The Final Tally: It's Practically a Tie

Congratulations to both Democrat Party Finalists!


Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 300,000 votes. Barack Obama won more pledged delegates but not enough to clinch the nomination; that came from the anti-democracy super delegates.

Here are the final pre-super delegate totals based on what I've read elsewhere:


POPULAR VOTE (all primaries and caucuses)

Hillary Clinton: 17,785,009

Barack Obama: 17,479,990

PLEDGED DELEGATES

Barack Obama: 1766.5

Hillary Clinton: 1639.5

Too Much Democracy for the Democratic Party!

Jon Stewart consults his calendar to figure out when Hillary should drop out of the race

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2008 campaigns, 2008 election, Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, anti-democracy democrats, elitist democrats, democratic party elites

The Deeply Racialized Psycho Sexual Schizophrenic Anxieties of White Media Types

Wouldn't it be a fascinating psycho-sexual study to peer into those not-so-hidden anxieties that seem to be repressed on the one hand and expressed on the other, but certainly not evenly distributed according to their true source?

As I've stated to friends and family: I don't have a problem supporting and voting for Barack Obama if he wins and it is indeed looking good for him. I also agree that the super delegates should not be used to 'award' the nomination to Clinton if the popular vote has gone for Obama.

However, I do have a big problem with the (mainly white male) broadcast media's disparate treatment and coverage of the campaign as evidenced by the condescending personal attacks and snide, not very disguised remarks about Senator Clinton based on qualities related to her gender, not her record, not her policies, not her skills.

Obama happens to be the beneficiary of unequal treatment which is not in his control. And yeah, of course, that's mainly MSNBC's undisguised favoritism of him and demonization of her, but includes a former Washington Post has-been schlub, Carl Bernstein on CNN.

I have a theory that most of these entitled, privileged, rich, very white guys actually DO have a lot of very deep anxieties about having a Black Male President (even though he's biracial and was raised by his white mom and white grandparents, he identifies himself as African-American, and the world does too, because we're a culture obsessed with racializing and sexualizing and categorizing and labeling 'others' — those who are 'not us').

So Tweety Matthews and Joe 'bully-boy' Scumbag and Smirking Fat-boy Russert and Living on Past Glories Bernstein and Chameleon Shuster and all those guys know vaguely on some level outwardly expressing their fears about Obama's Blackness and about having a Powerful Black Man in charge, installed in the most powerful office in the nation (and world) is obviously bigoted and stupid. (At least they know that it is forbidden to express publicly anyway — except for truly stupid bigots like Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck who don't have the sense to understand that everyone doesn't think — and I use that word lightly — like they do).

But after the 'Imus affair', those same guys who snickered during all the Imus jokey jokes about people of color and Hillary and women in general, finally found out that: Racism is out. Finally. May it burn in hell never to return. (I can wish and hope, can't I?)

But remember Rutgers: the main public and media outrage (as presented by the media itself) was over the outrageous Imus/McGuirk racism finally going too far, not the sexism.

"

He strides or stumbles about ... bifurcations ... often mapped onto the suspect divides between desire and anxiety ... between the body and perception ... [alternating between being] privileged or repressed ... the other often erupts through regardless of well-placed lines of defense*

"

Sexism is still in — alack and alas — as so many of the constant barrage of movies, songs, videos, games, magazines, tv shows continually prove every minute of every day. Sexism, misogyny, sexual objectification, sexual violence toward all things female/feminine are still acceptable and sanctioned, in fact required by our culture .... including through trite political commentary which is irrelevant and pointless, superficial, cruel, mean, petty, unequal, unjust, but highly effective at demonizing Clinton who represents powerful women, women with ambition, women with plans and determination who don't 'match' the social strictures which require women to be quiet, attractive, young, sexually objectified, non-threatening and not empowered. It's still the whore/madonna syndrome with newer, more sinister twists.

These smug, bloviating, sputtering, spitting, cowardly pundits are so unconscious about their own fears and biases and they have no where else to 'put it' (all that double whammy castration anxiety about powerful women and black men — we really are a repressed, sadistic, puritanical nation) — so they act out other culturally and socially acceptable forms of psychological (and political) violence that mirrors the relationship and stranger violence which occurs every day in the sexual assaults, beatings, sexual enslavement, rapes, murders of women, pregnant women, children and girls every day throughout this nation and the world (just watch the most recent trials and news stories about murdered pregnant women, missing daughters, wives and mothers — most of which are also dismissed as just more media obsession with pretty women, which may be part of the story, but the unconsciousness of what is really happening to women and girls in our culture is what I'm more interested in). Women of color are and have also historically been the targets of all the rage of their own cultures in addition to white culture; white women do not have a great history of supporting their struggles nor the struggles of men of color. Women of privilege and power don't always have a very good history of solidarity with or supporting other women for that matter. Patriarchy is unrelenting. Kind of like the Terminator character in the films and the new, apparently soon-to-be-dead TV series which features a couple of strong, powerful, intellectually and physically superior and determined female characters, coincidentally.).

About that Acting Out, as Robin Morgan has pointed out, if you substitute racist or anti-semitic slurs, terms, attitudes and ridicule, it would easily be identified as such and the outrage would be so loud and vociferous that it would not take 10 minutes for action to be taken amongst the outpouring of righteous indignation and public ire.

Meanwhile, just as also happens everywhere that all these atrocities and indignities occur (large and small), women often willingly participate or act as after-the-fact accomplices (Dowd, Mitchell, O'Donnell — Norah, not Rosie — and to an extent Maddow — what a major disappointment) or are silent (almost everyone else).

Even when you think there are some good guys (Olbermann), they eventually capitulate in order to 'fit in' and put 'good ole boy' loyalty — wanting to be 'one of the guys' above any remaining layer thin integrity and with their jello-filled backbones quickly jump right in to the group activities. I've never seen it fail to occur on some level when in the company of their cohorts. Never.

So when Hillary and others point out that you can't always count on 'the guys' (including Bill himself) to stand up for us, there's a reason and it's called history (or reality, take your pick). We have to hope Obama is different‚ and if he's not — it's up to us to hold him accountable for his promises. The work never ends. Voting is not democracy; it is one expression of a life-long process and responsibility to participatory democracy, and to preserving and extending our constitutional rights to freedom, equality, and civil rights (with rights come responsibilities).

Deep? Yeah, sure. But I'll be interested to read some historical analysis of this extremely 'hysterical' time in our nation's schizophrenic history as we get some distance. It saddens me that we're still such an immature (uncivilized) nation when it comes to women in power (so few) and empowering girls, but encourages me that we may make some major inroads on one of our collective historical sins, racism.

The drama of it all also kinda reminds me of The Graduate, especially the final scene when the two star-crossed lovers (Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross) end up together on that bus hurtling down the road. It's one thing to see that film in your youth, another to see it after you've grown up and matured for a while.

As I've noted numerous times before, we've never expected any male candidate to be 'perfect' (and they've never let us down in that regard) — including Obama — why do we expect Hillary to be the exception?

..................................

When it's all over, who might be able to provide some honest, clear-headed analysis? Whose book about this history-making time in our democracy's history would you want to read?

*VIRILIO, WAR, CINEMA, BODIES

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2008 campaigns, msnbc, 2008 election, castration anxiety, pscho-sexual fears, racism, sexism, Terminator, Sarah Connor

Because It Must Be Said...Written...Read...Considered...Acted Upon

For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence

Goodbye To All That (#2)

by Robin Morgan

February 2, 2008

Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version, see http://blog.fair-use.org/category/chicago/).

During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.

Goodbye to the double standard . . .

—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.

—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.

—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .

Carl Bernstein's disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.” Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?" with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged—and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!” Shame.

Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?

Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .

The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments (www.womensmediacenter.com). But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN’s Tony Harris chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.

Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .

Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities, abilities, sexual preferences, and ages—not only African American and European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arab American and—hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist—but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other discriminations, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”

So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially wealthy ones—adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were blackor he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance—even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.

I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote—until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being called “race traitors.”

Why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar—slavery—which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.

Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery, invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility, ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation, witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this historical moment women experience the world differently from men—though not all the same as one another—and can govern differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high office and barely got past the gate—they showed too much passion, raised too little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And goodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were even willing to abandon women’s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .

—blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys—though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.

—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.

—the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance. Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.

Goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar—slavery—which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.

Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.

Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She’s running to be president of the United States.

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power—granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Representatives Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Senator Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.

Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .

Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous “Obama Girl” flaunting her bikini-clad ass online—then confessing Oh yeah it wasn’t her idea after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said “made me feel like a dork.”

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten thestatus quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”

I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identifywith Hillary, and all the brave, smart men—of all ethnicities and any age—who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)

I’d rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical know-how—and he’ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?

And goodbye to the ageism . . .

How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation—the majority of which is female?

Old woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy; who inspired men to become more nurturing parents; who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put childcare on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of U.S. voters.

Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There’s not a woman alive who, if she’s honest, doesn’t recognize what she means. Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media’s obsession with everything Bill.

So listen to her voice:

“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.

“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard.”

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the U.S. State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (look here for the full, stunning speech).

And this voice, age 21, in “Commencement Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class of 1969.”

“We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . . searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. . . . [for the] integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. . . . Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.”

She ended with the commitment “to practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.”

And for decades, she’s been learning how.

So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?

“Our President, Ourselves!”

Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy—as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S. Senate, as we did when Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.

Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she knows how to get us out of Iraq. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.

As for the “woman thing”?

Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.

From the Womens Media Center

Robin Morgan has published 21 books, including six of poetry, four of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever. Her work has been translated into 13 languages. A founder of contemporary U.S. feminism, she has also been a leader in the international women's movement for 25 years. Recent books include A Hot January: Poems 1996-1999; Saturday's Child: A Memoir; her best-selling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, updated and reissued in 2001; and her novel, The Burning Time. Her nonfiction work, Fighting Words: A Took Kit for Combating the Religious Right, came out in September 2006.

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The HUGE disconnect between participatory democracy and military/militarism.

For me the Washington Post article today about the Rand 'advertising/marketing/branding' study for the Pentagon (links below) once more brings into focus and reinforces the major, likely insurmountable philosophical deficit of this admin (and its lackies both in the military and outside of it) — i.e., the Bush-Cheney administration's failure to understand much less practice participatory democracy both abroad and at home.

I see it in my ex-marine father and too many of his 'greatest generation' cohorts — especially the southern ones — who were entrained by the military, taught 'obedience to authority' through their WWII military service at tender teen ages and never grew beyond it. These men made great followers, committed to rule enforcement, upholding the rule of law (theoretically), but not so great independent thinkers and not very deep thinkers.

They naively believe that if only everyone followed the rules, all would be okay. They fail to analyze the context of the rules, much less the context of history. They are so easily confused and overwhelmed by analyzing rhetoric vs actions, hypocrisy and all the contradictions of power holders (not to mention downright mendacity and outright lying) that it was simply easier to have stopped thinking or learning to think way back when. Following orders, upholding social order has been their greatest strength — and strongest commitment — since those days.

It's also their most glaring deficit. They are still being willingly entrained by the Bushes, Cheneys, Limbaughs, O'Reilly's, etc etc — those who reap great personal wealth and power from the greatest followers' superficial grasp of democracy — one in which majority rules and following the rules defines their primary understanding of democracy — while failing to remember we are a republic, which theoretically upholds and protects the EQUAL rights of any and all citizens who are considered minorities.

The challenge for the advertising study ... was to find "something we can learn from Madison Avenue or from the marketers, the best in the world, that might help us when we're trying to deliver a message about what democracy is." ... the problem is "how we influence them to be on our side, or at least not be an enemy" when "what they see is armor." The goal of such studies ... is to distill what works and incorporate it into future training.

The fact that this recent Rand study is organized around the concepts of advertising, branding, and marketing the concept of democracy instead of actually modeling, teaching and practicing participatory democracy demonstrates the glib shallowness of this administration (its handlers, thinkers, strategizers and its military leaders). It shows both a severe contempt for and a foundational failure to understand much less practice participatory democracy.

Yet, once more, it does indicate their complete commitment and servitude to the fundamental mandates of capitalism: Selling for Profit (and power) ahead of everything and everyone else.

What is that saying — something along the lines of: great soldiers don't necessarily make great citizens?

We already know of one worse-than-poor, layabout national guardsman who has made possibly (likely) The Worst President Ever.

Sadly, disturbingly, this war, this administration, the severe lack of critical thinkers in the military industrial complex prove it with a vengeance.

If there was ever a time to Question Authority, this is it. We stand at the edge of an epochal precipice — full of world-life-society-country-citizen-altering challenges — and our responses to them will determine whether Americans will step forward to actively participate in our rapidly fading democratic heritage (and think critically about who benefits from the decisions which are made by those in power) or stand still to passively consume, produce profits for the powerful and rich, and remain obedient to authority except in the most superficial, self-destructive, meaningless ways.

Do we have any hope for meeting the challenge? What do you think?

The Washington Post article, entitled "The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue: U.S. Needs to Devise a Different 'Brand' to Win Over the Iraqi People, Study Advises" is here:

Technorati Tags:
U.S. Military, participatory democracy, entrainment, branding, marketing

Cracking the Hermetic Seals: Press starts acting like reporters instead of stenographers — Better Late than Never

What's Leaking Out of the White House
By Peter Baker, Washington Post
Sunday, April 8, 2007

Shortly before leaving Moscow after four years covering Russia, I was granted a rare audience by a top Kremlin official. As we talked about Vladimir Putin and his relationship with President Bush, the Kremlin official compared the Bush team to the Bolsheviks and laughed at how secretive their White House appeared. "They've adopted some of our techniques with the press," he said.

For most of the past six years, journalists covering the White House have indeed been forced to master the art of Kremlinology. The famously disciplined and leak-averse Bush team succeeded at hermetically sealing the building, keeping behind-the-scenes machinations, well, behind the scenes. Deprived of any genuine information about how the institution operated, reporters were left to extrapolate what was really going on based on who was standing where at a Rose Garden photo op.

But something surprising has been happening in the past few months. The hermetic seal is showing cracks, and now the most disciplined administration in modern times has begun to see its internal workings seep into public view. Bush's shake-up of his Iraq team appeared in the newspapers before he was ready to announce it. His fight with the Joint Chiefs of Staff over plans to send more troops to Iraq played out on the front page for weeks. Secret memos by his national security adviser and his old defense secretary showed up in print. And unnamed officials put out word that Bush's new defense secretary tried unsuccessfully to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"You always have more leaks when you have a combination of a late term and big controversy," observed Marlin Fitzwater, the only person to serve as press secretary to two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "Between the war and the last two years in office, I think it's pretty normal to have this kind of increase in leaked material. You've got to remember that the primary motivation for most leaks is that people want to influence the policy or the president when they're not otherwise able to do so. At the end of a term and in the middle of a controversy is when you can do that."

None of this means that the White House is suddenly leaking like a sieve. This is still not the most transparent institution; extracting information can be maddening at times. Just two months ago, as the Super Bowl neared, the White House refused to reveal what kind of television the president would watch it on. And in fact, many disclosures that have come out lately seem to have originated from other agencies in the administration. But it signals that the White House is no longer able to enforce its will on all corners of government quite as efficiently as it once seemed to do.

"Discipline is enforced by fear, and there's not a lot of people right now afraid of the president, politically afraid," said Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary for President Bill Clinton. "The Joint Chiefs, the Republican leadership, former aides are not worried about political retribution from the White House. They're a paper tiger."

Indeed, the toughest criticism of the Bush White House these days seems to emanate from those who were once on the inside and are no longer reluctant to speak out. Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, told the New York Times this month that he is "so disappointed in things" that he has concluded that Sen. John F. Kerry was right about Iraq. John R. Bolton left his post as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations and within weeks complained that the administration was not being tough enough on Iran and North Korea. Kenneth Adelman, a former confidant of Vice President Cheney and adviser to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, now denounces his erstwhile friends for running the worst administration in modern times.

Some of what is happening now was commonplace in past administrations. During Clinton's tenure -- and, I'm told, during those of his predecessors -- it was possible within limits to gain insight into how the White House worked. Reporters who had a question about economic policy could call the president's economic adviser, those writing on health care could call his domestic policy adviser, those with legal queries could call the counsel's office. None of those officials in the Bush White House returns reporters' calls.

In the past, it usually became known who was being considered for the Supreme Court or top administration posts long before any announcements were made. Options for welfare policy and diplomatic initiatives were effectively vetted in the media before landing on the president's desk. At times, that put Clinton's disarray on public display, but on many other occasions, it helped air dissent and further legitimize debate.

"Within reason, it's healthy for the system," Lockhart said. "You can't govern through the newspapers. But you also can't govern with six people in the room. You have to strike a balance." In the first two years of Clinton's presidency, "there was too much public argument," he added. "But by the end of the administration, the balance was pretty good."

Bush didn't think so, and he came into office determined to do things differently. Leaks, in his view, were a sign of a disorderly White House. Nothing should get out that was not supposed to get out. And his ability to make that stick through so many years suggested an unusual solidarity among his team. Bush remembered people in his father's White House coming to him as the president's son to complain that they had no access to the Oval Office. The son vowed not to repeat that management pattern and believed that by keeping an open door, there would be less incentive for aides to go to the media to be heard.

"You've got two polar extremes there," said Trent Duffy, a former Bush spokesman, comparing his White House with the previous one. "The main reason the Bush White House was able to maintain such a level of discipline was largely because they and the vice president's office were really in sync and there wasn't a lot of freelancing, versus the Clinton White House, which was the opposite."

Still, as Duffy noted, the signature disagreement of Bush's first term did eventually become public -- the struggle over the Iraq war between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on one side and Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other. The losing side in that struggle, Powell's State Department, was more likely to leak, a pattern that irritated Bush and the West Wing.

Every White House engages in strategic leaks that are planned and authorized at the top -- information placed without fingerprints to advance a particular goal or undercut a rival. Some aides in the Clinton White House kept a list of whose turn it was to receive a leak of an initiative that the president was soon to announce -- if it's Tuesday, it must be USA Today. Those sorts of meaningless 24-hour scoops were designed to maximize coverage of something the White House wanted covered on the theory that the recipient media organization would play up its "exclusive" and others would chase it.

The other kind of authorized leak can blow up on a White House, as the Bush team discovered when an attempt to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war, triggered a special counsel investigation that ultimately led to the indictment and conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

But it is the unauthorized leak that every president rails against and, in the end, finds impossible to stop. Now Bush sees it happening more often. In the past few weeks, for example, The Washington Post reported on internal e-mails sent by White House aide Elliott Abrams blasting the president's nuclear agreement with North Korea. And the New York Times detailed an effort by Rumsfeld's replacement, Robert M. Gates, to shut down Guantanamo Bay, a proposal blocked by Cheney and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Those are classic Washington stories, where debates on important issues of unquestionable public interest are aired in the open, something that might not have happened all that long ago. Duffy said that may stem from a somewhat more open environment fostered in the past year by White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and press secretary Tony Snow, who are not wedded to rote talking points.

Rather than shun the media, Snow has made a point of putting the president and top aides out for more interviews as well as off-the-record meetings with journalists. "It's obvious the White House is doing things they didn't do in the first term," Duffy said. "Tony has a totally different approach."

Snow also hasn't sweated garden-variety leaks the way others used to. After Bush recently held an unpublicized meeting with a Russian general accused of war crimes in Chechnya, a government official leaked it to Human Rights Watch, which tipped off The Post. The resulting publicity prompted the White House to disavow knowing about the general's past and to swear off any future contacts.

The Russians were annoyed. No doubt they wished the old Kremlin techniques were still in effect.

bakerp@washpost.com

Peter Baker is a Washington Post White House correspondent.

Original article here.

Freedom demands openness and transparency, a type of courage and willingness to share truth despite fear. Fascism and hegemony require secrecy, lies, closed-systems, obedience to authority, manipulation and playing on fear. We are at a crossroads as a nation. Do we choose fear or freedom?

Pessimism 'growing among Iraqis'

I guess 4 hours of electricity per day (if you're lucky) and no running water, no sewers will do that to you. Not to mention bombings, mangled children, assaults, rapes, murders, assassinations, kidnappings and all-around civil war.

Slate has a recent article discussing Bush's insistent annoyance at the Iraqi people for not being grateful enough about the fact that We have destroyed their country in order to LIBERATE them from their OIL.

Meanwhile, Bush Cheney Happy Talking Points About the Excellence of this War continue unabated, promoted by such stellar GOP role models as Tom under-federal-investigation resigned-in-shame under-threat-of-indictment bug-killer Delay on shameless still-shilling for the corrupt right-wingers and his right-wing bosses (GE) who are making billions off the unjust Iraq War, Tim no-backbone Russert despite the fact that:

Iraqis have become LESS optimistic about their future, the poll suggests

A new survey paints a pessimistic picture of Iraqis' confidence in their own government and in coalition forces.

Only 18% of Iraqis have confidence in US and coalition troops, while opinion is almost evenly split on whether to have confidence in Iraq's government.

About 86% of those questioned expressed concern about someone in their household being a victim of violence.

......Asked whether they thought reconstruction efforts in Iraq had been effective, some 67% said they felt they had not.

Read entire article here.

The BBC has much so much better fact-based actual news coverage of this unjust Iraq War debacle than any so-called news/media entity in the US has even dreamed about, much less had the courage to actually broadcast or print.

What the Democratization and Liberation of Iraq Really Looks Like
source: http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm