Several weeks ago this statement of Hillary Clinton got lots of attention:
I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said, “We are going to do it,” and actually got it accomplished.
What’s gotten less attention is what Martin Luther King himself thought on this subject. Chris Rabb has the bad taste to point out that King wrote this in an article published in January, 1969 after his death:
The past record of the federal government, however, has not been encouraging. No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn’t voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.
It would be fun to live in the kind of world where people remembered enough history to ask Hillary Clinton about this.
“Reality Is Totally Different” Iraqis on “Success” and “Progress” in Their Country By: Dahr Jamail
This March 19 will be the fifth anniversary of the shock-and-awe air assault on Baghdad that signaled the opening of the invasion of Iraq, and when it comes to the American occupation of that country, no end is yet in sight. If Republican presidential candidate John McCain has anything to say about it, the occupation may never end. On January 7th, he assured reporters that he was more than fine with the idea of the U.S. military remaining in Iraq for 100 years. “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so… As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me.”
He said nothing, of course, about Iraqis “injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” In fact, amid the flurries of words, accusations, and “debates” which have filled the airways and add up to the primary-season presidential campaign, there has been a near thunderous silence on Iraq lately — and especially on Iraqis…
Once again, with rare exceptions, that media has had a hand in erasing the catastrophe of Iraq from the American landscape, if not the collective consciousness of the public. What, it occurred to me recently, do my friends and acquaintances back in Iraq (where I covered the occupation for eight months during the years 2003-2005) think not just about their lives and the fate of their country, but about our attitudes toward them? What do they think about the “success” — and the silence — in America?
I wrote this one because I kept running across something I found really bizarre: the notion that top tier candidate X is above criticism, and any Democrat who supports top tier candidate Y or Z instead is a Republican dupe, if not an active emissary sent out by Karl Rove himself. If you follow message boards or comments threads at all, you know that it’s vehement this year, in a way that I don’t really remember from previous primaries. Supporters of each candidate are certain that if you don’t fall in line behind their person, then the Democrats will lose and “it will all be YOUR fault!” Whoever you are. Choose the wrong top-tier candidate this year and you might as well be a Naderite. It’s a strange way to approach a primary season.
I’m no economist, but isn’t this the very textbook definition of “throwing money at a problem”? We’re essentially going to drop $150 billion from airplanes and hope somebody spends it. Couldn’t the same money somehow be invested in a more sustained program to counter the increasing economic malaise, maybe some sort of WPA for the new century? As a wise man is purported to have once said, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish …
Then again, some Very Serious Republicans on one of the Sunday shows assured me that the trillion or so dollars that we’ve thrown at Iraq would have had absolutely no impact either way on our current economic situation, and there’s no reason whatsoever to even discuss the issue. These things are clearly beyond the understanding of a simple, undeducated cartoonist such as myself.
Pity the U.S. presidential candidates. They had their positions on Iraq all worked out by last summer and have repeated them consistently ever since. But events on the ground have changed dramatically, and their rhetoric feels increasingly stale. They’re fighting the Iraq War all right, but it’s the wrong one.
The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to “ending the war” and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.
A suicide bomber blew himself up in front of a high school north of Baghdad on Tuesday, wounding 22 people including teachers and students arriving for the beginning of the school day…U.S. commanders credit anti-al-Qaida fighters from Sunni groups, a six-month cease-fire by a Shiite militia and the dispatch of 30,000 additional U.S. soldiers last year for the reduction in violence. But there has been an uptick in high-profile bombings in recent weeks, suggesting al-Qaida remains a potent threat.
* * *
On Monday, a suicide bomber apparently targeting a senior security official blew himself up inside a funeral tent, killing 18 people in Hajaj, a village about midway along the nearly 20 miles between Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and the oil hub of Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad.
* * *
The attack comes one day after a 15-year-old suicide bomber walked into a party carrying a box of chocolates and detonated hidden explosives, killing himself, his cousin — a Sunni fighter working with U.S. and Iraqi forces — and four others.
* * *
Meanwhile, a military spokeswoman said a soldier killed over the weekend south of Baghdad was the first American casualty in a roadside bomb attack on the newly introduced, heavily armored MRAP, or Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicle.
At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.
Things are going great, if by “great” you mean “somewhat less horrifically terrible, but that could change.”
I expect conservatives will be denouncing this article as yet another example of America-hating liberal bias, yadda yadda yadda. What’s actually interesting is that the paper of record is tentatively beginning to acknowledge reality: people in this country, or at least some significant percentage thereof, understand what a colossal clusterfuck the Bush administration has been.
Now, Americans feel a loss of autonomy, in their own lives and in the nation. Their politics are driven by the powerlessness they feel to control their financial well-being, their safety, their environment, their health and the country’s borders. They question whether each generation will continue to ascend the economic ladder. That the political system seems so impotent only deepens their frustration and their insistence on results.
As she considers this campaign, Susan C. Powell, a 47-year-old training consultant who lives in a Kansas City suburb, said that what she feels is not so much hopelessness as doom.
“I know plenty of people who are doing worse than they were,” Ms. Powell said, “and nobody’s helping them out. People’s incomes are not keeping pace with inflation. People can’t afford their homes. People in their 30s and 40s, middle-income, and they don’t have jobs they can count on or access to health care. How can we say that we’re the greatest country on earth and essentially have the walking wounded?”
You almost have to feel sorry for the talk-radio apologists these days — it can’t be easy knowing you have to get up each day and find a way to put a happy face on corporate greed and political corruption and incompetence, when the consequences of same are painfully evident to people in their daily lives. Invocations of the long waits and bureaucracies of socialized medicine will eventually ring hollow to anyone who’s ever dealt with the long waits and bureaucracies of our own free market health system. Not to mention the people who can’t even find an affordable insurance plan, in this peculiar system of ours, in which availability of health care is inexplicably linked to employment status.
Then again, Republicans are often masterful at convincing people to vote against their own best interests, and Democrats are quite talented at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. As the line in “The Usual Suspects” goes, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn’t exist.
Opening his radio show with funeral music yesterday, Fox News host John Gibson callously mocked the death of actor Heath Ledger, calling him a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem.”
Playing an audio clip of the iconic quote, “I wish I knew how to quit you” from Ledger’s gay romance movie Brokeback Mountain, Gibson disdainfully quipped, “Well, he found out how to quit you.” Laughing, Gibson then played another clip from Brokeback Mountain in which Ledger said, “We’re dead,” followed by his own, mocking “We’re dead” before playing the clip again.
When O’Reilly or Hannity say something outrageous, the response is always that they are commentators, not journalists, and thus held to a different standard of propriety. Gibson occupies some nether region, neither fish nor fowl. His tv show is structured like a newscast, but he hosts it like a commentator — and then proceeds to host an hour a day of unabashed hate talk radio. But even for the ill-defined niche he occupies, this is really beyond the pale.
This is basically what Fox News is: assholes broadcasting assholery to other assholes. It’s an asshole extravaganza!
… adding this here, because it seems related: just when you think Republicans can’t be any more appalling …
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