Saturday Morning Malamute Blogging

Snow bunny?

Pat Buchanan: Offended White Man

Poor, poor Pat Buchanan. When it comes to the glorious events in American history where bravery, intelligence, strength of mind and body are called for and achieved, he's like Stephen Colbert—he doesn't see skin color. And like a bisexual narcissist, he doesn't see gender.

"[W]hat did white males do? OK, they were the only guys signing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, all the dead at Gettysburg, all the dead at Normandy."

OK, I'll give him the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence but Gettysburg and Normandy? Not so much. Media Matters has the exchange up and it's a must read.

At one point Tucker Carlson steps out of his role as "white male" to make a stab at sincerity:

CARLSON: Let me just say this. I think -- and I'm not just -- you know, people say, "Oh, you're a white man. That's why you're defending white men." Actually, I'm being sincere. I'm defending this purely on principle. I don't think that you ought to cavalierly attack people based on their race or gender.

But back to Buchanan, who had the following exchange with Bill Press:

PRESS: ...- when you look at the floor of the Democratic convention and look at the great diversity on the floor, in terms of men and women and people of color, and then you look at the floor of the Republican convention, and it looks like the, you know --

BUCHANAN: What's wrong with that?

And in the same hyperventilated discussion he says:

I would remind you, every single president has been a white male. Is that something wrong with America?

Not for long, Pat.

Happy Leaping!

Muckraking at Politico.com

Ben Smith at Politico does Musings & Migraines no favors by quoting me grossly out of context in his latest attempt to paint Barack Obama as a closet leftwing radical. He's trying to make a very circumstantial case on an event that happened 13 years ago. The only reason he needed my quotes is to establish that Obama, Ayers and Dohrn were somewhere, anywhere, together. The fact is Ayers and Dohrn have been Hyde Park political muckety-mucks for years. If being in the same room with them means you're a terrorist, than Richie Daley, most of his staff, and half the faculty at the universities in the area are suspect.

Ben, you really don't understand Chicago politics. Bobby Rush, former Black Panther, is my congressman.

Spanish for your Nanny

Mountains from Mole Hills

Two relatively recent posts here at Musings & Migraines regarding Barack Obama’s run for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 have picked up a lot of attention of late. Those who’ve expressed interest in those posts, which mentioned Obama’s appearance at a meet-and-greet fundraiser for the candidate, hosted by Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, have included Thomas Edsall from Huffington Post, Ben Smith from Politico.com, Peter Hitchens from the London Sunday Mail, and an anti-Obama blog called Rezcowatch.com. The question everyone seems to be asking is whether or not the connection indicates that Obama is secretly some flame-throwing lefty. Well, it doesn’t and he isn’t. In fact, neither were Ayres and Dohrn at the time of the event. And we say this as critics of Obama whose flaws we haven’t hesitated to mention on this blog.

What’s disturbing here is the pathology of current political coverage that leads pundits to go off chasing wild geese while they neglect the real issue lying right in the open. What’s the real issue? Obama is a centrist, who apparently has the knack of making a lot of people with ostensibly different views see what they want in him; a centrist who may have, ironically, opened himself up for attacks by helping stigmatize ideas associated with the left.

It’s a foregone conclusion that the Republicans are going to indulge in their usual left-baiting tactics when it comes to the general election, but it would be a shame for the liberal blogosphere to give them an assist.

with the professor

Monday Malamute Blogging --BONUS

Sunday Malamute Blogging

Air temp is -4° with the wind chill at -34°--Kodi does not want to come inside. Talk about chillin'...

Thoughts on Super Tuesday

In an email Adolph Reed writes:

Obama's biggest victories on Super Tuesday (not counting Illinois, which is a gimme, just as I wouldn't count either Arkansas or New York for Clinton) were in either 1) primary states where black voters make up a very large share of the Democratic vote -- Alabama, Georgia (about half) -- of Democratic voters, though in Delaware blacks were about a quarter of primary voters or 2) in caucus states (Idaho, Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, North Dakota and Kansas), which reflect mobilization of activists, not appeal to the electorate.

In the other primary states, he and Clinton ran basically neck and neck (CT and MO) or she beat him handily (CA, NJ, TN, MA -- where all the Kennedys in the world, John Kerry and Deval Patrick couldn't help him), again not counting NY and AR, where she also won handily.

This repeats the pattern of Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign, where 9 of his 13 victories while the nomination was still in play were in caucus rather than primary states. It also reinforces suspicion that Obama's "historic first" is mainly an ultimately amnesiac replay of the feel-good diversion that was Jackson's campaign, which was also touted as basically the same "historic first." The difference here is that Obama is more conservative than Jackson and offers patter about "hope" and "transcendence" and post-partisan "bringing us together" instead of "hope" and bringing together the "locked out."

As I reminded my class Tuesday, only five black people have been elected to serve either as governor or US senator -- i.e., to significant statewide office -- since the end of Reconstruction. One of those, Ed Brooke, was a two-term MA liberal Republican in the Senate, another, Patrick, was just elected MA governor. Of the others, Carol Moseley Braun was a one-term senator elected on a fluke -- an unanticipated three-way split in the Democratic primary that she won with little more than a third of the vote, a weak GOP opponent put up as part of a rotten deal between the Bush administration and the incumbent Democratic senator to get his vote for Clarence Thomas's confirmation to the Supreme Court, and a Year of the Woman bounce, partly motivated by the Thomas/Hill controversy, that got her a lot of suburban Chicago Republican women's votes. Obama, as has been his good fortune in all but one -- when he was trounced in a challenge for Bobby Rush's Congressional seat -- of his electoral races, ran basically unopposed for his US Senate seat.

In the cold light of this record, it's difficult to believe that he could win the presidency. I'm not sure that he's garnered a majority of white Democratic voters in any of the primary states yet.

On the basis of demographics, I imagine he'll win Louisiana and that it'll follow the same pattern as the other southern primaries. It's true, on the one hand, that these are southern states, where we should expect white racial voting to be especially pronounced, but, on the other hand, Democratic primaries are skewed, somewhat less so if they permit crossover voting, toward those white voters who don't mind voting the same way blacks do.

This might seem to add up to an argument that HRC is more electable, but the problem, of course, is that she has her own baggage that will weigh her down in the presidential race. My sense is that the GOP are just waiting in preparation for either of them much as General Giap waited for the French paratroopers to dig in at Dienbienphu.

Addendum: The states in which Obama has done best -- the southern primary states and most of the caucus states except Minnesota and North Dakota -- are states Dems have little to no chance of carrying in November. His boosters' claims that his performance in those states is an indication of his crossover appeal are ridiculous. In the southern states a white Republican bloc vote will overwhelm the black vote. In the caucus states he hasn't met any electoral challenge at all.

Between Barack and a hard place

I've never been more disillusioned at this point in an election year. Ever. And I love me some Kennedys, but even their endorsements don't move me in the direction of Saint Barack.

And Hillary? She's too damn far to the right. Although I get the feeling that she's more likely to bring the fight to the Republicans than our boy, Barry, is. They hate her guts and she apparently thrives on it. Barack wants everyone to like him. He'll sell us all out.

Damn you, John Edwards! Couldn't you have hung on until the day after tomorrow?

John Edwards Drops Out

Dammit! But at least I've found something that Eric Alterman and I agree on.

He was both the most progressive candidate on issues and the most electable on paper, and yet he did not get the support of most progressives or most professionals. This despite the fact that he actually ran a terrific campaign and, more than Obama and Hillary, defined it in a positive direction. That he forced the other candidates to respond did not end up mattering as much as the media's fascination with all things Clintonian, Obamian, and the egregiously awful coverage of Edwards. The Washington Post deserves special mention for its idiotic 1,300-word piece on his haircut and an even longer one on his house. Richard Cohen and Michael Dobbs both called him a liar and presented no evidence. The editorial board attacked him constantly. The New York Times also went in for the "How can you care about poor people when you're so rich?" line of questioning, which implies that poor people are unentitled to representation in the American political system, since it allows for only wealthy people to run. And Maureen Dowd was her usual awful, substanceless self, helping to set the tone for the rest, to the shame of all of us.

Monday Malamute Blogging

He loves his bed again, now that he knows who's boss. ;)

Charlie Pierce Gets It Right...Again

Every so often I stop reading Altercation because I disagree with some boneheaded thing Eric Alterman has written. But I can't help myself from coming back to read Charlie Pierce on Slacker Friday. He has really got the candidates for POTUS pegged. His astute criticism of Barack Obama is especially refreshing to read in the current climate of nonstop Obamarama.

As I was watching the debate the other night -- the Democratic one where Anderson Cooper came on afterwards and got to pretend to be Angelo Dundee -- I was struck by Senator Obama's resolute assertion that he was the candidate that can come to Washington and work with "independents and Republicans" to get things done. (One of his new ads has him sitting next to Dick Lugar, a Republican senator only slightly more relevant today than is Arthur Vandenberg.) I was struck even harder by it as I watched the Democratic Senate go supine, selling out poor Chris Dodd and the Constitution, and concocting retroactive alibis for the Telecom giants in a week where we finally got the empirical count of prewar Iraq lies. Here's my deal with His Barackosity. Take the list of Republican congresscritters, House and Senate. Make me a list of 10 of them with whom you think you can work to achieve anything close to the progressive goals you have said you want to achieve. Give me an honest run, and I guarantee you that you can't do it. You may get "something done" but it's not going to have anything to do with anything resembling the values of the party you seek to represent. This is a party that has to be forcibly disenthralled from its lunatic base.

Democratic Irrelevance

In 2006 the South Carolina Labor Party secured a statewide ballot line by gathering more than 16,500 signatures (10,000 were required) from rank and file South Carolinians of all races on the basis of the following statement:

For too long, we have watched the other political parties make concession after concession to the corporations that rule this state while our jobs have disappeared, our incomes have eroded and our children have gone uneducated. We are tired of the politics of fear and division that keep us divided and weak. We understand that only a party that is run by and for working people can speak to our real concerns.

We will conduct a never-ending campaign to secure the promise of the American Dream of opportunity, fairness and justice for all South Carolinians.

We will fight to create and preserve decent jobs and living wages for all who want to work.

We will work to establish the right to universal and quality health care in our state.

We believe that every South Carolinian deserves equal and free access to educational opportunity from pre-school through college to the maximum of their human potential.

The situation in South Carolina is bleak. As the 2006 Labor Party analysis noted:

South Carolina has the seventh slowest rate of wage growth in the United States. This is partly because the state is one of only six that have no state minimum wage. It ranks 48th in job growth, ahead of only hurricane and FEMA-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana.

The state also has the second highest rate of unemployment in the nation and lost 76,000 manufacturing and textile jobs between 1999 and 2004. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in key textile areas, such as Chester County, unemployment is greater than 10 percent.

More than 600,000 South Carolinians—over 14 percent of the entire state—are without health insurance, and this, of course, doesn’t count the thousands who think they have insurance until they get sick. To compound this problem the state legislature and governor adopted a “reform” that will eliminate traditional Medicaid in the state and replace it with skimpy personal health care accounts. They did this without significant Democratic opposition.

Working people in South Carolina clearly are hurting, and neither major party is at all inclined to address their most pressing concerns. Politicians from both parties boast that the state’s average wages are 20 percent below the national average. Republicans offer working people only corporate plunder and bigotry. Democrats abet them.

In just the last five years, Republicans have sought to divide South Carolina’s workers over whether the Confederate battle flag should fly at the state capitol, whether prohibition of same-sex marriage and civil unions should be written into the state constitution, and whether evolution should be taught in the state’s public schools. They have been able to make these into “hot button” issues because Democrats have not countered them with a political agenda that seeks to unite working people by speaking to their real, everyday needs.

Forty of the state’s eighty-three districts are classified as “disadvantaged.” The situation is so dire in many of these districts that several joined in a lawsuit against the state for not living up to its obligation to provide decent education to all South Carolina’s children.

The state Supreme Court ruled this past December that South Carolina’s only obligation is to provide a “minimally adequate” education. The remedy the court imposed is that K-3 education must be improved in the school districts that sued.

With only a shoestring operation, the South Carolina Labor Party was able to gain support among multiracial, working people for a progressive agenda directed at redressing these wrongs.

The SCLP is not itself going to win the state for progressive causes, but its minimal success should have pointed the way for Democrats supposedly interested in "change." The lesson here is that there's no need to pursue politics as usual, no need to tack to the right, to build a majority movement for progressive change.

Yet with three putatively progressive candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, we’ve had a debate about South Carolina that has pushed these issues virtually off the table. Bob Herbert in the Times today noted the catastrophe that is South Carolina public schools, but emphasized only the racial dimensions of the problem, while even the idiotic David Brooks observed that conservative South Carolinians aren’t salivating at the mere mention of such issues as abortion. Nonetheless our would-be progressive leaders are hammering away at each other's character and integrity.

What was this election supposed to be about anyway?

Friday Malamute Blogging

He's been a constipated crybaby since Lenora and Ceds left. Now he can get back to normal eating and walking routines. No more gummy worms. No more Cocoa Puffs. No more screaming gorillas.

Obrother

For someone, who, by his own admission "missed the '60s...," Matthew over at 40 Years In The Desert has a very hip analysis of Obama's recent praise for Ronald Reagan. And by "hip" I mean this guy has a clue. He points out astutely that Obama missed the turmoil of the '60s by virtue of being in Hawaii and Jakarta, and that Obama accepts Reagan's view that Big Government was really big and bad and excessive in the '60s, and what was really missing from that decade was clarity, optimism, and dynamic entrepreneurship—all of which were provided by Reagan.

So, to review what Barack Obama believes:
government expenditures in the '60s = bad / Ronald Reagan = good

Let's take a closer look with Matthew Saroff and Phil Gaspar.
Excesses of the '60s:

• Voting Rights Act
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
  
• Medicare
  
• the opening of social welfare programs to people of color

Clarity, optimism, and "a sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship" provided by Reagan:

• fired 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 -- one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century
  
• his vision of deregulation opened up the country for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis
  
• underfunded federal programs dealing with AIDS; believed people suffering and dying from AIDS were punished by God
  
• directed the Department of Agriculture to classify ketchup as a vegetable in September 1981 in an attempt to slash $1.5 billion from the federal school lunch program
• presided over the worst recession since the 1930s
• opposition to civil rights
• spearheaded class warfare on behalf of the rich
  
• supported apartheid in South Africa
• trained and supported terrorists, including the Nicaraguan contras and Islamic radicals in Afghanistan who later formed the al-Qaeda network.

A Democrat who admires the "different path" that Ronald Reagan led the country down—this is inspiring?

News from the political front

Red rabbit's been down with the flu, and Lenora's in the throes of exams, so I thought I might divert our readers by directing them to Andrew Stephens's article in the New Statesman, Obama Unmasked, which, while it includes no new reporting, draws attention to how little attention the media in general have devoted to the questions that the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times have raised about Obama's slick and misleading strategy of self-presentation.

Quoth Stephens:

The further away you get from Chicago, though, the more the saintly image takes hold. Publications like the New Yorker may coo for pages over "the conciliator", but the two Chicago newspapers are much more interested in Obama's close 17-year friendship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a long-time Obama donor and property developer awaiting trial on charges of attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud. A low-income housing project received more than $14m from taxpayers while Obama was a state senator, but he consistently denied that he had done any favours for Rezko.

All of this would matter little if there were some truly progressive politics being furthered by the self presentation, but alas . . .

Saturday Malamute Blogging

Toward a more active activism

I meant to link to this thought-provoking piece by our good friend, Adolph Reed, Jr., in The Progressive a month ago, but better late than never:

Sitting This One Out

By Adolph L. Reed Jr.
November 2007 Issue

OK, HERE WE ARE AGAIN, a year out from a Presidential election, and we’re all supposed to be figuring out which of the Democrats has the best chance to win—determined mainly by the standard of raising the most money—and subordinating all our substantive political concerns to the objective of getting him or her elected. This time, I’m not going to acquiesce in the fiction that the Presidential charade has any credibility whatsoever. I’m not paying any attention to the horse race coverage—that mass-mediated positioning in the battle for superficial product differentiation.

...

Saturday Malamute Video Blogging