The Try-Works

Just so’s you know, there ain’t nothing wrong with Unconventional Action.  Nothing at all.

From their website.

And check out the rest of their goodies, including a fun-filled map of Denver and a DNC disruption primer.

You Try-Works readers do know how I love Mr. Fish.

Which, sadly, seems to be all too much of the Try-Works’ readership these days.

Of course, if you’re surprised, you’re an idiot.

Arizona Sen. John McCain did not bother to show up for Wednesday’s Senate votes on whether to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to absolve George Bush of responsibility for initiating an illegal warrantless wiretapping program and to provide retroactive immunity to the telecommunications corporations that violated the privacy of their customers in order to collaborate with a lawless president.

But that’s OK, because Illinois Sen. Barack Obama cast the votes that McCain would have.

Keep reading.

See Mr. Fish’s latest here.

Not to point out the obvious, but I ran across this while trying to track down an urban legend.

And, no, I still wouldn’t support the sell-out motherfucker if he were shipping me truckloads of single-malt Scotch.

The mighty AngryIndian, who you must read, daily and with great attention, if you ain’t doing so already, takes on Barack Obama.

“[W]ith all the grace of a three-legged elephant during a GOP minstrel show,” indeed.  That’s the best line about Obama yet.

Barack Obama despite vociferous arguments to the contrary is a man of diminishing dimensions.  Whatever “hope and promise” his presidential campaign offered in its early days have long since faded into the predictable political abyss of enthusiastic double-talk, keyword-specific speeches and right-wing media pundit arse-kissing.  Mr. Obama, while highly guilty on all these counts is not out of pocket per se for being a politician and acting as one.  He is instead blameworthy for committing the greatest sin known to U.S. political principles as it applies to African representatives; he is allowing the Europocentric power structure to tear him, his wife and the hard-earned self respect of his people to shreds without a single word of significant protest in favour of American Empire.

In a world where lynching nooses are again on display in the 21st century and young, innocent and unarmed African men can be shot to death by municipal police troops to public and political approval, Mr. Obama is a mainstream closeted White racist imperialist’s dream come true.[i]  He visibly absolves White racist terror publicly, gleefully and unashamedly with a sheepishly becoming “Vote for Me” smile.  Shuffling dutifully with all the grace of a three-legged elephant during a GOP minstrel show, America’s newest “Favourite Negro” Barack Obama is letting “America” and the global community know in no uncertain terms that he accepts their racism, their denials of their xenophobia and that he is more than willing to keep this White supremacist gravy train rolling at home and abroad.

To deny this reality is foolish.  And it is even more imprudent and more to the point embarrassing when the American African intelligentsia commissars not only give him their earnest endorsements but defend him from those within the African community that have the temerity to question his lack of dignity and personal and political integrity in the face of overwhelming racist and anti-Islamic attacks.  It is proper that when forced by circumstance to confront such a situation, the African must look towards him and herself for clarification.  I can find no better an analytical example than the Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon when he observed:

“In every country of the world there are climbers, “The ones who forget who they are,” and in contrast to them, “the ones who remember where they came from.”[ii]

The pragmatism of this statement is beyond reproach and it unfailingly deconstructs the storm of Euro-American angst surrounding the Obama presidential campaign and what it means for the United States and the world.  As this writer has mentioned previously in other articles on the subject, Barack Obama, the half-White and therefore half-human politico wunderkind deeply critical of his pro-African religious mentor and brave hard-hitting apologist for White racism, represents a Get-out-of-Jail-Free playing card for those within the White power structure willing to vote for him.  His candidacy is based entirely on the explicitly revisionist premise that by “allowing” him to get as far as he has in the race for the democratic party nomination, the nagging questions of xenophobia, White privilege and pro-Europocentric institutional bias have been effectively and honourably dealt with.  In reality, the Obama rhetoric of “hope” and “change” only have relevance to Euro-American desires for alteration provided that White privilege and socio-political power remain concentrated within their traditional hierarchal configurations.  And to date, he has not given any of us soberly conscious of who controls what, how and why any logical reason to be convinced otherwise that his presidency would be one of White power with a Brown face.

He is without debate the “Dream Candidate” that promises change without actually disturbing the European socio-political or economic status quo.  His Black face with a White mask tap dance is designed to appeal emotively to slave and master alike, little more.  This is possible because both are so thoroughly psychologically steeped within the historical American paradigms of acceptable class boundaries, race and the dignified acceptance of racialised power disparities that the very suggestion that a “Black” man could actually become the head-of-state of Pax Americana supposedly nullifies the historical and political realities of what makes the United States an empire in the first place.

It is something of an intellectual puzzlement to this writer that after five centuries of unceasing Aboriginal genocide and five recent years of unending and merciless violence against an innocent people already tenaciously clinging to existence because of a series of lies emanating from the Bush White House that the U.S. voting public is still willing to “stay the course.”  And further, I find it an astoundingly hypocritical that a nation that shrieks peace while waging eternal war can still argue its goldenness while mothers, children, the crippled and the intrepid journalists documenting the carnage continue to litter the charnel grounds of the American consciousness.  The untested perception that Mr. Obama will alter this vicious current of American imperialism after numerous media appearances and press statements affirming his determination to maintain and extend American economic and military muscle is childish as best.  At its worst, it is practical confirmation of the existential fallacies that serve to illustrate the moral insincerities of American democracy, foreign policy and reactionary military engagement.

To say that I find Barack Obama troubling is to minimise the dangers I perceive in making a rush to find positivism within a decidedly restricted field of choice.  Ralph Nader aside, it must be said that his call for the broadening of the American political landscape is more than laudable, it is vitally necessary if a real democracy is ever to emerge in the United States.  The fact that large throngs of the U.S. public have historically never had direct access to the political process makes this abundantly clear as does the highly visible indications that a great deal of propagandistic effort and indoctrination goes into “proving” that these privileges do indeed exist.  Mr. Barack Obama, for all his promising oratory of progressive Americanism, is the new poster-boy for why America “works.”  He has officially added his voice to the fib that all Americans matter when one glance at the U.S. without rose coloured glasses shows a very different story.  So to trust him on the basis of his skin tone alone under the assumption that he will enact a nicer, more democratic imperialism at home and abroad is dim-witted political thinking of the highest order.  Especially since his reputation on these issues can only be termed as pathetically compliant to Europocentric capitalism in its most aggressive and virulent form.  He differs little from his other presidential hopeful predecessors in that he talks one game and plays yet another in full view of a hopelessly gullible American public eager for some sort of change that will put more hard currency in their pockets, lower fuel and food prices and allow working people to purchase more material goods that offer an illusory upwardly mobile social advantage.

Obama and his team of sincere kingmakers are more than happy to put on a stern yet objective demeanour when discussing bombing Iran back into U.S. corporate control or how proud he is to give the Apartheid State of Israel more money, more weapons and more moral support in their zeal to effectively eliminate the existence of the Palestinian people from their ancestral territories.[iii]  How this position can be reconciled with “progressivism” escapes me.  He’s only willing to negotiate with Arabs suffering from western Orientalism provided they are willing to continue their function as defenceless walking targets of Arab genocide and following their inability to resist any longer, readily become captive consumer fodder for American manufactured commodities.  Respect for their lives and lands are beside the point.  Empires have never entertained provisions for commonsensical and justifiable resistance to their rule.  Only contempt, vilification and death are accorded to those who dare speak of freedom be they intellectuals, partisans or parents simply and heroically struggling to keep their children alive in times of quarrel.

The rest.

Mickey Z on Barack Obama.

Every four years, much of the (so-called) Left gleefully drinks the Democrat’s Kool Aid. Such liberals spend three years droning on about social justice (as everything gets progressively worse) and then they throw their support behind whatever corporate-funded millionaire the Democrats nominate. This trend is no longer surprising or even noteworthy.

This year, however, Lefty Inc. has managed to take things to a depressing new level of denial and acquiescence…thanks to the presence of a multi-racial carnival barker named Barack Obama.

Exhibit A: The lead article on the March 29 edition of Z Net was called “Progressives for Obama.”

Written by Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover, this piece begins: “All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama.” From there, the authors go on to declare that Obama’s campaign is, in reality, a “sudden and unexpected new movement” and is not only “just what America needs” but also proves that the (insert drum roll here) “future has arrived.”

Get out your barf bags, the Limousine Left is at it again.

For the sake of clarity–and sanity–allow me to provide just a few minor details about Obama’s “social movement”: He’s funded by Wall Street. He voted for every Iraq war appropriation bill he faced. He refused to be photographed with San Francisco’s mayor for fear it’d be interpreted that he supported gay marriage. He voted against single payer health care. He supports the death penalty, the Israeli war machine, and the fence on the US-Mexican border. He voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State and to reauthorize the Patriot Act. (Somebody stop me…I could go on for days.)

The rest.

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.

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.

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.