The Weak In Rock

I wasn’t surprised that Barrack Obama distanced himself from Rev. Wright’s comments at the Washington Press Club, but I was still disappointed. On the one hand Wright is absolutely full of shit - claiming that the US government invented HIV to decimate the minority community. While on the other he’s dead on in such a way that anyone who calls him out on it is just in massive denial - that the 9/11/01 attacks shouldn’t have surprised anyone and were a logical outgrowth of the foreign policy practiced by the US for generations.

That Obama should distance himself from obvious conspiracy theorizing idiocy (the HIV comment) makes perfect sense, and he’s correct in wanting to keep his distance from such moronitude. Of course it could also be argued that comments so stupid shouldn’t even be acknowledged. Sitting Senators can and do support asinine social and political views, but those that do rarely become front runner for their party’s nomination to run for the White House.

What disappoints me is that Obama doesn’t have the courage to acknowledge that the obviously exploitative US foreign policies in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Central and South America are what fueled the anger that provided the opportunity for an organization like Al Qaeda to recruit volunteers to fly planes into US landmarks and kill thousands of people. This is not an extremist view. It’s a view held by many mainstream political thinkers (heck, I read Blowback by Chalmers Johnson, a sort of uber mainstream political scientist, former cold warrior and professor emeritus at UC San Diego, in 2000 when it came out - a book that flat out says the actions of the CIA and the US military in the third world were inevitably going to result in pissed off victims of those actions striking back at the US in the only way available to them - terrorist attacks.). But the official party line of the US government on 9/11/01 is that “the terrorists” attacked the US because they hate our democracy, our freedom of expression and Christianity, so Obama can’t deviate from that script lest he be thrown under the bus by his own party, also too cowardly to call bullshit where it’s so obvious the smell would curl your nose hair from 100 miles out.

I think most of all though I’m disappointed in my fellow Americans who continue to fantasize that our government somehow bears no responsibility at all for what happened on 9/11/01. I guess it’s just too difficult to think about for most people. They’d rather believe that we were all just hapless victims of sociopathic mass murderers, and while I’ll admit that there seem to be quite a lot of that sort involved in fundamentalist Islam (and fundamentalist Christianity, for that matter) it just doesn’t work for me to explain away 9/11/01 or Al Qaeda by saying “oh, they’re all just crazy with no genuine motives for the crimes they commit.” It’s sort of like the whole business about smaller scale sociopaths having been abused as children. It doesn’t excuse their actions. It does give them a logical explanation, however, and points out that looking the other way at domestic violence isn’t just bad for the immediate victim, it may lead to collateral damaged down the road.

Technorati Tags: Barrack Obama, Rev. Wright

This is the sort of thing that discredits folks on the left…

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/er.html

Some people are too dumb to be let out of the house.

Ok, I’m home sick today, so I guess I no longer have any excuse not wade into the muck regarding the Presidential nominating contests.  Well, of course I could be taking a nap, but what the hell.  You only live once.  *cough*

During the last Presidential election I expended a ton of personal energy blogging on behalf of the Democrats and John Kerry in particular (there’s a special circle in hell for me just for that).  So, I suppose it’s natural for my readers to ask me, frequently, why no words about this current political poop storm.  The answer is a simple one, so I’ll lay it on you…

They all suck.

That’s right.  You heard me.

The one candidate I sort of liked, John Edwards, was a non-starter.  He was linked to a failed bid for the White House in 2004, he’s from a state that doesn’t garner much attention on the national stage, he’s done nothing but campaign since he and Kerry lost to Bush/Cheney four years ago and his wife has had a relapse of breast cancer.  On some level I think the guy should be taking care of his wife, but I like him, and I think he’d have made a decent President.  However, I knew he had no chance running against rock stars like Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.

Now someone is going to probably get mad at me for saying Obama sucks, but I’m sorry, he does.  He’s fundamentally invested in the corporate system and has spoken highly of it on numerous occasions.   And that’s the biggest problem I have with him.  John Edwards is right - it’s the corporate power in this country that is the source of most of our problems.  You name it - health care = profit motive.  War in Iraq = profit motive.  Social inequity = profit motive.  Unless you’re willing to tackle the source of the problem you’ve got no hope of solving it.  So while in a contest between virtually any Republican and Obama I’m probably going to vote for him, I don’t like him and I don’t trust him.

Next.

Hilary.

Harumph.

Look, let me make this very, very simple.  If Hilary Clinton becomes the 44th President of the US of A that will mean that we will have a guaranteed period of 24 years during which no one whose name was not Bush or Clinton will have been President.  24 years.  There are nations in this world whose entire government has not survived 24 years in a row.  And if the GOP stays in as much of a sorry ass-eating mess as it is right now during her first term then she’s pretty much guaranteed a second, which will make it 28 years of Bush/Clinton hegemony over the chief executive office in the US.

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no way to put this nicely.  That is fucked up.

Never mind that Bill Clinton, whose legacy Hilary is running on, was a opportunistic, lying sack of crap whose great achievements in office were mainly screwing over people on welfare and staining an intern’s dress with his semen.  Never mind that Hilary’s plan to reform health care includes fines and jail time for anyone who refuses to purchase health insurance.  Never mind that the Clinton’s are the best recipe for uniting and reviving the lunatic fringe right wing of the GOP.  Never mind that stuff.  If we want to continue to pretend we have any scrap of democracy left in our government we CANNOT elect Hilary Clinton to the Presidency.  Because if we elect her then we’ve given up, and eight years from now we can expect to see Jeb Bush running for the nomination of his party, winning it and ascending to the White House.

I’ll say it again.  That’s fucked up.

So I will not, under any circumstances, be voting for Hilary Clinton.  Nuff said.

On the GOP side they suck just as much, but in different ways.  John McCain now pretty much has to have a heart attack or get hit by a bus in order to avoid being the Republican nominee.  There was a time when I liked McCain, but he blew that when he started bending over for the evangelicals who control the GOP.  There’s a chance, now that Romney has bowed out of the race that the McCain camp will realize that the evangelicals have been marginalized and he’ll tell them to screw themselves, but I doubt it.  He’s likely too afraid that doing so would encourage them to run a third party candidate who would siphon away votes from him in the general election.

McCain has painted himself as an independent, but he’s not really.  He’s a war hawk and as much a tool of the military industrial complex as Ronald Reagan was.  And since he’s politically chickenshit he’ll probably grab either Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney for a running mate to try to round up as much of that GOP evangelical vote as he can, and to try to set up a candidate to succeed him as President should he get elected.  It’s a sure bet his running mate will be much younger than he is to blunt any campaign criticism from the Democrats about his health and age.

Now that Romney’s out there’s not much point in repeating all the text that’s been written about his flip-floppery and opportunist politics.  And Huckabee’s got no chance of winning the nomination.  None at all.  Although I must admit I love his idea of shutting down the IRS and switching to consumption taxes.

Yes folks, once again we’ve got lousy choices before us.  But as H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

We’re going to get it good and hard this year.  Again.

Technorati Tags: Presidential election, Democrats, John Kerry, John Edwards, Bush/Cheney, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Republican, 44th President, Bill Clinton, GOP, Jeb Bush, John McCain, evangelicals, Ronald Reagan, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, H.L. Mencken

I’ve been saying for a long time that the British have had a much more enlightened conception of Al Qaeda than the US. Well, now it’s official.

“The words ‘war on terror’ will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

“Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless ‘death cult.’”

The story goes on to say, in reference to the most recent terrorist activity in the UK:

“’The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,’ Macdonald said. ‘They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.’”

Yup. That’s it. The folks who flew planes into the World Trade Center in NY on 9/11/01 were criminals, not soldiers. You cannot fight criminals with an army. You fight them with law enforcement - investigation, evidence gathering, arrests, prosecution and incarceration. And by calling these people what they are - fanatics, narcissists, murderers and criminals - you give them their proper status. By referring to them in any sort of context of warfare you elevate their importance in the world and dignify what they’re doing.

Maybe someone in the Democrats’ camp will pick this one up and run with it. We can only hope.

Technorati Tags: the British, Al Qaeda

Bill Maher’s got it nailed here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qkhd1bCb534 

Technorati Tags: Bill Maher