Near the end of his November 22 speech at the Council
on Foreign Relations, Senator Barack Obama sagely noted that "Those
of us in Washington are falling behind the debate that is taking
place across America on Iraq. We are failing to provide leadership
on this issue..." After 4,000 words of proving his own point,
Obama was a man who knew what he was talking about. Last week’s
BC cover article, "Obama
Mouths Mush on War," explored the senator’s agreement with
himself, as well as his detachment from facts on the ground both
in the unjust and unwinnable Iraqi war, and at home where public
opinion has begun to shift against the president’s crew and their
war, in a decisive way.
A number of discerning BC readers
weighed in on Obama’s attempt to number himself among prominent
pro-war Democrats who proclaim their respect for the personal
courage of Pennsylvania Congressperson John
Murtha, but who lack his guts and honesty.
Great article. I agree with its contents entirely.
Yes, Obama is the latest, glitzy packaged example of the crisis
in Black leadership. He reminds me of the title of a book
currently in print entitled, "We have no Leaders."
To hear liberal Whites fawn over him is both comical and
revealing. The spineless minions of the Democratic Party will,
as you predict, piss away the changing political tide, swim
upstream with the Neocon illusionists and ultimately keep the
right wingers in power. I have taken the same
stance as the editorial staff of The
Nation magazine, I will not support any candidate who supports
this war and fails to advocate for a swift withdrawal of troops
and an abdication of imperial designs on Iraqi oil and natural
resources. Keep up the critical analysis. Lord knows we
need it.
L. Starks
Martin Luther King used to say that leaders ought
to be less like thermometers, reflecting where their constituents
are, and more like thermostats that act to set the moral temperature.
Senator Obama fails both these test miserably, the former by failing
to reflect the views that speak for the large progressive and
anti-war constituency that catapulted him to the national stage,
and the latter by his refusal to lead the rest of America in that
direction.
Obama’s emerging strategy seems to be steadfastly
to ignore and disparage
his prior electoral base in the quest for corporate cash and a
hoped-for 2008 vice presidential run with another pro-war Democrat.
Inasmuch as US campaign laws virtually prohibit the emergence
of viable third parties on the state and national levels, Obama’s
disappointed former base voters will be left the choice of deluding
themselves, of holding their noses while voting for him, or staying
home.
Reader Daniel Bell recommends a history lesson for
Senator Obama:
Obama and others need to review the history and
outcomes of recent attempts to occupy and establish
"puppet" governments in Vietnam, Somalia, Algeria,
etc. The results in Iraq will be the same - the occupation
will end - it can be voluntary or over many years at a tremendous
and unnecessary cost in lives and money.
The dynamics have changed since the "colonial
days." Now there are organized cultural, religious, and
tribal alliances that provide capability for regular communications
between people within common borders and geographical areas. Their
are no tactics which can make occupations successful
anymore - those days are gone - thank goodness.
Daniel Bell
Mr. Bell makes a very good point. You’ll look a
long time before finding an example of a "successful"
occupation or a "successfully" quashed insurgency, regardless
of the level of force applied by the occupier. Think Northern
Ireland. Think Palestine.
Thank you for your brilliantly incisive dissection
of Barack Obama's speech on Iraq… writes reader Chris Lowe.
…What a disappointment that speech was. Your
analysis of Obama's manner and mode of rhetoric is particularly
important because his mush is a paradigm of a growing type of
self-delusory evasion. This self-delusion is already widespread
-- Obama himself notes in his speech that the ideas he expresses
are not original to him… Such self-delusion of course is an
extension of the delusions used to justify the war (apart from
the simple lies) and to justify votes for the war powers resolution.
Your connection of Obama's new rhetoric to John Kerry is thus
especially apt.
What your analysis shows is that Obama's approach
relies essentially on Americans bargaining with themselves over
what sounds good to them, rather than dealing with Iraqi reality.
In helping us see the delusion for what it is, you help us demand
better, especially from those who should know better, or do know
better but peddle the mush anyway.
We agree with Mr. Lowe that Barack Obama has every
reason to know better. Here is the rotten heart of the senator’s
mush mouthing on the war.
I believe that U.S. forces are still a part of
the solution in Iraq. The strategic goals should be to allow
for a limited drawdown of U.S. troops, coupled with shift to
a more effective counter-insurgency strategy that puts the Iraqi
security forces in the lead and intensifies our efforts to train
Iraqi forces.
At the same time, sufficient numbers of U.S. troops
should be left in place to prevent Iraq from exploding into
civil war, ethnic cleansing, and a haven for terrorism."
How long? When if ever, does Obama’s limited drawdown
become withdrawal?
We need not a time-table, in the sense of a precise
date for U.S. troop pull-outs… We need to say that there will
be no bases in Iraq a decade from now."
Compare that to the un-spun truth from Congressman
Murtha:
"The US cannot accomplish anything further
in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home. Our troops
have become the primary target of the insurgency. We have become
a catalyst for violence."
Murtha, who is widely believed to be a closer confidante
of more generals than the good senator from Illinois, suggested
on C-SPAN November 30 that a withdrawal can be well underway in
under six months and nearly complete in a year "…or sooner
if I had my way…". Compare this to Obama’s something less
than a decade. The divide among Democrats now is between those
who think the occupation is a "solution" that they can
somehow make "smarter" or "more effective"
and those who know the American presence in Iraq is itself the
problem.
Reader A. Caesar writes with a question:
Why is this the only place I can get some straightforward,
plain talk about this war? OK, Counterpunch will pick apart
Kerry and sometimes Obama, but no one does with such a sharp
instrument, peeling away the BS and squishy mushy, digusting
crap…. Your hardnosedness is the best. And this is one of the
best and most timely and accurate depiction of the state of
the mainstream of the Democratic party: a bunch of mush-mouthed
f'in losers.
Thanks and keep it up.
A Mr. Padnos expresses his disappointment with the
junior senator from Illinois thusly:
On your piece on Obama: YES YES YES YES YES YES
YES!!
Superb piece; thank you SO MUCH for detailing
the indictment against this most cruelly disappointing of all
new Democratic senators. I hope your piece gets the wide circulation
throughout the net and even in the MSM it so richly deserves.
Thank you again for taking the time to write this careful, detailed and
cosmically damning - piece.
Reader Helen C. weighs in with trenchant observations
about costs, courage and leadership
Just
read Obama Mouths Mush on War. One with the intellect,
just lost moral courage and sold out to the bag men for the
corporations and banks who are benefiting from this war while
the children are dying.
Obama and Edwards might have made a good ticket,
but both might just as well start digging a canal in New Orleans
for all the good their leadership is doing for the country.
It is break out time, who has the guts to break
out of the pack?
We at BC have met Barack Obama
and have a high opinion of his intellectual and human gifts.
Unlike the president and his crew we are certain the senator is
quite sane, though deeply mistaken on the war and issues of leadership
in general. Some of our readers, however, are not so sure.
J. Hutton writes:
Mr. ford and Mr. Gamble are "spot on"
in their critique of Senator Obama's speech. "Reality based
benchmarks" indeed. The very sad and very dangerous fact
is that people of Obama's ilk have become so divorced from any
reality that their mental processes can only be described as
a meandering of the mind. They have, most of them, wandered
outside the confines of sanity. They now truly believe their
own ravings, and that others should take them seriously.
If you have ever worked with insane people, and
I do, the characteristics are evident. Unfortunately, for the
rest of us, tradition prevents anyone publicly describing
a politician's character as it really is. Thus, Bush,
a pathological liar, is never called a liar in the press or
to his face by an interviewer. So the pretence is validated,
and very soon we, like they, forget what is real.
Sometime, somewhere, these pretenses have to be
paid for by someone; someone real.
We can understand how someone who works daily with
the clinically insane might experience difficulty discerning the
difference between a day at the office and a Sunday morning watching
Senator Obama, or Nancy Pelosi from home on CNN, CBS, Fox or MSNBC
on a Sunday morning.
Sadly, the antics of Democrats who’d rather follow
their corporate constituencies than lead their electoral ones
have very real consequences. Their refusal to make impeachment
of the president a major mid-term issue in congressional elections
will suppress their own base turnouts and help guarantee the continuance
of the Bush regime and Republican dominance of Congress. And
of course, hundreds of Iraqi and American lives are lost every
month as the illegal war and unjust occupation drag on.
For a chilling vision of the future course of the
war consistent with both the Bush Administration’s "strategy
for victory" and Senator Obama’s "limited draw-down"
over some period "less than a decade", we refer our
readers to Seymour Hersh’s current article in the New
Yorker. Hersh, the celebrated journalist who brought the
news of the massacre at My
Lai to public attention, forecasts a partial withdrawal of
American troops into even more fortified bases, combined with
a increased reliance on manned and unmanned American planes to
bomb the heck out of "insurgent" Iraqi military, and
inevitably, civilian targets. Supposedly this will buy time for
Iraqis to fight "their war". Hersh points out that
if nobody is counting Iraqi dead with American boots on the ground,
or numbers of missions flown or tons of bombs dropped either,
we can expect the uncounted corpses to pile up even faster with
less accountability in the next phase of this war.
For those of us with adult memories stretching back
35 years, this sounds identical to the Nixon strategy of Vietnamization.
It didn’t work there either.
Are ‘Hispanics’ an Ethnicity?
Last week’s Radio BC commentary
pointing out the fallacy of designating Hispanics in the US as
an "ethnic group" generated some reader response, too.
H. Paul. Brown writes:
This is a response to your piece of Dec. 1st entitled
"Are Hispanics an Ethnic Group?" In the face of increased
elite resistance to minority achievement, isn't this just helping
that very resistance along, playing into the hands of that elite?
The statement, "There is no doubt that Black Americans are
an ethnic group" of course, proves its own falsehood. "There
is no doubt," proves that there, in fact, is real genuine
doubt. To wield such narrow and uncritical rhetoric around, again,
serves the ends of the cultural elite, by dividing us in their
face. Americans, even European identifying Americans, all need
to be working together, showing a united front, as it were, for
the betterment of all of us all, or the cultural elite wins.
Your piece plays right into their hands.
While we thank Mr. Brown for writing, we do not
believe that stating a fact disproves that fact. Africans of
many religions, stations and nations were forged into one people
on these shores by half a millennium of slavery, of Jim Crow,
of defacto segregation. Hispanics come from many nations
and many ethnicities. What do a white Argentine, a native American
from southern Mexico, and a black Dominican have in common? Whatever
it is, it ain’t ethnicity.
Reader Mal Dixon offers another contribution:
Are Hispanics an Ethnic or Racial Group? No! So-called
Hispanics/Latinos are simply a language group! Though they collectively
may be of different races and/or ethnic groups, they unite around
what they have in common - the Spanish language.
Black people in America are a racial group point
blank and so for any of us to compare their plight to ours,
is to put us at a grand disadvantage. We catch hell because
of our complexion and physical features, they for the language
they speak and the fact that they're illegal immigrants.
This should explain why Sammy Sossa, who otherwise
would be considered a Black man in America, identifies first
and foremost as a Latino. Many Afro-Latinos don't believe in
identifying themselves by a race; and if they do choose to,
they'll say "I'm Brown." Even white European descendants,
who've lived in parts of Latin America for centuries and never
mixed in with the "natives," will identify themselves
as "Brown" or a "minority" upon becoming
a U.S. citizen simply because of the language they speak.
This is how they've become designated as the nation's
new largest "minority" group - eclipsing our numbers
in just a 30-year period. And as you've suggested the trend
will continue so long as their numbers continue to surge based
on an artificial premise - they're an ethnic or racial group
as Black Americans are.
The touting of Hispanics as the next big thing replacing
and supplanting African America has both marketing and political
subtexts. There is a Black
Consensus, a collective political will, a distinct polity,
the scope and broad unity of which was displayed recently in the
Millions More March. Since no such Hispanic political consensus
exists, all that white national political observers are telling
us is that it’s more OK than it used to be to ignore the perceptions,
the demands, the political will of black America
Michael Dawson, author of the very insightful book
The
Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life,
calls marketing "class struggle from above." Just as
media monopolies tend to suppress expression of uniquely black
political sentiment, the chief value of both blacks and Hispanics
to the powers that be, are as consumer markets and cultural gold
mines from which they can extract the occasional commercially
viable nugget. Think hip-hop.
Al the Sharpty
Readers B. Gleason and M. Dupree wrote to us about
this matter of urgent concern.
I came across your publication while searching
for contact info for Reverend Al Sharpton in order to express
my absolute dismay and disbelief of his paid endorsement of
a local predatory lending organization in Virginia, and thought
I'd pass on the info before I continued my search.
In a television commercial, he has endorsed LoanMax
Title Loans, a predatory lending company that preys on the financially
insecure, the poor, the uneducated. While expressing his
high regard for this shameful usury, he had the audacity to
mention this paid endorsement as part of his ongoing "fight
for the little guy!"
I don't know if these "businesses" are
an issue where you reside, but in Southwest Virginia it has
become an absolute epidemic. These companies prey upon
the vulnerability of our local poor, uneducated and those in
already difficult financial situations, and here this undo weight
falls disproportionately upon African-Americans, though these
companies make no distinction whose fiscal lives they destroy.
They contribute to the further oppression of those in our community
who already have it the hardest, and are perhaps the singularly
most destructive economic force in this region, speeding the
gentrification of our small cities and rural countryside by
disenfranchising and forcing out those who struggle the hardest
in the first place to be included in the "ownership society."
Reverend Sharpton would have been at the top of
the list of people whom one would consider motivating to fight
against these companies and help educate people to avoid these
financial pitfalls, and now he has crossed over, becoming a
promoter of the destruction of the very groups he claims to
protect. I still simply cannot believe it.
We did notice this item on Playhata,
one of our favorite
sites, last week, and thank Gleason and Dupree for bringing it
to our attention and that of our audience. The sight of Reverend
Al fronting for these bottom feeders is as appalling and indefensible
to us as it is to anybody. The reverend's excuse is about
as original as his hairstyle. Back in 1999, according to
the consumer blog of PIRG,
the Public Interest Research Group, he had no trouble knowing
and telling what predatory lending was.
The reverend ought to remember that he is who he is and where
he is because people watch and listen to what he's says and does.
It's important that we keep on watching. Critically.
Finally Norm Dyer, wrote us about one of our favorite
BC pieces, The End of American Thanksgivings,
published in November of 2003. The full text of all BC
issues is available by clicking the "past issues" link
on the left side of most of our pages.
At UIC campus, I was waiting for my math class
last Wednesday, standing out in the hall. An English class was
finishing up the hour in that room. The professor had noticed
the many bills posted around campus: "the crime of Thanksgiving".
The last 15 minutes of his class addressed the fallacy: That
because some one or more persons defined the word Thanksgiving
to mean genocide, that therefore all persons celebrating Thanskgiving
must be in support of genocide. The empirics and theories of
semantics and the evolution of languages into so many distinct
forms are "facts on the ground" that indeed it is
a fallacy to project one's own carefully chosen definition onto
some other person's usage.
"I am thankful to you for the history lesson.
I surely agree with you that no one should celebrate a crime,
nor ever desire doing so. But what you are "suggesting"
implicitly, if not explicitly, is a fallacy: That people celebrating
a human trait of gratitude must also be celebrating crimes.
That is easy to prove false - just ask them: "What are you celebrating?"
I’d be very, very surprised if as many as one in a million replied
with "I’m celebrating the elimination of Native Americans."
A discussion about the meaning of Thanksgiving should
not be reduced to one about the mere meanings of words.
"It's our job", like Native
American scholar and historian Ward Churchill says, "to poke
holes in the domes of false reality that the dominant culture
constructs to protect itself from the truth about itself".
The myth of Thanksgiving is one of those false realities that
obscures a central truth about America: that the project
of its founding was a genocidal project of epic proportions.
In his book, A
Little Matter of Genocide he recounts how scholars have pegged
the American population north of the Rio Grande at anywhere from
twelve to twenty million souls. The 1890 census counted
a mere 236 thousand and change survivors. That's a 96 to
98 per cent extinction rate. Match that up against the classic
case which springs to everyone's lips when the word "genocide"
is mentioned - efforts of 20th century Nazis attempt to exterminate
European Jewry, where they only managed to murder 75%, and the
enormity of both the primary crime and of the secondary one of
obscuring and covering up its traces, is as plain as the nose
on your face.
You can download a 27
minute MP3 audio file of Ward Churchill discussing exactly
these points.
In popular discourse, there are special and justifiable places
in rhetorical hell reserved for those who would deny the fact
of the 20th century European Holocaust - they are called "Holocaust
deniers," and I will note here that the spell checker in
Microsoft Word insists that "Holocaust" is a proper
noun. What is it again that we call those who minimize or deny
the near extinction of this continent's native inhabitants?
Good Americans? Thanksgivers? University professors?
Holidays are public, consensual affairs, part of the stuff that
binds us together as a society. The notion that everybody
gets to decide for themselves what they are celebrating on a Thursday
in November, is a fallback position from celebrating the racist
lie of Thanksgiving that we were all taught as schoolchildren,
but it is no less a deceitful obfuscation. It renders invisible
and irrelevant the millions of innocent dead upon whose bones
America is built, and thus serves the same purpose as the original
lie of Thanksgiving.
BC really does appreciate the correspondence
of its readers, and we welcome even more the news that young people
are still reading and finding relevant our observations in the
Thanksgiving 2003 issue, and forcing their professors to justify
the unjustifiable. It warms our middle-aged hearts and reaffirms
our belief that the best young people of every age are the least
patient with injustice - something at last, for which we can be
thankful.
BC Associate Editor Bruce
Dixon can be contacted at [email protected].
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