November 2009 Archives

Beat em' when they're down and beat em' again for good measure before they can get up. The beat down supposedly is not the American way of dealing with those who are down. The ground rules radically changed the moment Tiger Woods did life threatening damage to a tree and a fire hydrant. With that the beat down started with a vengeance. No matter that the only body damage done was to Woods. There was no allegation or hint of drugs or alcohol. No matter that that the law did not compel Woods to talk to police just to provide his license, registration and proof on insurance. No matter that he publicly accepted responsibility for whatever damage he caused, called the gossip "malicious," and pleaded for the media and public to respect his privacy.

None of this has mattered. It's irrelevant not because a sex, celebrity gossip, rumor and innuendo starved and obsessed mainstream media salivates at the prospect of scandal and titillation at the mishaps of celebrities. Nor have Woods' pleadings that the accident is a non-issue been sloughed off because he is one of the sports world's most bankable, best known noblesse oblige goody two shoes role model for the sporting world.

The truth is that the Tiger Woods beatdown began ages ago. The whispers, innuendoes, and back biting began the instant that he exploded on the golf scene. He wasn't black enough. He was too black. He was too arrogant. He was too aloof. He was too selfish. The more green Masters Tounament winners jackets that he donned and world class tournaments he won, and the fatter his bank account grew, the undertow of carping about him continued unabated. There have even been personal and race tinged digs and cracks that golfer Fuzzy Zoeller ("fried chicken") and Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman ("lynch him") made about him.

Woods graciously and diplomatically shrugged off the inanities and kept doing what he does best and that's win tournaments. It didn't stop the gossip mongers. Woods was simply too big, too good, and too rich for the tastes of a wide swath of the public and the celebrity crazed media.

Despite Woods careful and cautious downplay of race, for another swath of the public he was still a black sports icon who dominated what for decades was a gentlemanly, high brow, near sport of kings, white man's game. The price a black sports icon pays for resting on that high perch can be steep. One misstep and he or she can become the instant poster child for all that's allegedly wrong with celebriity, sport and society.

There are two reasons for that. When Woods tore up the greens he became the gatekeeper for the storehouse of fantasies and delusions of a sports crazed public as well as advertisers, sportswriters, and TV executives in desperate need of vicarious escape, titillation, excitement, and profits. Woods was the ultimate in the sports hero who fulfilled that empty need.

He was expected to move in the rarified air above the fray of human problems while raising society's expectation of what's good and wholesome. He's been handsomely rewarded for fulfilling that fantasy even though as he admitted in his statement about the accident on his website tigerwoods.com, he is only human. He reminded the world the obvious. He has the same flaws and foibles as anyone else, and that certainly includes sports icons.

The other reason for the Woods beat down is his fame and fortune. Black super stars cause much media and public hurt when they supposedly betray the collective self delusion of sport as pure and pristine. That stirs even greater jealousy and resentment. That's evident in the constant fan and sportswriter carping about how spoiled, pampered and over paid Woods and black athletes supposedly are. The first hint of any bad behavior by them ignites a torrent of self-righteous columns and commentary on the supposed arrogant, above the law black athlete.

Woods has not had nor will he have a day in court. He hasn't done anything to warrant one. But he squirms on the hook in the other court, the court of public opinion. Many in that court have tried, convicted and sentenced him. His sentence is cruel. That is having to cancel golf tournaments, hearing whispers from sponsors and ad persons about his image, and of course, the drumbeat tabloid gossip. But given who he is the sentence is not unusual. It's called the Tiger beat down.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

The great hope was that President Obama would have the courage and political sense to do what JFK did forty six years ago. Kennedy told the generals no to their demand for escalation in Vietnam. It wasn't easy. The Pentagon had drawn up plans for the massive military ramp up, had an active lobby on Congress and in the defense establishment, and had National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy pounding on Kennedy for escalation. To force Kennedy's hand, the generals dragged their feet, slowrolled," on implementing his directive for a contingency troop withdrawal plan. Despite the backdoor insubordination to an order from their commander-in-chief, Kennedy held firm on withdrawal.
But it took political craft to accomplish his goal. He quietly drew up a plan for withdrawal and then sent his two top military advisors Maxwell Taylor and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on a fact finding tour to publicly confirm that a massive escalation in American troops would be a resounding failure. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt and unpopular, the resistance was well armed, fiercely ideological and battle tested after years of war against the French. The US would have to permanently garrison tens of thousands of troops, at a cost of billions, risk large scale casualties with little hope of victory.

Kennedy did not live long enough to thwart the generals. They got their war. It dragged on for years, cost thousands of American lives, killed and maimed thousands of civilians, reinforced the image of America as a global bully, created massive political chaos at home, and jaded a generation of young persons who now saw the US policy makers as liars and deceivers.
Obama knows this tragic history. He has read many of the books on the Vietnam catastrophe, which tell how the war ripped apart a nation, and totally discredited the once highly popular and promising presidency of LBJ. He's heard from the experts and seen all the polls that show the war is unpopular.
For a brief moment in September it appeared that Obama's dither on Afghan troop escalation might be a JFK moment. The right elements were in place to turn his dither into a no to the generals on escalation. Polls showed that Americans were opposed to escalation. The overwhelming majority of Democrats openly voiced opposition to war funding increases and escalation. A number of military and foreign policy experts said the war was unwinnable and told him why. With public worry and unease rising over the economy, and an unfinished health care reform battle, escalation seemed even more absurd.
During the campaign much was made of the Obama-JFK comparison. Both were young, dynamic, inspired hope, and once elected immediately faced a military and foreign policy crisis that forced Kennedy and now Obama to weigh pressure from the Pentagon to expand a war. In JFK's case the immediate crisis was the Cuban Missile episode. The story is well known. The generals pushed hard for a quick strike against Russian missiles, and a bellicose warning to the Soviet Union that if they responded, the USSR would be obliterated. Kennedy rejected both.

The U.S.-Soviet stand down was brokered through back channel talks initiated by Robert Kennedy with the Soviet ambassador to the U.S. After they hammered out the bare details of the agreement Robert Kennedy and other senior advisors urged Kennedy to finally approve the deal. Kennedy choose diplomacy, embargo, containment of Cuba, beefed up military aid and assistance to Latin American governments, and counterinsurgency against guerrilla threats to counter communist backed insurgency in Latin America, over direct US military intervention.
Kennedy had one major advantage over Obama. He did not inherit a full blown war. When he took office US military involvement in Vietnam was fleeting. There were less than 1000 military advisors in the country, and fewer than ten Americans had been killed in combat related action. To most Americans, Vietnam then was merely a name on the map. The military and foreign policy issues involved in the prolonged fighting between the Vietnamese and French, and increasingly the Americans, were barely known, and even less understood.
The public was not asked to make a leap of faith that an untested president could handle a war crisis. But surprisingly Kennedy did. The situation Obama faces with Afghanistan is the opposite of what Kennedy faced. There's the depth of American military involvement, commitment, and the entrenched thinking that Afghanistan is the front line in the war on terrorism. Obama shares this thinking with the generals. This makes it even less likely that he would defy them and chart a course that relies solely on diplomacy, containment, partnerships with foreign allies, and Afghan governmental reforms, and Afghan security training and overhaul, in place of troop escalation to attain his goals.
JFK opted to take this course to deal with Cuba and Vietnam. Obama should take the same course with Afghanistan. If he did it would be his JFK moment. But don't expect it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Imagine the all too imaginable and there had been an attempt on President Obama's life. Since threats to Obama are 400% higher than against any other president, you'd think security would be pretty tough. You'd be wrong. Party crashers got in, got past the Secret Service, the social secretaries and got their hands and arms around Rahm Emmanuel and snuggled up to Vice President Joe Biden.

We are in a tricky place. We cannot ignore ethnicity and religion and yet we know that this has had very bad and dangerous consequences in the past. We cannot pretend to be truly blind to religion and ethnicity, because lying isn't helpful, and yet, nor can we make legal the different treatment of people by such reasons. What is clear and, at least to me, unambiguous, is that we cannot fix or therapize this dilemma without talking about it openly and honestly.

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

I would be happy to leave God out of this. I would be happy even to leave out arguments about who got there first and has maintained a presence. We, in fact, do not go over these issues with other states. We're not giving America back to Native Americans. The Anglos are out of luck in England. I don't fancy the chances of the Berbers in getting North Africa back from the Arabs or the Shiah Aluwites giving Syria to the majority Sunni Arabs.

This is not playing out in anyone's interests. The Palestinians are not getting the state that was within their reach. Israel is not getting peace. The demographic bomb may take peace, democracy and a two state solution off the table. I might agree with Rob and Thomas Freedman that it's time for America to pull back and make the two sides do something instead of depending on us. As tempting as that may sound, this was the George W Bush policy for 7 years and didn't work. But then, what has?

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Jonathan and Gail-Tzipporah are concerned that a critical mass of Palestinians isn't serious about peace with Israel. They may be right. I spoke to a Palestinian college student in New Jersey recently who said a two-state solution would be wrong, because only a return to her family's pre-1948 home would be meaningful. Anything else in her mind was tantamount to American blacks making peace with slavery.

I told her she was nuts, because she was facing a losing battle and should move on. She said she'd rather lose while fighting the right battle than win while fighting the wrong one. I worried for our world.

I frankly think most people in that part of the world are unreasonable when they list out reasons why "we were here first" or "God prefers us to them." But this is the dilemma I'd love to hear my FF colleagues address. If the status quo endures, Palestinians and Arabs in the disputed and occupied territories will soon enough outnumber those who want a "Jewish state." What then? Can you afford to say, "They get no nation because they don't deserve it"? Do you need to force a nation on them anyway, so that the Israeli democracy isn't rigged in favor of those who may want to abolish it?

And... if all this is such an intractable mess that will only get more demographically and politically and religiously messy, then shouldn't we as good Americans get the heck out of this rotten, crazy conflict?

There was never doubt the moment General Stanley McChrystal flatly told President Obama last summer that the US must deploy up to 45,000 more troops in Afghanistan that'd he heed his command. The Pentagon had officially spoken through McChrystal. With the rare exception of JFK's pushback against the generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the Pentagon speaks presidents listen. It's been a costly listen. Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, and now Afghanistan has cost countless America lives, squandered billions, frayed relations with the European allies, and reinforced the US's global reputation as a swaggering, bombs and bullets first bully. Afghanistan is no exception.

The apparent tussle between Obama and the Pentagon over a massive new troop build-up was never anything more than a game of political timing and numbers. It was simply bad politics to dump nearly 50,000 more troops in the country at a time when polls showed the American public has overwhelmingly soured on the war, and the majority of his base, liberal Democrats and progressives, scream for a withdrawal. With the GOP counterinsurgency gathering a head of steam Obama also cast a nervous eye on the recent off year elections. There was too much uncertainty about how Democrats would fare in state elections A double down on troops at a cost of billions more, and the almost certainty of bigger casualties demanded delay.

But there was no doubt that Obama would up the Afghan ante. This has as much to do with the Pentagon's relentless demand to escalate as with his unshakeable belief that the war can actually be won, no matter the cost.

Obama was willing to stake the credibility of his administration on that even before taking office. In his August 2009 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention, Obama sounded his it's the right time, right place and right war mantra line. "This is not a war of choice. "This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again."

There are of course better options to fight terrorism than a big, costly, and controversial Afghan occupation. Vice President Joe Biden for one urged a drastic scale back of the troop commitment in the country and to concentrate on targeted attacks against Al Qaeda wherever it was found. Biden's pitch for a less costly, more rationale approach to achieving Obama's aims was for the most part ignored.

Obama's buzz words are reforms, and anti-corruption measures, exit strategies, Afghan government, tight afghan security forces, and NATO partnerships. This is part fawn hope and part political script to sell the massive troop build-up to fight an unpopular war. The US hasn't come anywhere close to achieving any of these goals. Pouring 30 to 50,000 more troops in the country won't change that.

Aghanistan is a near impossible war to wage let alone win for reasons that go beyond simply finding a democratic government and shoring up a stable, corruption free governnment. It blends religious fanaticism, medieval beliefs, territorial imperative, and deeply flawed political assumptions about terrorism into a nightmare cauldron. Afghans, whether fighting the British a century ago and later the Russians, waged the wars spurred by a rigid, uncompromising Islamic fundamentalism that reached way beyond the tenets of traditional Islam. God was always on their side.

Even if there were any validity to the fantasy that Afghanistan could be cleared of the Taliban by military action alone, that would hardly end the threat of terrorist attacks. Terrorist groups can easily regroup in a host of other safe havens in places such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, the Sudan, Lebanon, and Iran and continue to receive financial backing through drugs, illicit arms sales, and covert state government backing. Then there are the terror targets themselves.

A study of suicide attacks by Robert Pape of the Chicago Project in 2005, found that almost all terror attacks and targets are aimed at getting the occupying forces to pull their troops out of a disputed territory whether it's Iraq, the West Bank, Israel, or Afghanistan. A bigger US occupation far from diminishing the prospect of more terror attacks assures that there will be more of them with US forces being in the terrorist bulls eye.
Military analysts seem genuinely surprised that the US build-up hadn't achieved the goal of reducing the influence and numbers of Taliban fighters and supporters within Afghanistan and Pakistan and by extension diminishing the threat of more terror attacks. Yet, there is a direct inverse correlation between the military ramp up in rural areas and the ramp up in support for the radicals. The obvious conclusion is that thousands more US troops will stir even greater resistance.

Obama declares that he will finish the job in Afghanistan. But thirty thousand more troops won't guarantee a finish, just a bigger bill, more lives at risk, and a potential political disaster. No matter, Obama's made it official, Afghanistan is now his baby.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

The problem in making peace in the Middle East is neither geographical nor intellectual. Were there a will for peace, both sides know how to carve up the borders and exchange land in Israel for West Bank towns. They know how to tie Gaza and the West Bank together with a land corridor (If the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank really wanted either peace or to be linked to Hamas controlled Gaza). Were there a will for peace--and the ability of a Palestinian leader to deliver peace (and not wake up dead in the morning)--even Jerusalem is not beyond our ability to have cooperative ownership of holy sites.

Yes, the optics of the settlements are not helpful, but what reason is there for Israel to be more helpful in a world that wants to deny its existence as a Jewish state? The issues are not insurmountable given a will for peace. Mubarak shows what the real problem is, but does his outrageous demand get press coverage and appropriate outrage? You know the answer.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

There are those who get upset just from looking in another person's direction. The mere mention of the other guy's name, the sight of his hair is enough to send them into a tailspin and launch them into convulsions.

And so it goes with the Palestinians and the Israelis. Responding to Israel's building of 900 settlements in Gilo, a neighborhood in east Jerusalem, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that he is dismayed because the settlements will make peace more difficult.

If that's what he and the rest of the Obama administration believe, then they might want to consider another vocation. The truth be told, the sight of an Israeli nose hair, the sound of the notes of a piano rising from an apartment in Haifa, the smell of their hummus or tehina on pita bread is enough to send the average Palestinian into a fit.

It is not the building of Jewish settlements that they so object to; it's the fact that the Jewish state is still there and after all they have done to try and destroy it. They have waged wars; they have lobbed rockets into Jewish neighborhoods, they have strapped bombs to themselves and their children, and the Jewish state and the Jews are still there because we have to be. After else, where else are we going to go? What else are we going to do? We just don't up and die that easily.

The only thing that is going to make the Arabs, the Palestinians and most of the world happy is when Israel and the rest of the Jewish community fold up like a makeshift tent and ride off like a grain of sand in the desert. And that just isn't going to happen.

The universal wisdom is that there is absolutely no chance that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can get anything but a swift conviction and the death penalty. The wisdom also says that it matters not whether the trial is in New York, another American city, or on the moon. No jury anywhere will be fair, impartial and unbiased. The memory and passions of 9/11 still rage at white hot temperatures. They all could be wrong.
KSM wins no matter what a jury decides. KSM's attorneys will turn the trial into a bully pulpit to expose every sundry, despicable, and patently illegal tactic that the US has dumped into and dug out of its bag of dirty tricks against suspected terrorists--illegal detention, kidnapping, torture, isolation, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, beatings, forced confessions, coercion, and suppression of evidence.
His conviction will be promptly appealed. This will give KSM another chance to publicly dredge up every dirty trick the US used to get him into the docket in the first place. None of this has even the remote bearing on whether he is the mastermind as charged behind the 9/11 attacks. It just gives the government a chance to make an unwelcome revisit of the unprecedented pain and suffering that 9/11 caused. Worse, it gives a terrorist, or in this case a suspected terrorist, a platform to make himself appear a victim of a vengeful government's thirst for revenge that tosses out all rules of constitutional law and conduct to wreak that revenge.

The release of the U.S Preventive Services Task Force's recommendation to curtail routine annual mammogram screenings for breast cancer is terrible news for nearly everyone--except the insurance companies. Eliminating annual screening for women in their 40s and making screening every other year for women in their 50s is ill-conceived and ill-considered. Thousands of women will die needlessly. Many will die directly because their cancers were not found early, and more will likely die because this is a cultural change.

This is a gift to those opposed to true health care reform. This is a panel that dealing only in numbers and not seeing the lives of women, releases its recommendations blind to the consequences of their report. Thinking like actuaries and not human beings, while denying that they essentially did a cost benefit analysis (which is what they did) they decided that detecting one cancer out of 1,300 tests (women in their 50s) was worth doing, but that detecting one cancer out of 1,800 tests (women in their 40s) was not. Tell that to their faces or through the tears of their husbands, partners, children and parents.

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

I know that I'm considered a reliable supporter of President Obama, having been in his camp since before Iowa. However, I think he and Atty. General Holder are wrong to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his band of plotters and murderers here for trial in our criminal justice system.

We need to designate Al Qaeda as the equivalent of a state actor and try those who plot and plan, who fight us on far-away battlefields, as prisoners of war and as potential war criminals.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Some have speculated that an upside of terrorist trials in New York is that the accused will lose their aura of super-villainy amidst the drudgery of the American judicial system. That is good both for Americans and for those who the terrorists seek to recruit. Their "cosmic war" would seem a good deal less glamorous.

But a friend offered me an intriguing insight into those Americans who decry the idea of terrorists being tried by our American justice system instead of secretive military tribunals: they trust the latter more than the former. They believe the former is more capricious and unreliable. They prefer the values of the military more than that of a jury of Americans. Given that our military is supposed to be giving their lives specifically to defend things such as our justice system, that's a bit ironic.

When the electoral public elected the Obama Administration under the moniker of change, they did not mean the chance to let them lose on the public to do whatever they want. And this applies to their decision to hold the 9/11 terrorist trials in New York City.

First off, former New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, feels that it would be dangerous to hold the trials in New York City because several plots have already been thwarted there, so he feels that it would be too charged and too much like a terrorist diving rod. While his fears may be true, the whole world has become their stomping ground because of our dependence on slick black gold, Texas tea, so any place where the trial was held would likely become a target.

The reason the Obama Administration shouldn't hold the trial in New York City is simply because Giuliani doesn't want them to. The other choice would be Guantanamo Bay, which is where Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and his five cronies will most likely wind up anyway.

Other than that, the place where they had the utter temerity to unleash their plot and take the lives of people who were merely going to work and going about their business is the place where they should be tried. After all, there is something to be said in rising up, looking our perpetrators squarely in the eye and letting them know that they can knock us down but not out.

In September, 2008, Oprah Winfrey was the reigning queen of daytime TV chatter. She flatly said no to any talk about then Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin gracing her set. Oprah made no effort to square having then presidential candidate Obama on her show twice with her cold shoulder of Palin, a woman who made history in her own right by being the first female GOP VP pick, and who seemed like a natural for Oprah's show. And since half of her female audience didn't and don't share her politics, they liked it even less that she was Obama's top TV cheerleader. But Oprah was unfazed by the rage she got from many women at ditching Palin, her attitude was it's my show, and I'll do what I want with it and that means I'll invite who I want on the show.
Oprah didn't need Palin to make her, a show, or ratings. Now, however, it's a different story. Though she's still the reigning queen of daytime TV talk and there are millions who wouldn't dream of ending their day without Oprah, her ratings have plunged. The estimated seven million who view her show is about half of what of the number who watched it a decade ago. She's even negotiating to move her show to cable in a couple of years. That's wise, bail from network TV while the money and her name and allure are still there. The relentless war for ratings makes Palin a hot property, and her much buzzed book, Going Rogue, is the hook for the interview.

But there's another reason that Oprah needs to pay back door homage to Palin. Though it sticks in the craw of millions of Palin loathers to admit it, she has a following, a big, and impassioned one. She has greater national political name recognition than any other Republican except McCain. She energizes and rallies the conservatives, and polls say far more Americans self-identify themselves as conservatives than liberals, let alone progressives. Palin's motherly, family values, fundamentalist pitch fascinates even those that personally disdain her. That includes much of the Palin obsessed media. Her politically inept, naivete smacks of a bumbling political innocence that far from being a liability endears her to throngs. This has made her a hot ticket item on the media and on the lecture circuit.

GOP regulars and political pundits routinely laugh her off as a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2012. She's still a favored running joke of late night comics. But this has endeared her to many as a scorned mother-non politician, and that serves to keep her public stock and appeal high.

The irresistible mix of Palin fascination and the sensationalism attached to it draws Oprah to her. Oprah hopes this formula will help push her numbers up. With memories still fresh that Oprah did what she'd never done before and that's not only endorse a presidential candidate, but crusade for him makes the Palin-Oprah talk duet even more tantalizing. Oprah will meticulously observe political decorum with Palin and not mention her unshaken Obama bias. Palin's appearance is billed simply as a talk about her book. But the Oprah-Obama connect will hang heavy in the set air. That's terrific for ratings too; ratings that Oprah can use. Oprah needs Palin for that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Read this. And weep for our nation. Set aside political correctness for just a moment and call this what it is: Terrorism. Cold, fowl terrorism.

It looks like the politically correct brigade is out, and this time they have landed at Brookstone, a gift shop at Boston's Logan Airport.

Peter Vadala, a deputy manager at the store, was their latest casualty. The 24 year-old was tending to his duties when in walked a manager from another store.

"I'm getting married," she said sometime during their conversation.

"Congratulations," said Vadala. "Where is he taking you for the honeymoon?"

"Where is 'she' taking me," the manager corrected.

Vadala, who is a Christian, kept mum, though after repeated references to her impeding nuptials during his shift, he privately told her that thought gay marriage was wrong. After reminding him that it is legal in Massachusetts, she opined with a parting sentiment: "HR, buddy. Keep your opinions to yourself. Get over it." And Vadala was fired.

Had he threatened to kidnap the happy couple, set fire to the hall or make off with the wedding gifts, that would have been one thing. But all he did was exercise his right to free speech and freedom of religion, so he will hopefully sue - and win if nothing else to be a crimp in the seat of the pants of that movement.

Loosely speaking, the manager also missed a chance to make a friend. While I favor a commitment ceremony over gay marriage, there are couples whose weddings I would attend, and it's because they've always been loving, kind and considerate. It's too bad no one thought about that before.

If the shooting at Fort Hood teaches one thing, it is this: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Hassan gave signals early on that he was a few cards short of a deck, meaning that it was merely a matter of time before he did something crazy. In this case, no one should be surprised. Even in medical school, he had problems and needed extra help and supervision. (Bingo and Clue # 1)

In medical school, the students would give a lecture about a topic of their choice on Wednesday afternoons. While others were lecturing about things like new medications and mental illness, Hassan chose to go the political route by telling his fellow classmates about Islam. (Bingo and Clue # 2)

At the end of his psychiatric residency in the military while his classmates were giving presentations related to medicine, Hassan chose Islam and suicide bombers and even said, "It's getting harder and harder for Muslims to justify being in the service when they have to kill their fellow Muslims," and "We love death more than you love life." (Last clues, end of story.)

This is not someone who should have been hoisted onto the public to practice medicine. It should have been the other way around where he is held in observation.

While I agree with Jonathan that it is unfair to lump everyone together and understand Rob's embarrassment, that doesn't mean that doing nothing is an option when the warning bells go off.

My two-year-old nephew Nicholas is as sharp as they come.

He sees a Starbucks logo and immediately says, "Robbie's coffee," recognizing his uncle's favorite brew. He sees a Mercedes logo and says, "Gramma's car."

He saw the Ft. Hood shooter on TV and immediately said to his father, "Robbie!!!"

Really? Is there that much of a resemblance? I guess I should leave extra time to get through airport security tonight....

What does this terror and tragedy mean, and what does it not mean?
(Note: This is a second look at this delicate but important topic)

The shooting rampage at Fort Hood was an act of terror, but we should not feel terrorized or lash out against Muslims. We should also not play either the politically correct card and avoid recognizing that a very small part of Islam is militant and violent or blame everything on Islam. We need to talk straight about this but with information, respect and kindness.

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, key House and Senate Democratic and Republicans, and most importantly the major pharmaceuticals and private insurers know one thing, and they've known it from the start of the health care debate. And that's that the senate not the house will decide what, if any, health care reform plan is finally approved.
The pharmaceuticals and private insurers have repeatedly and forcefully made it clear that they flatly reject a true public option, any enforced restrictions on their right to charge whatever the freight will carry for health care, or dump or summarily exclude anyone who's too sick, poor, or too old from coverage. They also made it abundantly clear that they'll only accept a bill that requires millions to be covered by them at government (taxpayers) expense and that slaps penalties on those who refuse to go along with it.

The full enactment of the main provisions of whatever health care bill is passed won't take place for nearly another decade and that gives private insurers time to hike prices to cover any added costs in policy and coverage changes they must make under reform. They've fielded an army of lobbyists, health insurer flacks, held secret deal cutting meetings at the White House, stuffed millions in the campaign coffers of leading Democratic senators (including one time senator Obama), and poured more millions into ads, mailers, and planted articles to get their way.

The senate, and even more specific, the Senate Finance Committee, has been the target of the insurer's relentless, prolonged, and well-oiled campaign to get the most generous industry health care plan possible, or no plan at all. Their time, effort and money has been well-spent. The finance committee quickly killed the public option, slapped penalties on non-buyers, and imposed no tough and enforced procedures to compel the private insurers to keep their bargain to insure everyone. It did not stamp on tight cost containment measures to insure that private insurers keep their prices down.
Senate leaders did not raise a peep at the crude, naked blackmail threat by America's Health Insurance Plans, the private health insurer's industry group. It publicly waved around a study it commissioned that claimed that private insurers would have to sharply increase the prices families would pay if the house version of the health care reform plan passed.
The actual house vote is far from the great victory that Pelosi and Democratic leaders declared. The Democrats had a crushing majority, had poll after poll that showed the public wants a real public option and full affordable health coverage for all, and no cuts in the Medicare services (the cuts are in the house and senate bills). Yet, the house bill still barely squeaked through and then only after Pelosi and other house liberals shamefully back pedaled and excised abortion coverage from the bill. This all guaranteed that the resistance to the most liberal provisions of the house bill will be even more ferocious in the senate.

Even if none of these factors came into play in the senate, the senate still more often than not has been the graveyard for house passed legislation that the senate considers too liberal, too pro labor, too expansive, too costly, and too non-industry friendly. In the past couple of years the senate has killed house passed legislation on tougher energy standards, scaling back contributions to the IMF, increased education spending, house amendments on Iraq and Afghanistan troop withdrawal and decreased war spending, and immigration and major banking reforms. It bottled up for years the house passed expanded hate crimes bill.

Industry groups dead set against the house bill have one more trump card, and that's the conference committees. The senate can amend, change the language, or red pencil out anything in a house bill it likes. It then tosses it back to the house to amend, change the language or excise things that the senate wants tossed out. The conference committee negotiations on controversial legislation are long, tedious, and drawn out. When or even if agreement is ever reached it then goes back to both the full body of the house and senate for a vote. There's no time frame for completion for any of this. Nor is there any requirement the senate take a final vote. This was the case with other pieces of "landmark" bills the house passed.
The house vote on health care reform was historic only in that one body of congress took the hotly contested first big step toward reform. The senate hasn't spoken. And it, not the house, is the name of the game on health care reform.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

I was in the Midwest yesterday, speaking to a college group about tensions between Muslims and the West, and I argued that Muslims in the U.S. tend to assimilate much more fully than in Europe. A short while later I heard about Nidal Malik Hasan at Ft. Hood. I felt horrified, angered and embarrassed.

Although I come from a Muslim background, I don't pretend to represent Islam, but I care deeply about Muslim family and friends who seek to balance their faith and their love for America. Ft. Hood mocks such attempts at balance.

A few years back, my brother and I penned a piece criticizing xenophobia directed at Muslim-Americans, but we still made it a point to argue that Muslim advocacy organizations such as CAIR "should go further [than just condemning violence], perhaps by establishing philanthropies for communities and families hurt by extremists who have hijacked Islam."

Maybe these groups can begin to put their money where their mouth is, by offering tangible support to families of the shooting victims. Some of those families may angrily reject such aid, because Hasan's act will aggravate latent xenophobia. But still, a steadfast and long-term commitment to such a healing approach represents the generous model of Muhammad at the height of his powers.

Last week the website of the terrorist group," Al Qaeda in Arabia", published an article imploring the faithful to "attack any crusaders wherever you find one of them, like at the airports of the crusader Western countries that participate in the wars against Islam, or in their living compounds, trains etc." The writer, Nasir al-Wahayshi, a native of Yemen, went on, "Jihadists don't need to conduct a big effort or spend a lot of money to manufacture 10 grams of explosive material, and they should not waste a long time finding materials. Simple attacks could be conducted with readily available weapons such as knives, clubs or small improvised explosive devices." Obviously guns also would work.

While understanding the dangers, it is vitally important to our future and our survival that we not demonize a race, religion or people. We may not know how to turn the violent towards peace, but turning the peaceful towards violence, that we know how to do all too well. We do it with violence and scorn, with hatred, distrust and isolation.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

Make no mistake Tuesday's GOP surge was about President Obama. The dumbest thing that progressives, liberal Democrats and much of the media did following Obama's election a year ago was to gloat and smugly declare the GOP dead. The silly line repeated incessantly was that the GOP has been reduced to a dwindling bunch of good ole' boy redneck yahoos in the Deep South. The even sillier line was that the GOP was so backward, discredited and marginalized that it was well on its way to sinking to a fringe party about as popular as the Socialist Labor Party and the IWW. Tuesday's election should have smashed that delusion.

The bad mistake Obama made was to mistake his popularity for support of his policies. Nothing could be further from the truth. Polls repeatedly warned that while a majority of voters still say they personally like Obama, they don't like, or are at best, are deeply ambivalent about his polices. The checklist is endless; his failure to wind down the Iraq War, his threat to escalate the failed, flawed, no win war in Afghanistan, a muddled, patchwork terribly compromised health care reform plan, abysmal failure to rein in Wall Street profiteering, skyrocketing unemployment, bottomless home foreclosures, a stimulus shell-out that hiked the deficit but created few sustained, verifiable, long term jobs.

The even worse mistake was to misread the 2008 presidential election results. Much was made that he got more white votes than John Kerry or Al Gore. That he revved up young whites, and that he totally exorcised race from the campaign. Obama's win supposedly was final proof that America had finally kicked the racial syndrome. This is the stuff of media talk and wishful thinking. Despite a GOP racked by sex and corruption scandals, an anemic presidential opponent, a laughingstock vice presidential candidate, a collapsed economy and an outgoing GOP president with a rating worse than Herbert Hoover's, McCain still crushed Obama by a twelve point spread among white voters.

The route was not just among old, Deep South unreconstructed or latent bigoted white male voters, but in virtually every voter demographic among whites, including a dead heat with Obama among a majority of younger white voters. This doesn't tell the whole story of the sharp racial divide Obama still faces. A sizeable percentage of whites were disgusted enough with Bush's policies to stay home on Election Day, but not disgusted enough with him and his policies to vote for Obama. The Henry Louis Gate's affair and the right's town hall rabble rousing made more whites wary of Obama's policies. Polls after the Gates outburst showed that a majority of whites condemned Obama for backing Gates and even more ominous expressed grave doubts about his policies.
A painful reality is that the crushing majority of whites who oppose Obama or disavow his policies for racial, party, or ideological reasons or personal prejudices, are a solid backbone of the radical right's counter insurgency against him. A cursory glance at the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races showed that except for a handful of counties with the big cities with a majority of young, liberal, and minority voters, the GOP swept all the counties. Even in the hotly contested upstate New York congressional race, that some crow about as a GOP rebuke, it wasn't. Despite the laughingly divided and feuding GOP factions, GOP conservative candidate Doug Hoffman still corralled nearly fifty percent of the vote.

The huge treasure trove of dollars that South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson hauled in after his legendary "you lie" outburst against Obama in the midst of his congressional health care reform talk before Congress, and the off the charts fund raising haul the GOP raked in the past two months, were two two grave warning signs that the GOP is hardly a lifeless corpse.

No, Tuesday's election was about Obama. And the 2010 and 2012 elections will be the same. Progressives, liberal Democrats, and the media are more than foolish to think otherwise.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Democrats lost the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. Certainly not good news for either Democrats or the White House. It is, however, not terrible or catastrophic news. Two highly flawed Democrats lost. Deeds, of Virginia, ran a bad and stridently negative campaign, and Corzine had raised taxes and spent lavishly of his own funds to buy the office.

In some strikingly similar ways both Republicans and Democrats have to wrestle with the same issues of perfection versus disappointment. Both need the passion of their bases without losing the center of the country. Tough stuff.

©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com

The latest snafu started when Dr. Hena Zaki, a Muslim doctor went for a job interview and was told she couldn't wear her headscarf to work at the clinic. Then, being nice, the personnel workers realized it was part of her religion and apologized for it.

And this is why people are always coming over here and trampling all over us because we're always apologizing for something. No one sees anyone trampling over Fidel Castro in Cuba or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. If anything, it's more the other way around and that's because they are both boundaried men who probably never apologized for a thing a day in their lives. If anything, it was probably the other way around. And look at those countries. No immigration problem, no complaints and probably no funnies or humor columns in the magazines and papers, which is why they don't an immigration problem. Those places are about as enticing as gingivitis.

Several years ago, a group of illegal aliens were packed into the back of a truck while the Texas police chased them. The truck careened into a parked car and out the immigrants. After the lengthy hospital stays which the city kindly paid for, the immigrants sued the police and headed back to their countries with enough money to open a town. And it all happened because we were too nice.

Had it been the opposite scenario and the accident occurred in Mexico with Americans on board, they would have been lucky to get a taco platter and a kick in the seat of the pants back to the border...

What that hospital should have done is called that doctor back, said they didn't realize the dress code was violating her religious freedom, begged her not to sue and offered to put her kids through college, buy her a summer home in the Hamptons and pay for a ski trip to Vail.