January 2012 Archives
When I left Tunisia following my two years in the Peace Corps, my government said something to me that was completely true. "Whatever your experience, good or bad, you will always read every story about 'your country'." Up until a year ago this was both true and easy. However, since the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, keeping up has been a nearly full-time job. Fortunately this also relates to my "day job," teaching Comparative Religion and Current Events at American Jewish University.
My sub-specialty, that ties these two subjects together, is Islam. I studied it both formally at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and informally with the Imam of Nabeul, the town where I lived. As a Jew, with a pretty good working knowledge of Islam, I am alarmed by some developments in Tunisia and the rest of the Arab World. However, about some things that alarm others, I have a more nuanced position. And yes, I know "nuance" is not a good word either in times of danger or a political year.
No, it is not good news that in Tunis there are riots by the extreme Islamists, the Salafists. They are protesting the showing of the cartoon movie Persepolis in a Tunis cinema. They found it insulting to Islam and want the people responsible arrested (done) and tried (not yet). Nor is it good news that these extremists are pushing women back into veils and moving from a secular model of government to one steeped in religion.
I certainly don't think it is good news when intolerant extremism happens in Israel or in America, whether it involves evolution, birth control or the role and rights of women. For all our denigration of politicians and the political process, politicians can, in theory, compromise. It is much harder to negotiate or compromise on religious principles. We don't normally vote on beliefs, faith or the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures of any faith--even our own.
The deeper point, beyond the apparent and real dangers of extremism in the Muslim World in general, and in "my" Tunisia in particular, is that we far too often have a simplistic and negative view of anything with Islamist in the title. Of course I am concerned when religion and politics intersect, as they are doing all over the world, but Islamist is not the same as fanatic, nor does fundamentalist--Muslim, Christian or Jew--mean violent and intolerant.
I studied Islam in Nabeul with a fundamentalist Imam. Yes, he was the cliché of the blind Imam, but had deep insight, understanding and tolerance. He was both learned and wise. He had read, when sighted, not only the Quran, Haddiths and Canoons, but also the works of Aristotle, Plato and Shakespeare. He had read Hebrew Scriptures and the Injel, the Gospels of the Christians--all in Arabic. While he didn't speak French or English, he facilitated his French-speaking wife in opening a school for young girls, to give them literacy in both Arabic and French.
Knowing I was a Jew, as my entire village did, he accepted me into his home and into one-on-one tutorials and conversations. His oldest son had already opened the door of acceptance by marrying an American who was not a Muslim. His oldest daughter had a degree from the university in Tunis and had studied in France. His spiritual eyes were wide open.
He was a fundamentalist and understood, in my view correctly, that the fundamentals of his faith were embodied in Mercy and Compassion. He understood that the Christian fundamentals were manifest in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and pleading for the widow and orphan. He accepted the Jewish idea of religious values being acted out in the Mitzvot, good deeds, understood as both obligations and opportunities. He truly grasped the fundamentals.
So when I read about various Islamic-centered parties, I have to remember that Islam is as wide and diverse as any other faith. I have to remember that we often misunderstand others by judging them by their very worst exemplars. Once upon a time we were predisposed to believe religious people were better than average. Now we seem ready to assume that they are worse. Both presuppositions are flawed. We must remember that all faiths have fundamentalists who forget the fundamentals of loving kindness. And all have fundamentalists who strive to practice and perfect the true fundamentals at the beating heart of their faiths.
I feel both apprehension and hope for Tunisia. I am not ready to write off the mainstream Islamist party, because I remember fondly my teacher Si Salah Mamouri and his great, generous and open home, heart and mind.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The bullet riddled tee shirt of President Obama posted brazenly on Facebook by seven semi-automatic gun toting men among them a Peoria, Arizona police sergeant was much more than the by now standard non-stop litany of racist cartoons, depictions, web postings, and kooky loose talk threats against President Obama. The gun toting men and the police sergeant were taking target practice on the president's likeness at an undisclosed desert locale. This is Arizona. The state where many legislators think it's ok to pack guns in the legislature, and for citizens to openly pack them in public. This is the state where former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was nearly killed in an assassination attempt, and where there's a wide body of respectable opinion starting with a finger in the face of the president governor, Jan Brewer, that simply loathes the president's policies and in many cases him personally. The gun toting men made a virtual public call for the gunning down of the president comes on Facebook.
It comes against the backdrop of Secret Service reports that the rate of threats against the President Obama has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush. He receives dozens of assassination threats continuously, and that number has been steady before and during the campaign and increased after he took office. Federal law is very clear on Threatening the President of the United States. It is a class D felony under United States Code Title 18, Section 871. It consists of knowingly and willfully mailing or otherwise making "any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States."
The Secret Service has taken the threats against the president seriously and has diligently investigated every one of them. In a few cases, prosecutors have brought charges. But here is the problem, in fact several problems. How seriously do other public officials take them, especially in places like Peoria, Arizona. Peoria, Arizona officials did not suspend the police sergeant pending review and investigation, let alone fire him, or call for a prosecution of him or his gun toting pals. Their weak, duck and dodge response was at worst that he may have violated the police department's employee conduct rules on the use of social media. There was no immediate response from Peoria, Arizona Mayor Bob Barrett or Peoria, city council persons to calls for them to take action against the officer and men involved.
The Secret Service also has had other worries, namely about staffing. At one point, in 2010 there was a report that in a budget request the Secret Service was understaffed and under-resourced. The Service denied it and insisted it had the resources and personnel to meet any security issue involving the president. But the president's hands on meet the people routine during his non-stop road travels throughout the country is a constant challenge to any protective and enforcement agency.
The intense concern over Obama's safety has been intense since he announced he would seek the presidency in February 2007. He had the dubious distinction of being the earliest presidential contender to be assigned Secret Service protection on the campaign trail. This didn't ease the jitters over his safety. Several congressional members even then demanded that Secret Service officials provide all the resources and personnel they could to ensure Obama's and the other presidential candidates' security. They heard the whispers and nervous questions from his constituents about Obama's safety.
During the presidential campaign in 2008, the flood of crank, crackpot, and screwball threats that promised murder and mayhem toward Obama continued to pour in. This prompted the Secret Service to tighten security and take even more elaborate measures to ensure his safety. This was especially important given the deep doubt and even paranoid suspicion that some blacks have that shadowy government agencies were complicit in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the fervent belief of millions of other Americans that the CIA or other government agencies were deeply complicit in the killing, if not outright murder of JFK.
There is nothing shadowy or conspiratorial about what police sergeant Shearer and his gun packing friends in Peoria, Arizona did. It was brazen and very open. The clueless Shearer for his part saw nothing inappropriate, let alone, dangerous, about what he did. He chalked it up to much ado about nothing or as he put it he didn't think that shooting up a t-shirt with President Obama's face on it "was that big a deal." It was more than a big deal. The target in their in gun sights, not a regular bull eye, a likeness of Howdy Doody, or a Cactus plant. It was President Obama. Federal prosecutors should see that they see it as the "big deal" that it is and bring charges.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Words often don't mean what we think they mean, and this is particularly true in politics. Words become labels and labels become libels. Our political discourse has so deteriorated that in Republican circles calling someone a moderate is an insult--a pejorative.
The beginning of the denigration of moderation began in one moment. This is quite unusual for a phrase and attitude to have a clear birthday. That moment was when Barry Goldwater in accepting the nomination of the Republican Party to run against LBJ famously said, "Moderation in the protection of liberty is no virtue; extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice."
Once upon a time moderation in all things was a virtue--or so Aristotle taught and most societies believed. When we wanted to shout invective or smear an opponent we called them extremists, we called them Reds, or Pinkos. We called them Pigs, Fascists or Brown Shirts. Hardly anyone, outside the Panthers or SDS, in the 60s screamed, "Off the moderates!"
But now Romney is figuratively spat upon by Newt and all the "true conservatives," for being that Massachusetts Moderate. In this case Massachusetts Moderate is the East Coast version of San Francisco Liberal. Okay, I get SF as being iconically liberal, and I get why the right wants to demonize it. But demonizing Massachusetts and moderation?
Most Americans are politically moderate. Yes, you can throw red meat at either base, but our broad middle is non-ideological and not repelled by moderation. Extremes may be tempting to the passions--and they are certainly entertaining, but this is for a fling on a weekend and not a four-year relationship in our homes, kitchens, dens and bedrooms. Gingrich and Kucinich are fun for a while but we really don't want to live with either one.
Now I make no argument for or against Romney. I have no idea what his real positions may be. He might be the conservative he is presenting this season. He might be the liberal who ran to the left of Ted Kennedy in the 90s. He probably does not actually know himself. He may have gotten lost in his drive to appeal and be accepted. I think him likely to be a kind of "method politician," who like a method actor, gets lost in the present role. However, I see no evidence that he is an example of the dreaded moderate. Moderate does not mean being philosophically incoherent, nor is it manifest by taking far left and far right positions and then averaging them. That would be like taking 50 men and 50 women and concluding that the average gender was hermaphroditic. Moderation is an attitude that is open to hearing both sides and finding practical solutions not based on ideology. It is thoughtful and not simply wishy-washy or opportunistic. Whatever it is, it should not be an epithet.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
I've been planning this move for twenty years, which may rate on the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's longest move. The earliest stages started almost the day I moved from my beloved Chicago to sunny and smoggy Los Angeles. I talked about moving back so much that I sometimes felt like the Kunta Kinte on "Roots." Unfortunately, Kunta Kinte died before he got back home, and there were times I was afraid that that would be me.
I was between jobs anyway, and my parents thought it would be a step up because I wanted to be a screenwriter at the time and because screenwriting does not exactly happen in Chicago like it does out here. To some sunbirds, Los Angeles with its year-round sunshine is a Mecca, but those of us with Midwestern souls never quite get that or many of the nuances out here. We like our sunshine, but we also like our rain, hail, sleet and snow, too, and we get plenty of that out there.
And the culture doesn't register with many of us. There were times I thought that if English wasn't the official language, I would have thought I was in a foreign country. Like the times people in supermarkets waited for me to move rather than using their words and saying "excuse me," or the times people looked through me like I was invisible.
Besides, I missed the way the grass rustles in the Chicago breeze at springtime, the first snowfall and the gleaming glass buildings on Michigan Avenue. Chicagoans have a sense of pride and ownership in the city that comes from being born and raised in a place and from having grandparents and aunts and uncles who live there and from going to school there. If ever there were a place where the six degrees of separation ring true, Chicago is it. And Chicagoans are polite on the whole. Even ex-Governor, Rod Blagojevich, never lost his temper or his cool after getting busted. That is Chicago.
Besides, it is different being in a place you know is right for you or have to flee for political reasons. I know an Afghani man, a lawyer in his country, who came to this country because the Taliban jailed him for telling women they had rights.
I've thought of my city almost every day for the twenty plus years, and I visited as often as I could, sometimes in the dead of winter to see if I could tolerate it. One November when my father was ill, I went back to see him, and I looked out the window at night and noticed the bare branches of the trees blowing in the wind as the clouds raced by and thought that the place has passion and that this is where I need to be.
Maybe that's why we produced some of the best and most notorious politicians in the world from the late Mayor Richard J. Daley to Rod Blagojevich to Barack Obama. It's because no one is neutral on anything, ever. Everyone has an agenda and an opinion. On one visit, I saw a guy trimming his fingernails on the el train, seemingly oblivious as his nail trimmings flew all over the train. It was a real gaffe, but then it was all so earthy and all so Chicago. On another visit, I was standing at a stoplight downtown and saw a cabbie running the yellow light to avoid getting ticketed by the policewoman who was walking alongside the cab. Through the closed windows of his cab, she threatened to ticket his arse while he slowly drove through the intersection and off. This is all so Chicago, too.
Dan Castellaneta, who plays Homer Simpson on the "Simpsons," is from Chicago. In the mid-80's, we worked together on a kid's show called the "Magic Door." I always knew he'd hit it big even when playing the bumbling and confused Detective Farblunget, (lost and confused in Yiddish) or writing scripts for the show. John Malkovich is from there, too, and it is the home of the famed Second City theatre company where many of these people are discovered by Los Angeles talent scouts sitting in the audience. Maybe it's our passion they pickup on; maybe it's our Midwestern work ethic. I don't know, but they pick up on something.
So now that I am able to and still have breath in my body, it is time to go home. I have been patient, and I waited long enough. I will miss certain things about LA but my heart and soul are in the land of the amiable yet crooked politicians and the tree branches swaying against the sky in winter and hanging on for dear, sweet life.
When Will We Ever Learn?
This plaintive line from Mikhail Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don" was an anthem of the anti-war movement of the 60s. While always relevant, never has it been more important than today. With the exception of some sincere, if misguided warmongers, and some political pandering, we Americans mostly do not love marching off to war.
We're sometimes deluded into believing that we're the last best hope for all humanity, and it is our burden to bring the blessings of democracy to the world--even if it means spreading our gospel of democracy with guns and bombs. When you look at 18th and 19th century colonialism and the moral imperative folks felt to bring their Gospels to the "primitives" of Asia and Africa, you can't help but see some relationship to our own present sense of noblesse oblige called, exceptionalism.
Right now, as we end one war in Iraq and withdraw from Afghanistan (after ten years and not one of our objectives achieved), we're in grave danger of stumbling into another war--a war with Iran. I don't think most of our leadership--civilian and military--want this war, but miscalculations are easy, historically common and devastatingly expensive in blood and treasure.
Nations can and do miscalculate. Before WWI many in Europe were convinced that the soldiers, coming mostly from the working classes, would refuse to kill one another out of a sense of solidarity. Germany didn't think that sinking the Lusitania would bring the United States in. We didn't think that our commitment of blood, treasure and time would be anything like it turned out. Most experts predicted a war of six weeks to six months.
Before WWII, we certainly didn't predict that squeezing an aggressive Japan by trying to restrict their access to oil would get the response of Pearl Harbor. And Japan didn't calculate that we had the heart or steel to fight two wars at once. We did have the heart. We also had the steel.
History is filled with smart people making tragic choices. Our rapid overthrow of the Taliban ten years ago led some to believe that our technology could instantly over-power bad regimes and victories would come fast, easy and cheap. It also led some to believe the quick victory that George H. W. Bush achieved in Iraq could be duplicated. Under George W Bush, we indeed did win the first great battle and quickly took Baghdad but mistook this for winning the war.
Today, crazy warmongers and political panderers aside, we are in grave danger of blundering into a war with Iran. With all the threats and counter-threats and all the trash-talking and physical provocations--on both sides--it's very easy to make a mistake, to have a bluff called, an incident escalate and find ourselves at war.
I want to be clear that I am not a pacifist, though I wish the world would allow me to be. Sometimes, tragically, war may be necessary--though too often it seems in the moment to be more necessary than it actually is. Still, when there must be war, when state violence becomes imperative, the process of commitment should be conscious and responsible. People should have some idea of the terrible consequences to human beings--those killed, those who do the killing and to the innocent.
To go to war by accident is seldom a good idea. However, international relations and military strategy are not exact sciences, and reasonable people can make different calculations. There are times when there are no perfect or even good choices.
The trash-talking going on now between the United States and Iran is troubling. Our choices are not clear or obvious, and the ways we express our goals are confusing. We're rightly concerned about Iran getting nuclear weapons, and despite their denials, no serious scholar believes they are developing atomic energy for peace. We're pushing sanctions as a way of forcing them to the table. But were sanctions to work, were we able to get the world to stop buying Iranian oil, we could count on them closing the Straits of Hormuz. As long as the straits make their shipments of oil possible, they are unlikely to scuttle their own ships and barges or lay mines. But if the straits became irrelevant to their economy, they would almost certainly do something that rash.
We've pursued a subtle and complicated strategy--at least I hope it's subtle and complicated and not simply incoherent. We're talking about talks, while threatening regime change. Our problem with both is that we actually don't know who is in charge--the elected, though hardly democratic, government of Ahmadinejad or the religious oligarchy of the Mullahs. We're also not sure who the good guys are--if there are good guys in either branch. We do know that there are plenty of good, smart, and cultured people in Iran who love neither side.
Meanwhile, the Iranians send out boats to challenge us in international waters. We send in an aircraft carrier and taskforce to challenge them in international waters--far from our shores and very near to theirs. The chances of an accidental encounter that escalates are great--far greater than any secret plan for a pre-emptive strike against their nuclear facilities. Understanding how easy it is to be wrong, I am far more worried about us falling into an encounter than of Israel acting unilaterally. Another Gulf of Tonkin is waiting.
We have legitimate issues with Iran and real reasons to oppose their nuclear weapons program. I hope that we have some planning and purpose in our policies and don't resort to momentarily popular bellicosity. Too easily this can take us to real war. There should be some learning from history. The question is: When will we (human beings) ever learn?
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Put "President" in front of Newt Gingrich and there's an even chance "white supremacy" could be put in front of his presidential moniker. The suddenly surging Gingrich upped his racially loaded pandering scorecard with the resurface of a handwritten first draft of a series of talks he prepared in 1993 a couple of years before his ascendancy to House Speaker for his prescription for "renewing American civilization". Gingrich initially scrawled that while Asians, and presumably whites, understood how to build businesses and acquire wealth, Latinos were sorely lacking in wealth and business acumen and blacks were even more hopelessly ignorant of what it took to succeed in the business world. Gingrich cited no figures, studies, or research to document his blatant falsehood. But he really didn't need to for two reasons. By the time a member of Gingrich's staff typed up the notes and prepared the speech for delivery at the National Review Institute, the racially inflammatory digs had been scrubbed out. By the time he delivered the talks they appeared to be racially neutered and came off as just Gingrich pontificating on the his stock tout of free enterprise, personal strength and values, American resolve, and America's alleged technological superiority.
The other reason Gingrich's racial pandering passed under the public radar scope is that the GOP had long refined the art of racial code speak. So Gingrich simply entitled his talks "the five pillars of American civilization." It was understood that talk of values, strength, enterprise, and technology punctuated with the caption "American civilization" was a not so subtle way of boasting of the alleged paramount role of whites in building American civilization and the alleged drain on building American civilization by Latinos, and especially blacks.
Gingrich's "American civilization" talks were more than bigoted, historically skewed pretensions of original thought and scholarship. They were talked up and more importantly acted out in House Speaker Gingrich's full throated attack on welfare, entitlements, and supposed runaway big government spending, all allegedly by Democrats. The dots from these themes connected directly back to the notion that blacks and Latinos were economic ignoramuses and chronic feeders at the government trough and that they had utterly failed to pull themselves up through business and entrepreneurship. The conclusion was inescapable that blacks and Latinos were dragging the government into a hopeless sinkhole of poverty and spending waste and this in turn put the free enterprise system in grave danger. Gingrich struck gold in those themes at the time. And at the height of his congressional power was able to bring government to a near screeching halt and whipsaw President Clinton into pecking even harder at reining in welfare, health care and education spending, and at times out GOPing the GOP in his talk of the Democrats taking the lead in taking the burden of government off the backs of the white middle class, and not placating minorities.
We fast forward nearly two decades and Gingrich hasn't missed a beat. He reached back and recycled some of the old coded racially front-loaded themes with his attacks on welfare and food stamps. And despite his profuse denials that tossing these terms out had anything to do with race, he knew full well that the stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in the popular mind that the prototypical welfare and food stamp grifter is poor, black, and female that it isn't necessary as two decades earlier to put black or Latino in front of the words. The mere mention of welfare and food stamps instantly pricks the emotional hot buttons of millions of Americans who consider these programs prime examples of the Democrats and President Obama's government giveaway to minorities.
One could cite fact after fact that the majority of food stamp and welfare recipients are white, and that the food stamp rolls increased more under President George W. Bush than Obama. But these are facts and they seldom get in the way of stereotypes. There is absolutely no danger that the press and much of the public will tar former President Bush with the label "the food stamp president."
There's as yet no solid evidence that Gingrich's presidential resurrection from what was thought to be an entombed candidacy and his even more dramatic surge to the top in the South Carolina primary and his bolt to the front in some polls in the upcoming Florida primary can be attributed to his crude play of the race card. But given the dump Obama at all cost rabid fanaticism of many ultra-conservatives, Tea Party leaders and followers, and plain, old school bigots, racial pandering can't be discounted as a factor in the headwind apparently gaining force behind Gingrich's presidential bid.
If that's the case, Gingrich will keep recycling and spewing out the shop worn racial code themes as the pathway to the GOP presidential nomination. If that's so, white supremacy would surely be on that same pathway back to the White House.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
I kept waiting for the trauma of turning forty to kick in. I've been waiting with curiosity now for 27 years and it, like a Trojan Horse in a computer, is finally doing its job of delivering a sense of mortality to the door of my soul. Forty, when I reached it, did not seem old or even middle aged. Yes, it had a zero, but it was no big deal. I enjoyed all the jokes about when Mozart was my age he'd already been dead for 5 years. Forty was just a good time for a party. I handled forty with joy, grace and equanimity.
So, why, you may well wonder, is it hitting me so hard right now? Do I feel particularly aged and decrepit? Has my step lost its spring? Has my memory noticeably deteriorated? The answers are: "No. No. And I don't remember." While I've had my share of medical issues and aches and pains, they don't make me feel old. Most of them started in my youth and came from sports. So when my back is killing me and I feel the scars and holes from three back surgeries, I feel young and remember when it all started so many years ago on the football field at Beverly High when my teammate tackled me and broke my coccyx.)
I think the only medical procedures that promoted my sense of age were my two cataract surgeries. Before I had them, I could gaze in the mirror each morning and through the blurred and hazy filter of my cataracts see, or rather not see, my real face. Clearing my vision was great for seeing colors and reading in less light than previously required. But it also removed the plausible deniability of my aging process. I'm not at all sure that Bobby Burns was right and "what a giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us!"
The actual cause of my feeling the years passing so swiftly bye is that my son, Adam, is turning forty on the 28th. I can handle being forty but my son? How is this possible? He was born yesterday. I remember so clearly my first glimpse of him as he was pulled kicking and screaming into the light--breach and sunny-side up. He mooned me! Only the next day I saw him take his first hesitant step. The day after he acted out his first pun when I asked him to bring me a pear and he brought me two--a pair of pears. His smile indicated he knew just what he was doing at the age of four! Only moments later at age nine, while we were on sabbatical and living in France, did I listen with feelings of great pride, mixed with horror, as I heard him cursing in fluent French as he played Flipper (Pin Ball) in the local café with the local kids.
Maybe a week went bye when I watched him with undiluted pride direct his high school choral group. Seemingly the next day he went off to the university, got his own apartment then returned to France for his junior year--perfecting his remarkable language abilities, inherited from his mother. One of my first, and most popular, essays chronicled my vicarious enjoyment of his French adventure by seeing what he was doing and where he was travelling, not from his letters but from the credit card bills.
Only seconds later he graduated the university, went back to France, came home--well not to my home but to California--met the spectacular Su-Yun Paik, got married and produced two remarkable and perfect granddaughters, Roxie and Iris. Yeah, I know he believes he had daughters but my cohort all understand he had granddaughters. And grand they certainly are.
I think the passage of time hit me when Adam was telling me how busy he was: commuting to his job (a job too technical for me to understand), coming home, helping with cooking and the girls and then going off to band practice and returning home late before having to get up early. Hearing myself cautioning that he needed to take care of himself because he wasn't as young as he once was shocked me that this might apply also to me.
My forty was child's play, while his forty cues the musical score: Sunrise Sunset
Is this the little boy at play? I don't remember growing older, when did they? Sunrise sunset, swiftly fly the years.
Swiftly indeed, beautifully in fact and as it should be. Happy Birthday!
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Before President Obama uttered a word of his second State of the Union Speech last January, he heard the loud chorus of criticism, attacks, denunciations, and just plain boos from the usual suspects. That is GOP officials, Tea Party leaders and followers, and the pack of professional Obama loathers, the right wing bloggers, talk show hosts and websites. This year won't be any different. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels will give the official GOP response. He'll hammer Obama on the usual GOP hit points that Obama and the Democrats, are guilty of alleged rampant government spending and waste, imposing crushing taxes and regulations that supposedly hamper business, and for a rudderless, dead-end policy on jobs and the economy. There's even a plan this time for Herman Cain, that's right the virtually forgotten and disgraced Herman Cain, to give the Tea Party rebuttal to the president's address.
Though Obama wisely hasn't dropped a hint of what he'll say in his Third State of the Union Address, it doesn't much matter. The reasons for the pre and post speech attacks are the same. The State of the Union speech is in effect a sort of de facto report card on the past accomplishments, and the present and future planned initiatives of a presidential administration and the president's vision for the country.
The stakes, though, are much higher this year than last. It's an election year, and Obama's popularity approval ratings have wildly see sawed back and forth between a plus and a minus. And with jobs and the economy being the GOP's stock hit issue on Obama and with a majority of Americans preoccupied with the economy, his speech is both an economic and political campaign referendum on what and how Obama will deal with both issues in 2012 and if reelected for the next four years. But it's the reelection issue that looms largest in the hawk like watch from Obama's GOP opponents on his State of the Union speech.
The State of the Union Address is every president's time to shine. GOP and Democratic presidents have always been keenly aware that their Democratic and Republican opponents know that State of the Union Addresses boost the stature, prestige, and power of the presidency, and usually bumps up the president's approval rating by a point or two. They also know that the opposition's response to the speech is feeble, pale, and little watched or counted by Americans. One can only imagine how dismal the ratings will be on Cain's "rebuttal" to Obama.
The history of the State of the Union speech underscores the power to shape policy and bolster the president's image. President James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln flatly called for the end of slavery in the rebellious states. This was the prelude to the Emancipation Proclamation he issued a year later. Woodrow Wilson warned of the dangers of impending war in 1913. Franklin Roosevelt outlined the famed Four Freedoms in 1941. Lyndon Johnson unveiled the outlines of his Great Society program to fight poverty in 1965. Bill Clinton unveiled his health care reform plan in 1993. George Bush in his State of the Union speeches in 2002 and 2003 prepped the nation for the Iraq invasion. Presidents quickly latched onto the media to give their State of the Union speech more exposure and political wallop. Calvin Coolidge gave the first radio broadcast in 1923. Truman gave the first televised broadcast in 1947.
Obama almost certainly will survey his administration's foreign policy, war on terrorism, immigration reform, and health care accomplishments. But it's the thorny problem of jobs and the economy that's still the prime issue. No matter what Obama says about it, whether he restates his repeated calls for more investment in infrastructure projects, an end to Bush's tax cuts for the rich and more spending on education, technology and green energy projects. Or, he goes big as some clamor for him to do, and propose sweeping overhauls in the tax code and massive new job spending projects, the GOP knives will dig hard into his political flesh and belittle his accomplishments and blast away at his proposals.
GOP leaders will do as they've done in his prior two State of the Union addresses and loudly shout that he's giving a partisan State of the Union speech that's tantamount to a reelection campaign stump speech that does nothing to allay the fears and worries of Americans about the country's economic malaise. But that's just GOP attack talk that rams even more politics into the State of the Union address. The days of a differential, somber and respectful listen to the president's State of the Union address are a thing of a nostalgic bygone past. Obama's state of the union speech will be no different than his other two. It will be under intense fire again.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
You have to admire the virtuosity of Newt's debate performances, particularly last night. He feigned outrage at John King's question about Mrs. Gingrich II's allegations of wanting an "open marriage." But it had to be asked, and Newt knew it. It could have hovered in the air while all waited and the tension built or it could lead off and give Newt the chance to hit it out of the park. Thus did King give the headline, the sound bite and the debate to Newt.
Newt did predictably what he has done systematically and that is attack the question, its formulation, importance, the questioner and the "elite media." He actually owes King a thank you note for this gift. Beating up the media for a politician is as challenging as the high school football team mugging the audio visual squad. We're sitting ducks--even when aiding the candidate by pitching a slow ball over the plate in the form of an inevitable question.
The factual irony of the timing of the question is quite rich. ABC, which had done the interview with Mrs. Gingrich II, was going to put the interview on hold till after Saturday's election, but could not after Matt Drudge, of the Drudge Report, broke the story and put it into the headlines and public discussion. Matt Drudge, it must be noted, is not a part of the so-called "liberal elite media," but a conservative muckraker.
While there is no case for honoring Newt's virtue, his virtuosity in verbal Ju-Jitsu is astonishingly good and entertaining. His instinct for the jugular and his willingness to go for the somewhat lower testicular, make for great anticipation and viewing. He is quick, incisive and immensely entertaining. His grandiosity, lack of discipline and race baiting make it impossible for me to seriously consider him for the presidency, but his intelligence is obvious. So, while there is much I dislike about Newt, on the subject of debates, you really have to hand it to Newt. And John King did.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The military relieving themselves and their frustrations on the deceased Taliban members is like the chicken or the egg argument. Were the marines crazy to begin with or did they become crazy as a result of the war and dealing with an enemy who creates their own rules of combat?
The answer is it depends. Some members of our military were born crazy, others became so early in life and still others after going to war. Either way, psych services should be one of the top priorities for any branch of the military, firemen, cops and even the Coast Guard. They should screen men and women before sending them into war; they should be screened once they get there, and they should be screened and counseled before coming home, and psych services should have as much importance as the canteen. Maybe Fort Hood wouldn't have happened otherwise, nor our servicemen's most recent conduct.
I know someone who dated a man working in a special unit of the Navy. After she tried breaking up with him, he stalked her and threatened to kill her, so she went into hiding. He was one fish that should have been caught in the military's net and never released
Some people have their own hell going into war and some coming out, but we don't need to add to their and everyone else's misery by ignoring the symptoms and the cures.
South Carolina Democratic Congressman James Clyburn lambasted the GOP presidential candidates for talking race in code. There's plenty of ammunition for the attack with the stream of race tinged references Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney made to food stamps, welfare, work ethics, and an entitlement society. Then there are the racially loaded newsletters from Ron Paul that resurfaced. The candidates when challenged have ducked, dodged, and denied any racial intent, or in the case of Paul's newsletter that he even penned them. The denials seem plausible only because the GOP presidential candidates have made it a practiced art of saying absolutely nothing on the campaign trail about discrimination, poverty, and the gaping racial health care and educational disparities. They are even muter in denouncing the non-stop barrage of racist taunts, digs, slurs, depictions of President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama by some Tea Party leaders and GOP elected officials.
GOP presidential candidates for the past three decades have crunched the voter numbers and the stats. The GOP base is the white South and the Heartland. They deliver more than one third of the electoral votes needed to bag the White House. These are the also the voters that GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. George W. Bush, and John McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked on for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance. They haven't disappointed them. Racial code talk has been a key weapon in the GOP's campaign arsenal. It has been the spark to reignite the GOP's traditional conservative, lower income white male loyalists.
The final presidential vote in 2008 gave ample warning of the potency of the GOP's conservative white constituency when aroused. While Obama made a major breakthrough in winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters. McCain still won a majority of their vote. Overall, Obama garnered slightly more than 40 percent of the white male vote. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. In South Carolina and other Deep South states the vote was even more lopsided among white voters against Obama. The only thing that even made Obama's showing respectable in those states was the record turnout and percentage of black votes that he got. They were all Democratic votes.
McCain would not have been as competitive as he was during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white male voters. Much has been made since then that they are a dwindling percent of the electorate, and that Hispanics, Asian, black, young, and women voters will permanently tip the balance of political power to the Democrats in coming national elections. Blue collar white voters have shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. The assumption based solely on this slide and the increased minority population numbers and regional demographic changes is that the GOP's white vote strategy is doomed to fail. This ignores three political facts. 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. And they voted in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks.
The 2010 mid-term elections was political textbook proof of that. The GOP snatched back the House with a deft play on the long favored racial code themes of tax and spend Democrats, wasteful big government, run-away deficit spending on entitlement programs, and their full blown assaults on so-called Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security programs, and labor unions. The major recipients of these programs are and have always been white seniors, retirees, women, and children, and white workers. But these programs have been artfully sold to many Americans as handouts to lazy, undeserving blacks, Hispanics and minorities.
Then there are the always thorny social issues. They slid off the nation's radar scope the past few years mostly because the laser preoccupation and worry of most Americans has been over jobs and the economy. But they didn't completely disappear as potentially inflammatory issues. GOP leaders have long known that blue collar white male voters can be easily aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and prayer. Rick Santorum and before her failed candidacy fell apart Michelle Bachman, have done everything they can to play the family values card to fire up ultra-conservatives and Christian evangelicals.
The GOP's traditional path to the White House has been to stoke the fears of whites over big government and minority encroachment. It failed in 2008 only because of the rage and disgust of legions of white voters at Bush's horribly failed and flawed domestic and war policies, and the GOP's sorry record of scandals, and ineptness. This was not a radical and permanent sea change in overall white voter sentiment about the GOP as the 2010 mid-term elections showed.
The ultimate end game of the GOP presidential contenders is to make Obama a one-term president. If they have to speak in racial code terms to do it, they'll do it. It worked too well in the past for them not too.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
War is hell. Men and, increasingly, women are called upon, ordered to take the lives of other human beings. They are to kill without pity or remorse and are expected to remain "professional." This usually means that they should not feel. We can make them pretend to this emotionless detachment, but those who truly do not feel anger, rage, fear, and pity are, in the civilian world known as, sociopaths.
So, yes, when some of our American Marines peed over the dead Taliban whom they had just killed, it was wrong. It was against the laws of war, a possible war crime and clearly will be used against us in the Muslim World. And yes, they should be punished for breaking regulations. But war crimes? Please. Peeing is bad, disrespectful and we really shouldn't desecrate corpses, but can we get a grip on ourselves here?
Let's stipulate to the fact that neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda is particularly interested in playing nice or in respecting our sensibilities. Our soldiers and citizens have been tortured, mutilated and beheaded while alive. Our dead have been dragged through the streets and hung from bridges. Of course this does not justify our desecration of the dead, but it sure explains the impulses our soldiers may feel.
How can we believe we can train compassion out of our people and make them see and feel the enemy as not a human but just a nameless enemy and expect our people to treat them with more deference in death than in life? How can we believe that our young soldiers can see their fellow soldiers killed and maimed by a merciless adversary and handle their losses and fears with detached equanimity?
We cannot expect our soldiers to act without our natural human passions. We can demand it and require it. We can punish them when they don't. But we must anticipate that in a kill or be killed world, rage will manifest itself.
There is a reason that "pissed off" is an expression we all understand--and it is universal. In Arabic, one of the first insults I learned was: Boul a-leek. Piss on you! (Ironically, it is the word Boul, and not leek, that meant urine.) This is how men show disdain, disrespect and power. Is it good? No. Is it appropriate? No. Is it a war crime? Well, not to me.
War is the crime. Shooting someone in the head, taking a human life--these are crimes. Not feeling anger and rage, stifling natural feelings under the guise of professionalism, is a two-way crime. It sets up our young soldiers to cover up real and appropriate emotions, and it sets them up for PTSD.
This is a bad story but an important one. It embarrasses us and reduces our pretense of being the morally superior and civilizing force. We are only human. Of course we should not celebrate killing nor should we desecrate the dead. While this is probably as damaging to our cause as Abu Gharaib, there is a fundamental distinction. Torture and humiliation of the living is not the same as mistreating a dead body. In my little moral universe, the living are due more deference than the dead.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com>
What this world needs is not love, sweet love, but a meteor with a GPS system programmed for certain people and neighborhoods. If that can't be arranged, then we need to bring back the idea of consequences. (Con'se'quences, n. to put the kibosh on those who have been nasty, rude, unseemly or utterly obnoxious, pg. 65 in the "Saunders' Dictionary of Favorite Rants."
But since most consequences have been lifted from state government from sea to shining sea, here are some for the more unsavory crimes.
1. Littering: The severity of the punishment will depend of the severity of the litter. Kleenex and gum wrappers... lose a fingernail, even an acrylic one. Fast food wrappers... the nail and a finger or two. Beer bottles, broken or otherwise... several fingers and an eye, for having bad beer breath, a beer belly and for putting humans and animals in danger with the broken glass. Used condoms... (Don't even get me started) the dangly bit, for being rude and unsanitary.
2. Stealing: Removal of the offending appendage. For regular bank robbers, cut off a hand or one of the feet they used to get there. The same for grand theft auto. For bank robbers with masks, glue the mask to their faces with airplane glue as well. (The exception being a mother stealing food to feed her children, though this doesn't apply to those who just don't feel like paying for it.)
3. Housing Fraud: Refusing to pay rent or mortgage but having money for trips, cruises, Disneyworld and parties. Make them live in a cardboard box along the freeway or put them on latrine duty at a football game.
4. Sexual assault: Lop off the offending appendage. No questions asked and no pain killers or anything nice.
5. Murder: Do onto them as they did onto others, the exception being self-defense when approached by a barbarian. It may not be nice, but we are not talking about nice. We are talking about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That don't mean that the whole world will be blind and toothless, for heaven's sake. That is a line from a movie, not a practice for from real life.
6. Drugs that cause people to do these things: Give them enough of the stuff to knock them out, permanent like.
7. Illegal Immigration: Have them crawl back to where they came from, and for heaven's sake, don't let them take part in medical care, and government sponsored programs like a free education. And don't do what Governor Brown did by allowing kids of illegal aliens to get free student loans for college, mama mia and carumba!
8. Driving without a license: Impound the car then sell it at an auction while the ne'er-do well watches.
9. Filching Money from a Charity: Make them live in the conditions of people they are supposed to be helping.
10. Animal and Child Abuse: All of the above.
11. Cell phone Abuse: The culprits should lose the phone down their throats as I don't want to hear about your search for the perfect garage door opener or screenplay when I have problems of my own.
Once when I was in my modeling phase, I was in the office of a photographer with a bad roving eye. When he asked me to go topless, a picture of my father with a grimace on his face crossed my eyes, so I declined and left. A more scrupulous photographer I met during my short-lived acting phase said he imagined his father chasing him around the room when he was about to veer too far off course. But now we need these remedies for parents who think that their children can do no wrong even after having a rap sheet that is longer than the Nile, for heaven's sake.
Monday is Martin Luther King Day, and we celebrate his life, his work and his dream that should, in my view, be our dream. It is a dream about fairness, equality and dignity--dignity not based on race or class but intrinsic in all human beings.
So the irony of the attacks on both Barack and Michelle Obama are not delicious but bitter. Yes, we say that all is fair in love and war--and by extension, politics--but this is really code for giving ourselves permission to be unfair. Every president and first family is picked on and criticized. Harry Truman went to Florida too much. Eisenhower played too much golf and escaped to Camp David. Kennedy partied too much (Oh, if we'd only known how much!). Nixon spent too much time in San Clemente, Reagan in Santa Barbara and W was always clearing brush in Texas. Presidents are begrudged their every pleasure for political reasons. The only exception was Carter who stayed in the Rose Garden and kept turning off the lights to save electricity. He was excoriated for being cheap and not presenting a good image of mighty America.
So the Obamas party and live high on the hog while there are wars, recession and terrible unemployment. Any president would come in for this boilerplate kind of criticism. Still there seems to be some special animus in much of the criticism of the Obamas. Some is consciously racist. Some is coded dog whistle aimed at racists. To see Barack as Nero fiddling and Michelle as Marie Antoinette, as spoiled and uncaring seems counter-factual to me.
Romney says, "Obama doesn't understand America." Gee, why not? Maybe because he's not a "real American." Maybe it's because he's an Indonesian/Kenyan brainwashed into anti-colonialism by the father he met twice, as Gingrich has charged. He is, many claim, out of touch with real (Read: White) Americans. He's an elitist. This charge is rich coming from Mitt Romney, one of the richest men ever to run for the presidency.
We have come a long way in approaching MLK's Dream but we have far to go. It is fair to criticize Obama or Romney or Gingrich for their policies. It is also appropriate to examine the content of the character of our politicians. However, race and religion should be off the table. That would advance us one more step towards living the Dream we celebrate this weekend.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The bottom line of being a public figure is that people are going to make all sorts of complaints and allegations about you, some true, in your opinion, and some not. And Obama, who promised change, has racked up some real zingers.
Four years later, here we are, four trillion dollars deeper in debt and with an unemployment rate at 8.5%, up from 6.1% when Bush left office. Maybe the first clue that things were going to derail was the inauguration bill. Many thought that George W. spending 40 million on his big day was extravagant, but then Obama outdid him by spending 150 mil., making his the most expensive inauguration in our history. Then there was the bailout of the auto industry and Wall Street without penalizing those responsible and illegal immigration, to name a few. The government should crack down on those sapping the system by not paying taxes, not reward them with free healthcare, a free education for their children and the right to sue when things go wrong. Even if Obama had the same skin color as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, few were going to be on board with any of this.
It is heartbreaking to see men and women groveling to take any old job and thwarting their dignity while our commander-in-chief and his wife party on. In the end, his campaign slogan shouldn't have been "change." It should have been "Let them eat cake."
"How do you do it, Jonathan?" people ask me. "How do you write a couple of blog posts a week and columns for three papers? Don't you ever run out of ideas?"
The easy, and in this case true, answer is that the world is busy, night and day across the globe, in all time zones, across the International Date Line (which I called and still couldn't get an exotic international date) and in every nation and culture providing material. While Karl Marx wrote that, "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce," in real time it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the two.
Take Greece. PLEASE! While in a catastrophic economic meltdown, while having to cut budgets and lay off workers, in both the public and private sectors, to the point of civil unrest, what did they do this week? They expanded their definition of disability in order to make more people qualify for disability payments--using money they don't have and that Germany doesn't much want to provide.
Now this sounds wonderful, moral and compassionate but goes some way in explaining why Conservatives mock Liberals. You see the gifts these Greeks bear to the huddled disabled masses is to include child molestation as a disability, along with pyromania and exhibitionism. This is an unnatural extension of the medicalization of bad behavior. We'll all stipulate that such folks are not fully ethically "abled" but to qualify them for a disability payment is quite mad. Clearly the authors of this law should get a nice state-sponsored stipend based on their own common sense deficit. Since they also included the politician's favorite disability, kleptomania, they all automatically qualify.
But we don't have to journey all the way to Greece to find governmental mental cases. Our own silly city Solons have been wrestling mightily with the porn industry. They want the porn actors to slip on some skins while slipping intimate skin; in other words, they want to legally require porn actors in Los Angeles to wear condoms. I'm sure that this is a laudable goal and they are extremely well-meaning in their desire to protect actor/sex workers from HIV and the other transmissible consequences of unprotected sex. But is this really the biggest danger facing Angelinos? Impotent against gang violence, unable to control the sale of guns and bullets, without enough police officers to protect the public, they are hard at work and focusing like laser beams on the porn industry.
Much of the industry promises either to go underground or leave LA if this becomes law. They believe in giving (or actually selling) the public what it wants which apparently doesn't include condoms. Now if this passes you may well wonder how they plan on enforcing the ban? They plan on hiring inspectors to be present at every porn shoot to see that nothing, well, shoots. If you are looking for a whole new category of civil servant, Condom Inspector/Enforcer should do nicely. If, however, this statute doesn't get signed into law, there is a movement to put the issue on the ballot. That really is my hope. I actually don't much care about the result, but I would really love to witness the campaign and the various advertisements pro and con.
As ridiculous as all of these stories are, how can we top Rick Santorum who believes that a child is better off with a father in prison than having a gay father? And he would be happy to put any gay father in prison. Comedy? Tragedy? Farce!
Run out of ideas and idiocy to analyze or lampoon? Not in this world. No, never.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
It was only a matter of time before the enshrined celebrity tabloid obsession would ensnare the Obama's. They have been ripe for the pickings of a media that for the past two decades has successfully parlayed gossip, innuendo, rumor, half truths and outright lies into a hugely profitable growth industry. New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor put the capper on the media industry's swap in kinky titillation by bagging a reported seven-figure deal to write a juicy tell all book about the President and her special target, First Lady Michelle Obama. The White House lightly pushed back against the gossipy tripe with a carefully guarded statement that blew off the book's revelations as "old news."
This won't stop the tongues from wagging about it as if the gossip from the dozens of the unnamed sources cited on the purported inner workings of the White House is the paragon of truth and accuracy. It's another case of flim flamming the public into taking a voyeuristic look into the alleged squabbles, fights, bickering, and confusion, with a strong hint of dysfunctionality that supposedly reigns between the President, Michelle and staff members. The cover to sell the tabloid hit job on the Obamas is that the alleged personal foibles and quirks of the Obamas in some way has some bearing on the weighty matters of politics and public policy. But that's what the book tries to do. It ridicules a Halloween party in which Michelle wore a leopard-print sweater, cat ears and sparkly eye makeup.
This supposedly is a prime example of extravagance, frivolity, and plain goofiness that supposedly goes on behind the White House doors. The proof of this is that Obama supposedly hid the party from the press and the public. They didn't. The press corps was invited, and the party was for the children of military personnel. What this are any of the other gossipy tales about the Obamas have to do with administration policy and decision making about job creation, deficit reduction, immigration reform, the war on terrorism, the Afghan war, the European debt crisis, environmental, labor protections, and transportation polices is anybody's guess. But that's irrelevant anyway. The point is too tantalize the public and belittle the administration. The timing that this purported tell all stuff hit is no accident. It comes as the 2012 presidential campaign kicks into high gear, and this insures that its even more fodder for the GOP political sleaze machine oiled by right wing bloggers, talk show hosts, and websites that delight in spewing out the litany of race baiting slurs, digs, and lies about the Obamas.
News editors, TV executives, and publishers insist that the alleged foibles and peccadilloes of celebrities even those that wear the mantle of the presidency, and now in the case of Michelle, their wives, are fair game for exposure. They are public figures and there is no such thing as privacy when that's the case. This is bunkum. Their only interest is how high ratings can be shoved upward, and how many newspapers and books can be sold in mining journalistic muck. News gathering is, of course, a business and it's certainly well established that sensational news, manufactured or otherwise, sells more than any other news. The rash of books on Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and most recently with Nixon, as with the Obamas, that purport to tell all about their foibles, insecurities, the behind the scenes squabbles and domestic or sexual quirks, are guaranteed to be big hits and will almost always translate into jingling cash registers at book stores, and in on line sales. By contrast, a book about the inside debates and deliberations in a White House over a job or health care bill or a foreign policy issue is guaranteed to draw snores from the public and gather dust on bookstore shelves.
The only difference between the Obamas and the latest frivolities and inanities about the Kardashians or Lindsay Lohan is that publishers make no pretense that they are informing or educating the public about any vital public policy issue. It's just pure titillation, and industry flacks cull the most lurid and prurient quotes and anecdotes from the books and stories on them to grab a headline or a sound bite.
But that's not all. In a book that purports to tell all about the private quirks and rages of the Obamas the author and the publisher can have it both ways. They smugly climb up on their high horse and claim that the public has a right to know about a president's inner life and then turn the table and claim that the public wants to know this stuff anyway and couldn't give a hoot about substantive public policy issues.
"The Obamas" won't be the last book to corral a legion of unnamed alleged inside sources to spin their personal grudges and wounded slights into a juicy tangle of rumor, gossip, and distortions, exaggerations on Obama to sell a book. In the tabloid media, dumping on a celebrity, especially if that celebrity is the Obamas, is standard procedure.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
There are two relentless constants in the manic drive by GOP ultra conservatives, tea party leaders and followers, and unreconstructed bigots to make President Obama a one term president. One is their drumbeat, non-stop barrage of racist depictions, slurs, digs and vilification of Obama. The other is their drumbeat, non-stop barrage of racist depictions, slurs, digs, and vilification of First Lady Michelle Obama. The latest is the outrageously racist depiction of Michelle on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit as a grotesquely muscular armed Marie Antoinette. The racist caricature was based on a 1775 portrait by 18th Century French painter Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty. The painting hangs in the Palace of Versailles outside Paris.
The racist comparison of Michelle to Antoinette is another in the endless knocks that Michelle lives an imperious and luxury lifestyle all supposedly at taxpayer expense. This is code language for an African-American that's "uppity." And if that African-American happens to be the First Lady, the fury level soars and the slanders against her fly even hotter and heavier.
The racial assault on Michelle began virtually the instant that Obama declared his presidential candidacy in 2007. The first salvo was an out of context remark in which Michelle allegedly questioned her faith in America. This set off bells and whistles that she might be the perfect surrogate punching bag for then candidate Obama. The Obama campaign sensed the danger and tactfully made sure that Michelle's would play the low keyed, support for her husband's candidacy that presidential candidate's wives traditionally play.
Once in the White House that quickly changed. She got pilloried for her push of the failed Chicago Olympic bid, and later for uttering a few words on health care reform. Her shopping excursions, her vacation in Spain, and her work-out routine all became fodder for political sniping, gossip and ridicule.
A viral email buzzed around the nets and blogs for a time that pounded her for her high-salaried and top-heavy staff. A British tabloid even engaged in malicious mischief when it claimed that Michelle's undergraduate thesis written in 1985 with the hardly incendiary title of "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" was an open call for black militancy.
That fizzled, but the jibes, taunts, and racist cartoons on the blogs and websites never stopped. The aim is to firmly link Michelle in the public's mind as both a power behind the White House throne and to identify her with the alleged bad policies of Obama. The more honest GOP strategists even said as much when Michelle gave them even more fodder when she sent out an email to friends and supporters touting the selection of Charlotte for the 2012 Democratic Convention. Her carefully chosen words touting the city as "vibrant, diverse and full of opportunity" were about as Chamber of Commerce-safe and tame as could be. But that was more than enough for the GOP to spring back on the attack. After all, said one GOP critic, conventions are partisan and political and therefore for a First Lady to utter a word about the convention makes her by that logic fair game for attack for playing partisan politics.
The juvenile attacks on Michelle may turn out to be child's play compared to what the big, nasty GOP hit machine is capable of steam rolling out. The avalanche of hit below the belt, name calling ads and attacks that the GOP presidential candidates have unloaded on each other give strong hint, if hint be needed, that the GOP will unleash its full arsenal of gossip, innuendo, rumor, slander and outright lies against Obama when the presidential campaign kicks into high gear later in the year.
Michelle almost certainly will figure into the GOP game plan. Obama's GOP presidential opponent will stay above the fray. He will not utter a word about Obama, and will publicly renounce any racial innuendos about the Obamas by their official campaigns. Michelle for her part will also stay above the fray. She will continue to work hard to improve the health and welfare of children and families and give support to military families. But that won't stop the attacks. The GOP will use its endless back door channel surrogates of bloggers, right wing talk show gabbers, and tea party operatives to slur and slander Michelle to sow even more doubt and discord about President Obama's policies and, by extension, him.
In the past the rules of political engagement have been clear. Presidents were fair game for any and every type of fair or gutter attack. Their wives and families, though, were off limits. But as the wife of the most politically assailed president in modern times by racial bigots, the rules of the political game have been smashed. Michelle will continue to be an inviting target of racial slander simply because she is who she is. And that's certainly not Marie Antoinette.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Someone ought to take a gun and take aim at the TV screen when the GOP (and Tea Party) come on to put all of us out of our misery. Otherwise, it is like watching reruns of "Dynasty" or "My Mother the Car." The problem with the GOP is that few, except for Newt Gingrich, are afraid to come forward with any sane, honest and rational opinions that may send the rest of them running like rats under a furnace. What we need to do is pass a national ordinance to get rid of the Tea Party and their extreme views so that things can go (somewhat) back to normal. What we also need are some laws to stop those like some bankers, CEO's and Wall Street tycoons who need a slap and governance rather than the golden parachute. We need a lab to create someone with the following: the know-how of an FDR, the thoughtfulness of a Lincoln and the looks of a Kennedy. Otherwise, Obama will win again. And even though he has passed programs to help people, our economy is still in the hole. The thing is that many people assume that we are in this mess because of the GOP's dalliances, and as much as I hate to say it, in ways, we are.
Though Bachmann and Perry are gone, and Huntsmann finished last and has only a week to live, the clear loser in Iowa was Romney. True, he both outspent and out-smeared the rest of the field and was well organized, and while he offered experience in both politics and business and with as much poise as he showed, three quarters of devoted Republicans voted against him. They voted against him despite the propensity that many folks have for being on the winning side. Romney's "inevitability" doubtlessly helped him but couldn't overcome something intangible that he doesn't seem to possess.
The last time around, even though the Republican party was not as far right as now, "The Massachusetts Moderate'" as Newt calls him, spent a fortune for almost no actual delegates. It must break his heart that despite his perfect looks, his physical and social grooming, folks just don't seem to cotton to him. Explanations are split between the two Ms--Moderation and Mormonism. He is just not plausible as a hard right ideologue--not after running to the left of Ted Kennedy in his losing battle for the Massachusetts Senate seat. After out liberaling Kennedy on Gay rights and reproductive choice, not to mention his largely successful Massachusetts healthcare plan, he comes across as hypocritical and desperately eager to please.
Though all politicians pander, most have some visible core beliefs. The only position where he has been consistent and sincere is his Mormonism. Politically he has had way too many core changes. If Gingrich has had at least one wife too many, for the Evangelicals, Romney has had six epiphanies too many on their core values to be trusted--not to mention his Mormonism.
He is still the odds-on favorite in this odd field to get the nomination, but a battle cry of being the least objectionable in not compelling for the true believers. True, their goal is to beat Obama, but in reality, they long for their own Obama, the Obama of the last election--a candidate who will call to their hopes, a candidate who will galvanize the young and bring both social and religious conservatives together. Romney is not that candidate nor is that candidate visible on the horizon.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Well that silly exercise in the appearance of democracy called the Iowa Caucuses is over for another four years. Once upon a time when Iowa politics were more moderate this process could be a bell-weather. But it hasn't been for many presidential cycles. Now, in the world of reality TV, it is simply media-driven entertainment. The winner seldom goes on to be the nominee and even more rarely the president.
In some ways this is like a pre-Broadway showcase for various shows. They can try out their materials, fine-tune their pitches and hold the equivalent of backers meetings to see if they can fund raise. Those who do well, may be able to attract backers and funds for the next three showcases (New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida).
While Iowa doesn't pick the nominee, it does winnow the field and those who do poorly soon find themselves victims of the cruel Marxist doctrine of "economic determinism." Ironically for a field that largely claims not to believe in Darwinian Evolution, this is about the survival of the fittest. If you can't mate with the money people, you will not survive. Harsh, but politics like nature is bloody in tooth and claw.
This is now a media-driven circus. Years ago Iowa was the sticks (or in a harsh winter, the Styx). Candidates could try out their messages. They could say something stupid and still survive. They could have a bad day; being over-tired they could be in a bad mood. Now every smile, frown, remark or joke is recorded, put on the Net, scrutinized, analyzed and dissected on Cable. There is no place to learn, to make mistakes and to grow.
The talking heads in the media have to come up with new things to say and new angles to cover. They too are trying out their material and trying to find their footing. With all the time available and the resources sent to fill that time, we all get an exaggerated sense of Iowa's importance. It is, in fact, only spring training conducted in the dead of winter.
©2012 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul just can't seem to help himself when it comes to his fetish on a law which has been on the books for nearly five decades and which has long since been rendered a moot point by even avowed white supremacists. That's the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Paul caught much flack when he flatly said he'd have opposed it if he had been in Congress in 1964. He dredged it up again as an issue in 2004 when he voted against a symbolic resolution honoring the law on its fortieth anniversary. He dredged it up again during his abortive presidential bid in 2008. And now he's dredged it up yet again stumping for 2012 presidential votes.
To hear him tell it, it's a matter of the simple principle of upholding the sanctity of private property from any government encroachment. It's a libertarian purism taken to the nth degree and it's a legal and public policy fraud. Paul's oft times uttered quip that private business owners have an absolute right to decide what to do with their own property to make his point that it is legally wrong to tell private business owners what they can do with their business is laughable. Local, state and the federal governments tell businesses what to do all the time. They compel businesses to pay state and federal taxes, business taxes, adhere to environmental, building and safety codes and regulations, have liability and workers compensation insurance, file employee tax reports, and corporate filing reports, and publish a DBA notice.
Paul, and GOP anti-government deregulation crusaders pay obligatory lip service to the campaign to slash and burn government regulations, but the long laundry list of subsidies, protectionism, tariffs, import controls, benignly weighted tax shelters, tax write offs and depreciation options that corporations use to reduce taxes and increase profits all courtesy of government intrusion would fill up a small telephone book.
Paul knows that the times that government has gone lax on "intrusion" into the affairs of private business it's been an unmitigated disaster for the public and business. The loosening of oversight on the savings and loan industry resulted in failure of banks, and left taxpayers holding the bag for lost account values. The deregulation of the electricity industry allowed for large-scale manipulation of rates for profit-making. The result was market panic and skyrocketing electricity prices. The jewel in the crown of government non-intrusion is Wall Street's scamming of the real estate and financial system in 2008. That did much to get the country into the fiscal mess it's still struggling to get out of, and for which President Obama gets blamed for. Paul makes no fetish of the appalling failures of business left to its own devices without government intrusion to handle, well, its own business.
There's no mystery why. Carping about workers compensation or safety regulations as government intrusion into private business is not chic, media eye catching and will not stir up controversy. It won't get lusty cheers from the legion of Paul devotees that think taking shots at a civil rights law decades after the fact proves he's a fearless, uncompromising fighter for his principles. Harping on the Civil Rights Act has even greater value since it's provides cover for race baiting without the odious stench of actual race baiting.
Paul's use of the Civil Rights Act as a foil to snatch a headline any other time could be dismissed as an archaic rant from the fringe. But Paul now has virtual house hold name identification, hordes of fanatical backers, unbridled media allure, and he's stirred nervous tremors among GOP mainstream leaders. He's not going to fade away no matter what happens in the presidential caucuses and primaries especially since he's dropped the coy hint that if the GOP doesn't play ball with him and take some of his positions more seriously he may just pick up his political marbles and not support the eventual GOP presidential nominee, meaning in reality Romney.
This makes Paul's broadside against civil rights laws more dangerous. There's no danger that government or corporations will roll back the clock on the Civil Rights Act but it does send another strong signal to government agencies to slacken up even more in vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. The relentless water down and outright elimination of affirmative action laws and measures by courts, state legislatures and ballot initiatives and the near impossibility of scaling the stratospheric bar of proof of intent required to win discrimination lawsuits against corporations and financial institutions that engage in blatantly discriminatory practices has already severely crimped the fight to broaden civil rights protections.
Paul is clever though. He recognizes that attacking the 1964 Civil Rights Act while in the next breath saying he's against discrimination makes his ploy seem like it's solely about protecting private property, and not the bigotry that it is. We haven't heard the last of Paul's civil rights fetish.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. 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 on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
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