Sherry Chandler

These national discussions just keep coming at us, don’t they?

Clinton Bloc Becomes the Prize for Election Day (I supply emphasis):

…Even the Democratic National Committee chairman is avidly trying to make up for accusations that he allowed sexism in the race to pass unchallenged.

“The wounds of sexism need to be the subject of a national discussion,” the chairman, Howard Dean, said in an interview. “Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers” toward Mrs. Clinton.

…

Former Gov. Madeleine M. Kunin of Vermont suggested in an interview that Mr. Obama promise to appoint women to half his cabinet positions.

Ms. Steinem advised that Mr. Obama deliver the same sort of ambitious speech about sex that he did on race. An aide said the campaign was considering such an address.

Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant unaffiliated with either campaign, wondered whether Mr. Obama might give Chelsea Clinton a prominent role in his efforts.

When Mr. Dean reached out to Cynthia Ruccia, who started an organization of female Clinton swing-state voters threatening to vote for Mr. McCain, Ms. Ruccia asked that the Democratic convention include a symbolic first ballot for Mrs. Clinton’s delegates. Mr. Dean discouraged the idea on the grounds of unity.

He has belatedly recognized the cries of sexism, Mr. Dean said, particularly when a friend showed him a video compilation of broadcasters’ comments about Mrs. Clinton.

“We all get over it when our candidates don’t win,” he said. “What you don’t get over is feeling like you’ve been insulted by some of the leading institutions in America and no one said anything about it.”

…

The Obama campaign will fight back, after waiting a respectful beat or two. In conversations with Mr. Obama and his aides, “I’ve tried to make sure that everyone understood that these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry,” said Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an important ally who is one of his leading emissaries to women. “To try to make that less than real is a huge mistake.”

As he declared himself the nominee on Tuesday, Mr. Obama cut a particularly woman-friendly figure on stage, dedicating his speech to his grandmother and affectionately bumping fists with his wife, Michelle.

Indeed, descriptions of those women, along with his mother and daughters, will be regular features of Mr. Obama’s speeches, Ms. Sebelius said. Women will ultimately choose Mr. Obama not because of symbolic overtures, she added, but because of his stances on health care, the economy and education, areas where his positions closely resemble Mrs. Clinton’s.

The key, Ms. McCaskill said, is approaching Mrs. Clinton’s supporters with utmost humility. And, Ms. Backus added, that is not always the strongest suit of the young people who are some of Mr. Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters.

“Not nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh,” Ms. McCaskill said, making a taunting sound. “We need them very, very badly, and we shouldn’t be able to be afraid to say that we need them.”

H/t Big Tent Democrat

But they didn’t need us last week. Weren’t too worried about those adolescent commentators then either.

I wonder how many women are going to see this sort of Damascus Road conversion as conveniently timed? Sort of an “I’m sorry honey. I’ll never do it again.”

They might want to polish up that humble rhetoric too. To quote Paul Lukasiak, “these women have a right to feel frustrated and angry” is not the same as “women have a reason to be angry.”

While I’m not a woman, this “right to be” language is the equivalent of an “I’m sorry that you were offended”, faux-apology — its a failure to acknowledge that the anger is legitimate, and that its not just the media that is at fault, but the candidate and the party itself.

Paul thinks this is all misdirection to distract us from the corruption of the DNC.

And, after all, it is not just women who voted for Senator Clinton over Senator Obama. There’s the question of the “Appalachia problem.”

Speaking of Appalachia, I still want policy specifics. In Bristol, Virginia on Thursday, Senator Obama got an enthusiastic response to promises that he’d provide everybody with health care but he didn’t say how he plans to do that.

Gail Collins is relatively clear-eyed about what Clinton accomplished:

Here’s where the sexism does come in. If Barack had failed in his attempt to make history by becoming the first African-American presidential nominee, you can bet we’d have treated his defeat with the dignity it deserved. Even if he went over the deep end at the finale and found it hard to get around to a graceful concession. [Ed. note: I wish people would get over this meme. The timing of Clinton's concession is well within the tradition and will be perfectly graceful. See Anglachel.]

For a long time, Obama supporters have seen party unity as something that Hillary could provide by capitulating. It also requires the Democrats to acknowledge what she’s achieved. If that makes them feel like wimps, let them take it out on John McCain.

…

Over the past months, Clinton has seemed haunted by the image of the “nice girl” who gives up the fight because she’s afraid the boys will be angry if they don’t get their way. She told people she would never, ever say: “I’m the girl, I give up.” She would never let her daughter, or anybody else’s daughter, think that she quit because things got too tough.

And she never did. Nobody is ever again going to question whether it’s possible for a woman to go toe-to-toe with the toughest male candidate in a race for president of the United States. Or whether a woman could be strong enough to serve as commander in chief.

Her campaign didn’t resolve whether a woman who seems tough enough to run the military can also seem likable enough to get elected. But she helped pave the way. So many battles against prejudice are won when people get used to seeing women and minorities in roles that only white men had held before. By the end of those 54 primaries and caucuses, Hillary had made a woman running for president seem normal.

…

For all her vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it’s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women’s issues she had championed all her life — repair of the social safety net, children’s rights, support for working mothers.

It’s not the same as winning the White House. But it’s a lot.

Speak Your Piece: The Appalachian Vote and Dirty Uniforms, from Bill Bishop at The Daily Yonder:

In 1988, the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Appalachia and it changed his life.

Jackson was running for president and he brought his campaign to Hazard, Kentucky, a small town deep in the state’s mountain coalfields. When he ate cornbread at Bailey’s, like every place he went in Eastern Kentucky, Jackson attracted a crowd. One young woman there at the roadside eatery pushed her newborn into Rev Jackson’s arms. The child’s grandmother blurted, “Don’t nobody dare tell him what this baby’s named,” and then gave up the secret. The child’s name was Reagan.

Jackson promptly put his palm on the youngster’s forehead and commanded, “Heal!” His old time preacher style “drew whoops from the restaurant regulars in this Eastern Kentucky hardscrabble hill country,” the Washington Post reported.

More than whoops, however, Jesse Jackson drew respect and a following. A reported 4,000 people crammed the high school gym in Hazard to listen to Rev. Jackson speak.

Sen. Barack Obama might have been able to pull 4,000 people to the Hazard high school gym in 2008, but he never came to Eastern Kentucky. He held rallies in Louisville, Kentucky, and Charleston, West Virginia, the two largest cities in the states. But he never ventured into the coalfields. He never ate cornbread at Baileys and never went to Hazard.

… Columnist Leonard Pitts said he felt “sorry” for West Virginia because of the “bigotry in Appalachia so vividly in display.” Funny, but two out of ten voters in New York said race was important in their decision — split between Clinton and Obama — but nobody felt “sorry” for them.

It turns out that West Virginians were entirely average in the percentage of voters who considered race an important consideration in their vote. In Alabama and Mississippi, three out of ten voters said race was important, and 62 percent of those voted for Obama. Two out of ten voters in Georgia said race was important, and 72 percent of those folks voted for Sen. Obama. In Illinois, 23 percent of the Democratic voters said race was important — a higher percentage than West Virginia — and 73 percent of those voted for Obama. In America, there’s a lot of sorry to go around.

…

I think his trip to Hazard changed Jackson’s life because he kept showing up in Appalachia. He was there on the 30th anniversary of the Farmington mine disaster in West Virginia. He brought Rev. Jerry Falwell to southeastern Ohio for a march aimed at attracting attention and investment to Appalachian communities. In 1998 he proposed a test for presidential candidates: “Do you matter to Mud Creek, Kentucky? Do you have anything to say that is relevant to the people of Eastern Kentucky and central West Virginia and Appalachian Ohio?”

Read it all.

Too little, too late, on CNN Howard Kurtz examines the question with a panel of (gasp!) women journalists. He predicts a backlash. Ya think?:

Watch at YouTube

Link via Tennessee Guerilla Women.

I do not have cable tv, let alone HBO, so I did not watch Recount, but Jane Smiley did and she came to conclusion that Al Gore was right to concede because, in part, it allowed the Republicans to show themselves:

Winning to them trumped every other consideration. It is also evident that they learned from their “victory” in Florida that bullying was the way to go, and so they attempted to use the same strategy and tactics in Iraq. The last eight years show that ethics, law, and human decency meant nothing to these Republicans. And their current pleasure in the depiction of their own rottenness shows that they have learned nothing.

I would like to be a fly on the wall in the room where John McCain is watching Recount. In the course of the next few months, knowing that bullying, cheating, and subverting the election might or might not work, he will have to make a choice. He can run an honorable campaign and lose or a dishonorable campaign that shames him. Does he watch Recount and see Warren Christopher as a “wimp” and James Baker as “tough”? Or does he watch Recount and feel the humiliation that every Republican should feel? He is the carrier of the Bush poison now. The sooner he recognizes it, the better off the nation will be.

My thought? Maybe the Democrats should examine their own house.

Link courtesy of Avedon.

Aside: Kurtz can’t resist a bit of blame the victim in his Washington Post venue:

Somewhere in Hillary’s inevitability phase, the trailblazing nature of her effort got lost. She became the establishment candidate, the return-to-the-’90s candidate, and the wow factor–which has always surrounded Obama–simply faded.

Simply faded? How about was stomped on and crushed and still wouldn’t die? See Avedon below.

Update: Over at Suburban Guerilla, zuzu asks Obama supporters how they’re going to reach out to disgruntled Clinton supporters in the event that Obama is the nominee. Interesting lot of replies. Go read. (Short version: they got nothin’)

Every time I say to myself that I have cast my vote and I am through with this election, ready to step back and watch events develop, some new madness crops up and I feel as though I have to speak out.

I am, of course, referring to the “uproar,” largely manufactured by political partisans, over Hillary Clinton’s remarks about the Robert Kennedy primary campaign of 1968.

For the media and/or political partisans to accuse one candidate of calling for the physical assassination of another is not only character assassination but also very unwise. Such tactics are not just divisive, they are incendiary.

And the whole incident makes me very sad. I just want to weep for our country that it has come to this.

I will leave you with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s remarks:

I’ve heard her make that argument before,” Mr. Kennedy said, speaking on his cell phone as he drove to the family compound in Hyannis for the holiday weekend. “It sounds like she was invoking a familiar historical circumstance in support of her argument for continuing her campaign.” . . . [H]is support of Mrs. Clinton has not wavered.

…

I have heard her make this reference before, also citing her husband’s 1992 race, both of which were hard fought through June. I understand how highly charged the atmosphere is, but I think it is a mistake for people to take offense.”

_______________

Updated May 25: Here’s an addendum from the ever wise Melissa McEwan (emphasis added):

Briefly, my opinion is that it was an ill-considered statement that warranted an apology, irrespective of intent. FWIW, I don’t think she intended to suggest anything nefarious, but it was not a particularly sensitive example to use to make her point, and careless in its disregard of the history of violence against black leaders. It was inevitable, and of course not unreasonable, that people would consider her competitor Obama within the frame she built, to upsetting results, even if she didn’t specifically mention him.

As I’ve said before, an apology after erring is not about the original intent; it’s about the result. It’s about making amends. When I step on someone’s foot unintentionally, I still say “I’m sorry.”

UPDATE: Also, I want to quickly note, when I step on someone’s foot unintentionally and say I’m sorry, that doesn’t give them license to premeditatedly punch me in the nose and claim I deserved it. Clearly, the usual suspects are seeking to deliberately misconstrue Clinton’s statement for maximum outrage-ginning, and I don’t guess I need to give you my opinion on that.

__________

Updating the Update: In response to Melissa McEwan, Six Degrees of Obama

So the new rule is Hillary (and Bill, her surrogates, etc.) cannot mention anything that someone might possibly, in some bizarre fashion, connect in some offensive way to Barack Obama within six degrees of separation?

…

The first player takes quote out of any statement by Hillary, Bill, or any Hillary staff member or prominent supporter, and the second player has to link a word from it to Barack Obama in an offensive way within six links.

Hillary says* “This is all a big kabuki dance”

Dance - racial sterotype of black people being good dancers - Obama is black - Obama danced with Ellen Degeneres on her show - Hillary is saying Obama is a good dancer because he’s black.

___________

Update to the update of the update: From the Argus Leader, where Hillary Clinton was being interviewed:

The Argus Leader’s Executive Editor Randell Beck issued the following statement today:

“The context of the question and answer with Sen. Clinton was whether her continued candidacy jeopardized party unity this close to the Democratic convention. Her reference to Mr. Kennedy’s assassination appeared to focus on the timeline of his primary candidacy and not the assassination itself.”

_________

One more: Commenter talex at TalkLeft:

What you won’t read on the blogs:

People are also ignoring the historical reference to Kennedy. Via Wikipedia:

“At the time of his death, [Bobby] Kennedy was significantly behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey in convention delegate support”

So you see, Bobby was still in the race in June even though he was running behind Humphrey in convention delegate support.

So the parallels with RFK are all Clinton’s: Senator from New York and underdog

This morning I stopped at my usual Swifty to pay 50 low-value dollars to fill the tank of my 1997 Camry. It’s a nickel discount for cash at Swifty, and as I handed my two-twenties-and-a-ten to the attendant, a rosy-cheeked white-haired man who is at those pumps in all weathers, I noticed that he had an “I Voted” sticker on his padded flannel shirt.

“Ah,” says I, “you voted. Good for you. I voted, too.”

“I haven’t missed an election since I was 21,” he replied. And, after a pause, “Of course, that’s just typical of old people. We’re reliable. We vote.”

Most in those years when the station attendant and I were young had to be 21 to vote, though at 18 a boy could fight in Korea or Viet Nam. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution rectified that inequity. My grandmother had two children before she had the right to vote. My mother was born without the right to vote. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution rectifed that. The 15th amendment gave suffrage to black males. (paragraph edited for factual inaccuracies.)

Voting is important to us old people. We remember those who did not have the right. We hold our right to vote sacred and we consider it our sacred duty to vote.

This gas-station conversation and Koshembos’s comment have given me a focus for some things I’ve been wanting to say here. It has to do with why I’ve become so obsessive about this election campaign. It’s probably going to be repetitive and it will no doubt be long, so I hope you’ll hang in there with me.

Though I have been hard on Barack Obama on these pages, I don’t consider myself his enemy or even an adamant opponent.

I have been proud to call myself a bleeding-heart liberal and a card-carrying member of the ACLU. I registered Democratic in 1963 because my Daddy told me I’d better do that if I wanted my vote to have any power in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. (I was thinking of registering Independent, but Independents can’t vote in our closed primaries.) I have been a loyal Democrat ever since, though I have voted once or twice for a Republican.

When this primary started, I would have been proud to vote for Obama and I had doubts about a Clinton dynasty (though never about Hillary Clinton, whom I have admired for going on two decades). As the race continued, I became more doubtful of Obama. I could still be persuaded to vote for him but I want something for my vote. That’s the way the system works. You vote for the candidate who is going to work for you.

I want the man to stop running as a Republican. I want him to take a strong stance against the character assassination, sexism, and misogyny that has characterized this primary race as Hillary Clinton has spoken out against any hint of racism. And most importantly, I want him to honor my vote.

If, as has been argued (most articulately by Anglachel), the DNC wants to use this year when a Democrat seems to be a shoo-in to develop a strategy that wins the presidential election without having to court the racist South, that’s fine with me. As a liberal white Southerner, I’m not eager to see the worst of my region exploited for electoral gain, though I do get my back up at the vitriol heaped upon our poor benighted redneck heads. But I would like this strategy to elect a Democrat, not a Republican in sheep’s clothing. If you aren’t going to elect a Democrat, what’s the point????

Who do I call a Democrat? Some one who looks out for the poor, the ill, the elderly, the working class, minorities. Some one who cares about education and the environment.

The problem with throwing out the South as Anglachel points out is that you also throw out the working class who make up what you might call the Appalachian diaspora. This, I think, used to be called the Democratic base, a large chunk of it anyway.

Still, I could be persuaded to vote for Barack Obama. When I look at John McCain and his promises of four more years of Bush policies, I could be persuaded.

BUT

I do not want him foisted upon me by a party elite, the media, and the blogs.

Frankly, I don’t trust them. I trust my fellow citizens, especially the ones who vote.

If I am convinced that Obama has seized the nomination without letting the process work — and I mean really work, not some cosmetic sort of let-Hillary-quit-with-dignity bullsh1t — if I am convinced that Obama and his supporters in the DNC have somehow gamed the system, then I will not be able to cast my vote for him.

Barack Obama is the Democratic candidate for president when the Democratic National Convention names him such and not before. He cannot declare himself the winner.

We were appointed a president by coup d’état, middle-class Republican riot, and patriarchal fiat in 2000 and I was furious. At the time, the news media congratulated us for sitting quiet for our coup, for recognizing “the rule of law” and not taking to the streets. Myself, I thought a little taking-to-the-streets was in order. It was Founding Father Jefferson, after all, who said “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.”

Voters have indicated in poll after poll that they want this primary contest to continue to its logical end. Me and the gas-station attendant and the poll worker I talked about yesterday, we want to have our say. Kentucky Democrats showed up yesterday at 43%, while only 19% of Republicans voted. This electorate is not ready to have a nominee chosen for them.*

But it seems to me that the Democrats have internalized the worst of the Rove/Bush worldview and they are using it to attack one of our own.

I will not enable such tactics with my vote.

__________

Read Big Tent Democrat.

And here.

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*Kentucky’s voters are old and poor and rural and we have a paltry 8 electoral votes, but if Al Gore had won Kentucky in 2000, the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 & 1996, he wouldn’t have needed Florida.

Last night I went to a GOTV rally for Hillary Clinton at Transylvania University in Lexington.

Doors were to open at 4:30, but opening was delayed a bit because we got the unexpected added treat of having Bill attend and extra security had to be laid on.

The line started forming at 3:00. By the time the doors opened, it stretched from the Clive Beck Athletic and Recreation Center (aka the school gym) at the corner of 4th and Limestone, all away around the campus’s main circular drive and out onto Limestone as far as I could see toward 3rd Street.

Everybody was friendly and upbeat, chatting, laughing, even when a light drizzle began to fall.

Greg Fischer had people there working the line. Union members were handing out signs and t-shirts. Mail Carriers for Hillary. AFSCME for Hillary.

Three lines of security. We had to leave our umbrellas outside in a big pile on a table. And under the table. Hundreds of umbrellas (and mirabile dictu, I found mine after it was all over). We joked that it was a political rally and umbrella exchange.

All I took with me was a wallet on a string with two compartments and a cell phone pocket. The guard searched that thing so thoroughly even I was beginning to think I might have snuck something in. A metal detector and a wand. But the searches moved quickly and the crowd flowed into the gym in a steady stream for over an hour. I’m not good at estimating crowds but I was told the gym seats about a thousand and then the floor was filled up, too. So maybe 1,500 people, aged 18 to 80. [Update: Washington Post says 2,000.]

Finals begin today at Transylvania, so the students seated to my left were studying while we waited for things to start happening. Local media were set up on risers at the back of the gym. We were in line behind Herald-Leader reporter Ryan Alessi. His report is here. (Rather tellingly, he devotes his first 5 paragraphs to Barack Obama, then gives another 4 to Michelle in Lexington, and spends more time on Bill than on Hillary, but he has some nice details of Bill’s talk.)

This event had been organized on about three days notice by a young man, a student who is heading Transylvania for Hillary. As my companion noted, this was “real grass roots stuff. Just people” come out to see and support an historic candidate. No post mortem here. We were having a big time, practicing politics the old-fashioned way.

The student organizer, in suit and American flag tie, spoke to the crowd. Charles L. Shearer, President of Transylvania, addressed the crowd briefly. A male chorus, about 8 young men, sang an a cappela version of The Star Spangled Banner that nearly moved cynical old me to tears.

After a lull, a sudden flurry of activity. The national media had arrived, slightly rain flecked, carrying huge video cams and laptop cases down the steep gymnasium stairs. Suddenly I noticed the three rows of library tables that got filled with laptops, each with a reporter busily typing away. Except for one blond in a white jacket, these guys were dressed in the sort of national uniform, jeans and t-shirts. But they were different. They were important. Glamor had come to our sleepy little town.

I surprise myself in saying this, but it was true.

Then there were Secret Service men in the crowd. These guys had on suits. They looked dour. They stood still in the milling crowd and watched. Anything that moved. I sat still. [Added: We speculated whether the red buttons we could see on their lapels were flag pins or the latest in mini-tasers.]

I couldn’t have got out anyway. My friend and I, being older women, discussed emergency bathroom procedures to which we might be reduced. These involved the plastic yard-signs we’d been given. We were only half joking.

Former Governor Martha Layne Collins did the warm up speech. She was governor of Kentucky when Bill was governor of Arkansas. Martha Layne is still a beloved figure in Kentucky, one of our most popular former governors. She’s 72 now, but she looks great, and she talked about the barriers she had had to break to become Kentucky’s first and only woman governor.

Five Kentucky governors have endorsed Hillary Clinton, as has Terry McBrayer, a superdelegate.

Then Jerry Lundergan, head of the Kentucky Democratic Party, who told how — when a Republican had won the governorship for the first time in decades and the Kentucky party was broke — both Hillary and Bill donated time to come to the state for fund-raisers that helped put the party back in the money.

Then Bill! Oh the crowd was on its feet yelling and stomping and waving banners. This was Bill Clinton.

We were never quiet after that. We were intensely involved in this event. (Added: My friend tells me Obama said it’s no wonder Kentucky is for Clinton, we’re so close to Arkansas. Maybe he was talking about a spiritual closeness. We sure loved us some Arkansans last night.)

What can I say about Bill Clinton? He looked distinguished, he was charming.
He told us that Hillary has done things to change people’s lives, to make life better for people. He was in his element. He spoke briefly. He can do that in support of his wife.

And finally, Hillary.

She looked radiant and relaxed. She was all smiles. She’s smaller than I’d thought, a neat figure of a woman in a gold pantsuit. When she came bounding up onto the stage and Bill hugged her, she was engulfed by his large masculine physicality but not overshadowed. Supported.

She said they’d traveled to the towns and cities in the four corners of the state and had a lot of fun meeting Kentuckians and I believed her.

She was slightly hoarse. She gave her stump speech, an excellent speech, well-delivered. She has learned to use her voice well. She said the things you’ve heard her say before if you’ve been paying attention. And we gave her our full approval.

Cheers especially for ending George Bush’s war on science, for ending No Child Left Behind, for helping students finance their college education. She asked if any students there were paying over 20% on their college loans, and I was shocked to hear them say they were paying 22% and 25% interest. I paid my $1,500 college loan back at 3%.

Cheers for bringing the troops home and supporting them after they get home.

I’m here to tell you that this is not a defeated woman. Whether she wins this primary or loses it, she’s a woman who has found her power.

And she was an inspiration to at least two old women seated in the bleachers.

[Update: I forgot to add that, as I started home, I switched on the radio to WEKU to the strains of Beethoven's Ninth, which took me rather triumphantly all the way home. I arrived there to the strains of the Ode to Joy. Thought it was a pretty good portent.

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium!
We enter, fire-drunk,
Heavenly one, your shrine.
Your magics again bind
What custom has strictly parted.
All people become brothers
Where your gentle wing lingers.]

The polls are open in Kentucky. Our votes matter in this election and that’s important. Bill Clinton said this is a vitally important election.

But they all are vitally important elections.

We have to elect U.S. Senate candidates, state senate candidates, city councilmen, county magistrates…

Agree with me or disagree about the better candidate, but go and exercise your right to vote. It’s what keeps you free.

And let us have joy in our political process, that lets us choose our leader.

Update: Video from the Herald-Leader.

Larry Webster’s column in today’s Lexington Herald-Leader is entitled Cover Stories for Obama Opponents. Unfortunately, it begins with one of the most egregious cover stories for Clinton opponents: Hillary is a monster. OR, to use Lambert’s formulation, Why Won’t that Stupid Bitch Quit. Here are the first four paragraphs:

My wife, Cheryl, and I once landed at a Zimbabwe airport only to find great hubbub and celebration. When we asked what was going on we learned that then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, were arriving, too.

We wondered why they were there, and for years Cheryl claimed that every spring break, Hillary Clinton took her daughter somewhere overseas on tax money.

That was when we saw through a glass darkly. But now it is clear that Hillary Clinton went to Harare to learn political exit tactics from Robert Mugabe. He is having his opponents beaten.

It is already fairly legal in America to beat a black person, so Clinton still has that option. It is easy for her to keep running since the only cost to the country is driving races apart.

I graduated from Owen County High School with Larry Webster back in 1963. We were teen rebels together, or possibly just too sassy and full of ourselves to know when to keep our mouths shut and so smart we could get away with murder. We worked on the school newspaper together and the yearbook. We both had character roles in the senior play.

After getting his JD, Larry decided to practice law in Pike County in the deeps of Kentucky’s mountains where he lives the Libertarian values he preaches, growing his own food, living and buying locally, and defending civil liberties.

There are many things to admire about Larry, but logical thinking doesn’t seem to be one of them. Granted, he is not wrong in saying that there are people in Kentucky who will vote against Barack Obama for the wrong reasons rather than voting for Hillary Clinton for the right reasons. Exit polls in West Virginia, whose demographics are very like ours, indicated that 8% of Democrats voting said race was the most important issue. I’ll grant you that people lie, but still, the number is low. Nevertheless, in a state with a stained past, it’s valid to point out the logical fallacies of the racists.

Unfortunately, by opening his argument with the very ugliest kind of Hillary bashing, Larry has given up all credibility. He is doing to Hillary Clinton precisely what he has accused racist Kentuckians of doing to Barack Obama. Making a vicious ad hominem attack with no reference to any fact.

I am furious with him, and all the moreso because our connection goes back so far.

Are there reasons to vote for Barack Obama? I’m sure there must be, but Larry doesn’t give us any. He tells us Obama is

a brilliant young man of principle with sparkling common sense and not owned by any master

but we have to take his word for it. He doesn’t give us any examples or tell us why these characteristics necessarily make Obama the best choice for President. That’s more ad hominem argument.

Then there’s this paragraph. I don’t know what this is about, whether it’s supposed to be parody or mouth-frothing righteous anger. After listing one of the racist cover stories as They say Obama wouldn’t be sworn in on the Bible, there’s this:

Listen and listen good. We real Americans are only going to tell you once before we run your ass off. The Bible is a Holy Book of one of many religions of the American people. Real Americans will die for the right of those who believe the Bible to use or not use it however they want. We will fight for the right of every American not to have to pay homage to somebody else’s religion.

If you don’t believe that, get your stuff and get out — and take that stupid lapel pin with you.

Is this the racist speaking? Or Larry speaking to the racist? I don’t know.

I’m as prejudiced against flag pins as anybody but still…

Either way I’m sad to say, if you’re looking to divide the country and stiffen the backs of Clinton supporters against Obama, Larry’s column makes a damn good start.

_________________________

By the way, I have a letter to the editor in today’s Herald-Leader. My letter is in response to a column by Charles Baker in last Sunday’s paper. Mr. Baker also exhorted me to vote for Barack Obama because he is black and I am white. (That column has already gone behind the archival curtain. Short abstract here.)

The letter is truncated in the paper. Here is the long version:

So Charles Baker would have me vote for Barack Obama because I am a guilty white person, without regard for the fact that Senator Obama has promised to “fix” a Social Security program that isn’t broken, that he has a weaker health care proposal than does Senator Clinton, that he has promised a Reagan/Bush foreign policy, or that he has referred to the Republican party as the party of ideas.

Mr. Baker is right. Kentucky has a shamefully racist past, but I cannot atone for that past by voting for Senator Obama when I don’t think his policies are the best ones for the Democratic party or the nation, and maybe not even for African Americans. It’s just as racist to vote for the black guy because he’s the black guy as it is to vote against the black guy because he’s the black guy.

Although the student Mr. Baker remembers may or may not have changed his mind about the innate superiority of white basketball players, time and the facts have proved him wrong. I doubt you’d find many Kentuckians today who would argue that point. We may be racist but we like to win.

By the same token, I think Kentucky’s voters are capable of looking beyond their putative racism in deciding who they will vote for in the primary. Your poll shows that the economy is Kentucky’s chief concern. If Kentuckians thought Senator Obama’s economic policies would ease our pain, I think they’d vote for him.

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Imprisoning people has worked out so well here, now I guess we plan to imprison the whole world.

Anybody remember the Soviet Union?

Although it looks like a prison would actually be an improvement:

…hundreds of Afghans and other men are still held in wire-mesh pens surrounded by coils of razor wire. There are only minimal areas for the prisoners to exercise, and kitchen, shower and bathroom space is also inadequate.

…

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers.

Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.

Update: And then there’s this from the Boston Herald via TalkLeft, Alabama sheriffs feed inmates on $1.75 a day

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Back in the day of chain gangs, Alabama passed a law that gave sheriffs $1.75 a day to feed each prisoner in their jails, and the sheriffs got to pocket anything that was left over.

More than 80 years later, most Alabama counties still operate under this system, with the same $1.75-a-day allowance, and some sheriffs are actually making money on top of their salaries. But exactly how much is something of a mystery because state auditors do not have access to sheriffs’ private accounts.

How could anyone turn a profit feeding men and women for an entire day on less than the price of a Coke and a bag of Fritos? Sheriffs practice Depression-style frugality and rely on such things as day-old bread, cut-rate vegetables and cheap inmate labor.

Whether or not it means she can ever be the Democratic nominee for president, one thing I find encouraging about Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that she persists in pulling high percentages of votes despite the news media’s best efforts to stop her. Over and over, they tell us she can’t win and over and over the voters come out for her. In this one instance, for good or ill, voters seem to be thinking beyond the media narrative.

The fact is that our media has played a disgraceful role in our politics since the 2000 election.

At one time, I thought the left-wing blogs would be watchdogs against this journalism-as-infomercial but this year they have nearly all chosen to fall in behind their candidate of choice and enjoy the schadenfreude when the other guy was trashed. The candidates, too, have failed to a lesser or greater extent to call foul.

The last debate between Clinton and Obama, for example, was a travesty but either one or both of the candidates could have refused to play the game. Senator Clinton has been forced by public outcry to repudiate perceived racism from her supporters but Senator Obama has not repudiated very real sexism from his own.

The problem is, as I’ve said over and over here, when you allow this sort of thing to happen to your opponent, you cannot complain when it happens to you.

Gabor Steingart, Der Spiegel’s man in Washington D.C. can see it, if we cannot. Here is a clip from his article The Media’s Mini-Truths

The American public has not only been misled during this election campaign, but has also been fed a constant stream of irrelevant information. In one of his novels, the British writer, essayist and journalist George Orwell invented the Ministry of Truths, which he called “minitruths,” with which one would try to confuse the public with small parts of the truth that even when added up do not give the whole picture.

This is despite the fact that there is no shortage of relevant issues to discuss. The upcoming US presidential election should address issues of war, peace, and growing inequality created by the forces of globalization.

Many questions could be posed that are hard to beat in terms of drama. What would happen if the Democrats really were to withdraw the US Army from Iraq? How does Barack Obama plan to address the threat that the killing fields of Cambodia could be repeated in Basra and Baghdad? Does he have a plan or even an idea for dealing with the day after?

How do the Republicans plan to end the scandal of the uninsured? Some 47 million people in America now have no health insurance. Around 9 million have been added to that total during the seven years George W. Bush has been in power. This is the greatest market failure since the invention of modern capitalism.

But one cannot blame the journalists alone for the decline of journalism. Their importance has diminished more than in any other previous election. They now share newspaper pages and TV broadcasting time with people who call themselves strategists or consultants and who are either in the pay of a party now, or have been in the past.

Journalists and strategists deliver their commentaries, side by side and in harmony, on CNN and Fox News. Make way for Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s two electoral victories, who is now under contract with Fox News, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Raise the curtain for Dick Morris, once the closest adviser to Bill Clinton, who is a fixture on practically every TV channel. Cast the spotlight on Donna Brazile, who appears on CNN as a commentator on every election night — the audience only learns in passing that she is actually a member of the exclusive Democratic National Committee and one of her party’s superdelegates.

My thanks for FrenchDoc at Correntewire for highlighting this article. Read her fine post on the subject.

Thanks to our media, candidates are more and more likely to run content-free campaigns. Is it possible that people are voting for Clinton precisely because she is bucking this trend, her lack of money for television commercials forcing her to go directly to the people and present her policy positions? Whether her policies are wise or foolish, she has laid them out very specifically.

But I’ll admit that I am partisan.

I’m not sure what we should do about this problem. I quit watching television news long ago and I get most of my information from books and online newspapers, blogs, magazines, and streaming interview shows. This solution, though, holds a danger of creating silos and gated communities of opinion that will further splinter the country. We need a national news media we can trust, not a for-profit infotainment industry.

For now, I will comfort myself with the knowledge that not everybody believes everything Chris Matthews tells them.

Update: Digby on this subject.

from Echidne, A Wolff In The Land Of Dry Pussies

Michael Wolff has written an interesting meditation on the difficulties of being a middle-aged man in the United States. Suddenly, in the midst of life, he walks into a dark forest of despair and depression, and why? Not because of those cholesterol values or that mortgage payment or all those youthful plans he once had, plans, which are now as dry as the dandruff on his stooped hard-working family-man shoulders, no. It’s because he can’t get wet and gushy pussy anymore, young and bouncy and eager pussy.

from Digby, Sexual Politics (cherrypicking my clip here in a way that is totally unfair):

Now, I don’t know about you, but among my friends, this just doesn’t come up.

And the incomparable Lance:

I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead since by now a mob of “the post-sexual set” has probably dragged him from his office in the Conde Nast building and hauled him uptown to Central Park where they’ve hung him up by his genetalia from Cleopatra’s Needle…

I promise to clean up my language here in a day or two. I’ve sort of been on a roll lately.

On a more serious note, there’s this from commenter Lost in Space at Corrente Some one like me doesn’t fit in much:

A PoC who has much trouble supporting Obama’s candidacy, surrounded by PoC who either actively or casually support him. The PoC I talk to are not as rabid as the Blogger Boiz, and most never knew of Obama’s actual positions - or lack thereof - nor his history when I talked with them. Many either still don’t know - or don’t care about this.

However, there is another issue at work here: I have noticed that the tenor of the online backlash of Obama and his candidacy has started to spread as a backlash against African-Americans as a whole. Not so much here [at Corrente], but I’ve seen this acrimony grow on many other Clinton-leaning sites - and now, like a cancer, may be on the verge of metastasizing.

This is a dangerous proposition. Should Obama get the nomination - and get bounced by McCain (which is most likely going to happen) - the blame will most likely be placed on the shoulders of African-Americans for the crime of voting for someone who happens to look much like them (let’s remember that America -in general - regards people with even as much as a drop of African ancestry as “Black”); speaks like them (sometimes); and comes across as someone who has been through the same struggles of life in America as they have (even though he has not). I don’t hear as much vitriol about the Leisure class sect that flooded the caucuses to pad Obama’s early totals - and this saddens me. Also, there is not alot of discussion of the SCLM complicity in both Obama’s ascension and H. Clinton’s denigration these days - sadly, there is almost no online discussions regarding the SCLM at all (save Somerby’s great analyses at Dailyhowler.com). Nor does there seem to be much discussion on the political games by Dean and Pelosi.

Actually, I figured any blame for any failure of Democrats this election would be placed on Hillary Clinton’s shoulders, but I want to make it abundantly clear that most of my rants about racism and sexism on this blog have to do with the collusion between Obama and the media, planned or unplanned, to demonize Hillary Clinton and her supporters.

Nor do I think that the African American community has turned against Hillary and Bill Clinton as vehemently as Obama’s white supporters and the pundits on the news media.

Update: Indiana’s new voter ID law proved itself yesterday. It turned away a clatch of rogue nuns. Retired:

WASHINGTON — At least 10 retired nuns in South Bend, Ind., were barred from voting in Tuesday’s Indiana Democratic primary election because they lacked photo IDs required under a state law that the Supreme Court upheld last week.

John Borkowski, a South Bend lawyer volunteering as an election watchdog for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said several of the retired nuns had been voting all of their lives but were told they lacked the required identification cards and could only file provisional ballots.

Since 2005, Indiana’s toughest-in-the-nation law requires every voter to produce a state or federal photo ID card. The Supreme Court, after weighing scores of legal briefs from conservatives who backed the statute and liberals who opposed it, upheld the law by a 6-3 vote, saying there was little evidence that it was unduly burdensome for voters.

Borkowski said Sister Julie McGuire, one of several nuns on poll duty, wasn’t pleased to turn away the nuns, some of whom were in their 80s and 90s and no longer had driver’s licenses.

“Here’s the supreme irony,” Borkowski said. “This law was passed supposedly to prevent and deter voter fraud, even though there was no real record of serious voter fraud in Indiana. Here you have a bunch of nuns whose votes can’t be accepted by a bunch of nuns … who live with them in the polling place in their convent because they don’t have an ID.”

Should I put nuns on the same page with all this language?