May 2011 Archives
Sarah Palin has no chance at winning the presidency. And that's what makes Palin's incessant presidential scam intriguing and amusing. It's intriguing because she gets away with, and amusing because most in the media and the GOP know it's a scam but go along with it for sheer thrill, titillation, and even chuckles. The latest to feed the Palin presidential scam is the man who foisted Palin on the nation, John McCain. He told an interviewer with tongue probably wrapped way back in his cheek that Palin could beat President Obama. McCain didn't really mean that. But as with much of the Palin presidential scam, he knew that uttering such nonsense was sure to snatch a headline. It was no accident that he uttered the inanity during the Memorial Day holiday weekend, a notoriously slow news time that further insured that this inanity would be hungrily snapped up by the press.
Palin dutifully did her part to feed the scam by tossing out an equally trite cliché that she had the fire in the belly for the presidential run. This stirred a few pundits to trot out the tired reasons why Palin could get the GOP nomination. She's got hordes of screaming, panting aroused Tea Party activists behind her who'll do anything to stop Mitt Romney from getting the nomination. She's got instant name identification. The GOP field apart from Romney is a weak, motley crew of retreads, and hacks, with lousy or no name, no money, no traction, and that stirs no enthusiasm from GOP voters. The conventional wisdom is that Palin could get the nod by default.
It doesn't work that way. It takes a sound, well-oiled, professional organization, painstaking delegate and caucus courting and support building, the ability to tap the corporate money spigot, and get the imprimatur of the party regulars to have any shot at the presidential nomination. Palin has none of that and has absolutely no intention of doing the work it takes to transform herself from a TV grasping mouthpiece into a serious GOP presidential candidate.
The man, outside of McCain, that did more than anyone else to create the Palin as presidential timber hype and hustle, Fox Network news boss Roger Ailes, said as much when he allegedly told an informant for New Yorker Magazine that he thought Palin was stupid and that she hadn't done anything to elevate the conservative movement. But Ailes is in the business of news hucksterism, and he knows that Palin was never and could never string together a credible and coherent set of ideas let alone program that could boost legitimate conservatism. But Ailes got one thing wrong about her. Palin's aim is and always has been to boost conservatism, as long as that conservatism is spelled PALIN.
Palin, though, continues to have shelf life, despite her plummet from popularity, for the same reason that she was foisted on the public in the first place: She is a virtual Hollywood casting-call prop for a media that routinely pawns off fluff for substance, and a public that grabs at it. Palin had plenty of the required fluff and that makes her even more of a serviceable attraction. She is Hollywood Stars, Jeopardy, American Idol and the Big Spin all rolled into one. She is crass entertainment and provides prurient relief from the traditional, staid, scripted way politicians say and do things. Her inanities have the faint ring of truth and light to them, and for many represent a frontal challenge to the established order. Being a "she," with a pretty face to some, and a folksy, home-schooling mom demeanor made her a sure thing for a media starved for ratings, viewership and ad dollars. When she spoke, it was lights, camera and action. Palin, in short, was a media cash cow.
For a time, she even had some value for the GOP. She could say what GOP mainstream political leaders couldn't, and say it in a way that would get the hoots and whistles from the millions that wanted the GOP to get down-and-dirty and call Obama out. A too- loose cannon running around, whipping up the mob frenzy against Obama, though, posed the danger that some of that frenzy might turn against GOP politicians for not being tough enough in standing up to Obama. The GOP walked a fine line with Palin.
In the wake of Obama's take down of Bin laden, his triumphant, statesmanlike series of speeches and meetings with European heads of state and with G-8 leaders, his land on the right side of the Arab Spring, and daring for trying to break the logjam on the Middle-East conflict, and touting immigration reform, and his dash to disaster scenes, his stock has climbed higher. Meanwhile with the GOP shooting itself in the foot with threats to hack up Medicare and Social Security, the party is in an even crazier search for someone to at least look like if not be competitive with Obama.
Palin isn't that one, But as long as she can keep her scam going that she just might be the one, the Palin presidential scam will stay in high gear.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Israel is preparing for border clashes now that the floodgates of Gaza have been opened. As you may or may not know, former Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, closed the Egyptian side of the Gaza after Hamas kidnapped Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit in 2007. He hasn't been released or heard from since but is believed to be alive.
An Arab-organized Facebook campaign is calling for demonstration along Israel's borders. Let's define their version of a "demonstration." Looting, shooting, rioting, throwing baseball-sized rocks at Israelis, burning cars, tires and anything else they can hold a match to and other forms of mayhem. They are just like that; it must be in their genes.
I don't know what I am more worried about, the opening of the Egyptian side of the border, which would let Hamas and other militants free to commingle and rage or the massive anti-Jewish campaign that the Arabs have waged which at times, I fear they may be winning. The bottom line is that no matter what anyone's grievances, they have no right to address them by blowing anyone up on a bus, launching rockets or by detonating explosives on a train or anywhere else for that matter.
The only possible bright spot in the whole thing is that the Palestinians will treat the Egyptians the same way that they have treated the Israelis and the rest of the world. And the papers will run stories and everyone will be horrified again until they play the victim card once again.
The Apocalypse that didn't happen on Saturday May 21st was good for both news and laughs. However, the real Apocalypse that may truly be prevented was not much of a story here. It played big in Canada, Great Britain and Denmark, but was all but missing from our newspapers and TV.
With somewhere between 33 and 42 million people with HIV/AIDS worldwide, with between 1.8 and 3.1 million human beings dying of HIV/AIDS each year, and around 5 million new infections annually, you might think that finding a cure for HIV/AIDS would be big news. You might be wrong.
While in America we discussed Arnold and Dominique Strauss-Kahn having unprotected sex (Not with each other!), the HIV story in our news was not about a possible cure. Though our American story was both legitimate and important, it was about prevention. Scientists found that putting HIV positive people on the anti-viral medications early cut transmissibility by over 90%. This is important. However, the current state of HIV/AIDS, though vastly improved from the early days, is still treatment and management. There has not been an actual cure in sight--ever. This is no longer true.
Dr. Louis Picker may have found the answer to the major problem that caused AIDS to elude our best scientists up till now. The virus mutates rapidly and that has gotten in the way of producing a vaccine. It's hard to hit a rapidly moving target. But Dr. Picker reports that after years of work in animal studies with SIV (Simian Immune Virus), a new approach to vaccines completely protects the system of half the test subjects.
He explains that T-cells are the memory chips of the immune system and they retain information about past viral challenges. They may not recognize and respond appropriately to a mutated virus. However by focusing on T-cell memory the new vaccines are able to meet the virus upon introduction and stringently control their replication thus preventing irreversible infection. The vaccine also creates continuous immunologic pressure which appears to "root out" the residual virus over time, such that virus may actually be cleared over the long term.
This is not the end. The battle is not over. The mountain has not been climbed, but this is still very big news. For now, we do not simply see the mountain or even the summit. Dr. Picker says, "Now we see a path to the summit."
At this point in the long battle against AIDS, a certain amount of self-protective skepticism is natural. However, his program has already been recognized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and has major long-term funding. Dr. Picker's medical and scientific bona fides are spectacular. He is a UCLA graduate in Bacteriology, has an MD degree from University of California in San Francisco, did his residency at Beth Israel in Boston, and post doc at Stanford in Immunology. He went on to be Associate Professor of Pathology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas before coming to Oregon State University in 1999. In other words, this is not marginal pseudoscience. This is mainstream, reviewed and yet cutting edge. No, make that "healing edge."
Think about what this means. To save one life, the Talmud teaches, is to save a world. Imagine saving two or three million lives a year. Imagine moving our world from 33 to 42 million infected people, over 10% of whom will die annually, to...to...well, a cure. Imagine a vaccine preventing AIDS from taking hold in people newly exposed.
In following the press reports in other countries this week, there was a downside to my otherwise unalloyed joy. Apparently many people believe that HIV/AIDS is completely preventable and therefore those who are sick or who will die are at fault and don't warrant our concern. AIDS is, they say, a lifestyle choice. Given this thinking (though 'thinking" is clearly the wrong word) we should not treat most coronary artery disease or diabetes because they also involve lifestyle and diet choices. Sports injuries too are voluntary--unless you're a professional.
But even were one to accept this hateful argument, it ignores the majority of HIV/AIDS sufferers who were not making lifestyle choices. While in America the majority of HIV positive people are male (75%), in the rest of the world the figures are reversed and the overwhelming number of cases are females who have very little say or control over their bodies. Then there are the children.
This development is much more than good news about some distant hope. This is great news and should be all over our media. Help is on the way. Polio and smallpox were all but eliminated in the 20th century. This is the first good news of our newly born and still stumbling century. The days of AIDS are numbered and another, and far more real, Apocalypse may be avoided!
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The US Supreme Court ruling mandating that California release tens of thousands of inmates to relieve gross overcrowding is the first sensible thing the Supreme Court has done in a while. The problem though is the court begged the question of why California's jails and prisons are packed to the ceiling in the first place. The answer is simple.
California's prisons are a mess because far too many persons are being tossed into the prisons when they don't have to be. With little fanfare and no public outcry, other states that have faced prison overcrowding have implemented programs that have reduced the prison numbers without increasing the danger to public safety.
They've increased funding for and expanded the use of specialty courts to screen and refer defendants to drug, domestic-violence and mental-health treatment or counseling. They issue citations for a variety of misdemeanor offenses, impose community service and pretrial diversion on offenders. They've increased the use of pre-incarceration probation and bail hearings to determine if an offender who does not pose a flight or public-safety risk can be released.
These aren't bleeding-heart, soft-on-crime ploys. In a report on California jail and prison conditions a decade ago, the Little Hoover Commission noted that education, work training, drug-treatment and counseling programs are the best and most cost-effective ways to reduce recidivism rates.
State legislators slashed millions in funding for a successful drug treatment diversionary program that helped keep thousands of people out of jail cells, and coupled with the lack of political will and imagination to enact programs that will end overcrowding and jail violence, was a surefire prescription that guaranteed that California's soaring rate of recidivism will continue unabated, the Supreme Court decision notwithstanding.
The name Herman Cain and the words GOP presidential nominee is a pitiable oxymoron. But the irrepressible talk show host and former Godfather Pizza CEO still thinks that he can stand the GOP on its head and get it to nominate him, an African-American, as its 2012 presidential standard bearer. Cain certainly has the right stuff to be considered a serious contender. He's articulate, passionate, and spouts the hardcore conservative line backing draconian immigration crackdowns, opposing abortion, and gay marriage, backing a muscular military, repeal of the health care reform law, a wildly regressive national sales tax to replace income taxes, and scaling government to the bare bone.
Cain has consistently scored at the top or near the top in straw polls by Tea Party activists and leaders as their choice to carry water for the party. And judging from the mostly white crowds that Cain has whipped into a frenzy when he lambasts Obama and big government, Cain has effectively trumped race. Or has he? It's one thing to shout the right buzz words to a crowd that's in lock step with the candidate in beliefs, but it's quite another thing to get those same voters to punch the ticket for an African-American, no matter how conservative, in the primaries. Cain banks that they will do precisely that because many white Democrats pushed race aside and backed Obama in 2008. But what Cain forgets is that many didn't. And it was based purely on race.
That was evident in Obama's bruising primary battles with Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Texas when Clinton got a majority of white Democratic votes. A 2006 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Yale political economist found that in 2006 House races; Democrats were nearly 40 percent less likely to back a black Democratic candidate than a white Democrat. Two years later, that changed somewhat in part due to Obama's race neutral campaign, absolute voter disgust with the GOP corruption, and scandals, Bush's domestic and foreign policy fumbles and bumbles, a lackluster GOP presidential contender and a laughingstock GOP VP contender, and a tanked economy.
Cain is also buoyed by the Congressional wins of black GOP candidates Allan West in Florida and Tim Scott in South Carolina in 2010. But West and Scott won in rock solid GOP districts, against weak, underfunded Democratic foes. Their wins were regional wins with absolutely no national implications, or for that matter any real influence in Congress. They are just two of hundreds of GOP congresspersons, and they are in no position to make, shape, or dictate policy whether in Congress or the party.
The GOP presidential standard bearer is a different matter. He is more than just Party's most important political standard bearer. He is the standard by which the party is judged and gauged by voters. And that doesn't just mean his philosophy, positions, style, and vision of governance. It means his visibility, and race does matter. If Obama had a tough sell with many white Democrats at least initially, Cain has an impossible sell with the broad rank and file in the GOP.
The same 2006 Yale study also found that white Republicans were 25 percentage points more likely to cross over and vote for a Democratic senatorial candidate against a black Republican foe. The study also found that in the near twenty year stretch from 1982 to 2000, when the GOP candidate was black, the greater majority of white independent voters backed the white candidate.
Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. GOP leaders have long known that blue-collar, white male voters can easily be aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues: abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and tax cuts. For 14 months, the Republicans whipped up their hysteria and borderline racism against health care reform. These are the very voters that GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked on to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance.
The GOP's "Win with the White Vote" strategy failed in 2008 only because of the frantic desire of millions of voters for change and the massive outpouring of support for Obama from black and Latino and young voters. An Obama Cain isn't. And even if he were, the GOP's Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and non-college educated blue-collar whites, make up a huge, powerful and core GOP voting bloc. If the Party's past and present racial history, is any gauge, Cain won't do much to get them to pull the lever en masse for him. Cain will get his headlines, and win a straw poll here and there, but when it comes to GOP voters pulling the lever for a black man for president, the name Cain and the words GOP presidential nominee will remain an oxymoron.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Borders are not the issue. Whether 1967 or 1948 or today the challenge of peace has nothing to do with borders. What gets in the way of peace is not where an old green line was drawn or what the British mandated or the UN partitioned. The challenge of a geographical agreement is not even very challenging. This is not about Israel's borders but Israel's existence.
As long as Hamas says openly, what the Palestinian Authority has learned only to whisper, and that is they do not, will not and cannot recognize a Jewish State, peace will remain impossible. Our once good friend Mubarak, after two decades of talking peace and a two state solution said only last year, "Yes there should be a Palestinian state and Israel with secure borders, but Israel cannot be a Jewish state." Uh, that is the whole point. That is the game. No fiddling with a farm in Syria, a grove in Southern Lebanon, land swaps on the West Bank or neighborhood by neighborhood vivisection of Jerusalem can overcome the refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
The kerfuffle we are now going through is about politics and not substance. While it is true that Netanyahu and Obama don't particularly like each other, Netanyahu is playing to his constituency and the argument about 1967 borders as a place to start negotiating is deeply shallow. Obama's choice of words gets dissected but the important gifts he gave to Israel were two-fold: The first was the promise to fight the UN in recognizing a Palestinian state. We will work and lobby the General Assembly and certainly veto a binding resolution in the Security Council. This is important.
The second gift, which in fact renders our little casus belli ( actually more like causes bellyache) irrelevant, is a complete pass on Israel needing to talk to the PA as long as they are in partnership with Hamas, and as long as Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist or to forsake violence. Since none of this will happen any time between now and, say, the coming of the Messiah, there are effectively no demands on Israel.
We stay stuck with no peace process. Sure Israel can want all the West Bank. Sure the Palestinians can want no Israel. So on which imaginary line, literally in the sand, we begin to discuss a deal is irrelevant unless and until some Palestinians can literally survive recognizing a Jewish state within any borders in the Middle East. Arafat couldn't say yes when he had nearly half of Jerusalem on the table and 92% of the West Bank. At that point he threw in the Palestinian "right of return." This would render Israel a non-Jewish state and is forever off the table.
But isn't the idea of a Jewish state somehow racist and apartheid? Well, no more than 38 states that are by law Muslim, most of which do not tolerate any Jews, hardly any Christians and minority Muslims not so well either. The irony is that minority Muslim sects have more religious freedom in Israel than in the Muslim World. Christians certainly have more rights in Israel than in any Muslim country. But one Jewish state is anathema, a cancer on the Arab body politic. So long as this is the case, forget about borders.
Yes, there are people of good will on both sides who want peace. But the ones who want it can't deliver it. The guns, hate and fear control the people on all sides of our imaginary lines in the sand. So toxic are the politics that even when friends (the US and Israel) really are in agreement, we still pretend to pick fights. The leaders know it's a game, but the followers don't realize just how dangerous a game it is.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
I once saw a sticker with a slogan that should be plastered to every maternity ward and nursery in this country. Parents should copy it one-hundred times the way the PE teachers used to do way back when when we forgot our PE clothes. Except this one would read, "You are your child's first teacher."
And this is why the jails are overcrowded because too many parents think that their children's teachers are their first ones so that they can be moved up to BFF or best buddy. If there were ever a sure-fire formula for jail, this is it.
When I was teaching, there were parents who came to school not only with tattoos, missing teeth and beer bellies, but with brass knuckles for fireside chats with the administration as well. One boy told his mother to shut up during a meeting with the dean, but rather than letting him have it, she sat there and smiled. He later pierced his tongue and came to school higher than a space shuttle. I'd be surprised if he made it through high school.
It starts earlier than that. Once when I was in line at a grocery store, I had the misfortune of being behind a woman with two kids under the age of ten. When she came up short of cash, she turned to her children and said that the cashier wouldn't let them have the groceries, as it were management's fault rather than a bookkeeping glitch on her part. Sans a credit card, I've come up short at times, too but never thought that it was the cashier's fault. While I have no way of tracking what happened to her or her kids, they probably never did anything all that meaningful with a lesson like that.
So rather than letting the inmates out of jail and sending California further down the gulch, the state should practice a little prevention and send notices to each parent upon leaving the maternity ward letting them know that they are their child's first teacher and have mandated parenting classes with lots of role playing. And they shouldn't stop there. They should spread the word far and wide and send it to all clergy so they can promote the message from the pulpit.
We should plaster it on billboards and send copies to lawyers thinking about taking a case from any parent incensed enough to sue.
The Apocalypse is Coming! No, not that apocalypse. I'm not talking Rapture here but rupture. Our prisons are going to burst, and out will spill dopers and felons and frauds. Oh my! According to Mr. Justice Scalia the Supreme Court's ordering that California reduce our prison population by over 30,000 in the next two years is the most hideous piece of judicial overreach in our history. We are going to drown in the ejecta.
The problem is, as the majority of the Supremes see it, is that we can't really allow Abu Ghraibs here. We can't have overcrowding, no medical care and prisoners dying without either due process or medical care from neglect. We either have to house them humanely or let some go. Since we have no money to build more prisons and certainly not to pay more prison guards at the current level (over 2,400 guards made over $100,000 last year), we need to disperse some prisoners.
Some will go to county jails, some to halfway houses and some to the streets. No question that some, okay many, will continue in their lives of crime. We can all agree that whatever our prisons do, the recidivism rate proves that they don't rehabilitate. They are penal; they are penitentiaries. The problem is that too many released inmates are not truly penitent.
One way of dealing with overcrowding is to look at why we put people in prison and why our sentences are longer than sentences for similar crimes in the rest of the Western World. Our California voters have consistently tried to take judgment away from judges and imposed sentencing guidelines that may fit a crime but not a criminal. We have also criminalized behaviors that increase both crime by definition and danger to our society.
Way too high a percentage of our inmates are in for drug-related offenses. Some are non-victim crimes--using marijuana and even stronger drugs. Some are serious--robberies and murders committed to get the money to buy drugs or to control drug markets and territories. Decriminalizing most drugs would not empty the prisons of the dangerous and violent people who robbed and killed to get, buy, sell and transport drugs, but it would stop the flow of people into our prisons and our judicial system. Take the profit out of drugs and the crime rate would tumble and our society would change for the better automatically. And, incidentally, so would the lives of many in Mexico.
The greater harm to our society is not the drugs in themselves (though they do harm, as do alcohol and tobacco) but the buying, the selling, the stealing to get the drugs. Far fewer die of overdoses than of the violence in obtaining the money and the drugs.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Princeton University professor Cornell West's silly, shoot-from the lip slur of President Obama as a black puppet predictably got the headline that he knew it would for two reasons. The first is that the slur came not from the professional Obama baiters, Sarah Palin, Limbaugh, and Michelle Bachman, Tea Party leaders and activists, the shrill pack of rightwing talk show jocks, bloggers and websites. It came from West, a mediagenic, leftist black academic. Even that might not have drawn mention since West has repeatedly hectored, harangued, and tweaked Obama as a sell-out to corporate interests and for allegedly saying and doing nothing to alleviate black suffering. The strong language West used calling Obama a "black puppet" guaranteed the momentary tantalizing headline.
But West's slur got traction for another reason. It came close on the heels of a recent Gallup poll that showed that Obama's approval rating had taken a dip among blacks. It's still high, but a dip nonetheless. The question then is did the president's approval ratings drop among blacks because of the disaffection, unease, impatience that an increasing number of blacks feel toward Obama? Probably, and the chill toward Obama is based on a grossly inflated, wildly unrealistic expectation of what Obama could and can do in the White House, and has done.
The Congressional Black Caucus was the first to signal impatience with Obama last year after when they publicly demanded that he spend more money and initiate special programs to reduce the near Great Depression levels of joblessness in poor black communities. There was even some talk that Caucus members would vote against his financial reform bill if he didn't kick in more funds for job programs for blacks. It was just talk. But the empty threat got some attention, and was the first sign that the near solid black support Obama had enjoyed during and after his election win was fraying at the edges.
But Obama has never deviated from the line that he virtually set in stone
the first day of his presidential campaign. In his candidate declaration speech in Springfield, Illinois in February 2007, he made only the barest mention of race. He had little choice. Obama would have had no hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, let alone the presidency, if there had been any hint that he embraced the race-tinged politics of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. His campaign would have been marginalized and compartmentalized as merely the politics of racial symbolism. The month after he got in the White House he mildly chided Attorney General Eric Holder for calling Americans cowards for not candidly talking about race.
However, this was not to cold shoulder talk of race, the plight of the poor, the crisis of unemployment, education and the criminal justice reform, and the staggering health care crisis that slams poor blacks. It's just a matter of style, timing and nuance. The string of Obama initiatives on health care reform, increased funding for education, a tough consumer protection agency, a nod toward drug law reform, the appointments of legions of African-Americans to agency and sub cabinet posts have been Obama's way to deal with the special needs and chronic problems that confront blacks. At the same time he walks a fine line. He knows that he's being watched hawk like by his powerful political foes for even the faintest sign that he's tilting toward blacks. This would be ammunition to turn the low intensity war they wage against his initiatives into a full blown racial counter attack against him.
This would fatally type him and his administration as anything but a race neutral president and insure that his legislation and initiatives would be twisted, tied-up, and straight-jacketed. It would also stir a push back among some within his party. His administration would be hopelessly hamstrung. His 2012 re-election bid would instantly be transformed from a tough but eminently winnable race, into a hard, time consuming uphill war.
Then there's the nature of what the presidency is and entails.
Obama, as all presidents, is tugged hard by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, environmental watchdog groups, conservative family values groups, conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders. They all have their priorities and agendas and all vie hard to get White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests. The presidency by definition is a series of deft political compromises, conciliation, give and take, trade-offs, quid-pro-quos, and straight out horse trading. Presidents must navigate through the treacherous shoals of the myriad special interests that routinely dominate beltway politics. This is the price that all presidents must pay to achieve pragmatic, effective White House governance. He's done that as well as the better presidents. To call Obama a black puppet tells more about the name caller than the president. But it still got the predictable headline.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Earl is correct that the forces for Strauss-Kahn are in full attack and smear mode. They will throw every possible offensive defense at the wall to see what sticks: He didn't do it and it was consensual. He thought she was a hired "escort," and it was a game of rough sex (thus explaining scratches and skin under finger nails). She was "asking" for it. It was a set up ad nauseum.
However the bottom line to this disgusting and appalling story is the likelihood that there will be a Kobe-style resolution. You'll remember that Kobe was charged with rape, and his people went into full smear mode. Soon, it became apparent that if the victim got lawyer and launched a civil suit for damages, that this would effect her credibility on the witness stand. The settling of the civil suit for big bucks made the criminal case effectively go away. The money doesn't buy silence but it tends to make complainants unsteady witnesses.
Were I offered the chance to get criminal justice and get this guy off the street, while being pursued and smeared, but with nothing to gain but some justice or a multi-million dollar settlement that would completely change both my present and my future, what would I do? The same as you and the same as this victim.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn doesn't get off free. It will be expensive, but he will get off. The inequality of power between the wealthy and the poor distorts any ideal of true justice. Justice will not be done for our society.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Former IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn loudly declared that he didn't rape a maid in his hotel room during his stay in New York. Strauss-Kahn is certainly entitled to proclaim his innocence. Under the law he is just that, innocent until convicted in a court of law. But the same can't be said for his alleged victim. Virtually from the moment that she made the charge against Strauss-Kahn, she has been tried, convicted, sentenced, and pilloried relentlessly in the press and on blogs and websites.
There's no mystery why. She has five strikes against her that made her ripe for the race baiting and victim bashing pickings of the much of the media, the public, French officials, and from many African writers. She is a low wage domestic, a West African immigrant whose legal status has been subject to question, she allegedly resided in a Bronx apartment building that caters exclusively to the HIV/AIDS afflicted, and by inference is HIV afflicted, and most importantly is a black woman. Strauss-Kahn is rich, powerful, politically connected at the highest levels, and is popular with French public opinion. Strauss-Kahn's defenders didn't stop there. They blithely ignored his checkered history of sexual bad behavior and victimization to reach even deeper in the apology bin to claim that he is the victim of an anti-Semitic conspiracy by everyone from French President Nicolas Sarkozy to unnamed political enemies. Their motive supposedly is to torpedo his chances at the French presidency. He's Jewish and is widely regarded and one of the front runners for the top spot. An initial poll cited by the French public radio service RFI found that nearly 60 percent of those polled said that Strauss-Kahn was "set-up."
None of these things have absolutely any relevance to the charge. Either Strauss-Kahn did or didn't commit the act that he is charged with. His or his alleged victim's status is meaningless to the facts of the case. But that's simply to look at rape cases purely from the standpoint of the law and the facts in the case. And it's never that simple. Race would cast a long shadow over the charge even if Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim had none of the strikes against her and Strauss-Kahn was not a rich, politically powerful figure, with no dubious history of sexual bad behavior and victimization.
Women's groups have waged a relentless and often times frustrating fight to get police, prosecutors, the courts and the media to treat rape as a serious crime, especially when the victims are poor, black or minority women and the alleged attackers are white males. They have battled the long history of gender and race stereotypes and the routine negative typecasting of black women as sexually loose, available, and crime prone. In decades past that made police hesitant to make arrests and prosecutors reluctant to vigorously prosecute rape cases when the victims were black women. That put women, particularly black women, at greater risk from sexual attack, and virtually assured that authorities would turn a blind eye to the perpetrators.
Strauss-Kahn in the not too distant past would have likely gotten the full benefit of the traditional official blind-eye to a rape charge against a black woman, and if arrested, would have quickly posted bail, and winged his way back to France. Everything would have been said and done to paint his accuser as a gold-digging, liar, of tainted character. Race would lurked underneath the character assassination and used subtly and openly to make the slur against her believable.
This is exactly what's being done now even though authorities did slap Strauss-Kahn in a jail cell and initially deny him bail. The battle lines over whether he is truly a sexual predator or an innocent victim of a money scam, a set-up, or politically motivated attack will heat up in the coming days if and probably when Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim name and picture is "leaked." It will be plastered over blogs and websites and the rumor mill will churn overtime feeding on every tidbit of gossip, allegation, and distorted fact about the alleged victim. She will be retried and re-convicted again in the press. The image assault will be dutifully punctuated with a choice quote from Strauss-Kahn's attorneys and prominent defenders that he is a victim and a target, and that it's absolutely incredulous that a man of his name and prestige, and with so much to lose would stoop to have sex with a maid, and unstated but strongly inferred, a black maid at that.
Strauss-Kahn set the wheel in motion for his counter-attack when he again passionately denied following his release on $1 million bail that he was innocent. The case and the subsequent trial will continue to stir passions and resentments, and will be yet another object lesson that when the alleged victim is a black female and the accused attacker is a white male politics, race and passions always collide. The lines will be deliberately blurred between just who is the real victim. In this case with much of the public it won't be Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
The experts predicted that Obama's surge in popularity after bin Laden's demise would quell like the waves at low tide. And on the heels of his latest Middle East announcement, the experts were right.
Now Obama is giving the old land for peace routine to the Israelis. The last time they tried that, the Palestinians turned their vacated synagogues into garages and everything else into rocket launching pads. So much for that brilliant idea.
The bottom line is that the land was won in a war, though the president and much of the world refer to it as "occupation." For anyone else it would be "annexation," even for the Hutus. Though for the Israelis, and by extension all Jews, it is an "occupation," and don't bother confusing anyone with the facts.
If the president wants us to all get along, then he is going to have to try another tactic.
Despite the snarky attention getting title, I take little or no pleasure in the troubles and travails of Arnold and Maria. While I don't truly know them in any real sense, non-the-less I feel connected to them. You see, when I was a young man in the Peace Corps serving in Tunisia and Maria's father, Sargent Shriver, was the director, she visited my home in Nabeul. She was a bright, round-faced (!) young girl of about 12 and she was utterly captivating, sweet and, to all appearances, unspoiled.
Some few years later, when I was living in Venice, I worked out at Gold's Gym and came to know Arnold. He was very funny, very smart--and clearly competitive with those whom he saw as competition. What impressed me about him was his generosity. One of his bodybuilding buddies was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not doing well in philosophy at Santa Monica Community College. Arnold hired me to tutor his pal. Sweet.
So, my personal experiences of them separately have been positive and I have no reason for any schadenfreude at their terrible situation. We have no way of knowing the internals of their marriage--or what their deal or expectations might be. Public humiliation is seldom part of the package--even for Kennedy women.
It is not particularly shocking that Arnold as a body builder, an actor and a politician had affairs and didn't tell either his wife or public about it/them. Arnold fit in three categories where he is always either on camera or looking in the mirror. All of his life implies a certain narcissism.
And, more relevantly, men tend not to be truthful about sex--and this bi-partisan. Men lie about sex when we're young and bragging about getting it when we're not. Then men lie about it in middle age claiming not to be getting it where we shouldn't. Then, coming full circle, we lie about it again when we're old claiming to getting it when we're not. At no point are men reliable historians.
Thus, this story is clearly is not about unique Republican hypocrisy. See the messy messieurs: Clinton, Packwood, Spitzer and Edwards. But since these guys seldom run on strict religious and family values platforms there is the sin but not the hypocrisy. It is more fun to see holier than thou conservatives fall to the temptations of the flesh. But my suspicion is that the percentages are pretty equally distributed. Even apparently dull gray economists with the IMF fall. But his is much worse allegedly being non-consensual.
So for Arnold and Maria and their family, I wish them well. I hope they make peace and find healing. For me this is not about the political sin of hypocrisy but the fragility of our character. And that is not just a male issue. Please note: All these famous people are doing "it" with women. Their role in rolling in the hay is being largely overlooked.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Come off it, Earl. Now we are supposed to believe that consequences for philandering run along party lines? Sit down and have a drink while I take you down Memory Lane. I don't know what happened to your old news clips, if you have any, but if someone were to do a word association session, and the words "cheating presidents" were given, do you really believe that the average American would say "George Bush" or "Ronald Regan?"
No, he would say Bill Clinton. He nearly got impeached after Monica Blue Dress Lewinsky came a'calling, but got to keep his job in the end. What about that other philandering family, the Kennedys? Rumor had it that John F. Kennedy used to sneak women into the White House when Jackie wasn't home. Most people knew what was going on, though it was business as usual at the end of the day.
Lest we forget his brother, Teddy Kennedy? After the accident off Chappaquiddick, he claimed that he dove into the darkened water after his car carrying Mary Jo Kopechne plunged in. Unable to succeed, he went home but didn't call the police until after her body was discovered the next morning. But what was his punishment? Not much considering that he was the forth longest serving senator. Oh, those marvelous boys' clubs.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a mistress, too, and he was as Democratic as they come, though I don't know about the mistress, as he might not have bothered asking about her political affiliations.
You said that the GOP looks the other ways at their boys' (and girls') dalliances, but this ain't necessarily so. Just a few weeks ago, on April 22, to be exact, Nevada Senator, John Ensign (R.) resigned due to an extramarital affair with a staff member. Last May, it was another Indiana Representative, Mark Souder.
We may not always clean up, but when we do, we clean up good.
When some people do things, they go whole hog and do them big. Ex-California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the most recent specimen. It would have been bad enough had he cheated on his wife. But to have one of those romps lead to unprotected sex and an illegitimate child? What was he thinking?
By way of excuse, he said that he sometimes does bad things. Now, there's an understatement. Add poor impulse control and feelings of invincibility to that list and you start to get a reading on this man.
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that he yawned and told the father of a murdered girl that he was "boring" him when asked about the commuted sentence of Estevan Nunez, the son of former Assembly Speaker, for his role in the 2008 murder of the coed? This man had to bury a child and the best our ex-governor can do is tell him that he's boring him? How sensitive.
I long ago heard that he had trouble controlling his impulses from a neighbor who worked with him on a movie set. Her only comment after watching him grope women was, "Where's Maria Shriver's self-esteem?" Maria, who surely knew of his indiscretions, may have had her reasons for staying this long. Being Catholic, it was probably traumatic for her because they don't believe in divorce, though now we at least know where her self-esteem is because she did what any self-respecting woman would do by leaving.
It's been said that those who dance to the music must always pay the piper in one way or another. If I were Maria Shriver, I would sue Mildred Patricia Baena, their retired housekeeper and the mother of Schwarzenegger's child. How they had the temerity to look Shriver in the face everyday for twenty years is beyond me, though barracudas aren't known for being the most introspective animals on the planet. Even so, I believe that Shriver will take the high road and say as little as possible while she and her children heal, though public damnation may be enough for Baena.
Former LA Mayor Richard Riordan said that if he were in the Terminator's shoes, he'd tell people that he wanted to be judged only by what he did today, tomorrow and with the rest of his life. I wonder what he would have said to bin Laden.
As for Arnold, not only will he probably have to say auf wiedersehen to his family and his relationship to his children as he knew it, but probably to his movie career as well.
One thing is certain in all this. He wasn't kidding when he said he was the Terminator.
Former GOP California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's terse apologetic statement that he fathered a child out of wed lock a decade ago is quite a contrast to what's been standard operating procedure for the GOP's family values, bible thumping moralists that literally get caught with their pants down. He did not try to duck, dodge, deny, ignore or finger point Democrats, or unnamed political opponents, for his illicit sexual secret. In nearly all cases when the sexual deviancy, profligacy, philandering, abhorrent fetishes, and pedophilia of GOP notables is exposed the word that instantly, and should, come to mind is hypocrisy, with a capital H.
The names of GOP politicians, big and little name, who have been caught in illicit sexual trysts fill paragraph after paragraph on Wikipedia. In some cases, the GOP offenders resigned from political office in disgrace (Nevada Senator Jim Ensign being the latest). In a handful of other cases they were prosecuted for serious sex crimes. But the news of their misdeeds quickly blew over. They were not endlessly pounded by Democrats for their acts. This stands in stark contrast to the virtual crucifixion of Former North Carolina Democratic Senator John Edwards, and for a time top Democratic presidential contender, after the revelation that he had an affair and fathered a child out of it. With Edwards there was even some talk of a criminal prosecution, as a spin off from the infidelity and out of wedlock child fathering.
That kind of finger pointing won't happen with Schwarzenegger. In fact, he gets a partial pass for his act, because he was exposed during his run for governor as a groper of many women, and he apologized for it. There was also the charge that he had sex when he was 28 with a 16 year old. The aside on this is that this is yet another case of legal hypocrisy, namely, an example of how a celebrity or celebrated figure with means and connections avoid prison time when they blatantly break the law. If the charge of having sex with a minor is true that would have been statutory rape.
But the pass Schwarzenegger gets on the love child rap is only partial. He was an established figure in the GOP, and at least for a time, eagerly embraced by GOP leaders as a potential national party standard bearer. Even though his sexual predilections are well known, Schwarzenegger it should be remembered as California governor was every bit the take no prisoner, hard liner, on crime, and punishment, and tried mightily to give the impression that he was a straight up, family guy, who had forsworn his earlier wild and wooly sexual lusts.
This normally could simply be chalked up to the perversity or sleaze of the individual GOP offender if the GOP had not crafted an entire political morality play out of the party's supposed virtuosity on moral values. The party has repeatedly whipsawed Democrat's for being the loose, anything goes, undermining of family values by touting gay marriage, abortion, and Planned Parenthood. These have become in the GOP hit lexicon code words for the "permissiveness" that then GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon lambasted Democrats with in 1968. He parlayed that attack into a White House win.
In the years since then, GOP presidents, presidential candidates, and nearly every GOP officer holder, or would be officeholder, used Nixon's morals script to win and hold office, and tar and slander Democrats as apologists for immorality. Despite the bad behavior of legions of GOP officials, the GOP has firmly imprinted family values defenders as its exclusive preserve. It will not give up the morality preserve without a fight.
Schwarzenegger's sexual revelation won't do anything to change or threaten that. He's a private citizen now, and his GOP credentials, always wobbly in the best of times, with the GOP orthodox, is even more tainted with his recent globe-trotting as a green advocate, and his thirst to get back onto the screen, that types him again as an unreconstructed Hollywood player, and Hollywood has always been the GOP's favorite whipping boy as the epitome of decadency and immorality.
Whichever GOP candidate eventually emerges from the pact in the 2012 presidential scramble to oppose President Obama will still try to rev up Christian fundamentalists, and supposed Tea Party moralists with the standard knock against abortion, gay marriage, and its tout of traditional family values. There will be nothing said about the GOP's warehouse full of sexual skeletons that continue to spill out the doors.
The Schwarzenegger episode will be quickly shunted aside or if mentioned at all simply shrugged off as the case of a one-time GOP notable that went sexually awry, and then written off as Schwarzenegger nimbly did as a "private matter." That does not call into question the dubious character of the GOP. That's only called into question, says the GOP, when the sexual miscreant is a Democrat.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul still wages war against civil rights. And we really shouldn't be surprised since Paul has repeatedly got into hot water nearly every time he opens his mouth about anything that remotely touches on race. But this time Paul sailed past the outer limits with his defiant boast that he would not have voted for the landmark 1964 civil rights bill. That's right the 1964 bill; a bill that's been the law of the land for nearly six decades, and Paul still opposes.
Paul's rap against the bill is just as absurd and tortured as the one that Southern Democrats and Northern GOP conservatives that bottled the bill up for more than a year in Congress used to pretty up their opposition to it. It violated property rights. Paul nearly six decades after their efforts failed tells an interviewer, "to say I'm for property rights and for state's rights, and therefore I'm a racist, that's just outlandish."
But what else would you call it? The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment wiped away the bogus claim that property rights trumps racial discrimination a century before Paul and Jim Crow maintenance proponents used this ploy to torpedo the civil rights bill. There's method, though, to Paul's silly and repeated knock of the law. He's now a declared 2012 GOP presidential candidate. And he knows full well that there are legions of frustrated, disgusted, even enraged defrocked GOP backers and purported libertarians that are desperate to have an alternative to the drab, lackluster, and downright zany cast of would be GOP presidential contenders.
Paul gives those desperate for an alternative exactly what they want. That's a candidate who will say anything to tweak the establishment. Paul actually garnered a 49 percent approval rating in the recent AP-GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. That high an approval rating put him far ahead of Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and former Utah Gov. and Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman in the GOP favorability derby.
The cornerstone of his appeal is his view of government and what it should or should not do about civil rights. Paul holds that government should have minimal or better still no role in civil rights laws and enforcement. The government passed and enforced civil rights laws, did nothing to solve the country's racial ills, and worse, fueled even more racial polarization, he says. That old, worn, and thoroughly discredited view warms the hearts of the packs of closet bigots that pine for the old days when racial and gender discrimination was the American norm and government did little to protect black and gay rights.
On his campaign website ronpaul2008.com Paul highlighted this as "Issue: Racism." "Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry." In other words, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of education school desegregation decision, the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and legions of court decisions and state laws that bar discrimination are worthless. Worse, said Paul, they actually promoted bigotry by dividing Americans into race and class.
Paul was outraged during his short lived presidential bid in 2008 when he was dinged as a racist when that as well as embarrassing newsletters was cited that were either written by Paul or authorized by Paul on his sites in the 1990s along with racially front loaded inflammatory quips that bashed blacks. The Paul-attributed digs and insults called blacks chronic welfare grifters, thugs, lousy parents, and said they are inherently racist toward whites. Paul vehemently denied that he said any of those things.
The quips appeared in his officially approved newsletters. There is no evidence that he wrote a correction, or issued a clarification. The jury then and now is still out on whether those views truly represent his feelings or not. He loudly protests that he's not a racist now because he has to if he is to have any credibility as a serious presidential contender.
But an anti civil rights position linked directly to the old property rights canard is another matter. It fits neatly into the stock libertarian argument that the best thing that government can do is stay out of the affairs of private citizens and private business. That the root of America's woes-- bloated spending, soaring deficits, congressional gridlock, crippling energy dependence, massive tax disparities, the drug plague, and even America's wars are the result of top heavy government interference and intrusion in the lives of Americans. Paul also knows that spicing up the horribly distorted Jeffersonian principle of limited government with race is always a good catch all.
It is a surefire way to get the media and public attention, and to get back in the political hunt. Fallen media curiosity Donald Trump used the race tact to masterful effectiveness by recycling the birther craziness about President Obama's birth certificate. It didn't last, but he got his 15 minutes.
Paul will get more than that. Unlike Trump he's a politician who knows how to get and sustain attention. And knocking civil rights when all else fails is always good for that.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
It's always good for business for columnists to get into feuds. It's a little tricky when you write for the same paper. This, however, is not the reason I hesitate to critique Al Martinez's Friday column complaining that we assassinated Bin Laden, and he was due some, well, due process.
I hesitate because Al Martinez is my hero and simply the best columnist I've ever read. He is an unparalleled observer, a man of good sense and tremendous empathy. He is a poet, a wordsmith and he has both humor and wit. Still, every once in a while, he has to get it at least a little wrong. Turn out a couple of columns a week for 45-50 years and the law of averages comes into play--even for a columnist who is way above average.
Bin Laden was due no process at all. He was not an American citizen, nor did he reside here. After 9-11 the congress acted to allow military action against him and Al Qaida. Even before that resolution, Clinton tried to kill him with a missile strike. Since then, both Bush and Obama have been trying to remove him as a direct threat.
As an enemy combatant we could drop bombs on him, shoot missiles at where we thought he was, and it was perfectly legal. Had we but bombed his compound and killed three of his wives and numerous children, it would have been business as usual and in accordance with the normal rules of war.
Al is right that targeted assassinations are not generally acceptable, but where is the moral sense in that? I can blow up the entire village to get him, but I can't aim at him specifically? This is the disingenuous game we have been playing this month with another bad guy, Muammar Gadaffi. "No," we say, "we're not trying to kill him. We're just hitting his command and control," This just happens to be happens to be wherever he is.
The more serious issue here is what we did to put our own men in peril. Sending in 2 to 4 helicopters and 24 to 48 men could have cost us lives. I would not want to trade a single American life to protect Bin Laden's very questionable rights. Had he been buck naked and surrendered, then maybe I'd have taken him. But the idea of risking a Navy Seal on the chance that Bin Laden was not armed and had no explosive suicide device is a bad idea. The thought of reading him his Miranda rights, trying him in our courts and providing him a platform is repellent. None of this was his due nor in our interests.
However, where Al is right is the issue of non-judicial executions of Americans. He is just wrong to apply this concern to Bin Laden. Where this comes into play is with the Bin Laden's Al Qaida heir-apparent, Anwar al-Awlaki. He is an American citizen, and trying to kill him without due process is a very bad precedent indeed. I don't know if we can constitutionally try him in absentia, but without such a trial, I would agree with Al, we should not be aiming at him.
So, in the end, I think Al is right in his thinking and sensitivities, but the object of his concern should be al-Awlaki and other Americans and not Bin Laden.
Wither or whither the Christians in the Middle East? Both are tragically correct. The once vital Coptic community in Egypt, that once made up over 10 % of Egypt's population, is withering. They are figuratively and literally under fire. They are being persecuted, their properties vandalized and the lives imperiled. They are hiding, fleeing and dying.
The once banned Muslim Brotherhood, and other more radical movements, are undertaking programs of persecution that may soon become actual ethnic cleansing. While the protestors who overthrew Mubarak's wretched government are not of one mind at all--there are true supporters of democracy and many others who just were united in their hatred of Mubarak. The more liberal, modern and tolerant majority has a fight on its hands to retain its own power. There is little enthusiasm for spending any political capital on the Christians. Thus the Christians, in reaction to the militant Sunnis, will die, disperse or both.
Meanwhile in Syria, the yet worse regime of Bashar Assad is fighting for its life, by taking the lives of the protestors in wholesale numbers, with a brutality learned from the Iranian suppression of democratic protestors. While we call for Assad's Alawite regime to liberalize, they know that they can't. As a minority sect that to the Sunnis is heretical, they know that leaving power will lead to leaving life.
The Christian community in Syria, in fear of Sunni militancy, has largely thrown its support to Assad. They reasonably fear that were the Alawites to fall, the other non-Sunni heterodox Muslim sects will be slaughtered--such the Ishmaelites and Druze. What most westerners don't understand, but Syrian Christians do, is that Christianity is considered a Muslim heresy--a sect that got the full truth but drifted away from submission to God. Thus the Christians believe that they will survive or fall along with Bashar Assad. Not an enviable position.
In the Palestinian areas of Gaza and the West Bank, it is even grimmer. Once more than 10% of the population of the old British Mandate, today Christian Arabs make up 1% of the population of Gaza and 4% of the West Bank. Christians in Bethlehem have been persecuted, marginalized and are undergoing their own unique and tragic Diaspora. Tellingly within Israel, Christians still make up 10% of the Arab population.
The plight and persecution of Christians is, in my view, the most significantly under-reported story in the coverage of the Middle East.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
You can say what you want about the current crop of clowns--although I don't find them very funny. But what if the Republican Party rescued itself by getting serious about dropping its many phobias (Xeno & Homo for a start) and emphasized conservative values like, well, conservation, and pragmatic, non-ideological solutions to real problems? What if the Republicans became the anti-war party?
It is possible. Democrats seem trapped in Afghanistan and appear afraid of having their toughness on defense questioned. Meanwhile Republicans are becoming increasing vocal in holding that we can't afford this adventure. They've noticed that we're not buying the hearts and minds of anyone in either Afghanistan or Pakistan and our so-called allies and friends don't like us. We, in turn, reciprocate by not trusting them. Republicans are beginning publically to ask the great existential questions: What the hell are we doing, buying or achieving?
There is a paradox that seems to narrate our history. The Republicans always claim to be supporters of business. They believe in markets and capitalism and seemingly truly believe that if we get rid of taxes and regulations the money will flow like liquored lobbyists at a Vegas convention. Yet under Republicans we had the crash of 1929 and the decade long Great Depression and our current Great Recession.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are usually thought of as the Peace Party: the party that hates war--and maybe is "soft" on defense. Yet these weak and recalcitrant Democrats, these peace-party people give us wars--good and bad. From WWII to Korea, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam, from Haiti to Bosnia the Democrats pursued military interventions. Now, Obama is setting the stage for a next to meaningless troop reduction in Afghanistan while the current Secretary of Defense is talking about a larger number of residual troops remaining in Iraq.
Maybe this is "only Nixon can go to China" and if we want a good economy and a balanced budget we must elect Democrats (See Bill Clinton), and if we want peace, elect a Republican. Okay, that might not work in the real world with the candidates in the running so far. But it's not impossible that the Republicans could give peace a chance. And I don't mean with a Nixon type "secret peace plan."
The era of big government may or may not be over, but the era of imperial adventurism must be over for reasons of both money and morality. I'd have some difficulty if the Republicans were to pick up the banner of peace, but, you know, this is important enough that even if their process for coming to this position is different from mine, I'd adjust. The irony would be possibly delicious or more likely, hard to swallow but peace would be worth it. It's a matter of values.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Happy Birthday, Israel. My ancestors and my ancestors ancestors ancestors ancestors never thought that I, their descendent, a simple woman in an under-water condo, would ever be able to say that. But then sometimes there are miracles.
Of course your presence doesn't erase anti-Semitism in the world, but it is a start. Anti-Semitism is as old as the hills, or maybe even older. Maybe it's within their genetic coding. Or maybe it's because otherwise we'd forget.
But a Jewish state means that we at least have a safe haven, a place to run to when times get tough. Had here been an Israel there wouldn't have been a Holocaust. Of this I am sure. Had there been an Israel, there wouldn't have been the pogroms in Russia because we would have had a place to go, and had there been an Israel, there wouldn't have been the Spanish Inquisition. Of this I am sure.
Your presence doesn't erase anti-Semitism, but it provides a buffer for it, a place for us to be proud, a center, ethnic identity. Happy birthday, Israel. May you live long past 63.
The GOP can't get rid of its clowns because many of them are clowns themselves laboring under some clownish ringmaster. They are also grabbing at straws to have a candidate, so they will roll out any knucklehead. Maybe someone will cancel my membership in the Republican Party, but I'm not so sure I care anymore. The average Republican signed up for that hayride because "Democrat" has become synonymous with liberal which has gotten us to where we are now, in many ways, and the decline of the Western civilization as we know it.
All I can say is that the Republicans had better roll out someone pretty good, and to make matters easier for them. So here are some simple guidelines until t hat day comes:
Don't pick someone who can't finish what they start or someone who flies off the handle when others criticize her daughter. Don't pick someone who makes a mountain out of a molehill and questions a Democratic candidate's grades in school or his birth certificate. Don't pick anyone who yawns and says, "You're boring me" when questioned about the commuted sentence of a crony's son convicted of murder. And don't pick anyone who says thinks that the government do any cessation of taxation when it's in the Constitution. (I hate getting taxed as much as the next person, but it is kind of a necessary evil, don't you think?)
Pick someone who is of the people, by the people and for the people. It's too bad that Abraham Lincoln and George Washington are no longer available to run.
GOP strategists and analysts sounded desperate even panicked when they implore Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to toss his hat in the presidential rink. Their panic to get Daniels in the race has less to do with any special magic that they think he'll bring to a campaign to oust president Obama then their mounting horror at how the best known potential GOP presidential candidates have turned the party into a three ring circus. The would-be candidates that have snatched the most media ink and public attention typified the clown lunacy that GOP regulars shudder at.
One (Donald Trump) was still musing over whether the birth certificate Obama released was really the real deal and whether Obama's college performance was fake. One (Sarah Palin) was going through back flips to not even mention Obama's name in praising the bin Laden take down. One (Michelle Bachman) was rambling on about Obama's teleprompter. One (Herman Cain) virtually demands that the government get out of the business of taxation. And Ron Paul back at again claiming that he'd back legalizing marijuana. It was beyond laughable. It was pitiable.
Meanwhile, the supposed serious GOP candidates might as well be on the far side of the Moon. They have virtually no name recognition, no program, little money, and busily trash around trying to find something, anything, to get some attention. None have stirred a faint pulse among GOP voters, let alone moderate and conservative independents. Not that it would much matter, it's still Palin, Bachman, Trump, and Paul that the public knows best, and to the terror of the GOP establishment believe define who and what the GOP is and represents.
Daniels fever is simply the GOP's front door way of saying that the party is desperate to wipe the bile in the mouths of the electorate from the clownish antics of their media known notables. But how can the GOP do it? Even if Daniels ultimately decides to go for the White House prize, Palin, Bachman, Trump, Cain and Paul still speak for a big swatch of GOP voters, the likes of Tea Party activists, and leaders, anti-gay, anti-abortion, gun toting, chronic tax protestors, and Christian right hardliners, neo-Confederates, and assorted racist kooks, crackpots and loons. This is the bunch that bring passion, fervor, and energy to the party. They can't be ignored. A major reason GOP presidential candidate John McCain committed what many GOP insiders still consider presidential candidate political suicide and picked Palin was because he thought that she could fire up the hardliners in a way that he couldn't hope to. The bitter truth for the GOP is that not much has changed since then.
Palin, Bachman, Trump, Cain and more often than not Paul's mug are seen round the clock on Fox, on web sites, blogs, and social media, cheered by the pack of rightwing talk show hosts, and Rush Limbaugh. They are heroes even icons to the Tea Party throngs and they know that any utterance no matter how silly and irrelevant will be picked up, played up and endlessly talked about in the mainstream media. Their idolatrous followers love every word from them.
Palin, Bachman, Trump and Cain could never have gotten non-stop media and public attention from their inane and outrageous quips alone. The media would have quickly grown tired of that and them and moved on to the next salacious, gossipy, trashy, celeb story. Their staying power is based squarely on their ability to stoke popular rage at and frustration with tin ear politicians among Democrats, but especially within the GOP, who've turned voters into invisible men and women. This translates to millions of disgruntled, frustrated voters who will be sorely tempted to push, prod and hector the GOP to give Palin, Bachman, Trump, Cain and Paul their due. Many will be just as sorely tempted to vote for them as the maverick candidate who poses a credible alternative to Obama, and the GOP mainstream. And since there is virtually no chance any one of the media grandstanding candidates will get the GOP nomination, the fear again is that their frenzied backers will stay at home on Election Day. This would be tantamount to a vote for Obama and would be an even bigger disaster for the GOP in 2012 than 2008.
The clownish sideshow ring mastered by the fringe GOP candidates is a textbook Catch-22 for the GOP. If party leaders publicly badmouth, marginalize, or ostracize them than that almost certainly will blow the very slender chance they already have of making Obama a one term president. This would be the GOP's nightmare and Obama's dream. The GOP thankfully is stuck with its clowns.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Hi There, Guys,
Here's my latest post on Wordpress about being irrresponsible.
Peace, Love and Blessings,
You Know Who
I'm glad we killed Osama bin Laden. He deserved to die and we deserved to avoid Mirandizing him and bringing him to trial. The microphone for conspiracy people and alternate (CRAZY) views of "what really happened," are too hideous to contemplate. I'm glad we dumped him in the ocean and avoided the family suing to get the body back and his burial place becoming a shrine for Jihadis everywhere.
I do believe, in this conspiracy-riddled world, we do need to release the picture. Not doing this inflames not the already radical Jihadis but the "deathers" who doubt the reality of his death. No, the hard-core corps of conspiracy folks can never be satisfied, but, as with the release of the bloody pictures of Saddam's rotten sons, the pictures mostly ended the controversy and denial. This is a bit like the normal everyday issue of whether to have a viewing before (or during) a funeral. Some folks hate the idea and for some it brings a kind of closure and sense of finality.
As far as putting our armed forces in greater peril or inflaming the Jihadis, well, those people who are already mad at us, shooting at us, blowing things up and plotting acts of terror do not need any inducements or excuses. They are not going to want to kill us even deader than they already want to kill us.
I suspect, but do not know, that we will have the best of all possible worlds here. We will claim not to release the picture out of sensitivity and respect, and, like everything else in Washington, it will leak. We will maintain deniability while keeping to the moral high-ground.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
For once I'm in agreement with Earl, which is almost as miraculous as the parting of the Red Sea.
Before this, I thought that Obama was an etsy-ketsy, iffy and so-so president at best. And the polls showed this as well. Although the unemployment rate is down, that could be a manipulated statistic as many still may be looking or have quit looking or their benefits have run out. This factored into it. Many are also upset at his stance on energy and drilling.
But after bin Laden's take down, even the most hard-hearted Republicans gave him kudos, though most likely through clenched teeth and uneasy keyboards. This gave him such as added boost that I may put my Republican card on reserve and vote for him next time.
But our president's decision to withhold the photos boosts his esteem in my eyes all the more. Not only could it pose a security risk from the easily enflamed Muslims. Regardless of what they say, he was buried in dignity and with a prayer said over his sorry corpse, which says something about our diplomacy considering that many of his victims were never given the same honor.
In addition, if released by the White House, the photos could also lead to cult-like behavior among the bored, the underemployed and the uneducated
Our president was right in taking the high road by withholding those grisly photos of that grisly man.
President Obama made the only decision that makes any sense in deciding not to release the photos of the body of bin Laden. That decision though based on pragmatism, namely that the DNA and other evidence was conclusive that it was bin Laden, and that if they released the photos it wouldn't satisfy the professional Obama bashers who would just claim that the photos were doctored anyway, and that there release could inflame some Muslim hardliners who might take retaliatory action against US personnel. These are pragmatic and compelling reasons for not showing the gruesome kill.
But there is another reason that Obama did not state. The wild, and frankly, repelling scenes of some Americans shouting, dancing in the streets and high fiving the death of Osama was not a celebration of patriotism or emotional catharsis that Osama was dead. True patriotism celebrates and extols the values of tolerance, diversity, freedom of expression, and a denunciation of bigotry. The avalanche of racist tweets, and racial epithets from some bloggers, and the gloats from some rightwing talk show hosts, mocked true American patriotism. The supposed joy and relief that countless Americans said they felt and that the polls reflected at bin Laden's take down, had little to do with their emotional connection or even interest in bin Laden. He had been on the lam for a decade, and his name had long ceased to be an object of daily mention, or seeming concern by the Bush administration and much of the media. Apart from the families, friends and associates of the thousands killed in the 9/11 terror attacks, and the trauma and emotional scars they carried from the deaths of their loved ones, bin Laden was little more than a name from the past to most Americans. And that was particularly true of college students who seemed to use the news of bin Laden's death as more of a campus cheer session, pep rally and party, than an expression of any serious concern, let alone understanding, of what bin Laden and 9/1 really meant.
President Obama understood that and was careful to place the Obama killing as a national security priority, in the overall framework of the war on terrorism. He took great pains to add that the killing was not a war on Muslims, and that this should not be used as an excuse to finger point Muslims. Releasing the pictures of a dead bin Laden would have simply played to and reinforced the spirit of vengeance and prurient bloodlust that unfortunately is still much a part of the thinking of far too many Americans.
It would have reduced the killing to that of a gladiator joust in which kills are measured by the amount of bodily mayhem the combatants can wreak on each other. This would make the bin Laden killing simply a freak, sideshow spectacle, and totally negate the point of why the US went after him in the first place. True, part of it was to see that justice was done. But part of it was also pure vengeance for the 9/11 attacks. But Obama smartly was careful not to publicly feed into that in his announcement that bin laden was dead.
In the days to come, Obama will hear the loud chorus from many quarters that Americans deserved to have a parade of the bloody pictures of bin Laden splattered in front of them as their trophy for the kill. And there will be endless criticism that by not releasing the pictures this in some way deprives the country of having final satisfaction in seeing the corpse of their number one terror nemesis to gawk at, and this cheats the country of real closure.
It does no such thing. The killing of bin Laden brought a close to one sad, tragic, and painful episode in American history. That should be satisfaction enough. The photos of his corpse would turn the satisfaction many feel at the removal of bin Laden into a cheap, voyeuristic and degrading spectacle.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
We say we killed Osama Bin Laden, but part of the world doubts us. They are deeply suspicious of our government and, the truth be told, they're suspicious of all governments.
How do they know that their great leader, their religious holy man is truly dead? And if he were dead, how do they know we killed him like we say--and that he didn't die from natural causes and we're just bragging?
They are so used to governments lying, that they have lost the capacity to recognize truth. And the thing is with conspiracy theory people, facts don't make any difference. Everything is explainable as a part of a grand conspiracy to fool the people. But they will not be fooled. They will not be fools.
Let's hear from them:
Sure the United States claims to have made the kill, but there are problems. We say we got him in Abbottabad, but that's obviously impossible. In a country of hundreds of millions of men who average about 5'7," the 6'4" Osama would not be hideable. He couldn't be concealed in a city--certainly not yards away from Pakistan's version of West Point. Everyone knows Osama is in Waziristan. There is no way that the USA flies helicopters deep into Pakistan and is not met with resistance.
Then notice how those Americans keep changing their story--a mark of bad lying. Osama was armed and fought. No, they have to retract that. It is too brave. So then he hides behind his wife like a coward. As of today he was not armed but posed enough of a threat that the Zionist Crusaders claim that even though he was unarmed, they still had to kill him. Lies. All lies.
Where is the body? Oh, they buried him at sea. Couldn't find any sand in the Middle East in the 24-hour burial deadline? How about pictures? Oh, they claim to be thinking about it and worrying about Muslim sensitivities. Fighting three wars against Muslims and they make that claim? Ridiculous. Of course, they'll release pictures; it is as inevitable as Obama releasing his long form birth certificate. They will show pictures but the pictures aren't ready yet. Still being redone in Photoshop and Rick Baker is doing the makeup on a dummy.
Back to the real world now. Nothing will convince the conspiracy folks. They need to see the death certificate--and not the short form. But you know, they still won't be satisfied. Facts mean nothing in a conspiracy-riddled world. And, oh yes, just a suggestion: That death certificate better not be issued in Honolulu.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Sunday, just before the official start of Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom Ha Shoah, I was moderating a panel on terrorism at American Jewish University. It certainly seemed a fitting time to talk about terrorism and the fanatical dedication of those who want us dead. There are still people who call for the extermination of both Jews and the Jewish State. There are still radicals who call for the conversion or death of all who do not submit to their twisted version of Islam.
A rapt audience gathered in our large new chapel to hear three authors speak of their experience. Joel Chasnoff, an American, had been a soldier in the Israeli army and served physically in Lebanon. Thanassis Cambanis was a journalist for both the Boston Globe and the New York Times--a Middle East correspondent, who had been in Lebanon, with the Lebanese and is an expert on Hezbollah. The third, Mordechai Dzikanski, is a former New York homicide cop who following 9-11 specialized in terrorism and has studied and written about anti-terror intelligence.
What they had to say was shocking. It might have been different had we known that even as we discussed this important issue that touches us all, Osama bin Laden was being killed. It might have, but I'm not sure.
What was shocking to me, as someone who speaks Arabic, teaches Islam, studied military strategy at the graduate level and writes about the Middle East, is the dog that didn't bark. In fact, it barely growled. That dog is Al Qaeda.
While most of our press (yes, including me) concentrates on Al Qaeda, these three experienced specialist were far more concerned with Hezbollah. While believing that Al Qaeda has some dangerous and deranged people, over the medium term the money, technology and fanaticism of Iranian-supported and Syrian-enabled Hezbollah presented a far greater threat. While we in America naturally look to Al Qaeda because of 9-11, we miss the organizational and institutional power of Hezbollah's brand of Shiite Islam. These are not peasants on monkey bars but doctors, lawyers and professionals. They have money. They are educated. They are, for the most part, not the wretched oppressed, not the clinically depressed--as is much of Sunni Hamas. They are smart, dedicated and patient.
Unlike the Palestinians who may want Israel destroyed for their own benefit, Hezbollah doesn't really have a territorial claim. Israel's sin is its existence. Rather like the famous scene in Goldfinger when James Bond asks Goldfinger, as a laser beam is about to cut him in half, "Do you expect me to talk?" And the reply is, "No Bond, I expect you to die." There is no peace proposal on the table for Hezbollah, no demand--not even an outrageous one that could start negotiations.
The radicals of Hezbollah have no bright lines of decency. They will use children, women, donkeys, ambulances and indeed other Muslims to achieve their destructive ends. With a pipeline of money and technology that is virtually limitless, they are our long-term nightmare.
In our immediate future, however, we still must consider and be concerned with Al Qaeda. Osama's death is certainly good news--though I'm uncomfortable about dancing in the streets. In the Talmud, God rebukes the Angels for celebrating the drowning of Pharaoh's army, saying that, "They too are my children." So, without dancing, I'm glad we got him. No he wasn't in operational control of Al Qaeda but neither was Adolph Eichmann perpetrating the Holocaust when Israel captured him and brought him to justice. Osama too was worth pursuing and killing.
Yes, I know people are now obsessing about why we gave him Islamic burial and didn't keep the body. The reason is actually pretty simple. We do not want to grow the martyr narrative. The treatment of Saddam's body was a short-term problem but his burial is a long-term nuisance. A gravesite gives pilgrims a place to focus on and even venerate. Dumping him in the sea feels just right.
But as he sinks from our view and consciousness, the dangers of Al Qaeda persist. Yes, Hezbollah is a growing threat--but they are state-based and we have addresses where we can retaliate. Al Qaeda is physically diffuse and philosophically apocalyptic. Had they a loose nuke from the old Soviet Union or one of Pakistan's 100 or so nuclear weapons, they would not hesitate to use it on Israel, in Europe or here. I will worry about Hezbollah, as the experts recommended, but tonight, I'll still lose sleep over Al Qaeda.
©2011 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
I'd like to give a rare shout-out to Hamas for letting the world know just what Israel is up against. Their candor is refreshing, while their values are reprehensible. They prove that they live and kill in a different moral universe from most of the rest of the world--including the Muslim world. They applauded 9-11. They fire rockets and RPGs intentionally at civilians and they condemn the killing of Osama bin Laden. How again is Israel to treat them as "partners on peace?"
Read Reuters:
GAZA (Reuters) - The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas on Monday condemned the killing by U.S. forces of Osama bin Laden and mourned him as an "Arab holy warrior."
"We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood," Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, told reporters.
Though he noted doctrinal differences between bin Laden's al Qaeda and Hamas, Haniyeh said: "We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs."
During the 2008 presidential election campaign, the GOP hit plan on then Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was simple. Pound him relentlessly as soft on the war on terrorism and the military. GOP presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and especially George W. Bush in 2004 in his reelection fight with Democratic presidential foe Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, used this ploy masterfully against their Democratic opponents.
The GOP strategists believed that the soft on terrorism smear would work even better on Obama. He was a liberal Democrat, untested in foreign policy matters, had made conciliatory remarks about Islam, was a staunch opponent of the Iraq war, and unstated, but very much a part of the thinking, he was African-American. This supposedly made him vulnerable to the sneaky and borderline racial suspicions among many that question black's patriotism. The smear almost worked. Polls consistently showed that despite the mountain of political baggage GOP presidential contender John McCain and the GOP carried, and the sky high voter disgust with Bush's domestic and foreign policy bumbles, the terrorism fears issue still had enough resonance to keep McCain competitive.
But Obama knew the history of how the GOP used the soft on terrorism ploy to discredit Democrats. He moved quickly to counter the fable. He threatened preemptive strikes against Pakistan for harboring terrorists and vowed to wage relentless war in Afghanistan against terrorism and Al Qaeda. During the campaign, he continued to assure that he'd launch preemptive strikes against terrorists wherever they were and that included search and destroy missions to ferret out Bin Laden. He even quipped that he'd put his own life on the line to stop another 9/11 attack.
The GOP to their shock and to the ire of many progressive and liberal Democrats found that he meant his words. He refused to soften any of the provisions of the Patriot Act, promptly issued a shoot to kill order against the Somali pirates to free American hostages, stepped up the drone attacks on the Taliban in Pakistan, and approved the massive expansion of troops, bases, and spending on the Afghan war. But most importantly, he issued tough and secret orders to the CIA to continue to do everything to destroy and disrupt Al Qaeda and to take out the one man that Americans most wanted dead, and that was Bin Laden. Obama's order to the CIA and military counter-terror teams hunting Bin Laden were clear; do not capture, but kill.
The Bin Laden killing has forced GOP leaders to scramble. The cheering crowds outside the White House following the announcement that Bin Laden was dead, the glowing praise from much of the public, and the congratulations from world leaders drove home the frightening political implications for the GOP with presidential campaign 2012 gearing up. Obama had done the one thing that Bush despite his bluster, and tough talk could not do, and that's take out America and the world's public enemy number one symbol of terror. Obama in one fell, and spectacular, swoop had rudely shattered the myth that's been a key weapon in the GOP campaign hit arsenal for decades, and that is that a Democratic presidential candidate, or president, was incapable of waging as tough and effective war on terrorism as a GOP president.
Confronted with the political game changer of the Bin Laden killing, it is amusing to see the tortured gyrations that GOP officials and conservatives are going through to heap credit on Bush, the military, special ops teams, the CIA, the 9/11 victims families, and even the general public for the Bin Laden kill, while either giving perfunctory, or no, credit to Obama for the pivotal role that he played in taking down Bin Laden.
The Bin Laden action came at the worst possible time for the GOP. Obama's poll approval numbers were sagging, and more Americans continued to voice displeasure over the way the country was going. This was the one bright spot for the GOP especially coming on the heels of other polls that showed that GOP core voters were bored, disheartened, and even contemptuous of the crop of would be GOP presidential contenders. At the same time, a majority of voters were repelled at the media grabbing, showboating, clownish antics of purported GOP contenders Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman.
In his national television address announcing the Bin Laden kill, Obama smartly did not revel in it. He posed it solely as a grim, but necessary action, in the war on terrorism. It was purely a national security priority. He just as smartly took pains to assure that this was not a war on Islam. Both messages were necessary, and both have left the GOP even more hapless and reeling to top this, now that another of their cherished myths about Obama has been shattered.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He also hosts the Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Osama bin Laden is dead. And like my father said after Timothy McVeigh was executed, "I'm not going to miss him." The same goes for the American people and for many people around the world. We're not going to miss him a bit.
But this gives me a newfound respect for President Obama. I know that foreign policy was his Achilles heel, and I didn't think he had the kishkies to steer the CIA into this covert operation.
All we need now is Gaddafi's kishkies and we will have a matching set. NATO may have missed this weekend and mowed down his son, Saif, and a few grandkids instead, but I am sure that the Libyan leader knows that his number is up in the Viagra spin of life.
There probably wouldn't be any bin Ladens or Gaddafis or Muslim Brotherhoods of the world had we rooted out this problem when it first began. I always wondered why so many Nazis living in this country and in places like Wisconsin.
And at a keynote address in commemoration of Yom Hashoua, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Pan Pacific Park, I learned why. According to John Loftus, an attorney and nice Irish Catholic boy who has dedicated his life to bringing this shameful period of American history to light, it was the indifference of the State Department that brought them here and it was the indifference of the State Department that allowed them to stay.
I learned that there were and are a variety of Nazis. There was the German variety, the Ukrainian variety and the Belarus variety. And there was also the Arab variety. Because the British and the US State Department didn't stop them even though they knew what they were about, the Arab Nazis become Hamas, al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. And their outlooks of fascism and killing those who aren't like them are identical to those of the original Nazis.
Elie Wiesel once said that there are three evils in this world, communism, fascism and indifference. And I won't be indifferent.
As the niece, daughter and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I promised myself that I would continue to go to these commemorations so long as I had breath in my body. Because if no one went, then others would think that it wasn't very important to us. I told myself that if I am the only person stranding out there holding a sign in the rain, then I will be the only person standing out there holding a sign in the rain.
A former coworker who I hadn't talked to in months called and without identifying himself said, "Turn on CNN." I was too embarrassed to tell him that mine broke during one of the Bush presidencies and that I never got around to buying another one.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because they think that bin Laden is dead."
"Today was Holocaust Commemoration Day," I said. "Did you go to Pan Pacific Park?"
"No, but bin Laden's death would be the perfect gift."
All I know is that the Lord works in strange and mysterious ways.
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