From WaPo: “An Idiot Wind”

Black/White thinkers cannot brook ambiguity or tolerate divergent views on complex topics. This Washington Post editorial is worth quoting in full.

An ‘Idiot Wind’
John McCain’s latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism
Friday, October 31, 2008

WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him “a PLO spokesman”; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers — a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance — was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear.

Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was “deeply flawed” but conceded there were also “flaws in the alternatives.” Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging — as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he “offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

It’s fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable — especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults. To further argue that the Times, which obtained the tape from a source in exchange for a promise not to publicly release it, is trying to hide something is simply ludicrous, as Mr. McCain surely knows.

Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

Quick Question

Let’s say you, as a person, possess these two traits:

A.  You’re a Professor of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University.

B.  You have a very Middle Eastern sounding name.

Are these the only requirements that one must have to be called anti-semitic these days?  Cause I have yet to see a single quote that actually indicts Rashid Khalidi of any views that are – you know- racist.

But some people don’t need much convincing.

Montana in Play?

I got robocalled last night – some guy talking about Obama’s ‘clinging to guns and religion’ comment. McCain is reduced to cheap shots and smears, and when a state comes into play, floods it with calls. That call told me that Montana is in play. Or maybe it’s just insurance. Who knows with that campaign.

Here’s what Obama said way back when:

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

There’s a problem with that statement: It’s true. In politics, that’s a no-no.

On Bearing False Witness

In a year when no holds are barred, when there is no low to which people will not stoop, I thought this was low. Despicable.

more about "Dole’s "Promise" ad on Hagan", posted with vodpod

Hagen had a good response. I hope there’s a backlash.

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A Tax Primer

I am self-employed and I live in Montana. I make a modest income, enough to qualify me as “middle class”. My marginal tax rates are as follows: Federal income, 25%, Federal self-employment (FICA), 14.2%, Montana income tax, 6.9%. My marginal tax rate is 46.1%.

Contrast that with someone who lives on inherited wealth or on passive income, such as dividends and capital gains: Marginal tax rates: Federal rate, 15%, Montana rate either 5.9% or 6.9%. Marginal tax rate, either 22.9% or 23.9%.

Those special investor tax rates applies to all income, no matter how high – into the millions. The marginal tax rates that apply to me apply to me and all workers whose taxable income starts at $44,000 and extends to $113,000. The rates only go up from there. Working stiffs are getting taxed at more than twice the rate that investors and trust babies are.

When pundits now tell us that a third of American pay no tax at all, they are talking about the income tax, and not the payroll (FICA) tax. All working Americans pay the FICA or self-employment tax (two names for the same animal) at 14.2% of earnings with no deductions or exemptions allowed. Many poorer workers get an earned income credit that refunds some or all of this tax. Poorer workers with children get a true subsidy via the EIC. Those are the only one who pay no tax, and it is nowhere near a third of us.

Obviously I have oversimplified, not taking into consideration deductions or exemptions. I paint with a somewhat broad brush, but even with those things factored in, the bottom line is that working middle class Americans pay tax at very high rates, often double what investors pay.

Obama would raise the top federal marginal rate from 35% to 39%, where it was prior to Bush taking office. He would eliminate the special break that investors get on dividends and capital gains. That would take us back to where we were in 2000. He would ease the burden slightly on the middle class.

The right wing is screaming now ( in unison, of course), that Obama is a “socialist” for wanting to offer middle class Americans a tax break while restoring the top rates to the pre-Bush levels. It’s doesn’t take a lot of research here to see what their real agenda is, and who they really work for.

For those Americans who think that an Obama presidency is a threat to the middle class, pay attention! A vote for John McCain is a vote against your own economic interest.

An Angry Man

In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy. … At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said ‘You’re getting a little thin up there.’ McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, ‘At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c—.’

This article, Head of State, comes from an unexpected source – the October 20 issue of The American Conservative. The thrust of the article is that John McCain could possibly be a victim of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The author, Jim Pittaway, is a licensed psychotherapist (practicing in Missoula) who has worked for a decade in a multidisciplinary rehabilitation program for victims of TBI.

I have a hard time in my mind casting John McCain as a victim. Indeed he acted in service to his country when he bombed the North Vietnamese, but said service was disreputable. We were a technologically superior society unleashing the totality of our killing machine on an agrarian country. John McCain was shot down while under cover of official duty, but his actions are rightly seen as crimes when stripped of the official cover of military necessity. He was captured, imprisoned, and, if he is telling us the truth, tortured. The torture was of a low-tech variety, where he was beaten and repeatedly went in to states of unconsciousness, only to be revived and beaten again. It was truly inhuman – what he did, and what was done to him.

Pittaway maintains that an individual cannot undergo such trauma without long-lasting effects, and that McCain has never been treated for these effects – is in fact in denial that such treatment could have affected him at all. As a result, he is a walking bomb, and man who Phoenix mayor Paul Johnson says is “in the area of being unstable.”

Pittaway says “He is always angry at someone, or he is looking for something to be angry about.” He should be consigned to blogging, and leave public office to the more stable types.

Interesting background on the effects of blunt head trauma on international affairs:

Under the Plantagenets, the long-suffering people of England were stuck with nearly 300 years of virtually continuous, ruinous, and fruitless wars of almost no conceivable purpose beyond demonstrating that they were boss in France. (It turned out they weren’t.) Similarly, McCain buys unconditionally into the idea that a diverse world—particularly the Islam-believing, oil-producing component—must recognize that the president of the United States is in charge.

It’s one thing to believe something like that. The question is how much violence you are willing to expend in pursuit of such a notion. The Plantagenet answer was simple: we will use all the blood and treasure we can extort from the people we control in pursuit of power over people who resist us. John McCain gives the same answer, without ambiguity or qualification.

From the time of Henry II until very recently, it was assumed that the peculiar Plantagenet temperament was inherited rather than acquired—they were called “Devil’s spawn,” and their rages and obsessions were Shakespearian in intensity. But insights derived from modern understanding of concussions, coma, strokes, sepsis, and the damage they do to brain tissue—and the effects these incidents have on human emotions and behavior—casts these particular rulers in a very different light.

Coming of age in Plantagenet times involved putting an iron bucket over your head and flailing about with broadswords, clubs, maces, and an assortment of heavy objects in the direction of other young men similarly accessorized, until you or your opponent broke major bones or lost consciousness. Then, with everybody revived—except those who were dead, fractured, or in a coma—the practice was to put the iron bucket back on your head, get on your horse, and charge at each other with maximum velocity until someone was unhorsed, generally landing on his head, which was still encased in that iron bucket.

We know enough about the damage blows can do to heads encased in high-tech football helmets or struck frequently with padded gloves. Imagine the brain damage a prince had to acquire before he was deemed fit to be king.

So, those games we used to play as a kid, where my brothers would put a bucket over my head and hit it with a baseball bat – those games were not so innocent after all. I should have known.

In the Tudor case of Henry VIII, we have an individual whose life has been chronicled in such tedious detail that we can identify with specificity what clinicians call “precipitating events.” We know that, in addition to any damage done in training, he was unhorsed in a tournament trying to impress Anne Boleyn. This left him unconscious, probably in a coma, for several days, as did another fall from a horse while riding in the country, shortly before he had Boleyn beheaded. Although this man was afflicted by numerous ailments, a recent publication by the Congress of Neurological Surgeons maintains that his remarkable cognitive and emotional degeneration was substantially due to progressively more severe organic brain damage incurred during the course of his violent life.

George W. Bush presents as a shallow man, incurious and seemingly indifferent to the suffering of others. He undertook impulsive actions with dire long-term consequences. He didn’t realize the fury of the force he was unleashing – he didn’t think it through. (But Cheney did – that is more worrisome.) He’s a lesson in why the guy you want to have a beer with is not necessarily the guy you want to be president.

McCain is something worse, if that is possible – a man who knows first-hand that war is hell, who suffers from “unregulated anger, impulsivity, inability to tolerate ambiguity”. Who is more dangerous? Hopefully, we won’t have to find out.

My First Volunteer Experience

Well, I went ahead and done it.  I gave 4 hours of my precious time to the Obama campaign here in Portland.  It was not without some prodding, however.  The campaign office is a measly 3 blocks away from where I’m living, so I naturally went there to register to vote (also naturally, it was the last day to register).  Of course, they encourage you strongly to volunteer, and I suppose I felt guilty for not having done it sooner.  So I signed up.

I told them very clearly that I didn’t want to talk to people.  I just wanted to do some of the basic data entry stuff or paper filing.  I’m a bit of a realist when it comes to politics, so I’m not the best person to be calling or canvassing in order to repeat the words “hope” and “change”.  Quite frankly, I have this picture of myself being asked why Obama’s taken such a hard line against Iran since the general election came about.  My response would be “Well you see, there’s a lot of Jews in Florida.  And Florida has a lot of electoral votes.”  In other words, maybe I’m not the best representative for the Obama campaign.

So I showed up to the office at 10:00 yesterday morning.  It was crammed with people, and there’s coffee and food (all donated) for everyone.  They tried again to convince me to canvas, but respected my preference once I made it clear.  The energy in the room was unmistakable.  Every time someone  came in to drop off a ballot, the lady at the desk would yell “There’s a ballot in the house!!”, and everyone would cheer while she banged on a pan with a spoon.  Smiles all around.

Everyone was chatty, and I was impressed with the basic organization skills of the volunteers at the lowest level of the Obama campaign.  Their goal is to knock on every door 4 times to ensure that every Democrat in the city has mailed their ballots in.  And this is in a state that Obama has locked up.  I can’t imagine what it’s like elsewhere.  It’s hard to think that this campaign can be stopped, especially after experiencing the enthusiasm and the scope of it at this level.  I’m awestruck, and more hopeful than ever that he’s gonna pull this thing out.

So, I’ll be back to volunteer next week.  Why didn’t I do this sooner?

A Timely Attack

The McCain campaign has set its sights on Pennsylvania, even though they trail wildly in the polls there. To them, it’s a turnkey state.

I’ve heard Pennslyvania described as “Pittsburgh in the west, Philadelphia in the east, and Alabama in between. As John Murtha regrettably noted, parts of the in-between are “redneck” and “racist”.

So when Hillary campaigned in that state, she sacrificed Geraldine Ferraro up, having her make some racist comments about Obama, and then resign her post. The comments were most assuredly aimed at the in-between area.

So I’m a little bit curious about Ashley Todd’s venture into infamy this week – her claims that she was attacked by a six-foot-four black man who carved a ‘B’ on her face. It’s the kind of thing that would play well to racist sentiments. When it happened, the McCain people were all over it, beating the police to the media. And it turns out that Todd is a McCain volunteer.

Politics can be seamy. Obviously this is only speculation, but the Todd incident struck me as timely, and as something that would have dovetailed nicely with McCain’s efforts to pull Pennsylvania out of the Obama column.

Addendum: Well, I’m not the only curious one. According to this Raw Story item, the McCain people knew far too much about this attack far too soon.

Addendum: Read what Josh Marshall has to say.

Paradox

As has been mentioned ad nauseum here and elsewhere, one of the McCain campaign’s biggest problems is the lack of a consistent message.  I think it’s important to note that a lot of that was beyond his control.  There’s a few narratives that he has to push in this campaign, and many of them come into direct conflict with each other.  But I think the biggest problem for the campaign has been the conflicting lines of attack that they’ve had to use on Obama, and how these messages affect people’s mental impression of him.

For the McCain campaign, the question has to be:  How do you paint someone as weak and inexperienced while keeping your basest of base supporters believing that he’s “dangerous”?  By pushing his connection with “terrorists” and a fiery reverend, the campaign has directly contributed to making Obama seem stronger, even if in the wrong way.  This campaign has been all about subtle messages from both sides… and creating the impression of strength has been one of the unintended side affects of the lines of attack against Obama.

When the Republicans were busy SwiftBoating John Kerry, these same issues didn’t present a problem.  For instance, when a guy says that John Kerry shot a Vietnamese boy in the back 40 years ago, it doesn’t conflict with the overarching message of John Kerry being weak on defense, or John Kerry being a smug elitist who doesn’t understand ordinary Americans.

By trying to paint Obama as an angry black man, the McCain campaign has unintentionally given the impression that he’s not weak.  By connecting Obama to some of these people, they’ve also muted any attempt to paint him as some sort of “elitist.”  How can a man be an elitist if he’s a closet terrorist and angry black man?  When put together with Obama’s excellent performance in the debates, I think this impression has hurt the McCain campaign much more than it has helped it.

If Obama really pulls this thing out, it could be in large part because of some of the people who live in his neighborhood.  Imagine that.

Crazy Tracy – This is Why America is Broken – From “Now on PBS”

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Most people are religious to some degree or another, but also have their heads planted in the real world. Religion is mostly something we inherit from our parents who inherited it from their parents … on and on. Religious icons are usually mother/father substitutes, and they offer great comfort to people in dealing with the inevitable pain and trouble and suffering that is part of life. So be it.

But there’s a portion of the population for whom religion is a club – a way of expressing their desire to control the behavior of other people, a way to self-justify while demonizing people who disagree with them. They are called fundamentalists, evangelicals, and other names. I’ve wondered for some time if there is some mental derangement that underlies such destructive belief systems.

Listen to Crazy Tracy – she’s only letting us in for a brief glimpse at her soul. She’s only telling us a little bit. But it’s enough. Barack Obama is not just a man with a world view – he’s some incarnation of evil, likely the devil, certainly Muslim. Tracy has a fire burning in her, a desire to see Obama punished, and likewise to all of us evil enough to support him. She’s not all there.

There are a lot like her. America is off-the-charts fundamentalist, a lot like Iran in that regard. Jimmy Carter was the first president in my lifetime who tapped the electoral potential of the Christian Right – he used them to some degree of success in his run in 1976. But the Republicans spotted the enormous potential for these people, who as a voting bloc tend to go all in or all out. From 1980 forward, the Republicans used the abortion issue enlist the Christian Right to their cause. Since that time, they have become an essential part of the party’s base.

The question is, of course, how much power they really have. The Republicans have skillfully managed them, taking their support and giving them little in return. But they are getting bolder, demanding more. Bush tossed them the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, and a couple of Supreme Court judges who may (or may not) overturn Roe v Wade. But the primary thrust of the Republicans has been far from religious – they are the party of top-down economics, and their art is to get people to vote against their own self-interest. The Christians have been an essential force in that effort, even as they fail to understand what it has done to them and all of us.

All things in moderation. A little religion is good, I suppose. A lot can be, and has been, very bad for us.

Footnote: If Roe v Wade is overturned, will the Christian Right recede again into the shadows? Will Republicans keep the issue alive?