THE RACE ISSUE: VOLUME TWO, NUMBER TWO
THE BEAST OF BURDEN
by Malik Isasis
















Malcom X once said, “You can’t stab a man in the back 9 inches, pull the blade out 6 inches and then say you are making progress.” But this is what it’s like when discussing race in America. Today’s white supremacy is still based in the idea of white superiority, but it is much more subtle than men in white sheets, or skinned heads, thumping their chests. People of color are still marginalizing outside of the institutions of power. What makes it difficult to discuss white supremacy, is the philosophy itself, which has been normalized.

The corporate media often tries and often succeed in normalizing oppression, that is, women and people of color are in the positions that they are in because of their ability. Writer Kendall Clark articulates it better, “If you can convince everyone, but especially members of the oppressed group itself, that the way things are is natural or inevitable or unavoidable, people will be less likely to challenge the way things are”

It sounds like the rugged individualism, pull yourself up by your bootstrap bullshit that is often thrown around by Republicans. White liberals aren’t off the hook here either, it is the colorblind philosophy that ignores the heritage of 400 years of slavery, genocide, and American apartheid that has left deep emotional scars, and intergenerational trauma, which still cripples Native Americans as well as African Americans. Don’t trust me, trust the statistics, here and here, for Native Americans.

Mainstreaming Oppression



Although the sheets have come off the heads of those who snort white supremacy like cocaine, they’ve donned suits and ties and are employed by the dozens in the ivory towers of the corporate media, keeping a vigil and aiming their sniper rifles at all of the righteous protestations that dare to point out injustices. One such vigil is Patrick J. Buchanan, employed by NBC Universal, also formerly employed by CNN. Just as an aside, General Electric owns NBC Universal. General Electric has contracts in Iraq. This is not random, it is important to point out the synergy. The United States is currently occupying two Muslim countries, and have killed approximately one million, and displaced another four million Iraqis, brown people and the corporate media hasn’t batted an eye—especially those whose parent companies are sharing in the profits from the pillage. Yet, if someone flips out and goes on a shooting spree at a university, or a white woman comes up missing, it is in the news for weeks.



Now back to Patrick J. Buchanan.

Buchanan after hearing Obama’s race speech responded something like this:

What is wrong with Barack’s prognosis and Barack’s cure? Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, “everybody but the rioters themselves.” (1968 Kerner Commission Report, here.)

It wasn’t until 100 years after the abolishment of slavery that African Americans gain their right to vote in 1965. So, in 1967 black folks were still being lynched, underemployed, brutally beaten by the State, languishing in the depths of poverty, and feeling powerless and disenfranchised, decided to riot in frustration. Here is were Malcom X’s quote, “You can’t stab a man in the back 9 inches, pull the blade out 6 inches and then say you are making progress”, is apt. In Patrick J. Buchanan’s worldview, these black folk should have been grateful for their condition. White supremacy is the anti-dote for compassion, and not taking responsibility for one’s action, which is always being preached to black folk.

Here’s a whopper from Buchanan:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

White supremacy in full effect.

Patrick J. Buchanan. America uprooted from the bloodied soil of twin genocides, Native Americans and Africans. But your history is a little twisted my friend, and when I say my friend, I mean dipshit. Both European and Africans founded the United States. Africans fought in every single war from the American Revolution to the misguided wars of Vietnam and Iraq. Buchanan’s false sense of superiority befalls him because he’s under the impression that America magically became a superpower because of the will of his white God, instead it was the 400 years of free labor that built the halls of power in Washington D.C. in which he lurked during the Nixon Administration.

Pat works for a major media conglomerate that purport to be news, yet his words has gotten no coverage in the media. Why?

Martin Luther King Jr. said something to the effect that white people have bought into their false sense of superiority, while black people have bought into their false sense of inferiority.

White man has imbued himself as God by carving himself into stone and marble in the image of God; he has painted himself on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as God. He has stated that he is God’s chosen people. What kind of entitlement do you think this creates?

Continued colonization, maybe? Maybe it’s a sense of duty of having to tame wild peoples and civilizing them with brute force, cluster bombs, rapes, and occupation.

It’s amazing to me that the United States can waltz into a country and occupy it, slap the people around, and when the people slap them back, they act surprised and offended and lash out like a frighten raccoon. It is the height of arrogance and ignorance, but then again, this is America's founding philosophy.

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THE PROPAGANDA ISSUE VOLUME ONE, NUMBER ONE
ENEMY OF THE STATE
by Malik Isasis























Who’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? Mr. al-Sahhaf was the Information Minister of Iraq, who upon the invasion by United States’ forces said, "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad…as our leader Saddam Hussein said, 'God is grilling their stomachs in hell.'" Al-Sahhaf was saying this even as U.S. troops were storming a palace of Hussein’s. The corporate media had become fascinated by al-Sahhaf’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of the situation and named him “Baghdad Bob” a somewhat racist euphemism to bolster their false sense of superiority. But before Mr. Baghdad Bob disappeared into obscurity he said, "This invasion will end in failure."

Who’s Baghdad Bob Now?

Five years later? A million dead Iraqis, five million displaced Iraqis, four thousand dead U.S. soldiers, a $6-9 billion per month cost; Recession: Priceless.

“One day, people will look back at this moment in history and say, ‘Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve because they laid the foundation for peace for generations to come,’ “ Bush said at the State Department after a two-hour briefing on U.S. diplomatic strategy around the world.

“I think actually the spending in the war might help with jobs...because we're buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses and the economy's adjusting.”

"The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary, and it is just. And with your courage the battle in Iraq will end in victory,"

Hmm. I wonder why the corporate media hasn’t given Incurious George a cute euphemism? It seems whatever falls out of Incurious George’s mouth, belongs in a toilet bowl. In spite of reality—like the recession, failure of two occupations, the plummeting dollar and the national debt, the corporate media has allowed Incurious George and his playmates to skip along on their yellow brick road throwing eggs at America’s window.

FOX NEWS and their Parrots

Fox News manufactured the Jeremiah Wright story in the middle of a recession, failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, the national debt, government-sponsored torture and domestic spying, and planned attacks on Iran as a distraction, as well as to sink Barack Obama’s candidacy. Lacking imagination, the other outlets such ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN began to parrot Fox News’ theme. Making the comments of a Chicago pastor the center of the world for weeks, while the Middle East burns, by a fire set mostly by Incurious George and his playmates.

The corporate media demanded Obama repudiate his Spiritual mentor, after Obama had done so, they criticized him for not throwing him under the bus.

When Incurious George stood by Michael Brown during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the corporate media gave Bush a pass on his loyalty the days following. When Brown finally was forced to resign, he was given a job as a FEMA consultant; when it came to the fore that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had illegally used the so-called USA Patriot Act to gather personal information on US citizens, Incurious George was given another pass; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales help Incurious George usher in torture, domestic spying without warrants, ending Habeas Corpus as we know it, and when Gonzales fired 8 Federal Prosecutors for political reasons. The media didn’t bat an eye. Then there is Scooby Libby, who ousted a C.I.A agent and was convicted on obstruction and sentenced to 30 months, when Incurious George commuted Libby’s sentence, the corporate media gave Incurious George, yet another pass.

The corporate shills lauded Bush for standing by his playmates and credited him for strength and courage, often saying that he was loyal to a fault (see here).

Cute, right?

Enemy of the State

Corporate media has fooled the populace for the most part in believing that they have choices and voices with gimmicks such as voting via the email on phony questions, non-sensical polling, variety of news channels and slogans that say “Fair and Balance”.

Over the past 8 years the corporate media has allowed Bush to rape the Middle East, and we were even witnesses to our very own raping while the corporate media turned their heads, and whistled to cover the screams. Instead of challenging Incurious George and his fanatical delusions, they went along with them like Baghdad Bob went along with his delusions, but the corporate media heads are so far up their asses that they don’t realize the irony. They’ve become political tools used to intellectually disarm the American people to keep us docile, ignorant and loyal consumers. As long as they have us believing that we have consumer choices rather than political ones, their parent companies can continue to act as a shadow branch of the government creating more wars, prisons, private militaries, unnecessary pharmaceuticals, weapons of mass destruction and debt.

The corporate media has become the Enemy from within, an Enemy of the State who no longer serves the interest of the people, but the interests of branding its products to sell to a docile and stupefied consumer.

We are not consumers.

We are citizens.

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Obama's Multiracial Coalition and the Politics of Racial Reconciliation
by Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report























As the presidential campaign heats up, the precarious nature of Obama's "multiracial coalition" along with the nature of the "racial reconciliation" his candidacy brings becomes more. Under the Obama version of "racial reconciliation" the opinions commonly held by most of Black America are deemed "divisive" relics of the past. Black opinion, wherever it differs from that of white corporate media is off the table. A shrewd and savvy politician, Obama is entitled to make these choices for himself, and for his own reasons. But should the voices of Black America be silenced and banished from the national discourse because they do not serve the career plans or short term interests of the Obama campaign? Just what shots does Black America call in this reconciliation, and what benefits do African Americans receive in this "multiracial coalition"?

“We took this country (from Native Americans) by terror...”

“We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We nuked far more than the numbers killed in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye...”

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas has been brought back to our own front yards? America's chickens are coming home to roost...”

These and similar statements by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, the long time pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ are not even particularly controversial in the Black community. They are, as the University of Chicago's Michael Dawson affirms well within the mainstream of Black opinion, and can be heard on street corners, barber shops, churches and around dinner tables all the time. The fact is, most African Americans agree with Rev. Wright.

But the common and ordinary wisdom of Black America is inadmissible in mainstream US discourse. In the reality-defying bubble of US corporate media, one must never speak of the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans as “terror”. Comparing the atomic bombings of hundreds of thousands of civilians in World War 2, the snuffing out of two million Vietnamese lives in the sixties and seventies or one million plus Iraqis and counting in the current war is, in mainstream media, strictly off-limits. And any suggestion that US imperial policies in the Middle East, Africa or elsewhere might provoke justified resistance or understandable retaliation is deemed beyond-the-pale anti-American hate speech.

The foundation of Barack Obama's electoral strategy is reliance upon a base of voters in black America motivated by a nationalistic desire to see one of their own in the White House, no matter what his beliefs. Thus the black vote, ordinarily the most dependably left wing bloc in the US can be safely and permanently taken for granted, leaving Obama free to move rightward, doing and saying whatever it takes to win white votes and corporate favor. Barack Obama is therefore the establishment's dream black candidate, almost entirely free of obligation to African Americans and our historic agenda, but getting our votes anyway.

Accordingly, to preserve his standing among white and Republican voters who imagine him as the “post-racial” candidate, Obama has for the past week sought to distance himself from his pastor of twenty years. In speeches and interviews Obama compared Rev. Wright to “that old uncle everybody has” who mumbles things we disagree with. He pronounced Wright an “angry” man, hopelessly stuck in the fifties and sixties. Obama's much ballyhooed March 18 speech went several steps further, suggesting that white American racism is a not a fundamental feature of American life, mischaracterizing his pastor's views on the Middle East, and blaming war and US imperial adventures that part of the world on “radical Islam” instead of on our insistence upon controlling their resources.

"...the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

The fact is that black America is more pro-Palestinian than any other constituency except Arab-Americans. Black America is highly suspicious of US claims to be an “honest broker” for peace in the Middle East. Obama's labeling of "radical Islam" as the transcendent national enemy, however, is perfectly in line with that of corporate media, as well as with Hillary's, McCain's and Bush's "war on terror" foreign policy framework. But it happens to be the exact opposite of where most of Black America stands.

If Barack believes, as he says, that "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam" are the reasons we are at war in the Middle East, what difference is there between Obama and Hillary, between Obama and McCain or even between Obama and George Bush or the neo-cons? If Barack believes this, his promised withdrawal and “over the horizon” redeployment of "combat troops" (not of mercenaries or contractors or counterinsurgency troops or training troops or the rest of the occupation, just the "combat brigades") will be followed by another intervention somewhere else in hopes of squashing "the perverse and hateful ideology of radical Islam". Maybe Somalia, which we already bomb regularly. Maybe Afghanistan. Maybe nuclear-armed Pakistan, a target Obama has already identified.

A further proof of how liberated the black candidate Obama is from the will of black voters is his promised to increase the military budget over Bush levels, to add 90,000 more pairs of boots to the army and marines, and to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, where we support a coterie of arms and opium smugglers masquerading as a government. Increasing the military budget is lower on the priorities of African Americans than of any other constituency in the land, and takes money away from all the cherished priorities of African American communities like education, public transit, and job creation.

And of course our "stalwart ally", as Barack called Israel, in fact a murderous apartheid regime in which Arab "citizens" are forbidden from owning land in much of the country, where their marriages are not recognized by the state, where Arabs are issued different license plates so their cars can be profiled from a distance, and many other indignities. And those are Arabs with Israeli citizenship. Palestinians, the owners of the land only two generation ago, are still experiencing wholesale confiscation of their remaining land and assets, penned up into Gaza and the West Bank, humiliated, starved and murdered at will by Israeli armed forces and death squads. Obama knows these to be facts, and at earlier points in his political career would show up at Palestinian events in Chicago. But the political game he has chosen to play, and the allies he has chose to play it with require a selective memory.

And just as Ronald Reagan was seldom able to complete a paragraph on race without a reference to fictional Cadillac-driving welfare queens, Barack Obama was unable to make a speech on race without a gratuitous and pandering reference to the alleged shortcomings of black fathers. Is this what “post-racial” black candidates must do to prove they are not “stuck” in the sixties? Is this how a “multiracial coalition” is built?

Two decades ago he took the advice of a local pastor who suggested his work as a community organizer in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood would go better if he had a “church home”, and Obama chose Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street. In the very early 80s, long before most Americans knew Nelson Mandela's name, Trinity UCC had a “FREE SOUTH AFRICA” sign in front of its building. Meetings were held and collections were regularly taken up since at least the mid-1970s to aid liberation movements in what were then the white-ruled countries of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Angola and South Africa. Rev. Wright was a theologian, an activist, a successful pastor and leader who built a thriving ministry that was one of the black south side's social, economic and political hubs for a generation. If you were up and coming on the south side, Trinity was one of the places to be, for many reasons.

Obama got what he could out of Trinity in the 80s,. He re-joined the church upon his return to Chicago after law school in 1992 to begin his political career. Obama admits that Wright married the him and his wife, baptized their children, and blessed their new house. But at this point in the campaign, Rev. Wright's message and ministry are as expendable as the political will of the rest of Black America has been all along. Campaign insiders have told reporters that if Rev. Wright was not retiring, Obama would have to change congregations, but since he is, that will not be necessary. In the end, Barack Obama is a grown man, a savvy and ambitious politician who will have to live with his moral and political choices. And so will we. We know what's in it for him. But what's in it for us?

What would it have cost Barack Obama to try to educate, to lead, to lift the level of the American people by picking say, the least controversial of Wright's assertions, say that the country was taken from Native Americans “by terror” and actually defending it? That would have been an historic and groundbreaking act of moral leadership. If Obama is not ready to lead now, when will he be? And where?

Obama's unconditional affirmations that America is “inherently good”, that white racism is not endemic, that “radical Islam” is the enemy, that apartheid Israel is a “stalwart ally”, and that his pastor and spiritual mentor, a man who accurately reflects the views of most of Black America is an angry, divisive old uncle stuck in the fifties and sixties --- all these may restore his credentials among whites as the candidate of “racial reconciliation”. But what is being reconciled here? Aside from the color of the president's face, what is being changed? And just what does Black America, its opinions and leading thinkers denounced, belittled and banned from the political discourse by the black candidate, no less, get out of this reconciliation, or this campaign?

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DISGRACE UNDER FIRE
by Malik Isasis























In 2003 I attended a lecture by Princeton Professor, Cornell West. West said something profound. He said that we no longer have leaders who would die for us. Leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, Malcom X, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa who would not only die for their cause but would die for their people. These people are an example of leaders who were able to transcend to the next level of consciousness, the enlighten state of consciousness. Today our leaders lack sacrifice, they much prefer that others sacrifice for their political gain. It is personal gain over political responsibility.

New York Times reported on March 24, 2008 that Senator Hillary Clinton is arguing that the Electoral College should be the measurement of a candidate’s strength since she would lead 219 to Senator Barack Obama’s 202. This argument continues the false narrative that winning, already Democratic big states, makes Clinton a more viable candidate. If Obama were the Democratic nomination, he would more than likely carry all the big states Hillary won in the primaries (Ohio may be the exeption). Since the corporate media has assimilated her talking points on momentum, Obama’s inexperience as well as their taking it easy on him, she seems to be beta testing a new talking point: The Electoral College. She is moving the goal post again to manufacture a new reality.

Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who backs Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, proposed another gauge Sunday by which superdelegates might judge whether to support Mrs. Clinton or Senator Barack Obama.

He suggested that they consider the electoral votes of the states that each of them has won.

“So who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes is an important factor to consider because ultimately, that’s how we choose the president of the United States,” Mr. Bayh said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

In a primary, of course, electoral votes are not relevant, but the Clinton campaign is trying to use them as an unofficial measure of strength.

.
Eight years ago when the Supreme Court decided to give the presidency to Incurious George W. Bush, newly elected freshman Senator Clinton said this on November 20, 2000:

"We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago," Clinton said. "I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it's time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president."

Power Corrupts, Absolutely

Like many of her Republican and neocon colleagues on the hill, Hillary Clinton has become consumed by the acquisition of power, for the sake of power. Her profound sense of entitlement has made attaining power the corner stone of her political career, no matter the cost of destruction that has to happen. It is the cyclical nature of this sickness.

When folks like Hillary, or Bush, or Bill, or McCain are in power, it is squandered. It is only the threat of losing power that drives them. Hillary had 8 years in the White House with her husband to make a difference, she also had 8 years in the Senate to make a difference, and yet on both fronts she has failed to show that she can change politics. She has become plugged in and she has been changed, and fights to maintain the status quo. She failed to convince her husband to stop the genocide in Rawanda, or stop the rightwing’s welfare reform act, which has failed the poor and working poor. She also voted for a war and occupation due to a political calculation (to be seen as strong for a future bid for president). Now the budget is in the toilet.

McCain has had more than a quarter century in the Senate and what has his leadership wrought? Unadulterated, blind faith in the Republican rightwing agenda, which has over the last 20 years, has assured the cottage industry of war, billions in contracts, which has resulted in a generation of continuous wars. McCain was also a foot soldier of Reagan and supported the destructive Republican Party economic policy of artificial economics, where debt, not income pays for goods and services. Hence, the $9 trillion dollar national debt.

It is clear that Hillary is willing to say whatever she needs to win, even at the expense of her party. She has all but lost the nomination, and yet she carries on because she is possessed by her sense of entitlement, and even anger that Obama is not waiting his turn. She will maintain the status quo because the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

We are who we vote for, which raises the question: Do we want to be a country sustained by fear and loathing?

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Obama's Passportgate: Historical Echo
by Robert Parry, Consortium News



















Five presidential elections ago, when another George Bush was in the White House and when Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee, State Department officials conducted an improper search of Clinton’s passport files, an echo of the current case in which Barack Obama’s passport files were penetrated three times this year.

The State Department announced on March 20 that two State Department contractors were fired and a third disciplined for accessing Obama’s files. Based on preliminary information, it was unclear what the motive of the Obama search was.

In 1992, the evidence revealed that representatives of George H.W. Bush, then fighting for a second term, pulled strings at the State Department and at U.S. embassies in Europe to uncover and disseminate derogatory information about Bill Clinton’s loyalty and his student trips to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

That assault on Clinton’s patriotism moved into high gear on the night of Sept. 30, 1992, when Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Tamposi – under pressure from the White House – ordered three aides to pore through Clinton’s passport files in search of a purported letter in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his citizenship.

Though no letter was found, Tamposi still injected the suspicions into the campaign by citing a small tear in the corner of Clinton’s passport application as evidence that someone might have tampered with the file, presumably to remove the supposed letter. She fashioned that speculation into a criminal referral to the FBI.

Within hours, someone from the Bush camp leaked word about the confidential FBI investigation to reporters at Newsweek magazine. The Newsweek story about the tampering investigation hit the newsstands on Oct. 4.

The article suggested that a Clinton backer might have removed incriminating material from Clinton’s passport file, precisely the spin that the Bush people wanted.

Immediately, President George H.W. Bush took the offensive, using the press frenzy over the criminal referral to attack Clinton’s patriotism on a variety of fronts, including his student trip to the Soviet Union in 1970. With his patriotism challenged, Clinton saw his once-formidable lead shrink. Panic spread through the Clinton campaign.

Bush allies put out another suspicion, that Clinton might have been a KGB “agent of influence.” Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times headlined that allegation on Oct. 5, 1992, a story that attracted President Bush’s personal interest.

“Now there are stories that Clinton … may have gone to Moscow as [a] guest of the KGB,” Bush wrote in his diary that day. [For the fullest account of the 1992 Passportgate case, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Democratic Suspicions

The suspicions about Clinton’s patriotism might have doomed Clinton’s election, except that Spencer Oliver, then chief counsel on the Democratic-controlled House International Affairs Committee, suspected a dirty trick.

“I said you can’t go into someone’s passport file,” Oliver told me in a later interview. “That’s a violation of the law, only in pursuit of a criminal indictment or something. But without his permission, you can’t examine his passport file. It’s a violation of the Privacy Act.”

After consulting with House committee chairman Dante Fascell and a colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Oliver dispatched a couple of investigators to the Archives warehouse in Suitland.

The brief congressional check discovered that State Department political appointees had gone to the Archives at night to search through Clinton’s records and those of his mother.

Oliver’s assistants also found that the administration’s tampering allegation rested on a very weak premise, the slight tear in the passport application. The circumstances of the late-night search soon found their way into an article in the Washington Post, causing embarrassment to the Bush campaign.

Yet still sensing that the loyalty theme could hurt Clinton, President Bush kept stoking the fire. On CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Oct. 7, 1992, Bush suggested anew that there was something sinister about a possible Clinton friend allegedly tampering with Clinton’s passport file.

“Why in the world would anybody want to tamper with his files, you know, to support the man?” Bush wondered before a national TV audience. “I mean, I don’t understand that. What would exonerate him – put it that way – in the files?

The next day, in his diary, Bush ruminated suspiciously about Clinton’s Moscow trip: “All kinds of rumors as to who his hosts were in Russia, something he can’t remember anything about.”

But the GOP attack on Clinton’s loyalty prompted some Democrats to liken Bush to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who built a political career in the early days of the Cold War challenging people’s loyalties without offering proof.

FBI Rejection

On Oct. 9, the FBI complicated Bush’s strategy by rejecting the criminal referral. The FBI concluded that there was no evidence that anyone had removed anything from Clinton’s passport file.

At that point, Bush began backpedaling: “If he’s told all there is to tell on Moscow, fine,” Bush said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I’m not suggesting that there’s anything unpatriotic about that. A lot of people went to Moscow, and so that’s the end of that one.”

But documents about the investigation that I obtained years later at the Archives revealed that privately Bush was not so ready to surrender the disloyalty theme. The day before the first presidential debate on Oct. 11, Bush prepped himself with one-liners designed to spotlight doubts about Clinton’s loyalty if an opening presented itself.

“It’s hard to visit foreign countries with a torn-up passport,” read one of the scripted lines. Another zinger read: “Contrary to what the Governor’s been saying, most young men his age did not try to duck the draft. … A few did go to Canada. A couple went to England. Only one I know went to Russia.”

If Clinton had criticized Bush’s use of a Houston hotel room as a legal residence, Bush was ready to hit back with another Russian reference: “Where is your legal residence, Little Rock or Leningrad?”

But the Oct. 11 presidential debate – which also involved Reform Party candidate Ross Perot – did not go as Bush had hoped. Bush did raise the loyalty issue in response to an early question about character, but the incumbent’s message was lost in a cascade of inarticulate sentence fragments.

“I said something the other day where I was accused of being like Joe McCarthy because I question – I’ll put it this way, I think it’s wrong to demonstrate against your own country or organize demonstrations against your own country in foreign soil,” Bush said.

“I just think it’s wrong. I – that – maybe – they say, ‘well, it was a youthful indiscretion.’ I was 19 or 20 flying off an aircraft carrier and that shaped me to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and – I’m sorry but demonstrating – it’s not a question of patriotism, it’s a question of character and judgment.”

Clinton countered by challenging Bush directly.

“You have questioned my patriotism,” the Democrat shot back. Clinton then unloaded his own zinger: “When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong, and a senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.”

Many observers rated Clinton’s negative comparison of Bush to his father as Bush’s worst moment in the debate. An unsettled Bush didn’t regain the initiative for the remainder of the evening.

Criminal Probe

The search of Clinton’s passport file had other repercussions. Eventually, the State Department’s inspector general sought a special prosecutor investigation for a scandal that became known as Passportgate.

In the end, however, George H.W. Bush escaped any legal consequences from the passport gambit in large part because a Republican attorney, Joseph diGenova, was named to serve as special prosecutor.

DiGenova’s investigation cleared Bush and his administration of any wrongdoing, saying the probe “found no evidence that President Bush was involved in this matter.”

FBI documents that I reviewed at the Archives, however, presented a more complicated picture. Speaking to diGenova and his investigators in fall 1993, former President George H.W. Bush said he had encouraged then-White House chief of staff James Baker and other aides to investigate Clinton and to make sure the information got out.

“Although he [Bush] did not recall tasking Baker to research any particular matter, he may have asked why the campaign did not know more about Clinton’s demonstrating,” said the FBI interview report, dated Oct. 23, 1993.

“The President [Bush] advised that … he probably would have said, ‘Hooray, somebody’s going to finally do something about this.’ If he had learned that the Washington Times was planning to publish an article, he would have said, ‘That’s good, it’s about time.’ …

“Based on his ‘depth of feeling’ on this issue, President Bush responded to a hypothetical question that he would have recommended getting the truth out if it were legal,” the FBI wrote in summarizing Bush’s statements. “The President added that he would not have been concerned over the legality of the issue but just the facts and what was in the files.”

Bush also said he understood how his impassioned comments about Clinton’s loyalty might have led some members of his staff to conclude that he had “a one-track mind” on the issue. He also expressed disappointment that the Clinton passport search uncovered so little.

“The President described himself as being indignant over the fact that the campaign did not find out what Clinton was doing” as a student studying abroad, the FBI report said.

Bush’s comments seem to suggest that he had pushed his subordinates into a violation of Clinton’s privacy rights. But diGenova, who had worked for the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, already had signaled to Bush that the probe was going no where.

At the start of the Oct. 23, 1993, interview, which took place at Bush’s office in Houston, diGenova assured Bush that the investigation’s staff lawyers were “all seasoned prof[essional] prosecutors who know what a real crime looks like,” according to FBI notes of the meeting. “[This is] not a gen[eral] probe of pol[itics] in Amer[ica] or dirty tricks, etc., or a general license to rummage in people’s personal lives.”

As the interview ended, two of diGenova’s assistants – Lisa Rich and Laura Laughlin – asked Bush for autographs, according to the FBI’s notes on the meeting.

Czech-ing on Bill

In January 1994, the story about Clinton’s student trip to Czechoslovakia in 1970 took another turn.

The Czech news media reported that former Czech intelligence officials were saying that in 1992, the Czech secret police, the Federal Security and Information Service (FBIS), had collaborated with the Bush reelection campaign to dig up dirt on Clinton’s student trip to visit a friend in Prague.

The centrist newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes reported that during the 1992 campaign, FBIS gave the Republicans internal data about Clinton’s Moscow-Prague trips and supplied background material about Clinton’s “connections” inside Czechoslovakia.

Derogatory information also allegedly was funneled through officials at the U.S. Embassy and was leaked to cooperative journalists. On Oct. 24, 1992, three Czech newspapers ran similar stories about Clinton’s Czech hosts.

“Bill Was With Communists” was one particularly nasty headline in the Cesky Denik newspaper.

The Czech stories suggested that the first Bush administration would go so far as to collaborate with a foreign secret police agency to undermine a political opponent.

Though the Passportgate case is now only a footnote to the 1992 election – especially after DiGenova cleared Bush and his administration of any wrongdoing – the scandal was viewed as much more important inside George H.W. Bush’s White House.

After Bush’s election defeat in November 1992, chief of staff Baker grew depressed, blaming himself for the passport disaster and the reelection loss. On Nov. 20, 1992, at 10:30 a.m., a despondent Baker visited Bush.

“Jim Baker came in here … deeply disturbed and read to me a long letter of resignation all because of this stupid passport situation,” Bush wrote in his diary. Bush rejected Baker’s offer to resign. [For details, see Secrecy & Privilege.]

The disclosure that three State Department contractors accessed Obama’s passport files on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14 may not have the high-level political intrigue of the Clinton passport case, but the intrusion does have a troubling precedent.

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The Man or the Movement
by Salim Muwakki, In These Times


















In writing a book about Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, I wondered whether it was the people or the person that made the movement.

I had initially subscribed to the notion that the people produce the leadership, but my look back at the Washington years forced a change in my thinking. Washington’s success was largely a product of his personal dynamism and unique political virtuosity. Had he not existed, I concluded, Chicago would still be looking for its first black mayor.

The political phenomenon of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) again brings to mind that question of what came first, the person or the movement.

The thought that Americans may actually elect a black man to be commander in chief is an extraordinary development for a nation that fully enfranchised African Americans only 43 years ago. For many Americans—particularly older African Americans—the prospect of a black president seems almost inconceivable.

A multiracial movement made up of political enthusiasts is propelling Obama’s candidacy. They are folks who are motivated by something beyond partisan passions.

But, again, is Obama a product of this movement or did he, with his unique combination of personal qualities, produce it?

Before the Obama campaign caught the fancy of the nation, many social critics were describing our current racial climate in increasingly dismal terms. Were I pressed to characterize the period, I might have called it the age of two “n-words”: niggers and nooses. But again, that was B.O.—Before Obama.

This n-word negativity began intensifying after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It revealed the desperate plight of the nation’s black poor and it was reinforced by the Bush administration’s inadequate response. Rapper Kanye West famously quipped on national television that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” and his remarks resonated across black America.

Following the Katrina debacle, a number of rancorous racial incidents began darkening the public mood: actor Michael Richards shouting “nigger” and evoking lynching at a comedy club; shock jock Don Imus uttering “nappy-headed hos” on the public airwaves.

Then, thousands gathered in Jena, La., in 2007 to register their anger at the racially disparate punishment of black students following the incident of a hanging noose on school property. The case triggered one of the largest black protest marches since the civil rights movement.

When nooses began popping up all over the country, many commentators began bemoaning the return of overt racism. A series of racially charged cases of police abuse reinforced those dire assessments.

Last August, the predominantly black National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) news service published an article with the headline “Mounting Racial Tensions ‘Resegregating’ America, Activists Say.” The piece typified the growing consensus that the racial climate was worsening, and it quoted a number of people who charted the decline.

Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that monitors racial hate activities across the nation, told the NNPA, “It’s undeniable that we are resegregating education in a dramatic way and we are also becoming more segregated residentially than we were.”

Potok was not alone in his assessment that these are troubled racial times.

In 2008, however, analysts are struggling to account for white America’s apparent willingness to hand the nation’s reins to a black man. But how has the racial attitude changed so drastically in a matter of mere months?

One reason: Obama.

Activists tend to debunk the so-called “Great Man” theory of history because of its potential to demobilize movements.

And other influences deserve consideration, of course. Hip-hop, athletics, movies, the news media and political activism have made many Americans more comfortable with African Americans’ presence in the public square.

However, all of that was true last summer, as well. The difference between then and now is the prominence of a movement created by one black man’s presidential campaign. That movement would not exist without Barack Obama.

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THE SICKNESS OF WHITE FEAR
by Malik Isasis























The propagandist, white supremacists and imperialists over at Fox News has been beta testing attacks on Obama for months to see which attacks would stick. The kitchen-sink theory, if you will. It appears they have been successful. After weeks of pushing the idea of Obama’s spiritual advisor Rev. Jeremiah Wright being a radical left wing black separatist, the other news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and ABC blindly followed Fox News’ narrative.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Here is Fox News’ narrative, watch the contempt:


Now here is a sample of Fox News’s narrative in the echo chamber over at ABC News:


White Supremacy

Only in Bush World, can issues having nothing to do with the failing economy, genocide, and military occupations take the backseat to sexual peccadilloes, or hysteria about Mexicans, Muslims or media labeled black separatists.

The corporate media sickness lies in its collective ideology: white supremacy. White supremacy is the idea that white people are more superior to other ethnic groups, and anything that veers outside of the white knowledge base is seen as a threat; the corporate media and higher education would have you believe that exclusively skinheads or other white separatist groups hold this ideology, but in fact, it is the founding ideology of the United States. It is why this country was founded on twin genocides of Native Americans and African slaves. It is why there was a 100 years of apartheid against African Americans in the United States after the abolishment of slavery. It is also why, this country feels it could occupy and subjugate two Muslim countries. And it is why when other ethnic groups speak out about the injustices and destructiveness of the white supremacy ideology, they are quickly discredited.

African Americans are supposed to be quiet about their genocide. We are told that it is history, and to stop whining. Those who do not shut up are labeled race baiters, or race pimps, or even black separatist. Never mind that collectively, African Americans hold absolutely no power in this country.

Yet, one preacher from Chicago is a threat?

What is the basis for this paranoia?

The sickness is so absolute that Bush has murdered hundreds of thousands, lost trillions in U.S Treasury through what will be discovered as the largest money laundry operation the world has ever seen, occupying two countries, has caused the displacement of millions in Iraq, Lebanon and Occupied Palestine, neglect of New Orleans after and during Hurricane Katrina, torture humans, domestic spying, and has caused an economic disaster in United States, yet the media has allowed him to skip along for nearly 8 years like a child with a picnic basket.

Bush's wake of destruction and travesty has not caused indignation because of Bush's and the neocons' ability to tap into the most darkest self, the reptilian brain whose base response is survival. They've managed to manufacture bogey men in the form of Muslims, Mexicans and Blacks, but instead of fearing black preachers and activists, it is white fear which needs to be deconstructed, because it causes far more destruction than a so-called black radicals with no political, financial, or governmental infrastructure to cause the collective, dominate culture harm.

Subliminal

Fox News, America’s State-run propaganda news channel, is the deftest at inciting white fear, as it pretends to be real news. Just look at this clip, where they show an African American murder suspect, followed by the interview with Barack Obama.



Black politicians are always asked to repudiate or distance themselves from black activists, however when it comes to white, right wing radical hate mongers such as Pat Robertson, or the late Jerry Falwell, white politicians aren't held to the same standard.

Why Obama subjected himself to Fox News and ass puppet, Major Garrett is beyond me. Garrett’s intent was clear, to make Obama look like a bumbling idiot, and it’s unfortunate that Obama has played the game. Now they’ve defined the narrative.

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STUPOR POWER
by Malik Isasis













As the useless corporate media continues to peek behind the curtains of politicians’ and celebrities’ bedrooms, George Bush, and his neocon foot soldiers with some help from feeble Democrats in the Congress, have dislodged the capstone of the United States' world prestige and influence, causing it to hit the ground and break into a thousand little pieces.

The media and politicians seem to be in denial about the United States’ economic collapse and political influence around the world. Instead, they give George W, Bush a going away party, and shake shiny keys in front of an obtuse populace with sexual and racial distractions. This works because Americans have a very narrow view of morality, which tends to focus solely on sex and patriotism.

The Fall

The Associated Press reported on March 13, 2008, Hit by a free fall with no end in sight, the once mighty U.S. dollar is no longer just crashing on currency markets and making life more expensive for American tourists and business people abroad; its clout is evaporating worldwide as foreign businesses and individuals turn to other currencies.

I’m no economist, but I do employ common sense. On November 26, 2007, I said,OPEC and the multinational oil companies that extract their oil has the world in a head lock as the price for a barrel of oil reaches a $100 a barrel. If some of the OPEC members have their way and switch to the Euro from the dollar as a reserve currency, we could expect the price of oil to reach $200 dollars a barrel due to the precipitous fall of the dollar. OPEC expects profits and if the reserve currency is devalued, the price has to be inflated to keep up with the world currencies that are surpassing the dollar. Robert McHugh of Financial Sense predicts that the dollar will lose 50% its value based on insurmountable debt.

The Wake Up

As media punditry and politicians wax on about the greatness of America, the world is passing us by. Greatness is defined by actions, and not by clunky, jingoistic propaganda that keeps us in the dark. We may become one of those great boxers, who decide to come out of retirement to fight again, only to be knocked out.

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Spitzer & America's Perverse Ethics
by Rabbi Michael Lerner, Consortium News


















The U.S. news media can’t devote enough time to the prostitution scandal that just forced New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s resignation and gave the ethics enforcer of Wall Street a bitter taste of his own medicine.

But the unspoken counterpoint to Spitzer’s dramatic fall from grace is how the same U.S. news media views public calls for the impeachment of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney -- over war crimes and violations of the U.S. Constitution -- as nutty and unworthy of serious debate.

The cross-the-political-spectrum attacks on Elliot Spitzer and the intensity of the demands that he resign his office show just how far the right-wing sexual moralizing has been able to trump any other kind of ethical reasoning in American society.

Going to a prostitute is legal in some states and some countries around the world, and is often the very arrangement that saves families from splitting up whose sexual energies have diminished but whose love is intact.

It's not uncommon for men (and now increasingly women as well) who have achieved great power in our society by adopting an outer show of ruthless pursuit of power and influence (even, as in Spitzer's case, if the power is aimed at pursuing laudable ends) to feel a deep emptiness and loneliness that is not addressed by friends or spouse, and hence to seek some kind of outside connection, no matter how superficial, that is not bound by previous rules and roles.

Nevertheless, I and many others in the religious and spiritual world oppose that practice when it involves adultery or prostitution, because it depends on the objectification of another human being, so that sex is disconnected in ways that it should not be from a significant encounter with the spirit of God in the other or a deep recognition that is the only real way to overcome existential or situational alienation.

Moreover, the trade in women for sexual purposes has frequently led to rape and abuse and the kidnapping of young women who are sold into sexual slavery. All of these outrageous practices are abhorrent and should be challenged.

The flaunting of sexuality in the media, and the implicit message that the only real satisfaction comes from having the most physically attractive people as sexual partners, not only generates huge dissatisfaction, even as it allows corporate advertisers to become predators manipulating our personal sense of inadequacy to sell their products, but also generates desires that feed the sexual trade in women.

Given this larger social context, until sexual satisfaction is so broadly available in our society that no one has to pay for it and so deeply tied to love that no one is objectified in the process, this kind of exploitation of women and degradation of sex is likely to continue.

All of these practices foster the sexual predators of the contemporary world.

So Elliot Spitzer deserves to be critiqued and ought to be doing deep atonement for what he did. His previous moral arrogance and willingness when he had power to do so to prosecute others for their participation in creating prostitution rings makes him an easy target.

We, in turn, might practice the forgiveness that our religious and spiritual traditions preach, particularly those of us who have been willing to honesty face how flawed we ourselves are, and how at times we ourselves fail to embody in our actual practice with others the values that we publicly espouse.

Humility and compassion are also part of the path of a spiritual progressive.

Ethical Perversity

But the intensity of the critique of the New York governor, tied with the demand that he resign, shows more about American society's ethical perversity than about Spitzer.

The President of the United States and the Vice President, working in concert with several other high-ranking officers of our government, lied and distorted to get us involved in a war that has led to the death of over a million Iraqis, the displacement of three million more, the death of 4,000 Americans and the wounding of tens of thousands more.

After token opposition in Congress, our elected representatives have overwhelmingly passed budgets funding this war, rather than refuse to fund any military projects until the President stopped the war and withdrew the troops.

Meanwhile, our government has overtly engaged in torture, wiretapping of our phones, and violation of our human rights and the rights of people around the world. Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Charles Schumer voted to confirm as Attorney General a right-wing judge who refused to repudiate these crimes.

The U.S. government has rejected every attempt to implement the Kyoto environmental agreements or to work out new agreements sufficiently strong to reverse environmental destruction that is certain to lead to new levels of flooding particularly in several poor countries around the world. The consequence: tens of millions of deaths.

The Clinton Administration pushed, along with corporate support, a set of trade agreements that have devastated the farmers of many developing countries, forcing many off their farms and into city slums where their daughters and sons are often sold into sexual slavery.

The global economic system we have fostered has led to increasing gaps between the rich and the poor, so that over one out of every three people on the planet lives on less than $2 a day, 1.5 billion live on less than one dollar a day, and over 15,000 children die every day from malnutrition-related diseases and inadequate availability of medicine that is hoarded by the rich countries who can afford the prices made to ensure huge profits to the pharmaceutical industry.

Health insurance companies and private medical profiteers are doing all they can to ensure that there will be no health care for tens of millions of Americans, unless that is provided in ways that guarantee corporate super-profits and thereby guarantee that the cost of health care paid through taxes will be huge and create anger at all government social welfare and well-being programs, leading to their likely de-funding.

People in the U.S. have faced severe economic crises on a regional and soon on a national level because corporations move their centers of production to countries in Asia where they can exploit workers with less government or union interference and where they can destroy the environment with fewer societal restraints.

Wild to achieve greater profits, corporations and the rich have managed to support politicians who lower the taxes on the rich, in the process bankrupting the public sector or severely reducing its ability to provide enough funds for quality education, health care, libraries, public transportation, and social welfare.

That there is no outcry for these government officials and corporate leaders to resign immediately or be impeached, that there is no moral outrage at the entire system that produces this impact, is America's ethical perversity.

Instead, the only crime against humanity that the media takes seriously and the politicians fear is being exposed for personal sexual immorality.

While everyone basks in their own self-righteous demands on Spitzer, we all allow media and elected officials to fundamentally distort our ethical vision and play out our morality on the smallest of possible stages while ignoring the global and personal consequences of our larger ethical failures.

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ADDENDUM: A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES
by Malik Isasis

UPDATED 3/11/08
While the Middle East, Africa and parts of Latin America twists in the flames of hell that Bush has created, he and the corporate media took a small respite to slap him on the ass in a congratulatory send off known at the Grid Iron Dinner. Major news reporters such as Helen Thomas participated in the event, which is supposed to be off the record. Someone recorded this travesty on a cellphone.






A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES
by Malik Isasis
























French philosopher Voltaire once said, “All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

The manufactured drama of the presidential race has caused the corporate media to focus almost all of its attention on Barack and Hillary. Meanwhile, George W. Bush has managed to tap dance and slip on banana peels into the annals of modern history as the only mentally retarded person to have ever been elected—once, as president of the United States. If he’s mentally retarded, what does that say about the American populace?

A million dead and counting, millions displaced, two occupations, asymmetrical wars in Latin America and Africa, trillions of dollars lost, a broken military, and the collapse of both the United States’ and Iraq’s economy. Only in a post 9/11 Bush World is a man of Bush’s intellectual and emotional deficit is not hold up in The Hague being tried for crimes against Humanity.

How did we end up here?

During the 2002-2003 build up to the Iraq Invasion, the corporate media had begun folding itself into the Department of Defense’s propaganda wing by blindly supporting the Bush Public Relations Administration’s talking points and subverting opposition to the initial Iraq Invasion and subsequent Iraq Occupation. Like a virus in its host, the corporate media had methodically carried the neocons’ message to the masses, infecting the American people with fear and submission. The corporate media also has helped the Republican Party and its right-wing hate machine, to politically box in the Democratic Party with two choices: supporting the terrorists or supporting the troops.

The corporate media assimilation was not difficult after September 11, 2001. The corporate media was looking to create heroes, and in the age of smoke and mirrors, had found exactly what they were looking for in New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, playing it cool under pressure and President Bush with the bullhorn, standing atop of the rubble of the World Trade Towers.

Jonestown

Jonestown was the short-lived settlement which was made in northwestern Guyana by the Peoples Temple, a cult from California, and which became lastingly and internationally notorious in 1978, when nearly its whole population died in a mass murder-suicide orchestrated by their leader, Jim Jones. The name of the settlement thus became, also, a term for that incident. The site is now an abandoned ruin.

Historians and social scientists will look back at the rise of Bush and his neocon army and trace the mass delusion of the American populace back to Bush standing atop of the rubble of the World Trade Center and speaking into that bullhorn, creating his very own Jonestown. In that moment, he converted millions into his cult of fear, war, unfettered capitalism, and imperialism.

Maybe that’s why the corporate media stuck their heads up their asses while Bush poured gas over the Middle East and struck a match, so to cover the largest money-laundering scheme ever in the history of man. If Bush is the head of this dragon, the corporate media, surely, is the neck.

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BLOOD IN, BLOOD OUT
by Malik Isasis




















In the past month Hillary has lost the last 12 out of 15 primary and caucus contests and yet after her three wins in Texas, Rhode Island and Ohio, she has momentum? The corporate media’s disproportionate celebration of her momentum seems odd specifically since the delegate count and popular vote are still mathematically out of reach for her but that doesn’t matter does it? Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stones said it best, “In the media, I know, I'm out there, I'm one of them, they have this idea of what the president is suppose to look like and if anybody deviates from this plan, they hammer the shit out of them until they're no longer a viable candidate. You can send any shit up the flag pole and all these reporters will just fucking salute it!"

Hillary’s an astute politician. How else can she play victim and Machiavelli simultaneously? Hillary’s whisper and kitchen-sink campaigning about Obama’s fluffy treatment in the media, life experience, his religious background, false NAFTA argument and the airing of a Karl Rovian political ad in the last week was sent up the flag pole and the corporate punditry and reporters saluted. And now with just three losses in the past 15 races, the corporate media has begun a narrative: Is Obama tough enough? Does Obama have a glass jaw?

If Obama fights back against the Clintons and the Democratic Party establishment and surrogates, they and the corporate shills will use it against Obama, saying that his campaign is not about Hope or Inspiration.

Goooo Establishment!

Clinton and her surrogates in the media are using the circular logic that she has won all the big states, and that since she has won all the big states she is better situated to win the presidency. The problem with that right off the bat is that if Obama were to be nominated, he would win all those big states, based upon the Democratic turn out. Those big states are democratic-heavy. The obtuse corporate media is not interested in facts, just fiction.

As Clinton bolsters McCain’s experience and parrots his talking points, she will find the media love for McCain will come back to haunt her. Once she has disposed of Obama, her talking points against Obama will be used to cut her throat. It will be Shakespearean.

There will be blood, but it will be what is left of this country’s integrity. Thanks to the Bush legacy, ignorance and fear will win the day.

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HOLOCAUST FOR GAZA
by Rory McCarthy, The Guardian

















Israel's deputy defence minister yesterday warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a "bigger shoah," using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust.

The choice of vocabulary from Matan Vilnai, an often outspoken former army general, was unusually grave - the word is not normally used for anything other than the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.

Vilnai was speaking about his government's plans to tackle the continued firing of makeshift rockets, known as Qassams, from Gaza.

"The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," he said, in a telephone interview with army radio yesterday morning.

His spokesman later tried to play down the force of his language, saying he meant only "disaster".

"He did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide," the spokesman said.

Vilnai appeared to suggest a big military operation was inevitable. "It will be sad, and difficult, but we have no other choice," he said.

"We're getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we've used a small percentage of the army's power because of the nature of the territory."

In just two days this week, Israeli military strikes killed 33 Palestinians in Gaza, among them several civilians, including four young boys who were playing football and an infant.

Palestinian militants fired dozens of rockets into southern Israel, killing one man in Sderot, and reaching as far as the city of Ashkelon, 11 miles away.

It was the latest in several recent rounds of violence in Gaza, a conflict that Israeli officials already describe as a "war."

According to the United Nations, 80 Palestinians were killed and 82 injured by Israeli military strikes in Gaza in January alone.

At the same time 267 rockets and 256 mortars were fired towards Israel, injuring nine Israelis.

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, travelled to Ashkelon yesterday and said a response was "required." "Hamas bears responsibility for this deterioration and it will also bear the results."

In Gaza, Hamas leaders said they too now believed a big Israeli operation was coming. "This is proof of Israel's pre-planned aggressive intentions against our people," said Ismail Haniyeh, the deposed Palestinian prime minister.

"They want the world to condemn what they call the Holocaust and now they are threatening our people with a Holocaust."

Hamas is reported to have indirectly offered a ceasefire with the Israelis. However, the Egyptian intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who often mediates between the two sides and who was due in Israel next Tuesday, cancelled his trip after the latest escalation of fighting.

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NEW FUTURE FOR PAKISTAN? THINK NOT.
by Maliha Masood, Matrix Contributor






















It is commonly believed both within Pakistan and the world at large that Musharraf’s days are numbered. The results of Monday's parliamentary elections are a vote against the unpopular President. The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of the late former PM, Benazir Bhutto, won most of the most seats, followed by the PML-N of another former PM, Nawaz Sharif. The two opposition parties are expected to begin talks on forming a coalition that could potentially control more than half the seats in parliament. Two thirds of the majority stipulates victory. If this happens, there will be a strong verdict against Pervez Musharraf. He will be forced to step down. What will this mean for the future of Pakistan? The Pakistani press thinks that a future without Musharraf will be good news.

According to the English language paper, The Nation, “the government's policies of lopsided development, its claim that it has created an economic bonanza for the general public and its decision to have recourse to the military option to eliminate the hydra-headed monster of terrorism" have all backfired. Urdu daily Jang echoes the sentiment. “We believe it is better for the leadership of both winning parties and the president to take decisions in the greater interests of the nation, as the challenges faced by the country these days can only be combated through unity." The prestigious Dawn claims, “The nation expects him to be a good loser... The voters have punished all those seen as being supportive of autocratic rule." The News says the president and his supporters in parliament have been beaten and "more or less humiliated".

As for opinions in the West, notably the United States government, a post-Musharraf Pakistan is a cause for celebration, in light of the fact that nothing has been done to root out the Taliban and the forces of evil lurking in the Tribal Areas. Despite a chummy alliance with the General, the Americans are getting tired of false promises. It’s time to put stock in new leadership with a democratic mandate. Has no one realized that democracy can be deceptive?

In the case of Pakistan, there is no such thing as effective leaders, democratic or not. Both Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari, the so called heroes of Pakistan’s future, are old rivals with long standing grudges. Both men have looted the country for personal gains and have a zero track record of doing anything decent for the public welfare. For them to change their tactics toward good governance, one that puts a premium on accountability and trust, will be quite a stretch. But still, there is wide spread belief that anyone will be a better option than the authoritative Musharraf. What gives?

Let it be clear that defending dictators is not my thing. But still, but still, I want to ask, what real difference is there between Bush and Musharraf, between Musharraf and Vladimir Putin? All three leaders are obsessed with power. Their own turf is the only turf as far as they’re concerned. Maybe the Bush administration has subtler ploys in controlling the U.S. media that more or less toes the party line. Musharraf, on the other hand, is so much clumsier. The man doesn’t know the meaning of subtlety. He brandishes power like a little boy playing with all his toy soldiers and GI Joes and robots at once.

But let it be known to the American public that the Pakistani media has had a much freer reign compared to Russia in terms of freedom of speech. While GEO TV was airing a talk show featuring a transvestite taking cheap shots at Mr. Musharraf, Mr. Putin disallowed virtually any criticism on the airwaves. Russian opposition parties have engaged with riot police and several members, including intellectuals, have been arrested for challenging the Putin’s presidential hegemony. Is this any different from the lawyers hunted down and put under house arrest during Musharraf’s recent crackdown? I think not.

Why is it then that Musharraf, and only Musharraf the bad guy? Putin is bringing forth the new face of Russia and Bush is containing the war against terror. Poor Mr. Musharraf is causing nothing but trouble. Pakistanis are sick and tired of the General. And they’re placing their bets elsewhere. But let’s just pause for a moment and think about the implications. If Pakistanis truly believe that self-governance, a weak power center and a curb on religious extremism will be the case in the new Pakistan, the one without Musharraf, then they are seriously deluded. Nothing is going to change. To find proof, all you need to do is consult the history books. The period between 1970-1988 will provide the bulk of the evidence.

Old wine in new bottles. That will be the likely scenario for Pakistan. It has happened before. And it will happen again. I’m not arguing in favor of Musharraf or the military. Because of all their shortcomings, Pakistan has suffered a great deal. But this country cannot possibly hope for a better outcome as long as the rulers don’t change their ways. Every politician in the world is motivated by self interest. Musharraf is no angel. Neither is Bush. Nor is Putin. Ditto for Zardari and Sharif. Regardless of free and fair elections, it is ultimately human beings who govern nations and no human being is perfect. In fact, many human beings are flawed and irrational and that especially applies to the champions of Pakistani leadership. Let that be remembered in discussions about the brave new future.


Maliha Masood has worked as a policy consultant at the International Crisis Group, a think tank in Islamabad. She teaches international relations at Edmonds Community College based in Seattle, WA.


Crisis in Gaza? Not for Obama or Clinton
by John Nichols, The Nation
















“Israeli aircraft and troops attacked Palestinian positions in northern Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 46 people and wounding more than 100 in the deadliest day of fighting in more than a year.”

“Hamas says Israel bombs Gaza Interior Ministry”

“Gaza residents are told to boil drinking water as purifying chlorine runs out”

“Escalating fighting renews threats of an Israeli invasion of Gaza”

“Rice heads to Israel”

That’s the news of the day.

The next president will have to deal with the reality of a humanitarian, political and military crisis in the Middle East that grows worse with each passing year because of the internationally recognized reality that the United States — while profoundly influential in the region — fails to operate as an honest or effective player.

So what is the response from the Barack Obama campaign on this desperate day?

“Barack makes a surprise stop at the Sombrero Festival in Brownsville, Texas,” announces his website.

And what of the Hillary Clinton campaign?

“Our campaign announced that we’ve raised approximately $35 million in contributions for the month of February,” declares her website.

Search as one might at mid-day, but you won’t find a statement on the exploding crisis in the Middle East.

Of course these candidates are locked in a serious competition that may be heading for some sort of conclusion with Tuesday’s Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont primaries. But couldn’t they at least bother to appear interested in the challenges that one of them might face as president?

None of us should be unrealistic. It would be ridiculous at this point to expect Obama or Clinton to display the concern for the plight of innocent Palestinians evidenced by Jimmy Carter… or even by the recently-engaged George Bush.

But failing to even discuss the burgeoning crisis in the Middle East sends a signal that should trouble people on all sides of the debate.

Carter told me a few months ago that the only way for a president to make progress toward peace in the region is to begin working on Middle East issues even before taking the oath of office.

If knowledge, concern and evidence of determination are not on display from the start, said the president who forged functional relations between Israel and Egypt, it will be impossible to advance the arduous process of peacemaking.

That Obama and Clinton are not inclined to look up from their campaigning for long enough to address an international crisis is probably to be expected. But that doesn’t make it any less unsettling. And if their current disengagement foreshadows things to come, then the talk of “change” that has so energized the 2008 presidential race will almost certainly turn out to have been just that: talk.

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