As I've said before, words matter. Cavalier use of language, throwing about words without care for the actual meaning, lowers both the quality of our discourse and the coherence of our culture. Words like "terrorist" are used interchangeably with words like "muslim," and it not only makes us look intolerant, it makes us look ignorant. This week, the buzzwords are "socialist" and "Marxist." I've already spoken about their misuse, but if some people think they can lob these as attacks and think no one will call them on it, they are sorely mistaken. Just this past Friday, while appearing on Larry King Live, Lars Larson referred to Barack Obama and other progressives as a "Marxist," to which Larry King responded by asking if he then thought that Conservatives were "fascist." Of course, Lars refuted this and then continued by falsely claiming that Obama is going to give tax rebates to people who don't pay taxes (apparently also confused about what a "tax rebate" is, since you have to pay taxes in order to get one back, and that it never exceeds the amount you pay in taxes.)
Well, let's examine this. I mean, since Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, and Bill Kristol all think that it's fair to call liberals "Marxist," then perhaps it is fair to call their right-wing counterparts "fascist." Let's take a look. Marxism is considered, politically, the extreme left-wing viewpoint in favor of collective ownership or the means and distribution of production. Fascism is considered the extreme right-wing viewpoint in favor of single-party and single dictator control of government and the economy. Well, under President Bush, the power of the Executive Branch has been expanded to hold more unchecked power (power that Sarah Palin said she would like to extend even more as Vice President than Dick Cheney has). He has also consistently used signing statements and claims of executive privilege to operate not as the law states but as he feels is appropriate, and has been backed up by his party who, for much of the last 8 years, have dominated the other two branches of government.
Fascism is also characterized by that party or dictator forcibly oppressing opposition and criticism. I think we all remember the firing of members of the justice department for refusing to investigate and prosecute Democrats for political reasons. I also seem to recall the constant attacks against liberals and Democrats for being "soft on terrorism," for "planning for defeat" in Iraq, and for "not caring about family values.' You need only check the news for the last few weeks to see how Democrats have been labeled "un-American."
Speaking of being labeled "un-American," fascism is known for emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism. When Sarah Palin talks about liking to visit the "pro-America" parts of the country, that sounds like aggressive nationalism. When people complain about Barack Obama not wearing a flag pin (something that he actually did in all three debates while John McCain did not wear one) that sounds like ridiculous nationalism. When they complain about those socialist Europeans, and those terrorist Middle Easterners, and then talk about how America is the greatest and most powerful country in the world, blessed by God, and duty-bound to spread democracy unilaterally, that sounds like thoroughly aggressive Nationalism. As for racism, just watch a video of any McCain-Palin rally, listen to their supporters outside, and listen to Rush Limbaugh who characterized Colin Powell's nuanced defense of his endorsement of Obama as being "all about race."
Fascism promotes military preparedness and cults of unity, strength, and purity. Under Republican leadership, we spend more on our military than most of the world combined. Republican talking points are constantly and manipulatively espousing "supporting the troops," and attacking anyone who even suggest teaching anything other than complete abstinence from recreational drugs and premarital sexual activity.
What else falls under the label of "fascism?" An emphasis on corporatism is at the top of the list, which I think sounds a little like the Republicans. The Fascist government of Italy banned abortion and literature on birth control...that also sounds familiar. Fascist cultures also tend to reject multiculturalism, which springs to mind everytime I hear McCain supporters talk about how this is a Christian nation, and how they are worried about minorities ruining the culture. Fascist governments are also usually strongly opposed to homosexuals.
With them opposed to so many types of people, how is it that fascist regimes come to power? Easy, they appeal to the average person with an affectation of populism, which promotes the "average person" (Joe Six-pack perhaps) over "the elites." You know, like the elite media, that elite Barack Obama, those elite intellectuals and college graduates.
Do I think the Republicans are fascists? No. See, unlike some of these hate-mongers that will do anything to win elections or get on television, I don't just use slanderous labels against people I disagree with. Do I think some of the things they've done in the past decade and in this election share similar tactics with fascists? Yes, and that's something that they need to change. But here's the rub: if you want to label liberals as "marxist," not only is their equal evidence to support an argument that conservatives are "fascist," but their might even be more evidence to validate the latter hypothesis. Liberals are no more marxists than conservatives are fascists, so it's up to Rush, Glenn, Sean, Bill, Karl, John, Sarah, and all the rest if that's a name game they feel like playing.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
It's Important to Own a Dictionary
When we have a national discussion, it helps to have a common vocabulary. Luckily, here in the United States, we long ago agreed on a common language. No, not “American.” It’s called “English,” because as some people seem to have forgotten, everyone in this country is from somewhere else (hey, even the Native Americans came across the land bridge.) Yes, just a few hundred years ago, those English border jumpers crossed the Atlantic to steal jobs and land from the real Americans, the Native Americans. Then some Dutch came to steal the English jobs, and then the Italians to steal theirs. Oh, and the Spanish were here too. It was the English language that won out, though, and since then we’ve agreed on a common vocabulary and meaning, and even published books to spell it out for the people who haven’t been able to pick it up just on context alone.
Some people, though, are real mavericks who don’t play by your “rule” of language. Who’s to say that “maverick” means “a lone dissenter who takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates.” I mean, if McCain and Palin want it too, why can’t it mean “a person who agrees with their associates 95% percent of the time” or “someone who adopts the opinions that their staff tells them will most appeal to their base?” “Maverick” isn’t the only word they don’t use properly.
How about “pal?” They say Obama is pals, or “a very close, intimate friend,” with Bill Ayers. I have lots of close, intimate friends who were full grown adults when I was 8, sit next to me in a room a couple of times, and whose actions I publicly denounce. I mean, really, not a day goes by that I’m not denouncing my close, intimate friends in the media. That’s what makes us such close, intimate friends.
They mocked Joe Biden for saying that paying your taxes is “patriotic,” which means “characteristic of a patriot.” For those who don’t know, a patriot is “a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.” Maybe I’m mistaken, but it sounds like paying your taxes, obeying the laws of this nation, in order to fund your democratically elected government and support it’s efforts around the globe and here at home sounds like “supporting his or her country with devotion.” Yeah, it does. It does sound “patriotic.”
But maybe that’s because Joe Biden is talking about The United States of America, and they are talking about the “real America.” Apparently the parts of the country where the majority of the people agree on issues and more than 50 percent of them support Barack Obama are “anti-American” and the parts where only a third of the people agree on anything and support John McCain are the “real” America. Really, what’s more anti-American than the majority agreeing on issues?
John McCain, Sarah Palin, and their friends, though, know that vocabulary goes by the wayside when dealing with someone like Barack Obama who’s a “terrorist,” “muslim,” “arab,” and “socialist.” Well since Barack is not “a person, who uses or advocates terrorism” I guess he’s not a “terrorist”. And since he’s not “an adherent of Islam,” he’s not a muslim either. Neither is he “a member of a Semitic people inhabiting Arabia and other countries of the Middle East,” since he was born in The United States and his parents were born in the U.S. and Kenya (a part of Africa, not Arabia.)
I guess that just leaves “socialist,” which is a word that they like to use to make you think “communist” and thus “Stalinist” and “brutal dictator.” Nothing could be further from the truth. See, “socialism” is “a system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.” Does any of that sound like Barack Obama? Has he ever given a stump speech in which he’s mentioned wanting the government to own all the farms and produce all the food? Or where he’s talked about taking all of your land and redistributing for other uses? No? Well, that’s because he hasn’t.
See, they confuse “socialism” which is an economic doctrine with “social programs.” Socialism would be like the government owning and operating all of the hospitals, and controlling who gets what health care. What Barack Obama wants to do is offer you the choice of belonging to whatever health care program you want, including a cheaper program run by the government. You can go to private hospitals, buy private insurance, or skip the whole thing altogether and just pay as you go. In this case, the government isn’t controlling or owning the health care system, they are becoming another provider in that system. Neither he, nor anyone else in the Democratic party, advocates the government controlling our economy, they just want the government to participate in the economy like any citizen or corporation is allowed to do. The government can give loans, or buy stocks, or create financial incentives, all things that ordinary citizens and corporations can do in the economy. These are activities that Republicans support as well.
Their problem is not with what he wants to do, but who he wants to do it with. Barack Obama wants to fund schools that everyone gets to go to, while John McCain wants to give money to schools that only a few lucky people can attend. Barack Obama wants to invest in companies that are working on creating new, cheap, and American-made energy, while John McCain wants to invest in companies that are making record profits by importing expensive and unclean oil from foreign nations and selling it to us at a markup. Barack Obama wants the government to pick up the slack where the free market leaves gaps, while John McCain wants you to be entirely on your own unless you can afford to hire a lobbyist, a lawyer, or create your own industry. Both of them still want the market to be free to do it’s business. But Barack Obama wants to make sure that someone is keeping an eye on them so that average Americans won’t lose all of their investments or be tricked, while John McCain wants to wait until companies overextend themselves and go bankrupt before then giving them money to keep on doing what they’re doing.
But you can throw around words like “dangerous,” “socialist,” and “unAmerican” and scare people about your opponent so that they support you. Though, in that case, then you become a “terrorist.”
Some people, though, are real mavericks who don’t play by your “rule” of language. Who’s to say that “maverick” means “a lone dissenter who takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates.” I mean, if McCain and Palin want it too, why can’t it mean “a person who agrees with their associates 95% percent of the time” or “someone who adopts the opinions that their staff tells them will most appeal to their base?” “Maverick” isn’t the only word they don’t use properly.
How about “pal?” They say Obama is pals, or “a very close, intimate friend,” with Bill Ayers. I have lots of close, intimate friends who were full grown adults when I was 8, sit next to me in a room a couple of times, and whose actions I publicly denounce. I mean, really, not a day goes by that I’m not denouncing my close, intimate friends in the media. That’s what makes us such close, intimate friends.
They mocked Joe Biden for saying that paying your taxes is “patriotic,” which means “characteristic of a patriot.” For those who don’t know, a patriot is “a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.” Maybe I’m mistaken, but it sounds like paying your taxes, obeying the laws of this nation, in order to fund your democratically elected government and support it’s efforts around the globe and here at home sounds like “supporting his or her country with devotion.” Yeah, it does. It does sound “patriotic.”
But maybe that’s because Joe Biden is talking about The United States of America, and they are talking about the “real America.” Apparently the parts of the country where the majority of the people agree on issues and more than 50 percent of them support Barack Obama are “anti-American” and the parts where only a third of the people agree on anything and support John McCain are the “real” America. Really, what’s more anti-American than the majority agreeing on issues?
John McCain, Sarah Palin, and their friends, though, know that vocabulary goes by the wayside when dealing with someone like Barack Obama who’s a “terrorist,” “muslim,” “arab,” and “socialist.” Well since Barack is not “a person, who uses or advocates terrorism” I guess he’s not a “terrorist”. And since he’s not “an adherent of Islam,” he’s not a muslim either. Neither is he “a member of a Semitic people inhabiting Arabia and other countries of the Middle East,” since he was born in The United States and his parents were born in the U.S. and Kenya (a part of Africa, not Arabia.)
I guess that just leaves “socialist,” which is a word that they like to use to make you think “communist” and thus “Stalinist” and “brutal dictator.” Nothing could be further from the truth. See, “socialism” is “a system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.” Does any of that sound like Barack Obama? Has he ever given a stump speech in which he’s mentioned wanting the government to own all the farms and produce all the food? Or where he’s talked about taking all of your land and redistributing for other uses? No? Well, that’s because he hasn’t.
See, they confuse “socialism” which is an economic doctrine with “social programs.” Socialism would be like the government owning and operating all of the hospitals, and controlling who gets what health care. What Barack Obama wants to do is offer you the choice of belonging to whatever health care program you want, including a cheaper program run by the government. You can go to private hospitals, buy private insurance, or skip the whole thing altogether and just pay as you go. In this case, the government isn’t controlling or owning the health care system, they are becoming another provider in that system. Neither he, nor anyone else in the Democratic party, advocates the government controlling our economy, they just want the government to participate in the economy like any citizen or corporation is allowed to do. The government can give loans, or buy stocks, or create financial incentives, all things that ordinary citizens and corporations can do in the economy. These are activities that Republicans support as well.
Their problem is not with what he wants to do, but who he wants to do it with. Barack Obama wants to fund schools that everyone gets to go to, while John McCain wants to give money to schools that only a few lucky people can attend. Barack Obama wants to invest in companies that are working on creating new, cheap, and American-made energy, while John McCain wants to invest in companies that are making record profits by importing expensive and unclean oil from foreign nations and selling it to us at a markup. Barack Obama wants the government to pick up the slack where the free market leaves gaps, while John McCain wants you to be entirely on your own unless you can afford to hire a lobbyist, a lawyer, or create your own industry. Both of them still want the market to be free to do it’s business. But Barack Obama wants to make sure that someone is keeping an eye on them so that average Americans won’t lose all of their investments or be tricked, while John McCain wants to wait until companies overextend themselves and go bankrupt before then giving them money to keep on doing what they’re doing.
But you can throw around words like “dangerous,” “socialist,” and “unAmerican” and scare people about your opponent so that they support you. Though, in that case, then you become a “terrorist.”
Things McCain Supporters Believe about Obama
1.) “He’s an A-rab!”
No, he’s really not. See, according to the Constitution, you have to be a natural born citizen of the United States in order to run for President. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, a State, to a woman originally from Kansas. He’s also not ethnically Arab either. His mother was white, and his father was from Kenya. Neither of those things is Arab. He’s white, and he’s African.
2.) “He’s a terrorist!”
Again, if he were a terrorist, do you think he’d have made it through a year and a half of campaigning and vetting? He’s a lawyer, educated in the northeast, who worked in Chicago, and then became a Senator. Along the way, he sat on a board with William Ayers, and they met a couple of times. William Ayers was a leading member of a terrorist group, the Weather Underground, here in the United States. They protested things by blowing up statues and buildings, avoiding hurting people in the process. Most of them were caught, convicted, and served jail time. Bill Ayers was on this board because he was elected to it, because since that time he has worked peacefully in the system to improve education, something that Barack Obama was also working on. So they ended up in the same place at the same time, and Barack wasn’t going to, nor should he, abandon that goal because one of the other people working towards the same goal had served jail time for his crimes and was now trying to be a productive member of society. They aren’t friends, and Barack Obama has publicly condemned William Ayers actions as a member of the Weather Underground, which occured at a time when Barack was 8, so he certainly wasn’t involved in them or even old enough to know about them at the time, plus he was in a completely other part of the country.
3.) “He’s a Muslim!”
No, he’s really not. His birth father, the man who essentially abandoned him as a child and he almost never saw was a Muslim, but Barack was raised by his white, Christian mother and grandparents, and has always been a Christian. Remember when you attacked him for what his REVEREND said? Yeah, it’s because he attends a church, with a Christian Reverend. You can’t attack him for what his Christian Reverend says and also call him a Muslim. That doesn’t work.
4.) “He Went to a Muslim School!”
Nope, wrong again. He briefly attended a school where many, but not all, of the children were Muslim’s. The story that he attended a Muslim school broke and was disproven in a matter of hours, even by Fox News who had to admit it was false. Saying the school he attended was a Muslim school is like saying every public school in America is a parochial school, because most of the students in them are Christian. It was a secular school, and Barack was not being taught religion there. Some of the kids were Muslims, but Barack was still Christian.
5.) “We Don’t Know Anything About Him!”
If you don’t, it’s because you’ve been living in a cave. He’s been a major player in the party for the last 5 years, especially since speaking at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He’s been campaigning for President for 2 years now, and received record coverage and investigation by several opponents and the news media during this contentious primary, and since then. John McCain has made it a point to make sure you know every tiny detail about Barack Obama. Barack, himself, has written 2 memoirs to let you know all about him, and has appeared on every major network and been interviewed by all the big name reporters. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, was unknown to most of the nation until about 2 months ago, and has refused to be interviewed by most journalists.
6.) “He’s the most liberal Senator!”
This oft-repeated fact is based on one source’s idea of liberalism, and even still, being the most liberal Senator is a lot like being the world’s classiest McDonalds - there’s not much difference between that and all the others. John McCain even pointed out that Barack has voted with President Bush about 60 percent of the time. So is Bush 60 percent liberal? John McCain has also voted with Barack on this bailout package...does that make McCain a fiscal liberal? No, exactly.
7.) “We wants to socialize health care!”
Not at all. He doesn’t propose free or mandatory health care. All he wants to do is allow people who want to be able to join the same plan that Congressman get, so that it’s cheap and effective. They’d still be paying a company for coverage, and anyone who wants to can buy it from any other company they want, and most people would still get it from their employers.
8.) “He Wants to Meet with Iran and North Korea!”
No, but he does want us to have diplomatic contacts with them, meaning that our low-level diplomats can talk to theirs. This is a strategy also endorsed by the UN, Europe, our military leaders, and President Bush. Because, ignoring them has only encouraged them to continue trying to build nuclear weapons so that we’ll take them seriously. Either we bomb them, or we talk to them to get them to stop, and if we bomb them, they’ll have no reason not to bomb us.
9.) “He Doesn’t Support Israel!”
He does, and he’s taken the exact same stance on Israel as John McCain has. If anything, Sarah Palin disagrees with McCain on Israel more than Obama does.
10.) “He’s Not An American!”
Again, check your constitution. You have to be a NATURALLY BORN American to run for President. He was born in Hawaii… a STATE in the UNITED STATES. Sarah Palin was born in Alaska and John McCain was born in… the Panama Canal Zone. Yes, at the time a U.S. territory, but if McCain is a citizen, how can you question someone born in an ACTUAL STATE. He’s lived in the United States, from coast to coast, his wife is from the United States, his children were born in the United States, he went to school in the United States, he served as a Senator in the State of Illinois, and then in Washington, D.C., the United States’ Capitol, as a U.S. Senator. He’s a Christian, like the majority of Americans. He’s half-white and half-black, the two biggest racial groups in the United States. He’s lived in rural areas and cities. He has lived the American Dream, and he is as American or more American than anyone else in this country.
Anymore atrocious accusations? I know fact-checking really slows down the hate-speech.
No, he’s really not. See, according to the Constitution, you have to be a natural born citizen of the United States in order to run for President. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, a State, to a woman originally from Kansas. He’s also not ethnically Arab either. His mother was white, and his father was from Kenya. Neither of those things is Arab. He’s white, and he’s African.
2.) “He’s a terrorist!”
Again, if he were a terrorist, do you think he’d have made it through a year and a half of campaigning and vetting? He’s a lawyer, educated in the northeast, who worked in Chicago, and then became a Senator. Along the way, he sat on a board with William Ayers, and they met a couple of times. William Ayers was a leading member of a terrorist group, the Weather Underground, here in the United States. They protested things by blowing up statues and buildings, avoiding hurting people in the process. Most of them were caught, convicted, and served jail time. Bill Ayers was on this board because he was elected to it, because since that time he has worked peacefully in the system to improve education, something that Barack Obama was also working on. So they ended up in the same place at the same time, and Barack wasn’t going to, nor should he, abandon that goal because one of the other people working towards the same goal had served jail time for his crimes and was now trying to be a productive member of society. They aren’t friends, and Barack Obama has publicly condemned William Ayers actions as a member of the Weather Underground, which occured at a time when Barack was 8, so he certainly wasn’t involved in them or even old enough to know about them at the time, plus he was in a completely other part of the country.
3.) “He’s a Muslim!”
No, he’s really not. His birth father, the man who essentially abandoned him as a child and he almost never saw was a Muslim, but Barack was raised by his white, Christian mother and grandparents, and has always been a Christian. Remember when you attacked him for what his REVEREND said? Yeah, it’s because he attends a church, with a Christian Reverend. You can’t attack him for what his Christian Reverend says and also call him a Muslim. That doesn’t work.
4.) “He Went to a Muslim School!”
Nope, wrong again. He briefly attended a school where many, but not all, of the children were Muslim’s. The story that he attended a Muslim school broke and was disproven in a matter of hours, even by Fox News who had to admit it was false. Saying the school he attended was a Muslim school is like saying every public school in America is a parochial school, because most of the students in them are Christian. It was a secular school, and Barack was not being taught religion there. Some of the kids were Muslims, but Barack was still Christian.
5.) “We Don’t Know Anything About Him!”
If you don’t, it’s because you’ve been living in a cave. He’s been a major player in the party for the last 5 years, especially since speaking at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He’s been campaigning for President for 2 years now, and received record coverage and investigation by several opponents and the news media during this contentious primary, and since then. John McCain has made it a point to make sure you know every tiny detail about Barack Obama. Barack, himself, has written 2 memoirs to let you know all about him, and has appeared on every major network and been interviewed by all the big name reporters. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, was unknown to most of the nation until about 2 months ago, and has refused to be interviewed by most journalists.
6.) “He’s the most liberal Senator!”
This oft-repeated fact is based on one source’s idea of liberalism, and even still, being the most liberal Senator is a lot like being the world’s classiest McDonalds - there’s not much difference between that and all the others. John McCain even pointed out that Barack has voted with President Bush about 60 percent of the time. So is Bush 60 percent liberal? John McCain has also voted with Barack on this bailout package...does that make McCain a fiscal liberal? No, exactly.
7.) “We wants to socialize health care!”
Not at all. He doesn’t propose free or mandatory health care. All he wants to do is allow people who want to be able to join the same plan that Congressman get, so that it’s cheap and effective. They’d still be paying a company for coverage, and anyone who wants to can buy it from any other company they want, and most people would still get it from their employers.
8.) “He Wants to Meet with Iran and North Korea!”
No, but he does want us to have diplomatic contacts with them, meaning that our low-level diplomats can talk to theirs. This is a strategy also endorsed by the UN, Europe, our military leaders, and President Bush. Because, ignoring them has only encouraged them to continue trying to build nuclear weapons so that we’ll take them seriously. Either we bomb them, or we talk to them to get them to stop, and if we bomb them, they’ll have no reason not to bomb us.
9.) “He Doesn’t Support Israel!”
He does, and he’s taken the exact same stance on Israel as John McCain has. If anything, Sarah Palin disagrees with McCain on Israel more than Obama does.
10.) “He’s Not An American!”
Again, check your constitution. You have to be a NATURALLY BORN American to run for President. He was born in Hawaii… a STATE in the UNITED STATES. Sarah Palin was born in Alaska and John McCain was born in… the Panama Canal Zone. Yes, at the time a U.S. territory, but if McCain is a citizen, how can you question someone born in an ACTUAL STATE. He’s lived in the United States, from coast to coast, his wife is from the United States, his children were born in the United States, he went to school in the United States, he served as a Senator in the State of Illinois, and then in Washington, D.C., the United States’ Capitol, as a U.S. Senator. He’s a Christian, like the majority of Americans. He’s half-white and half-black, the two biggest racial groups in the United States. He’s lived in rural areas and cities. He has lived the American Dream, and he is as American or more American than anyone else in this country.
Anymore atrocious accusations? I know fact-checking really slows down the hate-speech.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
The "Real" America
When John McCain, Sarah Palin, and any number of Republican candidates are on the campaign trail, the like to score easy political points by talking about those "East Coast Elites" and "Big-City Liberals" who are out of touch with "real American values." The other night on The Daily Show, author Sarah Vowell made the excellent point that when Sarah Palin visited ground zero in New York, she reiterated how we would never let this happen again, yet as soon as she leaves New York, she's talking about what a cesspool it is and how it's not the "real" America. "If New York is America enough for al qaeda," Sarah Vowell said, "it should be America enough for [Sarah Palin]."
There is a tale of two America's that only exists in elections. People joke about "fly-over" states, and about the East Coast elites and West Coast liberals. People like Governor Palin and Senator McCain spend their time talking to the people on "Main Street" about how they represent real American values, and demonizing Washington, Hollywood, and the Northeast. What makes the south and midwest the real America, though? When the Pilgrims first came to the United States, they landed in the Northeast. When the American Revolution was sparked, it was in Boston. When the battles were being fought, it was in Concord and Lexington, Trenton and New York. The Founding Fathers were meeting in New York and Philadelphia, and all that existed of the America we know was on the East Coast.
All of our history and the people who founded our nation were East Coast elites, and yet at some point it became politically effective to trash Massachusetts, New York City, and Washington, D.C. They talk about how the people in rural Iowa are "real" Americans, and those of us in cities are all living lives of sin and depravity. Not only is this insulting to people like me, but it's insulting to anyone who understands the history of the United States. For instance, Republicans like to insult those Ivy-League liberals (even though many of them went to the Ivy League schools), but the prototypical Ivy League school, Harvard, was founded by the Puritans who landed in Massachusetts in 1630. They believed deeply in the Bible, but also believed deeply in education and learning from the ancient cultures of Greece, Roman, and others. From these earliest days, through to the present, when people first came to America, they came to the cities. This is where they integrated into American life, where they began to build there fortunes, and from where they then branched out to tame the west. If everyone in America came from somewhere else, then all these first settlers of the west and the south came from the East Coast.
And today, what can be more ridiculous than to claim that Kansas is the real America, and that Massachusetts is not. The most densely populated states are in the Northeast. In a nation that defines itself on the will of the majority, more than half of the people in the United States now live in cities. To say that they are not the "real" America is not merely wrong, but is an insult to America, because that is where most of Americans live. And, I assure you, they are all real. New York has our nation's oldest and most respected newspaper, and Boston has many of our most respected Universities. Washington, D.C. houses our nation's history in it's Museums, and our every branch of our federal government. Major cities from Atlanta to Nashville to Seattle are the sources of our culture and music, and Los Angeles creates the movies and television shows that all Americans watch and love. Yet, we in the city don't claim that the people out in the suburbs or on the farm aren't real Americans. We are all Americans, and it's time for people like Sarah Palin and John McCain to insult the majority of Americans in order to rile the affections of those who live in the sparsely populated states.
There is a tale of two America's that only exists in elections. People joke about "fly-over" states, and about the East Coast elites and West Coast liberals. People like Governor Palin and Senator McCain spend their time talking to the people on "Main Street" about how they represent real American values, and demonizing Washington, Hollywood, and the Northeast. What makes the south and midwest the real America, though? When the Pilgrims first came to the United States, they landed in the Northeast. When the American Revolution was sparked, it was in Boston. When the battles were being fought, it was in Concord and Lexington, Trenton and New York. The Founding Fathers were meeting in New York and Philadelphia, and all that existed of the America we know was on the East Coast.
All of our history and the people who founded our nation were East Coast elites, and yet at some point it became politically effective to trash Massachusetts, New York City, and Washington, D.C. They talk about how the people in rural Iowa are "real" Americans, and those of us in cities are all living lives of sin and depravity. Not only is this insulting to people like me, but it's insulting to anyone who understands the history of the United States. For instance, Republicans like to insult those Ivy-League liberals (even though many of them went to the Ivy League schools), but the prototypical Ivy League school, Harvard, was founded by the Puritans who landed in Massachusetts in 1630. They believed deeply in the Bible, but also believed deeply in education and learning from the ancient cultures of Greece, Roman, and others. From these earliest days, through to the present, when people first came to America, they came to the cities. This is where they integrated into American life, where they began to build there fortunes, and from where they then branched out to tame the west. If everyone in America came from somewhere else, then all these first settlers of the west and the south came from the East Coast.
And today, what can be more ridiculous than to claim that Kansas is the real America, and that Massachusetts is not. The most densely populated states are in the Northeast. In a nation that defines itself on the will of the majority, more than half of the people in the United States now live in cities. To say that they are not the "real" America is not merely wrong, but is an insult to America, because that is where most of Americans live. And, I assure you, they are all real. New York has our nation's oldest and most respected newspaper, and Boston has many of our most respected Universities. Washington, D.C. houses our nation's history in it's Museums, and our every branch of our federal government. Major cities from Atlanta to Nashville to Seattle are the sources of our culture and music, and Los Angeles creates the movies and television shows that all Americans watch and love. Yet, we in the city don't claim that the people out in the suburbs or on the farm aren't real Americans. We are all Americans, and it's time for people like Sarah Palin and John McCain to insult the majority of Americans in order to rile the affections of those who live in the sparsely populated states.
A Palin's History of the United States
There was something that outraged me a few weeks back while I was watching the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Well, actually, there were many things that outraged me, but one in particular that, at the time, I couldn't quite explain why it was important. Now that I've had some time to think about it, I know, so let me explain.
During the debate, Sarah Palin leaned heavily on prepared remarks and Republican party buzzwords, specifically invoking Ronald Reagan. At one point, she stated the following: "And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said..." Anyone who knows anything about Reagan would recognize this line, since he said it often. The thing that made me mad was that, Reagan didn't write that line. She was crediting Reagan with a line that he himself was quoting from someone else. At first, I assumed this bothered me because it was doing what Republicans often do: crediting Ronald Reagan with all manner of things that happened that weren't his doing. Really, though, this bothers me because it says something far more worrisome about Sarah Palin specifically, and a large number of people in her party generally. That is, that they have no true sense of History.
Sarah Palin and her supporters have developed a myth of America, in which everything they believe is confirmed by our founding fathers and everything the disagree with is wiped from history in Orwellian proportions. When Ronald Reagan refered to America as a "city on a hill," he was referencing a famous sermon by John Winthrop titled A Model of Christian Charity, who himself was referencing Matthew 5:14 from the Bible. Perhaps it doesn't matter where the quote came from, but it's a sign of a much larger problem that I don't think Sarah Palin is aware of who John Winthrop is, and probably doesn't know that the phrase is from the Bible. As far as she's concerned, Ronald Reagan created the line from whole cloth, and whatever he says is the final word on the subject, rather than him being in the middle of a long line of commentators.
Despite having no understanding of history, though, they so often rely on it to bolster their arguments. When we talk about the separation of church and state, an important concept put in place by the Founding Fathers of our nation, they talk about the Pilgrims and the Judeo-Christian (by which they mean, mostly Protestant Christian) foundation of our country. However, to know history is to know that this is a false affirmation. The reason the Pilgrims came to the New World is because they had suffered under a government that had established a religion, and they specifically preferred local congregations that were neither related to government nor even to a larger, national church. They would also probably be surprised to know that Governor John Winthrop, the man who referred to his new colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as that proverbial "city on a hill," and who so inspired Reagan, in fact thought that democracy was "the meanest and worst of all forms of government." He also thought it was a violation of the Bible's Fifth Commandment. So, it's difficult to claim that our nation's values should be dictated by a group of people who think our nation's very founding could be sinful. These were people who, though they disagreed with the King's mistreatment of religion, they believed that he was owed due respect as an anointed representative of God. The King was the father of the nation, and as such, had to be respected as the Bible commands.
By misunderstanding history, they can claim that the founding fathers wanted all citizens to have guns, ignoring the fact that the 2nd Amendment was written at a time when we had no army and needed militias, and at a time when gun violence was not a huge societal problem and guns couldn't be easily concealed and fire hundreds of rounds a minute. They can claim Mexicans are stealing our country while ignoring that the Europeans were the original immigrants, and they stole land from the people who were here, and then made the same claims against every wave of immigrants from the Irish to the Italians to the Russians, all of which now make up large and productive parts of our America. They can even deregulate the banks and blame the economic decline on Democrats while ignoring the Great Depression which was under a Republican President's watch and lead FDR to establish many of those regulations in the first place. And of course we can't forget the attacks of September 11th, which they tell you will be repeated if we allow a Democrat into office, even though they occurred with a Republican President and Congress, and with a Republican mayor in New York, and it was those same Republicans that have endangered us since by not finishing the job in Afghanistan and creating a hotbed for terrorists in Iraq.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not understand history, doom the rest of us.
During the debate, Sarah Palin leaned heavily on prepared remarks and Republican party buzzwords, specifically invoking Ronald Reagan. At one point, she stated the following: "And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said..." Anyone who knows anything about Reagan would recognize this line, since he said it often. The thing that made me mad was that, Reagan didn't write that line. She was crediting Reagan with a line that he himself was quoting from someone else. At first, I assumed this bothered me because it was doing what Republicans often do: crediting Ronald Reagan with all manner of things that happened that weren't his doing. Really, though, this bothers me because it says something far more worrisome about Sarah Palin specifically, and a large number of people in her party generally. That is, that they have no true sense of History.
Sarah Palin and her supporters have developed a myth of America, in which everything they believe is confirmed by our founding fathers and everything the disagree with is wiped from history in Orwellian proportions. When Ronald Reagan refered to America as a "city on a hill," he was referencing a famous sermon by John Winthrop titled A Model of Christian Charity, who himself was referencing Matthew 5:14 from the Bible. Perhaps it doesn't matter where the quote came from, but it's a sign of a much larger problem that I don't think Sarah Palin is aware of who John Winthrop is, and probably doesn't know that the phrase is from the Bible. As far as she's concerned, Ronald Reagan created the line from whole cloth, and whatever he says is the final word on the subject, rather than him being in the middle of a long line of commentators.
Despite having no understanding of history, though, they so often rely on it to bolster their arguments. When we talk about the separation of church and state, an important concept put in place by the Founding Fathers of our nation, they talk about the Pilgrims and the Judeo-Christian (by which they mean, mostly Protestant Christian) foundation of our country. However, to know history is to know that this is a false affirmation. The reason the Pilgrims came to the New World is because they had suffered under a government that had established a religion, and they specifically preferred local congregations that were neither related to government nor even to a larger, national church. They would also probably be surprised to know that Governor John Winthrop, the man who referred to his new colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as that proverbial "city on a hill," and who so inspired Reagan, in fact thought that democracy was "the meanest and worst of all forms of government." He also thought it was a violation of the Bible's Fifth Commandment. So, it's difficult to claim that our nation's values should be dictated by a group of people who think our nation's very founding could be sinful. These were people who, though they disagreed with the King's mistreatment of religion, they believed that he was owed due respect as an anointed representative of God. The King was the father of the nation, and as such, had to be respected as the Bible commands.
By misunderstanding history, they can claim that the founding fathers wanted all citizens to have guns, ignoring the fact that the 2nd Amendment was written at a time when we had no army and needed militias, and at a time when gun violence was not a huge societal problem and guns couldn't be easily concealed and fire hundreds of rounds a minute. They can claim Mexicans are stealing our country while ignoring that the Europeans were the original immigrants, and they stole land from the people who were here, and then made the same claims against every wave of immigrants from the Irish to the Italians to the Russians, all of which now make up large and productive parts of our America. They can even deregulate the banks and blame the economic decline on Democrats while ignoring the Great Depression which was under a Republican President's watch and lead FDR to establish many of those regulations in the first place. And of course we can't forget the attacks of September 11th, which they tell you will be repeated if we allow a Democrat into office, even though they occurred with a Republican President and Congress, and with a Republican mayor in New York, and it was those same Republicans that have endangered us since by not finishing the job in Afghanistan and creating a hotbed for terrorists in Iraq.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not understand history, doom the rest of us.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Things I Never Knew About John McCain
1.) Ronald Reagan is his hero.
2.) No, check that, Teddy Roosevelt is his hero.
3.) No, wait...not quite his hero, but he has a big boy crush on General Patreus.
4.) He is so ready to contest anything that Barack Obama says, that he furiously starts writing notes even before the debate has begun. It's because he can see the future, and is furious about what Obama is about to say about his economic plan. Spooky.
5.) His bedtime is 11 p.m. EST. That's why Cindy had to rush him out after the debate while Barack and Michelle took pictures, signed autographs, and spoke with people. Listen, if the American people want John McCain to address their concerns, they have to show up during office hours. And even then, he'll probably trail off into something about Iran and not answer your concerns.
6.) He thinks it's awesome that eBay is doing so well. Yes, for every person that loses their job in this bad economy, John McCain wants you to know you can have a successful career selling all of your possessions on ebay to other unemployed people who can no longer afford to buy things new from a store. Sure, our economy is crumbling, but the black market economy is on the rise! (Side note: John McCain thinks the CEO of eBay would make a great treasury secretary. The CEO of eBay just laid off 10% of her company.)
7.) John McCain is uncomfortable with human contact of any kind. Whether it's giving an awkward pat on the back to a veteran, or refusing to shake Obama's hand after the debate, or giving his wife the awkward one-armed-side-by-side hug that I usually reserve for my male friends or people I've just met.
8.) John McCain doesn't understand your question, and won't respond to it.
9.) McCain knows just how to fix the economy, how to win the war in Iraq, and how to capture Osama Bin Laden. But, he can't tell you. Vote for him on November 4th and he'll let us in on the secret. I bet the answer to all three is "with robots."
10.) You know that bailout bill that many Americans are opposed to, and that John McCain both voted for and then called for the President to Veto? He thinks we should get the country's money back by...buying all the bad mortgages that put these banks in trouble in the first place and then...renegotiate them lower. Yes, he wants to spend MORE MONEY to buy the loans that are LEAST LIKELY to be repaid, and then make a deal so that if they are repaid, that it will be for less then we dish out for them. So, to counteract the bailout that he said was terrible, he wants to expand the bailout and get even less of a return.
And see, after all this time, I thought I couldn't learn anything new about John McCain. I guess he really is a mavericky maverick.
2.) No, check that, Teddy Roosevelt is his hero.
3.) No, wait...not quite his hero, but he has a big boy crush on General Patreus.
4.) He is so ready to contest anything that Barack Obama says, that he furiously starts writing notes even before the debate has begun. It's because he can see the future, and is furious about what Obama is about to say about his economic plan. Spooky.
5.) His bedtime is 11 p.m. EST. That's why Cindy had to rush him out after the debate while Barack and Michelle took pictures, signed autographs, and spoke with people. Listen, if the American people want John McCain to address their concerns, they have to show up during office hours. And even then, he'll probably trail off into something about Iran and not answer your concerns.
6.) He thinks it's awesome that eBay is doing so well. Yes, for every person that loses their job in this bad economy, John McCain wants you to know you can have a successful career selling all of your possessions on ebay to other unemployed people who can no longer afford to buy things new from a store. Sure, our economy is crumbling, but the black market economy is on the rise! (Side note: John McCain thinks the CEO of eBay would make a great treasury secretary. The CEO of eBay just laid off 10% of her company.)
7.) John McCain is uncomfortable with human contact of any kind. Whether it's giving an awkward pat on the back to a veteran, or refusing to shake Obama's hand after the debate, or giving his wife the awkward one-armed-side-by-side hug that I usually reserve for my male friends or people I've just met.
8.) John McCain doesn't understand your question, and won't respond to it.
9.) McCain knows just how to fix the economy, how to win the war in Iraq, and how to capture Osama Bin Laden. But, he can't tell you. Vote for him on November 4th and he'll let us in on the secret. I bet the answer to all three is "with robots."
10.) You know that bailout bill that many Americans are opposed to, and that John McCain both voted for and then called for the President to Veto? He thinks we should get the country's money back by...buying all the bad mortgages that put these banks in trouble in the first place and then...renegotiate them lower. Yes, he wants to spend MORE MONEY to buy the loans that are LEAST LIKELY to be repaid, and then make a deal so that if they are repaid, that it will be for less then we dish out for them. So, to counteract the bailout that he said was terrible, he wants to expand the bailout and get even less of a return.
And see, after all this time, I thought I couldn't learn anything new about John McCain. I guess he really is a mavericky maverick.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Soon We'll Be Reading in the Future
Increasingly, we are moving to a digital world, and while downloading information straight into our brains a la The Matrix or Johnny Mnemonic (what’s with Keanu Reeves?) is a long way off, it still gives pause to someone who grew up with the analog. In some cases, it just makes sense. You can’t play a record in a car or on the go; you can’t bring a board game with you to play on the subway; you can’t keep everything in file drawers when you have limited office space. Television, the latest to join the digital revolution, is better in a digital form than in an analog form.
Sadly, though, the trend seems to be constantly towards the impermanent. Having shelves of LPs gives physical presence and value to the music, and the act of having to take them off the shelf, place them on the record player, and flip them halfway through turns listening into a participatory experience. You have to really want it. It’s for that reason that while CD sale decline, sales of Vinyl LPs are actually increasing for the first time in years. People don’t want just convenience, they want meaning.
Luckily, one medium that has resisted the switch to digital has been the printed word. Sure, you can read newspapers online and occasionally find a book on the web (or in an audiofile), but by and large, people still consume literature in book form. The e-book has been slow to gain acceptance, and it’s because of the very nature of books. They too are a participatory experience, requiring your active looking and page turning but also the active participation of your imagination and interpretation.
An iPod allows you to place thousands of songs in one small device. Songs go by quickly, and in the course of a day you might listen to several albums worth, and it’s simply not practical to carry around your whole physical music collection with you so that you can choose your next album or song on the fly. It would also be impractical to carry around movie projector and a series of reels, or a television with VCR and collection of tapes.
Books, on the other hand, take time. If you leave the house in the morning with one book, chances are you won’t finish it by the time you get home. At most, maybe you’ll need two books. An e-reader, in order to be comfortable to hold and read, as well as to have the proper storage and power requirement, needs to be a certain size to be practical, and that size is roughly the same as a short book. So it’s not necessarily more convenient than an actual book. In addition, a book requires no additional power source. Unless you’re in a pitch black room or out at night in the woods, the natural world provides everything you need to see that book, without you having to worry about finishing the book before the battery runs out. You can pick it up and start reading without having to open a program or scroll through pages, and you can do so in any setting without disturbing others with your glowing page.
Frankly, I like books because they are so analog. I can see at a glance how much I’ve read and how much further I have to go. I can, on a whim, skip ahead or travel back for a second to check something. I don’t have to turn off my book when the plane is taking off, and I don’t have to find an outlet to plug in my book. When I was a kid, I could hide my book in my lap and read during a particularly boring health class or assembly, and no one would be the wiser because my book gave off no sound or light and could easily be hidden amongst my other school-required books.
So feel free to convert everything else I own into a digital copy that can be attached to me at all time and hold everything I own, leaving me with the fear that one day it will crash and I’ll lose it all. I’ll keep my every increasing shelves with my collection of books taking up valuable space.
Sadly, though, the trend seems to be constantly towards the impermanent. Having shelves of LPs gives physical presence and value to the music, and the act of having to take them off the shelf, place them on the record player, and flip them halfway through turns listening into a participatory experience. You have to really want it. It’s for that reason that while CD sale decline, sales of Vinyl LPs are actually increasing for the first time in years. People don’t want just convenience, they want meaning.
Luckily, one medium that has resisted the switch to digital has been the printed word. Sure, you can read newspapers online and occasionally find a book on the web (or in an audiofile), but by and large, people still consume literature in book form. The e-book has been slow to gain acceptance, and it’s because of the very nature of books. They too are a participatory experience, requiring your active looking and page turning but also the active participation of your imagination and interpretation.
An iPod allows you to place thousands of songs in one small device. Songs go by quickly, and in the course of a day you might listen to several albums worth, and it’s simply not practical to carry around your whole physical music collection with you so that you can choose your next album or song on the fly. It would also be impractical to carry around movie projector and a series of reels, or a television with VCR and collection of tapes.
Books, on the other hand, take time. If you leave the house in the morning with one book, chances are you won’t finish it by the time you get home. At most, maybe you’ll need two books. An e-reader, in order to be comfortable to hold and read, as well as to have the proper storage and power requirement, needs to be a certain size to be practical, and that size is roughly the same as a short book. So it’s not necessarily more convenient than an actual book. In addition, a book requires no additional power source. Unless you’re in a pitch black room or out at night in the woods, the natural world provides everything you need to see that book, without you having to worry about finishing the book before the battery runs out. You can pick it up and start reading without having to open a program or scroll through pages, and you can do so in any setting without disturbing others with your glowing page.
Frankly, I like books because they are so analog. I can see at a glance how much I’ve read and how much further I have to go. I can, on a whim, skip ahead or travel back for a second to check something. I don’t have to turn off my book when the plane is taking off, and I don’t have to find an outlet to plug in my book. When I was a kid, I could hide my book in my lap and read during a particularly boring health class or assembly, and no one would be the wiser because my book gave off no sound or light and could easily be hidden amongst my other school-required books.
So feel free to convert everything else I own into a digital copy that can be attached to me at all time and hold everything I own, leaving me with the fear that one day it will crash and I’ll lose it all. I’ll keep my every increasing shelves with my collection of books taking up valuable space.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
And All the Rest That Fits
Now that I've completed my overall analysis, and my guy reaction, of the Biden-Palin debate, I have a few points I'd like to delve into. To begin, something of a petty one:
We've had two terms of a President who has butchered the English language, setting a bad example for children in America and making us look stupid abroad when foreign leaders can speak our language better than our own President. I don't think it's elitist to suggest that we try a President who, with a team of people telling them on a daily basis, is able to remember that "nuclear" only has the one "u" in it. It's "nu-cle-ar" not "nuc-u-ler." Also, "Iraq" and "Iran" are not Apple products (though I hear the new iRaq has wi-fi). It's not "I- Rack." If we're going to invade a country and kill tens of thousands of it's citizens, let's not add insult by acting like we've never heard of the country before and don't know how to pronounce it's name in our own language.
Now, the real facts. Palin disputed Biden's claim that our commander in Afghanistan said a surge-like strategy wouldn't work. She said that "McClellan" never said that. Perhaps that's true, because our commander in Afghanistan is named "McKiernan" and he did in fact say that something like the Sunni Awakening wouldn't work in Afghanistan, because the tribal situation there is more complex than the situation in Iraq.
Palin refered to the Obama-Biden strategy in Iraq as a "white flag of surrender." General Patreus, who she repeatedly invoked as someone she thought could do no wrong, said recently that he didn't think "victory" was possible in Iraq. If our goal is to rid the world of terrorists, specifically in Iraq, you never can have a victory. Terrorists aren't an ethnic group that can be wiped out. Terrorism is a tactic, and it will be employed anytime you have dissidents. It's happend in Iraq, it happened in Africa, it's even happened in Oklahoma. Obame and Biden don't want to drop our weapons and run for the hills, they want to continue fighting for the next YEAR and a HALF, they want to keep training the Iraq army for a YEAR and a HALF, and then they want to keep some American troops in Iraq to support the 400,000 MAN Iraqi army to defend their own country (a policy that both President Bush and the president of Iraq now support). That's not a white flag. That's turning the country over to the people we said we were rescuing from a dictatorship. That, is victory.
When asked about what campaign promises they might have to scale back considering the financial crisis our country is in, Joe Biden was very straightforward. He said we might have to slow or scale back our foreign aid, something I would oppose but certainly won't cost him any points here. He also named other things that he would put on the back-burner while specifying all of the things he thought we couldn't afford to withhold money from, including health care and education. Sarah Palin's response? Nothing. In a time when the value of the dollar has dropped, the stock market has plummeted, unemployment has risen, job creation has decreased, and our deficit is at an all-time high...Sarah Palin and John McCain will both cut taxes (decreasing the money our government has to spend) and increase spending, thus ensuring that our deficit climbs higher, we have to borrow more money from China, and our dollar and economy continue to decline in power.
How about that health care? Obama and Biden want to make sure that all Americans can get it, because studies (and common sense) have proven that if our citizens can go to the doctor when they need to, they will get sick and injured less often and therefore not have to miss work or work at a diminished capacity, thus increasing productivity and growth in our economy. Sarah Palin and John McCain say they would like to increase payroll taxes, thus causing employers to be burdened and therefore decrease health benefits, and then they want to replace the average of $12,000 in benefits you get with a $5,000 tax credit. They claim this is "revenue neutral," meaning that it won't cost extra, but in fact it means it will cost the government $5,000 for each person, because that's 5k in taxes they won't be paying to the government but to a healthcare provider. I don't understand how they don't consider that socialism when they want to take tax money and give it right to the health care companies.
Palin again repeated the falsehood that Obama wants to sit down with our enemies without preconditions. His actual policy is that he wants to engage with these countries diplomatically. He's not saying that he personally wants to sit down with these leaders, or that he will do it whenever or however they dictate. He is merely saying that we can't just ignore these countries and think that our threats will change their ways. His idea is so crazy, though, that 5 former secretaries of state, our current President, and much of the rest of the world agrees with it. Meanwhile, she thinks we shouldn't even bother sending diplomats unless they agree to immediately disarm, something you can't get them to do until you send diplomats to convince them to do it, and she has no response for why McCain doesn't want to meet with the leader of NATO-ally Spain who has troops in Afghanistan fighting with us.
Palin again repeated the falsehood that McCain put country first and suspended his campaign to take care of the financial crisis. He "suspended" his campaign by continuing to do television interviews, continuing to run campaign ads, and not going to Washington until the following day, at which point he derailed that negotiation process for his own political ends. She also said she wouldn't answer the questions they way the moderator wanted, and that she wanted to talk straight to the American people without the media filter. As a filter take the toxins from your drinking water, or cuts the tar from you cigarette, does she not realize that the media filters bs from a candidate's mouth and tells us when they are lying to the American people. Yes, I think she does, which is why she wants to talk straight to us - so she can lie to us.
She doesn't believe an unstable Pakistan WHICH ALREADY HAS NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAT COULD HIT ISRAEL is as big a threat as Iran which merely wants Nuclear weapons. She states that America has nuclear weapons as a deterrent and that's a good thing, I suppose unaware of the fact that the reason Iran and North Korea want them so badly is so that they can use them as a deterrent against us so we'll negotiate with them and not invade. She said McCain knows how to win wars, even though the war he fought in is a war we lost and that as Senator, he presided over and supported several conflicts we fared poorly in, and opposed ones in which we succeeded. She said that, like Dick Cheney, she believes the Vice President is a member of Congress as well as the Executive branch, and that she wants to expand that role. She promotes placing our embassy in Jerusalem, a move that increase hostility against the U.S. and Israel from Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt. She supports a two-state solution in Israel, something most Israeli's are opposed to, but has no problem with the fact that Hamas won in the elections in Palestine, probably because she doesn't know what Hamas is.
And her solution to the lending crisis? She thinks Americans should stop borrowing money. Well, you see, since the United States' government can't stop, and her policies would mean that more people are out of work and have higher costs, how are they supposed to live if they don't occasionally put something on the credit card? Well, if average Americans are anything like her, they'll just have to live in their Governor's mansions instead of their private estates, and they'll have to sell their jets and instead take flights paid for by lobbyists. She said she doesn't think paying taxes is patriotic, but maybe that's because in Alaska she cut their taxes and made the federal government and the American energy consumer foot the bill.
Finally, a special note for both Biden and Palin. I know you're trying to win an election. I know that change comes slowly. I know that a lot of people in America aren't ready for real change. However, there is never an acceptable time for bigotry. You can say you support the right of a same-sex couple to have hospital visits and joint home ownership. You can say they should have the right to enter into contracts together. None of these, however, are rights you couldn't get through a lawyer or as partners in a corporation. The fact is, you can say you are "tolerant" as Sarah Palin did, but tolerance is not enough. "Tolerance" means that you'll put up with something. I hate bees buzzing around me in the summertime, but I tolerate it. When she says "tolerate" she means she thinks you are a sinner, a pervert, someone who made a terrible choice, and because of that she doesn't think you should have the same rights as anyone else in this country, but I guess that she won't actively try to get you thrown in jail or beaten up. That's her "tolerance." But Joe, you should know better. You fought actively for civil rights, at a time in this country when black people, like the man you are running with, still hadn't been afforded all of the equal rights of the rest of us. You can give gay people all the individual rights in the world, but as the Supreme Court proved, separate but equal is not what our country stands for. As long as they are treated as "other" they will never be equal, and we will as a nation will never be truly free.
Thank you for reading, and good night.
We've had two terms of a President who has butchered the English language, setting a bad example for children in America and making us look stupid abroad when foreign leaders can speak our language better than our own President. I don't think it's elitist to suggest that we try a President who, with a team of people telling them on a daily basis, is able to remember that "nuclear" only has the one "u" in it. It's "nu-cle-ar" not "nuc-u-ler." Also, "Iraq" and "Iran" are not Apple products (though I hear the new iRaq has wi-fi). It's not "I- Rack." If we're going to invade a country and kill tens of thousands of it's citizens, let's not add insult by acting like we've never heard of the country before and don't know how to pronounce it's name in our own language.
Now, the real facts. Palin disputed Biden's claim that our commander in Afghanistan said a surge-like strategy wouldn't work. She said that "McClellan" never said that. Perhaps that's true, because our commander in Afghanistan is named "McKiernan" and he did in fact say that something like the Sunni Awakening wouldn't work in Afghanistan, because the tribal situation there is more complex than the situation in Iraq.
Palin refered to the Obama-Biden strategy in Iraq as a "white flag of surrender." General Patreus, who she repeatedly invoked as someone she thought could do no wrong, said recently that he didn't think "victory" was possible in Iraq. If our goal is to rid the world of terrorists, specifically in Iraq, you never can have a victory. Terrorists aren't an ethnic group that can be wiped out. Terrorism is a tactic, and it will be employed anytime you have dissidents. It's happend in Iraq, it happened in Africa, it's even happened in Oklahoma. Obame and Biden don't want to drop our weapons and run for the hills, they want to continue fighting for the next YEAR and a HALF, they want to keep training the Iraq army for a YEAR and a HALF, and then they want to keep some American troops in Iraq to support the 400,000 MAN Iraqi army to defend their own country (a policy that both President Bush and the president of Iraq now support). That's not a white flag. That's turning the country over to the people we said we were rescuing from a dictatorship. That, is victory.
When asked about what campaign promises they might have to scale back considering the financial crisis our country is in, Joe Biden was very straightforward. He said we might have to slow or scale back our foreign aid, something I would oppose but certainly won't cost him any points here. He also named other things that he would put on the back-burner while specifying all of the things he thought we couldn't afford to withhold money from, including health care and education. Sarah Palin's response? Nothing. In a time when the value of the dollar has dropped, the stock market has plummeted, unemployment has risen, job creation has decreased, and our deficit is at an all-time high...Sarah Palin and John McCain will both cut taxes (decreasing the money our government has to spend) and increase spending, thus ensuring that our deficit climbs higher, we have to borrow more money from China, and our dollar and economy continue to decline in power.
How about that health care? Obama and Biden want to make sure that all Americans can get it, because studies (and common sense) have proven that if our citizens can go to the doctor when they need to, they will get sick and injured less often and therefore not have to miss work or work at a diminished capacity, thus increasing productivity and growth in our economy. Sarah Palin and John McCain say they would like to increase payroll taxes, thus causing employers to be burdened and therefore decrease health benefits, and then they want to replace the average of $12,000 in benefits you get with a $5,000 tax credit. They claim this is "revenue neutral," meaning that it won't cost extra, but in fact it means it will cost the government $5,000 for each person, because that's 5k in taxes they won't be paying to the government but to a healthcare provider. I don't understand how they don't consider that socialism when they want to take tax money and give it right to the health care companies.
Palin again repeated the falsehood that Obama wants to sit down with our enemies without preconditions. His actual policy is that he wants to engage with these countries diplomatically. He's not saying that he personally wants to sit down with these leaders, or that he will do it whenever or however they dictate. He is merely saying that we can't just ignore these countries and think that our threats will change their ways. His idea is so crazy, though, that 5 former secretaries of state, our current President, and much of the rest of the world agrees with it. Meanwhile, she thinks we shouldn't even bother sending diplomats unless they agree to immediately disarm, something you can't get them to do until you send diplomats to convince them to do it, and she has no response for why McCain doesn't want to meet with the leader of NATO-ally Spain who has troops in Afghanistan fighting with us.
Palin again repeated the falsehood that McCain put country first and suspended his campaign to take care of the financial crisis. He "suspended" his campaign by continuing to do television interviews, continuing to run campaign ads, and not going to Washington until the following day, at which point he derailed that negotiation process for his own political ends. She also said she wouldn't answer the questions they way the moderator wanted, and that she wanted to talk straight to the American people without the media filter. As a filter take the toxins from your drinking water, or cuts the tar from you cigarette, does she not realize that the media filters bs from a candidate's mouth and tells us when they are lying to the American people. Yes, I think she does, which is why she wants to talk straight to us - so she can lie to us.
She doesn't believe an unstable Pakistan WHICH ALREADY HAS NUCLEAR WEAPONS THAT COULD HIT ISRAEL is as big a threat as Iran which merely wants Nuclear weapons. She states that America has nuclear weapons as a deterrent and that's a good thing, I suppose unaware of the fact that the reason Iran and North Korea want them so badly is so that they can use them as a deterrent against us so we'll negotiate with them and not invade. She said McCain knows how to win wars, even though the war he fought in is a war we lost and that as Senator, he presided over and supported several conflicts we fared poorly in, and opposed ones in which we succeeded. She said that, like Dick Cheney, she believes the Vice President is a member of Congress as well as the Executive branch, and that she wants to expand that role. She promotes placing our embassy in Jerusalem, a move that increase hostility against the U.S. and Israel from Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt. She supports a two-state solution in Israel, something most Israeli's are opposed to, but has no problem with the fact that Hamas won in the elections in Palestine, probably because she doesn't know what Hamas is.
And her solution to the lending crisis? She thinks Americans should stop borrowing money. Well, you see, since the United States' government can't stop, and her policies would mean that more people are out of work and have higher costs, how are they supposed to live if they don't occasionally put something on the credit card? Well, if average Americans are anything like her, they'll just have to live in their Governor's mansions instead of their private estates, and they'll have to sell their jets and instead take flights paid for by lobbyists. She said she doesn't think paying taxes is patriotic, but maybe that's because in Alaska she cut their taxes and made the federal government and the American energy consumer foot the bill.
Finally, a special note for both Biden and Palin. I know you're trying to win an election. I know that change comes slowly. I know that a lot of people in America aren't ready for real change. However, there is never an acceptable time for bigotry. You can say you support the right of a same-sex couple to have hospital visits and joint home ownership. You can say they should have the right to enter into contracts together. None of these, however, are rights you couldn't get through a lawyer or as partners in a corporation. The fact is, you can say you are "tolerant" as Sarah Palin did, but tolerance is not enough. "Tolerance" means that you'll put up with something. I hate bees buzzing around me in the summertime, but I tolerate it. When she says "tolerate" she means she thinks you are a sinner, a pervert, someone who made a terrible choice, and because of that she doesn't think you should have the same rights as anyone else in this country, but I guess that she won't actively try to get you thrown in jail or beaten up. That's her "tolerance." But Joe, you should know better. You fought actively for civil rights, at a time in this country when black people, like the man you are running with, still hadn't been afforded all of the equal rights of the rest of us. You can give gay people all the individual rights in the world, but as the Supreme Court proved, separate but equal is not what our country stands for. As long as they are treated as "other" they will never be equal, and we will as a nation will never be truly free.
Thank you for reading, and good night.
Past is Prologue.
Tonight, as I watched the Vice Presidential debate, time and again I was reminded of the past. No, it was not from Joe Biden, who Sarah Palin accused of being focused on the past and not the future. To address that, I say that the reason we are in the bad situation we are now in both Iraq and with our economy is because the Bush Republicans ignored the lessons of the past. No, I was reminded of the past by Sarah Palin's performance. Her caricatured folksiness, her inability to answer the questions she was asked, her reliance on memorized talking points, her mispronunciation of all words including "nuclear," and her attempts to pretend she's "just like you" despite being wealthy and powerful; all of these things reminded me of George W. Bush's debates.
It was a joke on the Simpson's that, to paraphrase, you can't be "cool" if you tell people that you're "cool." Well, tonight, Sarah Palin repeatedly tried to tell us that she was "an average American," that she was a "maverick," and that she was "a Washington outsider." So again, if you have to tell people repeatedly that you're a maverick, then you probably aren't one, or else they would think it without you saying so. As I watched the debate, though, I thought Sarah Palin did well in one important respect: she played to her base. She played to the people who care only about her as a persona and not her as a politician. She played to those who care more about what a person says than what their record proves. She played to the people who hear only the buzz words and forget the substance.
If the bar is set so low for Sarah Palin that she'd have to stutter and fumble, then yes, she just cleared it. She may have mispronounced "nuclear,"" Iraq," and "Talibani" but she gave that folksy twang that will blind those people to the fact that she's a wealthy, powerful, Alaskan separatist who's in the pocket of oil interests and other lobbyists. To think on substance, however, she had none. She repeated over and over that we had to take on "the greed of Wall Street" and that she came from a "team of mavericks," but nowhere in there did she state what they would do if they were elected, how they would be different from George W. Bush, or how she came to her false conclusions about the policies of Barack Obama an Joe Biden. Unfortunately, well the dust settles, though the news media will report the misstatements (or flat-out lies) she made, it will already be too late, and all people will remember is that she said Barack Obama voted against the troops.
By the one hour mark, though, she was winded and Joe Biden was just getting started. He called her out on her distortions of his record. He called her out on McCain's record. He called her out on the fact that she is not the only one on that stage who understands the needs of families. When he spoke so eloquently, in response to her harsh negativity, and choked up about knowing what it's like to struggle to care for your family, she responded without even an acknowledgement, going right into another prepared talking point that didn't even address the question.
Ultimately, I think much of the blame for the fact that she was allowed to ignore the substance and dodge the questions falls on the moderator, who seemed to haphazardly employ the rules of the debate, asking a series of questions but never seeking followup or allowing a chance for the candidates to stay on a topic beyond a single response each, meaning that she could suddenly jump to a prepared talking point about taxes or Afghanistan without addressing either what was asked, or responding to Joe Biden.
My view of Sarah Palin's performance can be demonstrated by what she did at the end of the debate; she brought her whole family up on stage, including her infant son that should have been in bed by now. The child was tired and probably annoyed by all those lights, and after using him as a prop for photo ops, she passed him off to her youngest daughter, barely big enough to hold him, and went back to glad-handing. Sarah Palin is all about the photo op, and not about the substance. She's about getting in the sound bite and not answering the question. She's about looking like she's a good leader (or a good mother) and not about being one. So when our country needs real leadership and real change, she'll keep us up past our bedtime, drag us through the political side show, and then pass us off onto cronies and people with even less experience. Well, Sarah Palin, I for one have been kept up way past my bedtime.
It was a joke on the Simpson's that, to paraphrase, you can't be "cool" if you tell people that you're "cool." Well, tonight, Sarah Palin repeatedly tried to tell us that she was "an average American," that she was a "maverick," and that she was "a Washington outsider." So again, if you have to tell people repeatedly that you're a maverick, then you probably aren't one, or else they would think it without you saying so. As I watched the debate, though, I thought Sarah Palin did well in one important respect: she played to her base. She played to the people who care only about her as a persona and not her as a politician. She played to those who care more about what a person says than what their record proves. She played to the people who hear only the buzz words and forget the substance.
If the bar is set so low for Sarah Palin that she'd have to stutter and fumble, then yes, she just cleared it. She may have mispronounced "nuclear,"" Iraq," and "Talibani" but she gave that folksy twang that will blind those people to the fact that she's a wealthy, powerful, Alaskan separatist who's in the pocket of oil interests and other lobbyists. To think on substance, however, she had none. She repeated over and over that we had to take on "the greed of Wall Street" and that she came from a "team of mavericks," but nowhere in there did she state what they would do if they were elected, how they would be different from George W. Bush, or how she came to her false conclusions about the policies of Barack Obama an Joe Biden. Unfortunately, well the dust settles, though the news media will report the misstatements (or flat-out lies) she made, it will already be too late, and all people will remember is that she said Barack Obama voted against the troops.
By the one hour mark, though, she was winded and Joe Biden was just getting started. He called her out on her distortions of his record. He called her out on McCain's record. He called her out on the fact that she is not the only one on that stage who understands the needs of families. When he spoke so eloquently, in response to her harsh negativity, and choked up about knowing what it's like to struggle to care for your family, she responded without even an acknowledgement, going right into another prepared talking point that didn't even address the question.
Ultimately, I think much of the blame for the fact that she was allowed to ignore the substance and dodge the questions falls on the moderator, who seemed to haphazardly employ the rules of the debate, asking a series of questions but never seeking followup or allowing a chance for the candidates to stay on a topic beyond a single response each, meaning that she could suddenly jump to a prepared talking point about taxes or Afghanistan without addressing either what was asked, or responding to Joe Biden.
My view of Sarah Palin's performance can be demonstrated by what she did at the end of the debate; she brought her whole family up on stage, including her infant son that should have been in bed by now. The child was tired and probably annoyed by all those lights, and after using him as a prop for photo ops, she passed him off to her youngest daughter, barely big enough to hold him, and went back to glad-handing. Sarah Palin is all about the photo op, and not about the substance. She's about getting in the sound bite and not answering the question. She's about looking like she's a good leader (or a good mother) and not about being one. So when our country needs real leadership and real change, she'll keep us up past our bedtime, drag us through the political side show, and then pass us off onto cronies and people with even less experience. Well, Sarah Palin, I for one have been kept up way past my bedtime.
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