That’s Not the Fat Lady Singing, That’s John McCain!

That’s not the fat lady singing.  That’s John McCain.

Fat Cats?

A couple of things are on my mind these days.  The first is the Alfred E. Smith charity dinner.  The Second is John McCain’s new war on black and brown people.  The third is what I am going to do about both.

Senator Obama and Senator McCain sat down together once again, Thursday night, after the third debate, to help support a 60-odd year old charity honoring the first Catholic candidate to win the Democratic nomination for president.  Fundraisers are all well and good, but McCain’s first joke was about “Joe the Plumber . . . sign[ing] a lucrative contract with a wealthy couple to take care of all eight of their houses.”  How many people, worrying about their mortgage and their bills, faced with too much month at the end of the money, struggling to cope with the loss of THEIR ONE HOME, thought that was funny?  Senator Obama made a joke about “no expense being spared . . . it must be a dinner for AIG executives,” because those bastards spent half a million dollars on a retreat, complete with spa treatments after they got their $85 million “bailout”, and no one laughed, because that one hit a little too close to home.  And Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and a host of other powerful people laughed and yucked it up.  (Confession time:  I laughed, too.)    I even told my students to watch it, because it was an example of how though these two men are competing against each other, and have said some pretty nasty and insulting things, they can still come together, setting aside their differences for a good cause.

Upon more sober reflection, it began to bother me.  White ties.  Bone china.  Champagne flutes.  I felt like one of those people who talks a good game about helping the less fortunate, but aren’t really working for it, like a voyeur watching the pigs and humans playing poker in Animal Farm.  The whole dinner gave me a squirmy feeling that said, “none of these people really know what struggling is, even if they used to.  Because this show is wrong, even if it’s for a good cause.”  I am supporting Senator Obama for president, but . . . I think he needs to rethink his participation in this one.

Kanye West got some notoriety after President Bush and his cronies f*cked up the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, when he said, “President Bush don’t like black people.”  I’m going one step further:  neither do John McCain and Sarah Palin.  The “war on ACORN” that he’s fighting, to de-legitimize an Obama victory in November, is pre-conditioned on disenfranchising the poor, mostly minority, people that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is working to register and involve in the body politic of the United States.  Much like his tax policies, and his stance on immigration (which isn’t discussed on his website except in the context of  Homeland Security), this latest campaign attack only seeks to disenfranchise citizens who aren’t going to support his candidacy anyway.  By attacking another non-issue, though, he effectively tells citizens who did register with ACORN that they’re suspect, and to people who aren’t political junkies like me, that Obama is doing something wrong even though ACORN is not associated with the Obama campaign.  However, as we’ve come to see in this campaign, facts don’t mean much to Senator McCain and Governor Palin.  As long as they repeat what they want people to believe loud and long enough, they think that citizens will believe it.  Country First?  Apparently not.

And just what am I going to do about these things?  First, I’m going to continue speaking truth to power.  Yes, I support Barack Obama for president, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things I think he needs to reconsider.  I expect McCain to pull stuff like the Smith dinner, but Obama, Clinton, Schumer, the Catholic Church!, all have some explaining to do.  Second, I’m going to march my happy behind right down to 3619 Motor Avenue in Los Angeles, and spend at least 30 minutes a day volunteering for the Obama campaign between now and November 4^th.  I think that the tenor of the campaign says much about the style of governance of the candidate, and by all rights and examples, the choice for me is clear.  Just like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Kansas City Star, and a whole lot of other people and organizations, I am endorsing Barack Obama for president, and I’m going to work to make that happen.  And so should you.

McCain Acorn Fears Overblown

Obama, ACORN, and Voter Registration

ACORN and the FBI

Barack Obama for President

Cross posted at Will Rhodes Portmanteau on October 18, 2008.

Swimming With Sharks

We’re all treading water, just hanging out on the surface, dealing with the shallows, ignorant of the powerful currents roiling beneath our kicking feet.  John McCain is a distraction.  He’s not even a real candidate.  He’s Uncle Fester with a comb-over.  As we swim in this ocean of verbal contortion, misapprehension, lies, silly laughs, and “investigations”, there are monsters lurking below.  Shock Doctrine, Chicago Boys, Reaganites, Milton Friedman disciples, American torturers, people who think that the market is the nirvana, and government is (never thought I’d say this) to quote the other distraction, “the problem.”

My mother-in-law is from Chile.  She came to this country because her husband was tortured and exiled, bringing with her her two children and a socialist ideology that from time to time I argue with to gain more information from someone who actually lived it.  It never dawned on me, though, the connection between her arrival and the shock and awe campaign espoused by John McCain and inflicted on the citizens of Iraq.  Even her posts in response to some blog pieces didn’t enlighten me.  But listening to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, it becomes clearer and clearer why people are screaming about Barack Obama at John McCain rallies – it’s the theatre of the absurd writ large.  It’s Caesar’s “bread and a circus” to keep the rabble distracted while the wolves raid the chicken coop.

Meanwhile, the same people who engineered the overthrow of the government in Chile; who chopped up the public school system in New Orleans after the US government’s failure to act in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; who used the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 to wage an invasion in Iraq and are now lining up Iran in their crosshairs; these same people are waving McCain Palin in our collective face (and if you don’t understand that she is a distraction, stop reading now) in order to keep us from asking what the other hand is doing.

How else to explain the Republican candidates’ continued lies running unchecked?  How else to explain “the Maverick” being the presidential nominee for the Gallant Old Party and hiring the people who ran him out of the primaries eight years ago?  How else to explain a hugely under-qualified sparkly vice-presidential nominee?  How else to explain the privatization of war (Blackwater), education (New Orleans), social security (oops!  That one didn’t go through), healthcare (Senator McCain?)?

This transfer of public money into private hands ($840 billion last week, neh!?) is not accidental.  The same rush to judgment that led to the invasion of a country who had not attacked the United States and to “the rescue plan” is driving McCain supporters to cry in terror over an Obama presidency, and Obama supporters to shiver at the thought of more Abu Ghraibs and Guantanamos and Taxis to the Darkside.  Why is there an army division being deployed inside the United States?

This distraction called John Sydney McCain III is serving a purpose once again – but he’s not serving his country.  Blinded by his own ambition, he’s the clown, the jester, lurching from rally to rally, unsure of what to say or how to say it.  And we are all continuing to tread water, watching his antics, worrying about feloniously ridiculous “character attacks”, battling the flies while the vultures are eating the carcass.  And the powers that be are already setting up the next Allende, with building blocks like the fake ACORN-voter fraud accusations, setting up a question of legitimacy before Senator Obama gets elected.

We need to dive below the surface, realize that supporting hope and change means reading between the attack lines, looking for the undercurrents (like Representative John Lewis) below the rhetoric.  Otherwise, just as we believe we’ve made it to shore, we’ll hear that famous music, and feel the flash of teeth devouring our lower extremities, as we get bitten in the butt.  Just like the invasion of Iraq and Blackwater and Haliburton and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and post-Katrina and (McCain wants to battle Russia?) and the sub-prime mortgage crisis credit crunch $700 billion plus earmarks bailout.  And those same nefarious power brokers will be setting up an Obama presidency to take the fall, or to just fall.

The sharks are swimming below all of us . . .

CIA Tactics Endorsed in Memos

Make-believe Maverick

Biden Says Reaction at Some McCain Rallies ‘Scary’

Charter School’s Big Experiment

The McCain-Palin Lies and the Neil Armstrong Principle

Conservatives against Sarah Palin:  The List is Growing

Brigade Homeland Tour Starts Oct. 1

How McCain Will Steal the Election from Obama (Sort of)

John Lewis Warns McCain: You’re “Sowing the Seeds of Hatred and Division”

Cross-posted at Will Rhodes Portmanteau on October 14, 2008