Jeff at Speedkill encountered a creationist, and demolished him. No surprise, I guess, but the exchange is one of the best I have read in many a day. If you haven’t, set aside ten or fifteen minutes. It’s well worth your time.

We liberals and progressives are asked to take an oath now and then – it’s implicit in much of the debate regarding Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I think of it as the “Nader inoculation”. It goes something like this: “Do you swear that no matter who the Democratic nominee turns out to be, that you will vote for him or her?” Often it is followed by an oath of allegiance – “We are really fortunate to have two excellent candidates.”

That’s not true, of course. We don’t have two really excellent candidates. We have one really bad candidate, and one we don’t know too much about. And given the current state of American media coverage, we’re not going to find out much about Barack Obama save that damned lapel pin and his goofy minister.

Hillary is the definition of what is wrong with the Democratic Party. She’s mostly Republican, judging by her pro-war votes, her pro-free trade agreements record while her husband was president, and pro-USA Patriot Act votes. She’s taken more money from the health care industry than any other candidate, yet tells us that she’ll be a reformer. She has the audacity to claim that all that money means nothing, that corporate CEO’s throw money away by giving it to her and expecting nothing in return.

But oh my the enthusiasm of her followers. These are the liberals, soft on issues, and weak on recent history (like from 1993 to 2001). And we are cautioned again not to make the same “mistake” in 2008 that we made in 2000, when some of us got uppity and demanded more progressive policies from the conservative Democrat Al Gore. That, they tell us, gave us Bush. It wasn’t Gore, not his failings, not his weak campaign and conservative vice presidential candidate, not his failure to lead on progressive issues – no, it was only Nader. That’s how Democrats think.

In the ensuing years since 2000 it’s come up again and again, and freethinkers have pretty well been beaten into submission. Democrats act like royalists, and we have no right to support anyone but the one they put up. We are wrong to expect more of our political system than those vague mirror images of one another we got in 2000.

I think they’ve succeeded now – progressives have been roped into the Democratic Party.

But there is hope. Hillary Clinton, according to the Wall Street Journal (Fund Race: Obama Outflanks ‘Hillraisers’), relied on a tried and true fund raising strategy – she used wealthy patrons to shake down corporate executives and heavy hitters. Her campaign was almost exclusively tied to big money. And she’s losing.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has used a ramped-up version of Howard Dean’s internet fund raising strategy, and to great success. His average donor gives around $200 – that doesn’t mean that money is not seeking him out or that he is not selling favors – it only means that he is not so indebted to corporate cash as Hillary. If elected, he might be more free to pursue independent policies, unlike Hillary.

I’m both cynical and naive all at once. I want to believe in Obama, and I know that structurally, a candidate is married to his source of income. If a candidate’s income comes from a huge base with a non-specific agenda, he would be free to write his own ticket. If money comes in large chunks from sources advocating specific policies, then the candidate, once elected, will pursue those policies as surely as the little lamb followed Mary.

I oversimplify, of course, reducing this massive system of bribery down to something mentally manageable. There are many checks and balances operating in our system – for one thing, corporations don’t always agree on policies. For instance, General Motors may want health care reform, while Aetna doesn’t. (But when they do agree on a policy, it is faithfully carried out by both parties – ref: Iraq.) The media, who seem to be a monolith, can also pick and choose among a host of issues, selecting and emphasizing as they please, ignoring as they please. (ref: Rev. Wright, yes, Rev. Hagee, no.) And when elections draw near, candidates are even seen to vote according to the majority wishes of their constituencies.

Often times grassroots movements affect policies. It’s been known to happen now and then, though not often. All of the great progressive and reform movements of the 20th century came from outside the political parties. It’s harder to get something going anymore, as mass media seems to have euthanized the population, but it’s still possible.

It’s a complex web – but something seemingly somewhat progressive is going here, perhaps a movement is afoot, perhaps we have the real deal in Obama. Perhaps we have found a way to subvert corporate control of the Democratic Party. The Republicans are holding their fire, but surely have something unseemly in the works – Obama’s candidacy, no matter the polls, is a long shot.

But for today it appears that a bad candidate is going down, and that a good one is winning. Here’s a quote from the above Wall Street Journal article, regarding Chris Korge, one of Clinton’s Wall Street “bundlers”, or one charged with roping in corporate cash:

If Sen. Clinton loses, what happens to her fund-raisers? In any normal political season, Mr. Korge and others would sign on with the last candidate standing. In 2004, Mr. Korge backed then-Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who made a brief run at the nomination. Then he shifted to then-Rep. Richard Gephart, who eventually was vanquished by Sen. John Kerry. Mr. Korge then went on to raise some $3 million for Sen. Kerry.

That may not happen this time. “I’m a party man, and plan to support the nominee, whoever it may be,” Mr. Korge says. “Will I go flat-out for Obama? I’m not sure Obama needs folks like me.”

Indeed, there is hope for all of us.

Courtesy of George Will, we have a way for Hillary Clinton to secure the Democratic nomination:

Or perhaps she wins is Obama’s popular vote total is, well, adjusted by counting each African-American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).

Alex Trebec and the Jeopardy people are famous for being picky, making contestants get an answer precisely right to award the cash. On tonight’s show, which is part of a college tournament, they disallowed one answer when the contestant answered “Evia Peron” when the answer was “Eva” Peron. (She should have just said “Peron”.)

So the answer to the final jeopardy clue was Mozart, and all three got it, but the guy who won spelled it “Motzart”, and they gave it to him anyway.

Go figure.

Hillary is elected and takes office. A few months later, she orders an attack on Somalia, strafing cities in towns, killing many people and doing untold damage.

Somalia protests at the UN, saying that they were minding their own business, that the kids were busy playing soccer and the men working the fields.

“What did we do?”, asked the Ambassador.

“Oh, you know what you did”, said Hillary.

Patrick Cockburn is a journalist working for the Independent operating out of London. He has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 (he has celebrated seven birthdays there), and has won numerous awards. Unlike most American journalists, he works outside the Green Zone. He is the author of the book Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.

Seymour Hersh has referred to Cockburn as “quite simply, the best Western journalist working in Iraq today.”

The following snippets are taken from an interview with Cockburn by Bob McChesney aired on April 27. It’s a different view of why the U.S. invaded Iraq, and one that makes quite a bit of sense. I was also quite surprised by the gun ownership situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

McChesney: The first question that most Americans have had – we see in the United States politicians and think tanks eager to pursue this war and to defend it and push it even when the factual basis of the arguments doesn’t seem to hold together especially well. And we’re left to wonder. why exactly is the United States in Iraq? What is the motivation, because the stated reasons don’t really hold up. So you’re left wondering why does this war exist? You’ve been there as much as anyone – I suspect you’ve thought about this. What is your sense about why this war took place and why we’re there now.

Cockburn: A number of reasons, I’ve always felt. One, everyone thought it was going to be a very easy war, and governments are always tempted by the thought that they’ll have a short, victorious war that’s going to secure their power at home. I think that the U.S. government thought they had what appeared to them to be an easy war in Afghanistan (they hadn’t really won that war in the way they thought they had), but they thought this was going to secure their power at home.

I think also fair to say that if the main product of Iraq was asparagus rather than crude oil that enthusiasm in Washington to invade the place would be less. They thought there would be enormous opportunities there for U.S. oil companies. They also felt they would dominate the Gulf by installing a client regime in Baghdad. They lived very much in a sort of world of fantasy, above all, of hubris and of thinking that they were far stronger than they were. After all, this war was to prove that America was the sole great superpower of the world, to prove the enormity of its strength. In fact, it’s proved exactly the opposite.

McChesney: Iraq is such a complicated place politically. Even Saddam Hussein, a fairly unsavory figure, had difficulty In running the country as a police state. To think that the United States, as an outsider could come in and govern it …

Cockburn: Yeah – it’s an extraordinary country. That’s the reason I kept going back there over the years. You had this very brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but at the same time, everybody in Iraq had a gun, usually an assault rifle, not a shotgun. I remember after the fall of Baghdad talking to an Iraqi neurosurgeon whose hospital had almost been looted, and I remember him saying to me, “just remember that Saddam Hussein had great difficulty running this country. It’s not going to be easy for the Americans or anybody else.”

Iran announced today that it would no longer trade its oil in U.S. dollars, instead using a basket of currencies, primarily the euro or the yen. They cited depreciating dollar value on exchanges. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year called the falling dollar a “worthless piece of paper.”

If indeed the U.S. was primarily motivated by strategic concerns centered around oil in invading the Middle East, then this is a serious move on Iran’s part – it literally invites retribution. The next move will be up to Bush/Cheney. Attack? Invade?

Some cynics say that the Bush Administration is waiting on action against Iran until it can be done in such a way as to yield maximum impact on the U.S. elections in November. This cynic says the attack will happen before that time, and for bipartisan reasons, primarily oil.

I went to a baseball blog sponsored by a newspaper this morning, and was hit with the loudest, most annoying car sales advertisement imaginable. I could not turn it off, and a guy was walking all over the screen talking. When I closed the window it opened another and kept on going.

So I downloaded Adblock, a Firefox add-on that takes care of this sort of nonsense. But I also found this – a guy who writes these ads asking the annoying ad writers of the world to join together and boycott Firefox. He says that we are depriving him of revenue, and he’s pissed.

The Internet was first developed as a means of back-channel communication for the Pentagon. Later it was turned over to the educational community. In the early 1990’s not too many people saw the potential there, and when the net first went public it was a bonanza of free information sharing. That’s what it does best.

But the marketplace got hold of it, and it didn’t take too long before the penis-enlargers, sideshows, pornographers and carnival barkers came on board. The free market gave us viruses and spyware, pop-ups, intrusive ads along with the phishing and other schemes. When the first pop-up blockers came out, I jumped on them – surfing the web had become a tedious experience with ads jumping out at you from ever corner. Finally we had a way to block them.

But advertisers work hard every day to find ways to invade our computers. Adblock was developed by German programmer Wladimir Palant as open source, non-market, and does a marvelous job. Furthermore, advertisers cannot detect it and go around it. It’s priceless.

So web-browsing is again a pleasant experience and I’ve no doubt that, as advertisers find new ways to invade our privacy, open-source people will find new ways to block them. God bless open-source.

I had quite a roughing up over at Wiley’s place over a mistake I made in overreaching – I made the comment that all racists are Republican. It’s simply not true, of course. Racists come in many stripes, and as the Obama campaign forges ahead, we’re going to see many manifestations, from both Hillary Clinton and the Republicans. We won’t see overt racist commentary, but more of the subtle, sublime variety, as when Ronald Reagan launched his 1976 campaign for president from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were famously killed, and when he later coined the phrase “welfare queen” … as if it meant something else.

But I was trying in my clumsy fashion to make a larger point. The Republican Party owes its election success from 1972 forward to one simple factor: The south changed from Democrat to Republican. This trend manifested itself first in 1964, when the deep south voted for Barry Goldwater, one of 27 senatorial opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1968, the same states voted for overt racist George Wallace and his American Independent Party, and finally, in 1972, the south went Republican. 1976 could be considered an anomaly, as Jimmy Carter was a southerner and evangelical Christian, and Watergate influenced the outcome. But in 1980 and in every election since, the south has voted solidly Republican.

Outside the south, the country is more or less Democratic, and this was manifest in the 2006 election when, outside the south, the Republicans took a holy beating. A full 42% of their congressional seats now come from the South. And the trend will likely continue – save for effective use of wedge issues, and electronic voting and election fraud, the Republican Party will soon be the party of the south, and not much more.

And it makes sense – this is the party that wants to do away with Medicare and Social Security, that took us into Iraq with no way out, that favors tax cuts for the very wealthiest among us while inflicting onerous payroll taxes on the working classes. It’s not much of a platform, and has only enjoyed the success it has due to their Rovian skill in exploiting wedge issues. I quote from Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas (but ran across the quote in Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal – I haven’t read the former):

The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make the country strong again, receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs, receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists, receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEO’s rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

This year the Republicans, with McCain at the helm, will be giving us a collective wedgie, just as before. But if 2006 is an indication, it’s not working as it once did. Kansas is coming back to the fold.

The deeper question, beyond wedge issues, the one we never speak of except in code, is racism. Is the south racist? Have the Republicans struck a deal with the devil? Predictably, when I broached the subject over at Wiley’s, I got Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell tossed at me, with the implicit point that if two really smart and successful black people are Republican, then the party is not racist. But that’s not what it’s about, and they know it. It’s still about welfare queens, income redistribution, about the large percentage of blacks who are poor and depend on the social safety net. There’s resentment. And this resentment, while existing everywhere, most manifests in those states with the largest percentage of blacks in the population – the south.

Katrina brought it to the surface – we were faced with the spectacle of natural disaster hitting an area with many poor blacks. We saw looting and helplessness and white flight, while blacks congregated in the Louisiana Superdome. We didn’t say it. But it was there in the pictures. These people can’t take care of themselves. They are dependent on us.

I find it all very troubling – like most Americans, I find welfare and handouts to be counterproductive, yet don’t want to go back to the days of private soup kitchens and Jesus as the only hope for the poor. I want to find that magical formula that prevents people from starving without creating dependency while at the same time lifting them up. Blacks have a lot on their plates – racist attitudes are embedded deep within our culture, and are hard to overcome. So-called free markets don’t advance social policies. Liberal guilt hasn’t helped them. Affirmative action creates a backlash.

These are hard questions, and we need skilled leaders to deal with them. I suppose Obama is such a leader – we’ll see. In the meantime, I know that the leaders we need are not members of that party that since 1964 has exploited white resentments of blacks to gain political power. Let the Republicans have the south, while the rest of us try to solve problems rather than exploiting them.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. … Mark Twain

We live in a land where, officially anyway, we cherish freedom of speech. But notice on the blogs an odd phenomenon: People use fake names – very few actually say who they are in real life. There’s a reason for this: people want to express their true ideas with passion, but they are at work, on company time, they have a boss, or don’t want to be Googled in the future when they are looking for a job.

Freedom of speech is a nice concept. I’m in favor of it.

Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot John F. Kennedy. Any damned fool can plainly see this. Yet today, 45 years later, if you work in or around the news media, you cannot say this or even hint that you suspect it. America’s elections have gone haywire – exit polls very seldom buttress official results, and those results are almost always skewed towards Republicans. No one in media (save Olberman) talks about it. During the 1990’s, the United States of America imposed onerous sanctions on the country of Iraq, this after bombing them into oblivion, and as a result over one-half million children starved or died of preventable disease. That’s written out of history now. We’re trying to rescue that country from …. us, I suppose.

These thoughts, these realities, are in the backdrop. Few of us but ever give voice to them. It’s a silent backwater. On some level, cloaked in denial, there is awareness of the ugly reality that is America, but it’s our alter-ego, our Mr. Hyde. We know these things. As evidence look at the screaming and breast beating that goes on whenever someone says openly what we know privately. It’s like a child caught doing something wrong – his first reaction is to blame his sister.

Well, someone has done it. Someone has spoken openly and truthfully. And the results are predictable – indignation, accusation and spurning, marginalization and shunning. That someone is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Read his words:

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday, did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, did you see him John, a white man, and he pointed out, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammed was in fact true, America’s chickens…are coming home to roost. We took this country by terror, away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arowak, the Comanche, the Arapahoe, the Navajo. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Granada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers, and hardworking fathers. We bombed Qaddafi’s home and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock. We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children from school, civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

The British government failed, the Russian government failed, the Japanese government failed, the German government failed, and the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese decent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. The government put them in chains. She put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in sub-standard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America…no, no, no

Not God bless America, God damn America. That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent. Think about this, think about this.

For every one Oprah, a billionaire, you’ve got 5 million blacks who out of work. For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you’ve got 10 million blacks who cannot read. For every one Condoskeeza Rice, you’ve got 1 million in prison. For every one Tiger Woods, who needs to get beat, at the Masters, with his cap, blazin’ hips playing on a course that discriminates against women. God has his way of bringing you up short when you get to big for your cap, blazin britches. For every one Tiger Woods, we got 10,000 black kids who will never see a golf course. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.

It’s an emotional expression of opinion backed by fact and anecdote – he let his eagle soar. Slave ships were real, Indian genocide was real, bombs dropped in a Panamanian barrio killing … how many?… don’t know. We don’t count. (These were not important people, after all.) To be an American is to live in denial, to constantly have to reinforce doubt by extolling patriotism to block out the ugly reality of who we really are. A true-blue American never looks in the mirror.

The Reverend Wright is not “really proud” to be an American. He’s going down, and I assume he will be taking Barack Obama with him.

It’s a sad spectacle. This November we’re going to elect a man who made his reputation bombing cities and killing innocent civilians in a country that hardly had an air force. He was justly held captive for those crimes, yet we lionize him and demonized those who imprisoned him. We speak no evil of this man who graduated at the bottom of his class, lost three aircraft by means of stupid accident, who has an ugly temper. He is protected by the media. He has a false reputation, yet his veil will not be pierced. It will carry him all the way to the White House. While there, he will never say anything that is true. He’ll be safe.

In the meantime, as Reverend Wright has learned, speaking truth to power is not allowed. It will get a man lynched.