Framed

Equivalently Orwellian

Intelligence

It's gratifying but (sadly) surprising to hear the Democratic Presidential candidate saying what us crazy liberal bloggers have been saying for years:

"Now in their attempt to distort my position, Senator McCain’s campaign has said I want to pursue a law enforcement approach to terrorism. This is demonstrably false, since I have laid out a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy that includes military force, intelligence operations, financial sanctions and diplomatic action. But the fact that I want to abide by the United States Constitution, they say, shows that I have a “pre-9/11 mindset.”

Well I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let’s talk about 9/11.

The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors – the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we’d be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.

Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership – the people who murdered 3000 Americans – have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism."

On a deeper level, this is a fine example of what I have come to like to much about Obama: his willingness to treat the electorate like grown-ups.  That trait was evident in his speech about race and Reverend Wright, in the creation of his Fight the Smears website, and in his calling the various campaign tempests about flag pins and bowling scores "distractions" to which the American people will not succumb this time around.  Too often, Democratic politicians have been afraid to try to argue the facts of 9/11 to the electorate.  Many of them didn't trust the people could keep Osama and Saddam straight in their minds; others feared sounding pedantic.  Without talking down to people, Obama puts his faith in people's intelligence.  How refreshing.

Good-Natured

What a wonderful election this is going to be.

So full of good-natured political humor.

Dehydrated Babies!

Just add hot water.

I think Senator McCain is confused again.

Veepstakes

Sam Nunn?  Ugh.  A 70 year old conservative Democrat. A board member of Chevron and GE.  In favor of limiting death penalty appeals and against allowing gays in the military.  A one-trick foreign policy pony.  Surely, we can do better than that.

The Man

In a short article about Hollywood's depictions of African American presidents, CNN mentions one of my favorites but gets the plot wrong:

In "The Man," James Earl Jones receives the big gig after the entire cabinet perishes in a series of freak accidents.

Wrong.  A more accurate plot summary reads as follows:

When the President and Speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse, and the Vice-President declines the office due to age and ill-health, Senate President pro tempore Douglas Dilman (James Earl Jones) suddenly becomes the first black man to occupy the Oval Office.

The book from which the movie was derived was written by Irving Wallace in 1964 (!) and was one of the many potboilers I devoured in junior high.  I think I'll dig it out and give it another read.  The climax of the book occurs when a white woman--the daughter of a U.S. Senator--accuses Dilman of raping her.  Dilman is impeached and tried by the Senate, which acquits him by one vote, that vote being cast by the accuser's father who is forced to admit that his daughter is mentally unstable and has fabricated the rape story.

The book had everything an adolescent political junkie like the twelve year old me could want.  Constitutional arcana about the line of Presidential succession.  Racist southern Congressmen.  Sex and direct allusions to the age-old white man's fear of the black man's sexual potency.  Parallels to the Senate trial of Andrew Johnson.  Backroom political plotting.  And above all, an antiracist moral that left me enthusiastically open to the idea of an African American one day becoming President.

One of the assumptions Wallace made in the book was that certain elements of society would stop at nothing to oppose a man of color's assumption of the Oval Office.  They would draw on the crudest retrograde racial stereotypes, wrap them in a thin veneer of legality, and deploy them shamelessly.

44 years after Wallace wrote the novel, I wonder how far we've come.  That Barack Obama stands at the brink of the Presidency through election, rather than through multiple vacancy in the line of Presidential success, is a testament to our progress.  It would have been completely unrealistic in 1964 for Wallace to posit a situation where a man of color gains the the nomination of one of the two major American political parties.  He was constrained to place his character in the Oval Office by happenstance.

On the other hand, the racist, atavistic attitudes Wallace depicts are still very much with us.  I'm thinking of

--the video clip of an older white woman in West Virginia saying she didn't believe in putting a black man on top;

--the cutesy confusion by the right-wing media of Obama and Osama and the harping on Barack's middle name;

--the paranoid insistence that Obama (unlike, say, McCain) produce an American birth certificate to prove he is a native born citizen and therefore Constitutionally eligible to run;

--the suggestion that a hypersexualized Obama copped a public feel of his wife's ass just after giving her the old "terrorist fist bump";

--the repeated attempts to link Obama to angry, violent, anti-white radicals;

--the revolting description on Fox News of Michelle Obama as Barack's "baby mama," a term linking the Obamas to ghetto culture that casts them both as promiscuous and sexually irresponsible;

--the pathetic attempts by attention seekers (much like the pathetic attention-seeking Senator's daughter in The Man) that Obama has had gay sex with them.

Sad to say, none of these developments would have seemed out of place to Irving Wallace back in 1964.

Worst

What are the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of the country?

Scott v. Sanford, which upheld African American slavery?

Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the separate-but-equal doctrine?

Korematsu v. U.S., which OK'd internment camps for citizens of Japanese ancestry?

Bowers v. Hardwick, which approved the criminalization of sex between consenting adults?

Bush v. Gore, which usurped both voters' and states' rights to elect a President?

Tough to say.  But to these undistinguished examples of jurisprudence, John McCain would add Boumediene v. Bush, the recently-decided case that upheld Guantanamo detainees' right to habeas corpus:

John McCain weighed in on the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the rights of Guantanamo Bay prisoners to challenge their detention in U.S. courts at a town hall meeting Friday, calling the 5-4 decision “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Consider that for a moment.  This decision, which gives people who were scooped up by the military in the confusing wake of the ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan the chance to be heard by a court and to challenge their summary designation as "enemy combatants."  It gives these people access to The Great Writ, the  legal procedure that has been the very cornerstone of Anglo-American civil liberties for the last 700 years.

To John McCain, though, that prospect is worse than permitting slavery, worse than racial separation, worse than interning people in camps based on their ancestry, worse than governmental intrusion into people's most intimate personal lives, worse than having a court pick a President.  That's how much the possibility that just maybe, in some cases, the government accidentally picked up innocent men along with the guilty, seems to derange him.

Wow.

Veto the Brewskis?

Yesterday:

[A] misreading of the teleprompter led McCain to sound a little bit more like a teetotaler fraternity president than a presidential candidate. Speaking about his use of the veto pen to eliminate wasteful spending, he declared, "I will veto every single beer, um, bill with earmarks."

Today:

All part of Obama's effort to connect with white, working-class voters.

Pro Shop

It's a campaign!

It's a pro shop!

It's a campaign!

It's a pro shop!

No, wait--you're both right: it's a campaign and a pro shop!!

And John Cole has some wicked product reviews.  Read 'em all.

Circus Veep

When she's on, there's no one quite like Camille Paglia:

Hillary for veep? Are you mad? What party nominee worth his salt would chain himself to a traveling circus like the Bill and Hillary Show? If the sulky bearded lady wasn't biting the new president’s leg, the oafish carnival barker would be sending in the clowns to lure all the young ladies into back-of-the-tent sword-swallowing. It would be a seamy orgy of scheming and screwing. Hillary could never be content with second place. But neither could an alpha male like Obama. The vice-president should be an accomplished but subordinate personality. An Obama-Hillary ticket might tickle party regulars, but it would be a big fat minus in the general election. Republicans have shrewdly stockpiled a mammoth arsenal of past scandals to strafe Hillary with. Only a sentimental masochist would want to relive the tawdry 1990s.

I would very much like to have lunch with her someday.  Camille, that is.