The Try-Works

I profoundly apologize for the rash of Snapple posts while I was gone.  I’ll delete them at some point, but now and then it’s nice to remind ourselves exactly how fucking lunatic the other side is, ain’t it?

And, hell, in the interest of tolerance, I’ve decided to respond to one of Snapple’s queries.  S/he would like to know what I think of certain recently unearthed statements made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years.

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright’s sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

“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, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.

“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,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

“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,” he told his congregation.

The rest.

Well, my response is easy, Snapple.  While I admire Reverend Wright’s intent, I see no reason for the reticence and reserve of his statements.  It seems to me that given his insightful analysis, it might be indispensable to coin some snappy term for those who benefit as a result of US foreign policy choices.  Some way of describing the, well, banality of evil endemic to those in the upper echelons of, say, international trade.  Y’know, the folks who make their millions wiping their ass with the rest of humankind.  Particularly brown humankind.

Any ideas?

Update:  Charles Coulter of the Kansas City Star points out the obvious.

So the Rev. Jeremiah Wright made comments that some portray as hate-filled and anti-American.

So what? I think that’s covered by something called the First Amendment.

And some want Barack Obama to distance himself even further from his spiritual mentor. Why?

Rev. Wright has not said anything that has not been said or is not being said in bars, poolrooms, barber shops, hair salons or anywhere else more than three black people gather.

And don’t fool yourself. It’s not just the black urban poor, those without jobs, education or hope, who express these comments. Many members of the black middle class have the same sense of history; the same sense of anger.

The rest.

Not to follow Mr. Coulter in his rather slavish obviousness, but it ain’t just blacks.  A fucking third of Americans believe 9/11 was a direct inside job.  Not blowback for US foreign policy decisions, which is what Mr. Wright and Mr. Churchill argue, but a direct conspiracy to either commit or allow the attacks.  The only pinheads left on earth who deny that US foreign policy is the reason they hate us are either working for Fox News or sipping Metamucil over at Jim Paine’s place.

So, over the last few weeks we’ve been getting an extra few hundred page views a day here at the Try-Works due to a cartoon about Barack Obama we posted from Mr. Fish. It seems said image turns up about a couple of dozen pages back in the Google image search for those looking for Mr. Obama’s headshots.

As such, and given some of the email I’ve been receiving, I thought I should clarify the Try-Works’ editorial stance vis-a-vis Clinton vs. Obama. While it is true that I’ve been running an Anybody But Clinton campaign of the last few weeks, I want no one to think that’s an endorsement of Barack Obama. The minute Mr. Obama wins the nod our editorial stance shall immediately become, well, Fuck Obama.

Why?

Well, for all the reasons Mr. Fish gave in the initial cartoon. And has continued to give.

And since we’re on a Mr. Fish lovefest, my favorite political cartoon of all time.

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.

From your friends at Shubel Morgan.

Remember, no matter who wins, it’s just the same old shit.

You locals have probably been following the hubbub surround Denver’s hosting of the Democratic National Convention. (I haven’t been, at least not closely enough, but that will be changing.) Anyway, it’s coming, and a local group calling itself Re-create 68 has sworn to protest — rightfully — and is adamant about ensuring the local cops respect their First Amendment rights. As co-founder Glenn Spagnuolo has noted, “In Denver when money talks, the Constitution walks.“

Needless to say the local police ain’t having none of it.

Denver Deputy Police Chief Michael Battista said the city will probably be able to allow closer access for protesters than Boston did in 2004, since the Pepsi Center is not next to a freeway like Boston’s Fleet Center.

“At the Fleet Center there were railroad tracks and a highway and the protesters were put on the other side,” said Battista. “At the Pepsi Center you don’t have those issues to deal with.”

Keep reading.

That’s, of course, bullshit. See, when a cop tells you where you can assemble, he’s abrogating your rights. Just as surely as when he tells you where you can exercise your rights. They don’t get that fucking power. In fact, it’s specifically prohibited.

What kills me are the local conservatives, or, at least what passes for them, who support this thing. And it’s typically the same shiteating creeps who oppose McCain-Feingold as being an assault on the First Amendment. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, the only difference between liberals and conservatives in the backwater nation is they’re slightly divided on which of your rights they want to violate first.

Anyway, good for Re-create 68 and good for Glenn Spagnuolo. The right to assemble in public space is a right. The right to free speech is a right. What the cops designate a “free speech zones” are specifically designed to curtail those rights. It’s a small slab of fenced-in cement surrounded by riot cops. That’s not a fucking protest, that’s a concentration camp. Anybody who would willingly file into one of those things deserves to be fucking teargassed. And anybody who would peaceably submit to having their rights abrogated deserves the police state they live in. Spagnuolo’s dead fucking right when he says his folks will “‘not accept pens,’ even if demonstrators ‘must take things into our own hands.’“

Like I said, good for him. Nobody with any respect for themselves would willingly accept a fucking pen. No matter what their political persuasion.

Update: To s/he who egged Denver Councilman Charlie Brown’s house: I owe you a Scotch. Huzzah, sir/ma’am! (Can’t find the goddamn link, but I know I saw it.)

Update II: Gee, why would any distrust Denver’s finest?

Time to change the filter cartridges in the old gas mask, folks.

Terming it a “lack of foresight” on the part of the Democrats, a group of Colorado activists have snagged a half-dozen 2008 Democratic National Convention related Web domain names  — and secured another bundle of sites designed to help protesters organize long before descending en masse on the Mile High City.

Anyone who clicks on DenverDNC.org, or 2008DenverDNC.org, or multiple other related web sites will automatically be rerouted to Recreate68.org, a “Virtual Activists’ Convergence Center” designed for “people who are tired of being sold out by the Democratic Party.”

The group, calling itself Recreate-68 Alliance, shelled out $126 for the domain sites six months ago, anticipating that Denver would be selected for the ‘08 convention, said organizer Glenn Spagnuolo. (See the box below for a complete list of the 15 Web sites.)

“The gamble paid off,” Spagnuolo said. “We didn’t know what they were going to use, so we grabbed as many variations as possible [given the cost restraints].”

. . .

Asked whether the Recreate ’68 will bring a repeat of the rioting and violence that gripped Chicago during the ’68 convention, Spagnuolo said: “That will be up to the Denver Police Department. Any violence would be at the hands of the Denver Police Department.”

And actually, such national conventions now fall under the U.S. Secret Service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as the lead agency coordinating National Special Security Events. Spagnuolo says the group plans to meet with police agencies, but will object to any efforts to install protest zones, or protest pens, that have used to segregate protesters from convention-goers.

Both national political conventions in 2004, in Boston and New York City, included a massive police presence, with concrete barriers, barbed wire fencing and what one Boston judge described as “a brutish and potentially unsafe place for citizens who wish to exercise their First Amendment rights.” Spagnuolo was among an estimated 600,000 protesters at the Republican National Convention that year.

“I don’t think the message will come down to crack skulls,” he said of Denver’s ’08 convention. “We’ll try our hardest to negotiate, but we won’t be having protest zones — you can’t cage democracy.”

Keep reading.

Looking for the name of the infamous twentieth-century war criminal who said this:

“We’re not inflicting pain on these fuckers. When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.”

Mickey Z’s got the answer.