, for me, a window into another world, another America. That’s the America that came together after the attacks: Ronald Reagan’s America, Jimmy Stewart’s America. A place that welcomed blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Asians only conditionally into the periphery of their great parade. All that Bob Seger music, Like A Rock. Never heard that playing growing up in my neighborhood.

America came together but merely papered over deep divisions among us. The love-in welcomed us so long as we sang along in harmony to their tune—the American tune, “American” as defined by huge corporate interests which made out like bandits in the post-9/11 hysteria. The hopeful (and insidiously manufactured) good will and jingoism in the country was shattered years later in the days following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the city of New Orleans.

Beginning with the indifference demonstrated by the vacationing president and continuing with the staggeringly inept emergency response led by “Heckuva Job” Brownie, this unified, flag-waving, Arab-hating, America-love-it-or-leave-it crowd sat on their sofas and watched the desperate poor of New Orleans suffer in unimaginable, unacceptable ways, fracturing the manufactured post-9/11 unity.