cascadian telegrams

hypocrites

gingrich in pearls

...as somebody waggishly tagged Sarah Palin, had her coming out party in St. Paul last night.  Good job reading from that teleprompter.

Now it is time for the press to do it's job and ask her some serious questions about her record, allegations of corruption, what her specific ideas are about what she would do in office, etc.  For example:  What exactly did you do with all that money for the 'Bridge to Nowhere' that you claim to have prevented?  The money (a lot of money) was never returned to the Federal Government.

Isn't it ironic that these fucking idiots out in the sticks who drink the deepest from the federal trough are the same ones who gleefully launch vitriol at the federal government?  Irony is apparently too subtle for them.

Of course, Palin and her ilk have no ideas of the thoughtful variety.  I suppressed the gag reflex and watched the video of her acceptance speech.  It was pure red meat politics for the audience wingnuts, and it had zero substance. 

The thing that surprises me most about Palin is her incredible arrogance (arrogance and stupidity make for a bad combination) and the cynicism of the McCain campaign who apparently believe that (a) she and Obama and equivalent, or worse, that her record is superior and (b) women are stupid enough to vote for her even though her political beliefs are somewhere to the right of Pat Buchanan.

The selection of Palin really tells you everything you need to know about McCain:From Time/Joe Klein:

Both the major-party candidates for President have now made their first major decision — on a running mate — and I can't remember a year when the selections were more revealing about the character of the candidates. What we have is a choice between a conservative and a radical.

The conservative is Barack Obama. He is a careful man, perhaps to a fault. His vice-presidential selection process was quiet, orderly and comprehensive. The selection of Joe Biden was no great surprise — he added experience to the ticket, a reliable loyalist and gleeful attack dog, a working-class Roman Catholic with a terrific personal story. The process was in keeping with the rest of Obama's candidacy: he has taken no great risks. His policy positions are carefully thought out and eminently reasonable, reflecting the solid middle ground of a Democratic Party that is more united on substance than I've ever seen it.

This small-c conservatism is, in part, a calculation. Obama doesn't want to seem angry or threatening, for obvious reasons. But it is also a reflection of who he really is: a fellow who does not like to disappoint anyone, who is obsessed with finding common ground. That may be a great advantage in a President at this ugly moment in our history — but I would feel more comfortable with Obama if he took an occasional play from John McCain's book of partisan transgressions and gored some Democratic oxen. It would be nice if he, say, challenged the teachers' unions, which didn't support him anyway and whose work rules choke out any chance of creative experimentation in the public-school system. Or if he stood against the atrocious Farm Bill, which spreads unnecessary fiscal fertilizer upon an already profitable industry. Or if he didn't feel the need to promise a tax cut to 95% of American families.

But Obama's weakness for undue prudence seems downright virtuous compared with the recklessness that McCain showed in choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. He had months to make this choice, but he allowed it to come down to a chaotic scramble in the last week — a reaction, it seems, to the fact that the Republican Party elders had vetoed his first two choices, Senator Joe Lieberman and former governor Tom Ridge. McCain wasn't going to give the bosses the choice they wanted — Mitt Romney — and he cast about, deciding on Palin, an occasional maverick, at the last minute. He had never worked with the governor. He had spoken to her a few times. His team, it now seems clear, had not vetted her very well. In her first appearance alongside McCain, she claimed to oppose the "bridge to nowhere," that Alaskan icon of pork mythology, but she had supported the bridge until it was clear that the hullabaloo would prevent it from being built.

As the week progressed, it became apparent that Palin stood diametrically opposed to McCain on issues large and small. She passed a windfall-profits tax on the oil companies — the very sort of tax that McCain excoriated Obama for favoring — which successfully swelled the coffers of the Alaskan treasury. She didn't believe global warming was a man-made phenomenon; McCain had confronted Republican orthodoxy on that issue — boldly, at first, and timidly more recently.

Palin was a blatant porker when she was mayor of Wasilla, hiring a lobbying firm to rake in the projects; she was close to the corrupt megaporker Senator Ted Stevens, a frequent McCain adversary and champion of the mythic bridge. Rather than putting "country first," her husband had been a member of a local secessionist fringe group called the Alaskan Independence Party, whose slogan is "Alaska first," and Palin apparently attended or spoke at several of the group's meetings. Her lack of interest in foreign policy and national security was the opposite of McCain's obsession with such issues. She called the Iraq war a "task that is from God."

Indeed, it seemed Palin and McCain held common ground on only two high-profile issues — an admirable rebelliousness when it came to their party's hierarchy and their opposition to abortion rights. Given the fact that McCain's top two choices for Vice President, Lieberman and Ridge, favored abortion rights, it would not be unfair to conclude that McCain's devotion to this issue was more political than personal.

The Palin selection — peremptory, petulant — was another example of McCain's preference for the politics of gesture over the politics of substance, as is his sudden fondness for oil exploration ("Drill here, drill now.") and hair-trigger bellicosity abroad (Syria, Iran, Russia). His lack of interest in actual governance is disappointing; his aversion to contemplation seems truly alarming. He has done us all a favor with this pick: he has shown us exactly what sort of President he would be.

vote for pedro

wherein John McCain jumps the shark

unafraid

Is the word that springs to mind as Barack Obama delivers a great acceptance speech in Denver and becomes the first-ever black nominee for President of the United States.  (click picture for speech).

from dailyKos:

Gay marriage, guns, abortion, social security, and more. When you touch the third, fourth, fifth and six rails of American politics in your acceptance speech, that's gutsy. And brilliant.

This is muscular liberalism, and a man with righteous anger at the abuses of the last eight (nay, 30) years:

This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.

We're a better country than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment that he's worked on for 20 years and watch as it's shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty...

... that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.

This moment, this moment, this election is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive.

Sullivan, as ever, says it better than I:

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn't shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Above all, he took on national security - face on, full-throttle, enraged, as we should all be, at how disastrously American power has been handled these past eight years. He owned this issue in a way that no Democrat has owned it since Kennedy. That's a transformative event. To my mind, it is vital that both parties get to own the war on Jihadist terror and that we escape this awful Rove-Morris trap that poisons the discourse into narrow and petty partisan abuse of patriotism. Obama did this tonight. We are in his debt.

Look: I'm biased at this point. I'm one of those people, deeply distressed at what has happened to America, deeply ashamed of my own misjudgments, who has shifted out of my ideological comfort zone because this man seems different to me, and this moment in history seems different to me. I'm not sure we have many more chances to get off the addiction to foreign oil, to prevent a calamitous terrorist attack, to restore constitutional balance in the hurricane of a terror war.

I've said it before - months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

Personally I keep reflecting back to the newspaper editor in Iowa, back when this all began:

(we) are about the select the smartest person in the room.

History is being made.

 

Crouching amid the Tennessee delegation on the floor of the stadium, I noticed him, this tall black man standing behind me. His face was as broad as his shoulders. And as Barack Obama finished his speech, as fireworks shot off and red white and blue confetti fell, tears rolled down his cheeks.
What emotions are running barreling through right now?

“So much, I see so many things,” replied Keith Norman in a rich baritone. “I see my earliest dreams as a child. I see a man being given a fair chance because of his talent.”

His chest heaves; he is looking at the stage and the Mr. Obama hugging his wife and his two daughters.

“I see his faith in God. And I see the hand of God,” he said, “And it makes my heart glad.”

A friend, a barrel chested black man in a black Obama beret comes over and puts his arm around the midsection of Mr. Norman and asks another man to take a picture of them together.

Both men are crying and smiling.

Run, Barack, Run!

And godspeed to ye.  You won't arrive a minute too soon.

obama in berlin

a good speech.

 

upon reflection, Obama hit some high notes and performed ably, but much of his rhetoric about "terrorism" and the US is designed for the domestic audience and falls on deaf ears in Europe.  Unfortunately one cannot run for high office in the US these days without including some of that rhetoric.

reich endorses obama

former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich endorses Obama because he's disgusted with the Clinton Campaign's attacks.  He wouldn't endorse on Stephen Colbert's show, though:

Stephen Colbert does a wrap up from Tuesday’s Semi-super Tuesday primaries and wishes his buddy a Huckabye-bye.

Robert Reich, former Clinton Labor Secretary, appears to give his enthusiastic endorsement of the democratic process and to dismiss Colbert’s charge that the Democratic party is destroying itself from within, but just won’t give an enthusiastic endorsement of a specific candidate, no matter how many ways Colbert tries to wheedle it out of him.

   SC: Are you endorsing Hillary Clinton?

   RR: No, I decided not to endorse this round.

   SC: So, you’re endorsing Barack Obama?

   RR: No, I’m not going to endorse anybody. Because I’ve been a friend of Hillary...

   SC: But you’re leaning, you’re leaning towards Barack Obama...

   RR: ...for so many years, I don’t want to endorse anybody, I think that would be inappropriate.

   SC: Okay, let me put it this way: if we were at a restaurant together and the waiter brought around the dessert cart, and the choice was ladyfingers or Black Forest cake, which way do you think you’d lean?

   RR: Quite seriously, either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would make a great president.

   SC: Let me put this a different way. If I were a waiter and I were to offer you two different slices of pizza, and one was half-Hawaiian and you weren’t entirely sure what it was going to taste like. And the other was plain with cheese and had been under a heat lamp for 35 years, I mean, it had seen everything. Which would you go for?

   RR: I don’t think I’d be terribly excited about either of those slices.

   SC: Which movie would you rent? "Big Momma’s House" or "Medea’s Family Reunion"? Be careful, they are both about strong women who are actually black men.

   RR: Um, gosh. I think I’d try both of them out.

tell 'em, brother!

I was feeling down about the drumbeat of attacks on Obama's "bitter" comments from both John McCain and Hillary Clinton (interestingly, and maybe predictably, their responses were nearly identical, except McCain didn't go on about how he shot ducks as a kid).  Here's the actual quote:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

but one of the great things about Obama is his ability to cut through political noise, and he responded ably and truthfully.  Andrew Sullivan, as usual, says it better than me:

"I'm not betting against him. You know why? He's not afraid. And by jettisoning fear as the lodestar of liberalism, he is doing us all a favor, right and left. Man, he cheers me up."

Hear, hear.  And here's the actual response:

says it all..

via Miami Herald

obama and the phobocracy (michael chabon)

I have friends -- people who ought to know better -- who, with every negative press release, or fox news bullshit, or whatever -- immediately start wringing their hands and writing Obama's political epitaph.  Don't believe it:  he can take a punch, and the democrats have enough power to absorb all the crap and still win this election cycle.

Michael Chabon nails it:

Oh, sure, most of these people tell me they would like to see Obama become president. No question, he comes off as at once brilliant and sensible, vibrant and measured, engaged and engaging, talented, forthright, quick-witted, passionate, thoughtful and, as with all remarkable people whom experience has taught both the extent and the bitter limits of their gifts, reasonably humble. In a better world, people tell me, in theory, sure, having a president like Barack Obama sounds great. But not, you know, for real. Not in the base, corrupt, morally spent, toxic and reeling rats' nest that we like to call home. Things are so bad we just can't afford to waste our votes, people tell me, on some fantasy super-president with magical powers. We need someone electable, someone, as I have been told repeatedly in the past year, who can win.

Of course this misses the point; it misses all kinds of points. In a better world, if there were such a thing (and so far there never has been), we would not need a president like Obama as badly as we do. If there were less at stake, if our democracy had not been permitted, indeed encouraged, to sink to its present degraded and embattled condition not only by the present administration but by a fair number of those people now seeking to head up the next one, perhaps then we could afford to waste our votes on the candidate who knows best how to jigger, to manipulate and to conform to the vapid specifications of the debased electoral process it has been our unhappy fate to construct for ourselves.

Because ultimately, that is the point of Obama's candidacy -- of the hope, enthusiasm and sense of purpose it inspires, yes, but more crucially, of the very doubts and reservations expressed by those who pronounce, whether in tones of regret, certainty or skepticism, that America is not ready for Obama, or that Obama is not ready for the job, or that nobody of any worth or decency -- supposing there even to be such a person left on the American political scene -- can be expected to survive for a moment with his idealism and principle intact.

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

Since I started talking and writing about Obama I have come to see that this ruling fear, and nothing else, lies at the back of every objection or reservation people raise or harbor regarding the man and his candidacy.

Fear whispers to us that white voters have a nasty tendency to tell pollsters, friends and neighbors that they support an African American candidate, then go into the voting booth and let the fear known as racism pull the lever.

Fear tells us that ugliness, rage and brutality are the central facts of human existence, that decency and tolerance are luxuries on whose altar our enemies will be only too happy to sacrifice us.

It is through our fear of falling prey to the calamity and misadventure from which the media promise faithlessly to protect us -- a fear manufactured and sold by the media themselves -- that we accept without question the media-borne canard (tainted, in my view, by a racism as insidious as any that hides behind the curtains of voting booths) that Barack Obama, a seasoned and successful 46-year-old husband and father of two, a man sweeping into the prime of his life with all his sails and flags unfurled, is too young and inexperienced for a job that demands vitality and flexibility and that, furthermore, has made nonsense of glittering resumes, laughingstocks of practiced old hands and, in a reverse of Popeye's old trick, ravenous alligators out of years of accumulated baggage.

Fear and those who fatten on it spread vile lies about Obama's religion, his past drug use, his views on Israel and the Jews. Fear makes us see the world purely in terms of enemies and perils, and leads us to seek out the promise of leadership, however spurious it proves to be, among those who speak the language of that doomed and demeaning, that inhuman view of the world.

But the most pitiable fear of all is the fear of disappointment, of having our hearts broken and our hopes dashed by this radiant, humane politician who seems not just with his words but with every step he takes, simply by the fact of his running at all, to promise so much for our country, for our future and for the eventual state of our national soul. I say "pitiable" because this fear of disappointment, which I hear underlying so many of the doubts that people express to me, is ultimately a fear of finding out the truth about ourselves and the extent of the mess that we have gotten ourselves into. If we do fight for Obama, work for him, believe in him, vote for him, and the man goes down to defeat by the big-money machines and the merchants of fear, then what hope will we have left to hold on to?

Thus in the name of preserving hope do we disdain it. That is how a phobocracy maintains its grip on power.

To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.

And when we all wake up on Nov. 5, 2008, to find that we have made Barack Obama the president of the United States, the world is already going to feel, to all of us, a little different, a little truer to its, and our, better nature. It is part of the world's nature and of our own to break, ruin and destroy; but it is also our nature and the world's to find ways to mend what has been broken. We can do that. Come on. Don't be afraid.

Obama and Race

Wow.  The best speech in a generation on race in America.  Excerpt:

"We can accept the politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism," he said. "We can tackle race only as spectacle -- as we did in the OJ trial -- or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina -- or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies."

Obama said we can move in that divisive and tired direction as a nation and as a people, or we can choose a new path that seeks out wherever possible our common interests and our common fate. "I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation -- the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election."

 

You can see it here and read some reviews here.  The NYT called it his 'Profile in Courage', harkening directly back to Kennedy.

There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.

Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better.

It may be hard for people outside of the US (or people who didn't grow up in a racially-mixed area) to understand how emotional the issue of race is for many in this country.  It is hard to have a discussion of race without surfacing some of that emotion.  And especially for politicians, it is the "third rail":  the electrified topic that no one, usually, dares to touch.

But not only did Obama 'go there', he did it with grace, clarity and wisdom.  I'm so proud to be a supporter of his candidacy.  He has the potential to be one of the finest presidents in our history.

Andrew Sullivan, as usual, puts it best:

I have never felt more convinced that this man's candidacy - not this man, his candidacy - and what he can bring us to achieve - is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man's faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.

I'm not a Christian (wrt the metaphysics at least) but I have to say: Right on.  Run, Barack, Run!