The Try-Works

An essay from Tim Wise on Hillary Clinton, sexism, and her playing to racists.  A staple of white feminism since white feminism began, after all.

Mr. Wise closes the piece with some of the clearest thinking I’ve seen yet on the subject.

Perhaps the defeat of Hillary Clinton will expose for all the underlying racial supremacy at the heart of much white feminist analysis. Perhaps it will allow the development of a more complete and thorough analysis of patriarchy and the way it interrelates with white supremacy to divide and conquer groups that often have common interests. Maybe it will force white women like Hillary Clinton to confront their privileged mindset, their sense of entitlement (which flows uninterrupted and almost effortlessly from the fount of whiteness to which white women have had access, in spite of patriarchy). Or then again, maybe it will just lead white women to become pissed at black folks, who they’ll be encouraged to view as having “stolen” the Presidency from them.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a group of white liberals had missed the point, after all.

Keep reading.

No, I suppose it wouldn’t, would it?

Seems Mad Dog Madeline ain’t just touring the country for shits and grins, she’s stumping for Hillary.

Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, rallied support for democratic presidential nominee Sen. Hillary Clinton Wednesday in Lewis Laboratory.

“I’m here to support Hillary in Pennsylvania because this is not only the Keystone State, but it is also the key to what is about to happen in the upcoming presidential election,” Albright said.

Albright, who was once the highest ranking female official in the U.S., said whoever wins the presidential election will face many difficult tasks.

“The world is a mess,” she said. “I’ve never seen things so bad.”

The rest.

A wonderful article from Matt Gonzalez in Counterpunch. Mr. Gonzalez actually takes a look at Obama’s record. And it ain’t pretty.

My position is still Anybody But Clinton. But, y’know, Fuck Obama.

THE WAR IN IRAQ

Let’s start with his signature position against the Iraq war. Obama has sent mixed messages at best.

First, he opposed the war in Iraq while in the Illinois state legislature. Once he was running for US Senate though, when public opinion and support for the war was at its highest, he was quoted in the July 27, 2004 Chicago Tribune as saying, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.” The Tribune went on to say that Obama, “now believes US forces must remain to stabilize the war-ravaged nation ­ a policy not dissimilar to the current approach of the Bush administration.”

Obama’s campaign says he was referring to the ongoing occupation and how best to stabilize the region. But why wouldn’t he have taken the opportunity to urge withdrawal if he truly opposed the war? Was he trying to signal to conservative voters that he would subjugate his anti-war position if elected to the US Senate and perhaps support a lengthy occupation? Well as it turns out, he’s done just that.

Since taking office in January 2005 he has voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward, totaling over $300 billion. He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her complicity in the Bush Administration’s various false justifications for going to war in Iraq. Why would he vote to make one of the architects of “Operation Iraqi Liberation” the head of US foreign policy? Curiously, he lacked the courage of 13 of his colleagues who voted against her confirmation.

And though he often cites his background as a civil rights lawyer, Obama voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in July 2005, easily the worse attack on civil liberties in the last half-century. It allows for wholesale eavesdropping on American citizens under the guise of anti-terrorism efforts.

And in March 2006, Obama went out of his way to travel to Connecticut to campaign for Senator Joseph Lieberman who faced a tough challenge by anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. At a Democratic Party dinner attended by Lamont, Obama called Lieberman “his mentor” and urged those in attendance to vote and give financial contributions to him. This is the same Lieberman who Alexander Cockburn called “Bush’s closest Democratic ally on the Iraq War.” Why would Obama have done that if he was truly against the war?

Recently, with anti-war sentiment on the rise, Obama declared he will get our combat troops out of Iraq in 2009. But Obama isn’t actually saying he wants to get all of our troops out of Iraq. At a September 2007 debate before the New Hampshire primary, moderated by Tim Russert, Obama refused to commit to getting our troops out of Iraq by January 2013 and, on the campaign trail, he has repeatedly stated his desire to add 100,000 combat troops to the military.

At the same event, Obama committed to keeping enough soldiers in Iraq to “carry out our counter-terrorism activities there” which includes “striking at al Qaeda in Iraq.” What he didn’t say is this continued warfare will require an estimated 60,000 troops to remain in Iraq according to a May 2006 report prepared by the Center for American Progress. Moreover, it appears he intends to “redeploy” the troops he takes out of the unpopular war in Iraq and send them to Afghanistan. So it appears that under Obama’s plan the US will remain heavily engaged in war.

This is hardly a position to get excited about.

. . .

NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT:

Regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama recently boasted, “I don’t think NAFTA has been good for Americans, and I never have.” Yet, Calvin Woodward reviewed Obama’s record on NAFTA in a February 26, 2008 Associated Press article and found that comment to be misleading: “In his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama said the US should pursue more deals such as NAFTA, and argued more broadly that his opponent’s call for tariffs would spark a trade war. AP reported then that the Illinois senator had spoken of enormous benefits having accrued to his state from NAFTA, while adding that he also called for more aggressive trade protections for US workers.”

Putting aside campaign rhetoric, when actually given an opportunity to protect workers from unfair trade agreements, Obama cast the deciding vote against an amendment to a September 2005 Commerce Appropriations Bill, proposed by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, that would have prohibited US trade negotiators from weakening US laws that provide safeguards from unfair foreign trade practices. The bill would have been a vital tool to combat the outsourcing of jobs to foreign workers and would have ended a common corporate practice known as “pole-vaulting” over regulations, which allows companies doing foreign business to avoid “right to organize,” “minimum wage,” and other worker protections.

SOME FINAL EXAMPLES:

On March 2, 2007 Obama gave a speech at AIPAC, America’s pro-Israeli government lobby, wherein he disavowed his previous support for the plight of the Palestinians. In what appears to be a troubling pattern, Obama told his audience what they wanted to hear. He recounted a one-sided history of the region and called for continued military support for Israel, rather than taking the opportunity to promote the various peace movements in and outside of Israel.

Why should we believe Obama has courage to bring about change? He wouldn’t have his picture taken with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom when visiting San Francisco for a fundraiser in his honor because Obama was scared voters might think he supports gay marriage (Newsom acknowledged this to Reuters on January 26, 2007 and former Mayor Willie Brown admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle on February 5, 2008 that Obama told him he wanted to avoid Newsom for that reason.)

Obama acknowledges the disproportionate impact the death penalty has on blacks, but still supports it, while other politicians are fighting to stop it. (On December 17, 2007 New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine signed a bill banning the death penalty after it was passed by the New Jersey Assembly.)

On September 29, 2006, Obama joined Republicans in voting to build 700 miles of double fencing on the Mexican border (The Secure Fence Act of 2006), abandoning 19 of his colleagues who had the courage to oppose it. But now that he’s campaigning in Texas and eager to win over Mexican-American voters, he says he’d employ a different border solution.

It is shocking how frequently and consistently Obama is willing to subjugate good decision making for his personal and political benefit.

Obama aggressively opposed initiating impeachment proceedings against the president (”Obama: Impeachment is not acceptable,” USA Today, June 28, 2007) and he wouldn’t even support Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s effort to censure the Bush administration for illegally wiretapping American citizens in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In Feingold’s words “I’m amazed at Democrats cowering with this president’s number’s so low.” Once again, it’s troubling that Obama would take these positions and miss the opportunity to document the abuses of the Bush regime.

The rest.

Part one, here.  We may have to make this a regular feature at the rate the Clintonites are moving.  Fucking nary a week goes by that they don’t don their collective hood, light up the old cross, and go out appealing to the baser instincts of their constituency.

Racist motherfuckers.  If there’s a fucking voter on Earth that can’t see through these bigot peckerwoods they oughtta have their ears checked for brain matter on the assumption they’re leaking somewhere.

As Senator Barack Obama has risen in the polls and extended his string of primary victories, he has taken rhetorical mortar shots from all sides in the political war. They continued unabated on Monday.

A flap erupted when some Internet sites on Monday posted a photo of Obama in Somalian garb, including a white turban. When the Obama campaign charged that Clinton aides had leaked the photo - taken during a 2006 trip to Africa - the Clinton campaign manager, Maggie Williams, tried to turn the matter back at the Obama team, even though her camp has not denied any role in distributing the photo.

“If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed,” Williams said in a statement. “Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.”

The rest.

And say there’s a slim chance you might not be able to steamroll the opposition in an open primary contest, subject to the will of your everyday primary/caucus goer.

What would you do?  (Remember, you’re Hillary Clinton.)

Why, you’d start trying to finagle backdoor deals in hopes of circumventing the will of those everyday primary/caucus goers.  What the fuck else?

The Democratic duel for the presidential nomination has taken a hard shift from Super Tuesday to the Super Delegate, opening a kind of shadow primary race for the support of hundreds of party elite members.

With Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama fewer than 100 delegates apart in the chase for the Democratic nomination, the party’s so-called superdelegates — roughly 20 percent of the total delegates available — are garnering attention from the campaigns.

Consider Colorado’s Democratic Party chairwoman, Pat Waak. Chelsea Clinton called her cellphone and home, wanting to talk about Chelsea’s mom. Former President Bill Clinton personally asked Waak to support his wife.  Obama supporters found Waak’s private e-mail address, urging her to “fight against back-room deals” and support the man who won the Colorado caucuses Tuesday night.

“I’m sure this is just the beginning,” Waak said.

There are delegates, and there are superdelegates at Democratic National Conventions.

Voters in state primaries and caucuses choose the delegates. Superdelegates such as Waak — party leaders, members of Congress and other VIPs — get an automatic vote on the convention floor, one that’s purely up to them. And for the first time since the Democrats set up this system, they could hold the balance of power.

The close race could mean Denver hosts the ultra-rare brokered convention, although that possibility is still considered a longshot.

And if that were to happen, there is yet another longshot chance that surely chills the hearts of party officials: The winner of the pledged delegates who represent the popular vote loses to the candidate who wins the most superdelegates.

“You would see all kinds of chaos reigning again,” said Kenneth Bickers, chairman of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Referring to the bloody riots that occurred outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the Denver protest group Re-create 68, Bickers said, “The people who want to see what happened in Chicago (happen) in Denver, this would be the force that would do that.”

The rest.

Well, one can dream.

Hell, she can’t even stop lying about her husband’s penchant for carpetbombing Iraq civilians on a whim.

Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He said today: “If facts matter, then it should matter that Hillary Clinton chose to rely on such a basic falsehood during the debate when she flatly stated: ‘We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors.’ In fact, just prior to the Clinton administration’s several days of bombing Iraq in December 1998, the U.N.’s UNSCOM weapons inspectors left Iraq when UNSCOM head Richard Butler withdrew them — because the Clinton administration made it clear that the U.S. government was about to start bombing.”

Solomon added: “That false statement by Hillary Clinton during the debate Thursday evening came as she was trying to verbally navigate what were her most difficult moments of the night: about her vote for the October 2002 congressional resolution that authorized an invasion of Iraq. At that point in the debate, she was arguing that she had made what she called a ‘reasoned judgment’ which assumed that Saddam Hussein had a record of blocking inspectors so they couldn’t find his weapons of mass destruction. In the process, her extreme distortion of history — asserting that the four-year absence of U.N. inspectors from Iraq was because Saddam ‘threw out inspectors’ in December 1998 — goes to the core of her candor about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and her rationale for voting to authorize it.

“Any journalists interested in fact-checking Senator Clinton’s claim that ‘We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors’ would be well-advised to stick to relying on the original reportage of what occurred in December 1998. Since then, a self-referential myth has developed in retrospective news coverage of those events, with journalists and politicians alike frequently recycling the false assertion that the four-year absence of U.N. inspectors from Iraq began when Saddam kicked them out of the country.”

The rest.

You can’t make this kind of shit up.

A spectacular piece on Bill/Hillary’s latest racist tactic. As if you needed another reason not to vote for her.

George Wallace reflecting on his first and unsuccessful run for governor of Alabama in 1958 defeat, made a remarkable vow. “Well, boys,” he said, “no other son of a bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” Needless to say, no one did, as you might recall.

Perhaps until now. Bill Clinton, self-proclaimed and rather foolishly acclaimed by some who shall go nameless as the first “Black” president has played the race card with a finesse that even Wallace might have admired. He has niggered Barack Obama. After he and Mrs. Clinton began to see that African-Americans were turning to Obama – doubtless armed to with polling data (I am guessing here) that might have indicated an African-American swing toward Obama in other states, this most ruthless and cunning couple, the Macbeths of our time, played the race card.

And Bill Clinton knows it. There is nothing, and I hope that progressive Southerners will forgive me this, like the expertise of a Southern politician in out-niggering, to use Wallace’s infelicitous phrase. Clinton employed it with a devilish finesse. Why, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice in 1984 and 1988. And he ran a good campaign. Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here, he’s run a good campaign everywhere.” (Financial Times, January 28, page 4) The Financial Times, a straight-ahead, moderately conservative but rigorously reported newspaper concluded: “Mr. Clinton’s bleary-eyed implication was clear: Mr. Obama is a black candidate whom blacks disproportionately support.”

The rest.

This ain’t an endorsement of Obama, by the way. As has been pointed out in the comments — though not with the emphasis where I’d place it — there ain’t a viable candidate up there that offers a real choice vis-a-vis foreign policy. Nor, for that matter, in any other issue I give a shit about. They’ll all be pro tyrant, pro war, pro torture and pro pissing on the Constitution. I wouldn’t waste my time voting for one of them if the ballot box was located behind my toilet and I’d just finished a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Not if mine was the sole deciding vote.

But I hate Hillary Clinton. Besides her stated positions, I hate her for being a Clintonite. Just as I hated Gore. See, I take she and Bill at their word, that she was instrumental in Bill’s policy decisions. And I remember his Presidency. I remember the explosion in prisons, and the clearcutting of civil liberties. I remember Clinton’s awesome slavishness to corporate interests. Most of all, however, I remember the continuous, systematic bombing of Iraqi infrastructure and the imposition of sanctions known to have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

Bush policy ain’t anomalous. It ain’t even a fucking deviation from the norm. Overthrowing sovereign governments and the application of military force in violation of international law is business as usual, and has been since the Mystic massacre of 1637.

And, to my mind, nothing is so emblematic of business as usual as the Clintonites. No set of political hacks better represents the uselessness of the American political process. And if the Democrats go with her, I hope to God they get handed their fucking head.

Y’know, that might even be a scenario where I’d vote. If it turns out McCain vs. Clinton, I might just have to stumble out and throw down a ballot for McCain.

Just to add my own tiny little voice into the national chorus of “FUCK YOU” that I expect will resound in the Democrats’ ears for decades to come.

Master James Benjamin rightly amends my call for “Anybody But Hillary” to “Anybody But Clinton.”

I’m printing bumper stickers. And, when Ms. Clinton is ordained the Democratic candidate — which there’s no doubt of — don’t forget that we’re holding the party right here in Denver.

And there ain’t never been a better year to re-create 68.

Over at Salon, Gary Kamiya takes on Gloria Steinem’s doorknob-dumb argument that compared to American white women — one half of the most pampered population on the planet — black guys have it easy. (Seems Ms. Steinem missed that whole prison industrial complex thing that’s been happening over the last couple of decades. Not to mention nigh a century of poverty data.)

In effect, Steinem was arguing that sexism trumps racism as a national concern and backing that up by claiming that women in America have fewer options than black men. But this claim is flawed, as a simple thought experiment shows. Would you rather be born in the U.S. today as a white woman (to choose the most privileged subset of Steinem’s “restricted” caste) or as a black man? Few would choose to be black. More white women are not in prison than in college, thousands of young white women are not shot down on inner-city streets every year, few if any white women have ever been arrested for driving while female, and so on. Steinem’s historical arguments are unconvincing because they aren’t up to date: She ignores the exponential advances made by white women and the failure of black men to keep pace. Leaving aside her omission of Jim Crow laws, and no matter how many black men may have made it into boardrooms before women (and there weren’t too many), it was never better to be a black man than a white woman at any time in U.S. history.

If we compare only middle-class black men to middle-class white women, Steinem’s thesis gets a little stronger — but not much. There is no way to quantify these things, of course, but I would argue that middle-class black men still suffer from the legacy of slavery and racial bigotry far more than middle-class white women suffer from sexism. Only if we compare wealthy black men to poor white women does Steinem’s argument ring true.

Some critics of Steinem’s piece have argued that racism and sexism can’t be compared because they’re apples and oranges, and that she’s inciting conflict between two victimized groups and two worthy candidates. But that’s evasive. Steinem had every right to make the comparison — she was just wrong.

The rest.

You can be a white feminist and vote for Hillary Clinton. But you can’t vote for Clinton if you’ve raised a single objection to George Bush’s murderous and insane foreign policy. There is no candidate more pro torture, pro mercenary, or pro war than Ms. Clinton. Likewise, her contempt for international law, particularly that which would limit civilian casualties, is fucking unrivaled.

So, yeah, a Clinton presidency would be a token victory for wealthy white women in the United States. But it’d also be a vote for the butchery of non-wealthy non-white women, the rest of the world over.

Meaning, in a way, it’s the perfect stance for white feminists, isn’t it? A vote for Hillary Clinton helps ensure white feminist interests, while ensuring the open imperialism that ensures their over-indulged status is reinforced.

All in the name of, ahem, diversity.

Update: You won’t be surprised to hear that Clint Talbott of the Boulder Daily Camera has weighed in on the issue recently. Quoting Steinem, no less.

Which only makes sense, of course. Given that the demographic of Clint Talbott’s paper resembles nothing so much as a KKK dream community.