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Tag: Barack Obama

Why you should vote for Obama

If you’re reading Feministe and you’re American, you’re probably planning on voting for Obama anyway. But The New Yorker lays out all the reasons why that vote is so important; it’s the best juxtaposition I’ve read of Obama’s policies with McCain’s. Read it, pass it on, etc etc. The closing lines:

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Live-Blogging the Debate Tonight

We’ll be live-blogging the Presidential debate tonight at 9pm EST. We’re using software that allows you all to comment and participate in the live-blog with us, so we hope you’ll tune in to Feministe and C-SPAN at the same time and be a part of our big ol’ snark-fest.

See you tonight!

(And remember, you can also find Feministe on Twitter. And Feministe bloggers Holly and Jack will be liveblogging over at Jack’s place with a bunch of other awesome folks, so check that out as well).

The Man Behind the Obama Smears Also Supports Tort Reform*

You know when the New York Times describes you as “a prodigious filer of law suits,” it’s only going to go downhill** — especially when the caption to your picture is “Andy Martin is known for filing many lawsuits.” His mother must be proud.

[Anyone for a game of “Is it real news or is it the Onion?”]

But this guy apparently has credibility among the FreeRepublic crowd: He’s appeared on Fox News — on Hannity’s America and in a documentary-style program where he pushed the lie that Obama was trained to overthrow the government — and he’s quoted as an expert in some right-wing propaganda rags. His Fox segment was watched by 3 million people. He’s the one who started the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

So who are the right-wingers relying on for their information about Barack Obama? Well, among Andy Martin’s accomplishments:

-Graduating law school, but having his Illinois bar admission blocked after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

-Running for president twice, and running for public office on both parties’ tickets in at least three states (and losing every time).

-Being the inspiration for the CBS documentary “See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits,” about his prodigious lawsuit-filing.

-Filing so many law suits that a federal judge barred him from filing any more without preliminary approval. At least one of those suits was filed against the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, for not supporting Mr. Martin

-Running for Congress with the purpose of, among other things, “exterminat[ing] Jew power.”

-Claiming to care about the potential threat that “Muslim” Obama would pose to Israel, while calling a judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race,” and making charming comments like “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did” and “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome.”

This guy’s press releases go on the front page of right-wing websites like FreeRepublic; he goes on Fox News, where his opinion is taken seriously; and he is a featured “expert” in several right-wing books.

Once you’re done laughing, are you a little bit scared?

____________________________________
*Not really, but it would be funny.
**Or uphill, I suppose, depending on your view of these things.

Required Reading on Racism and the Right Wing

First, Adam Serwer on another right-wing dogwhistle phrase: What Right Wingers Mean When They Call Obama Socialist. He explores the long history of American politicians using “socialist” as short-hand for “scary black person”:

Conservatives, now and in the past, have turned to “socialism” and “communism” as shorthand to criticize black activists and political figures since the civil-rights era. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X as written by Alex Haley, Malcolm recalls being confronting by a government agent tailing him in Africa, not long after his pilgrimage to Mecca. The agent was convinced that Malcolm was a communist. Malcolm spent years under surveillance because of such bizarre suspicions. Likewise, J. Edgar Hoover spent years attempting to link Martin Luther King Jr. to the communist cause. King, for his part, welcomed everyone who embraced the cause of black civil rights, regardless of their ideological ties. This included communists and socialists, but the idea that a devout man of God like King saw black rights as a mere step in a worldwide communist revolution was absurd. Malcolm was a conservative. King was a liberal. To their enemies, they were simply communists.

The feeling that black-rights activists were part of a front for communism and socialism was widespread. Jerry Falwell famously criticized “the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.” Falwell charged, “It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.” For the agents of intolerance, things haven’t changed much. On October 9, a McCain supporter told the candidate that he was angry about “socialists taking over our country.” McCain told him he was right to be angry.

The right wing continues to link the fight for black equality with socialism and communism. At the website of conservatism’s flagship publication, National Review, conservatives like Andy McCarthy argue whether Obama is “more Maoist than Stalinist,” and National Review writer Lisa Schiffren explicitly argued this summer that Obama must have communist links based on his interracial background. Schiffren mused, “for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.”

This conclusion is one she shares with Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s, who declared that “amalgamation is ultimately the goal of the Communist element.”

And Megan at Jezebel — who, as a sidenote, has become one of my favorite bloggers, if you aren’t already reading her stuff — writes Just Say It: The Race-Baiting Tactics Of John McCain And Sarah Palin Are Reprehensible.

This is not purple Band-Aids and flip-flops, this is not “George Bush is a war criminal and should be prosecuted.” This is also not simple name calling: calling someone a traitor, or accusing him of treason, calling “off with his head” is a call for someone’s death, not an effort to mock or simply belittle him. This is hate speech, this is, in some cases, a series of threats against people’s lives and they should be stopped, immediately and directly by the candidates, who should say without equivocation that such speech and such threats are not welcome. But they won’t, because this is the new McCain strategy: portray Obama as the outsider, the threat to America, the guy cavorting with terrorists — who, in the minds’ eyes of many of these people, are not white college professors, let’s add —, the one who doesn’t understand the “real” America. This is code for “white” America. The McCain campaign is using some horrible, twisted fear that apparently lives in the hearts of too many Americans that there are two Americas (as John Edwards said) and that they are a white one and a black one, a good one and a bad one, an honorable one and a hooliganish one, a democratic one and a socialist one. And there is a time and a place to give people the benefit of the doubt, and there is a time and a place for the media to stand up and say: we know your faces, we know what you are and we reject you.

Read ’em both. Adam and Megan are right: This isn’t just about differences of political opinion or the usual “liberals-are-socialist-pussies” rhetoric. This is getting scary. John McCain and Sarah Palin may not be the ones yelling “Kill him!” at rallies, but they are instigating their supporters and playing the fear card as hard as they can. And that’s dangerous — when they continue to position Barack Obama as a threat to America and our very way of life, they send the message that something needs to be done. Some conservatives have already suggested “the fucking solution” — a noose.

This isn’t politics as usual — although I suppose it is a rehashing of segregationist-era tactics that never explicitly promoted violence, but made it clear enough. To quote Georgia Congressman John Lewis:

“During another period, in the not-too-distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights.

“Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

Guilt by Association

As long as we’re talking about the presidential contenders’ ties to terrorists:

PFAW points out:

Senator John McCain has been making a lot of baseless accusations lately, but he is the one with the troubling past. McCain and Marylin Shannon — a 2008 McCain delegate and former vice chair of the Oregon Republican Party — both appeared at an August, 1993 fundraiser for the far right Oregon Citizens Alliance. McCain appeared against the advice of Mark Hatfield, a GOP senator from Oregon, who feared that the group’s extremist views would taint McCain.

Shannon, who attended this year’s Republican National Convention as a McCain delegate, spoke immediately before McCain and “praised the Grants Pass woman accused of shooting an abortion doctor in Wichita” earlier in the month, referring to her as a “fine lady.” When McCain spoke next, he said nothing about Shannon’s vile comments and delivered his speech as prepared.

Just a few months later, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve a crucial anti-domestic terrorism bill, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. McCain opposed the bill.

Between 1977 and 1993 there were “36 bombings, 81 arsons, 131 death threats, 84 assaults, 2 kidnappings, 327 clinic invasions, 71 chemical attacks, more than 6,000 blockades and related disruptions” against reproductive health clinics. Congress was finally spurred into action by the killing of Dr. David Gunn outside a Florida clinic in March of 1993. In August, Dr. George Tiller was shot and wounded in Wichita.

“When anti-choice extremists were terrorizing American women and their doctors, John McCain had multiple opportunities to make what should have been an easy choice,” said Kathryn Kolbert, President of People For the American Way, and a longtime women’s rights advocate who successfully argued a crucial abortion rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. “But he chose political expediency over law and order. He didn’t say a word when Marylin Shannon sympathized with an attempted killer. He voted against the clinic access bill even as everyday Americans were being assaulted and besieged by domestic terrorists. As someone who faced repeated threats for work on behalf of reproductive rights, I am deeply disturbed by John McCain’s willingness to stand with and side with sympathizers and enablers of domestic terrorism.”


Whatever you think about Obama’s limited contact with Bill Ayers, there hasn’t been any evidence that Ayers ever condoned or promoted terrorism in Obama’s presence. There hasn’t been any evidence that Obama ever met with Ayers during his presidential campaign, or that Obama is still willing to lend Ayers a sympathetic ear.

That isn’t the case for John McCain, who was meeting with militant anti-choice activist and Operation Rescue supporter Paul Schenck as recently as last week.

Read More…Read More…

Live from Nashville, it’s Tuesday night.

Hokay.  I’m here to live-blog the debate, so doggone-it you betcha I’m gonna write a preview.

First, the state of the race: a done deal. Two weeks ago it looked like and Obama win, but the questions was ‘narrow or solid?’  now it looks like an Obama win, but the question is ‘solid or landslide?’  If the numbers keep rolling in for Obama (numbers like double digits in Virginia), in two weeks the only question remaining will be which historic landslide to compare it to.  The negative tack McCain is taking 1: hasn’t shown any favourable-to-McCain effects in the polls, and 2: will likely backfire, since McCain and Obama’s favourables are diverging for the first time in the race.  Also, Obama has better mud, once it gets slung: the Keating stuff is non-trivial and hits close to home in the middle of a financial crisis.

Second, a word on the format: a classic Town Hall debate, but with very strict rules.  All questions from the public (submitted in advance on video), no follow-ups, no rebuttals, no crosstalk.  John McCain is most at home in a Town Hall format, and with the other rules likely working in his favour, this debte seems to be campaign-teeball for McCain.  However, with such a strict format, it will be difficult to introduce any game-changers.  (Unless one of the questions asked is “Senator McCain, do you have any verifiable photographic evidence of Obama doin beer-bongs with bin Laden and Louis Farrakhan?” and the answer happens to be “yes.”)  What Obama needs here is to get through the debate without saying anything outright inflamatory (inflammatory of “death to Israel” or “whitey can suck it” proportions), but what McCain needs is a miracle (a miracle of “ghosts of Reagan, Kennedy, and both Roosevelts join him onstage” proportions).

Third, submissions for the drinking game:  Sip for the usuals (maverick, change), but double if they’re used ironically by the opponent.  Sip for Alaska, double if Obama mentions that he hasn’t been there.  Sip once for each Rezko, Ayers, or Wright, twice for a “Chicago politician” or any other code for “black”.  Finish your drink for a Keating.  I should note that I plan to keep a few counts, but I will likely get caught up in the action and forget half-way through.

Fourth, and final, predictions:  I predict it will feel boring and contrived compared to the last two, it will be relatively uneventful, and afterward it will be declared a “tie”, and the fact that McCain needs worlds better than a tie at this point will get no better than lip service.  I also predict that we’ll be able to milk an entertaining live-blog feed out of it, nonetheless.  The only thing that will surprise me in this debate if I somehow get surprised (do you follow?).  In that regard, it’s the direct opposite of the Biden-Palin debate.

So, enjoy the debate, kids, and remember: if you aren’t registered, and it’s not too late in your state, DO IT NOW.

Ridin’ Dirty

I’m home during a half day — which is lucky because I’ve got a head cold that beats all head colds — catching up on political news. Part of my research includes watching The View, which has gotten consistently more interesting since the addition of Whoopi Goldberg and the sad, plodding political leanings of Elizabeth Hasselbeck, who thinks Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayres is exactly the same as McCain’s relationship to the Keating Five scandal.

Hasselbeck’s is a new GOP talking point (she practically read her defense of McCain-Plain verbatim from a campaign email yesterday), one of the points that Palin has been casually mentioning on the campaign trail by trying to tie Ayres’ activities with The Weathermen to Obama to brand him a domestic terrorist. Although I think Kathy G may be minimizing Obama’s working relationship with Ayres (I don’t know, I’m a layperson), she has two interesting posts on the prevalence of the Ayres family in their Chicago neighborhood, which is to say that if you live there and are even nominally active in Chicago politics, you’ve probably rubbed shoulders with them. All fact-based reporting suggests that they didn’t have much of a relationship at all.

(Apparently that Todd Palin was a card-carrying member of the secessionist AIP, and involved enough that everyone assumed Sarah Palin was a member as well, isn’t an indicator of radical, unpatriotic beliefs.)

The real story, if the story is about character and judgement, as people like my mother assert, is this:

On this day of tit-for-tat politics, the Obama campaign missed the real reason why the Keating Five remain relevant 20 years later. The point lies not in the details of the bygone scandal (trust me, they are complex and murky), but in the way that McCain has abandoned in this presidential campaign all the good-government habits that he adopted after he was chastised by the Ethics Committee. As he recounted in his memoir, “I decided right then that not talking to reporters or sharply denying even the appearance of a problem wasn’t going to do me any good. I would henceforth accept every single request for an interview … and answer every question as completely and straightforwardly as I could.”

McCain, who until the spring was indeed the most accessible major politician in America, has veered completely in the other direction, avoiding reporters at one point for more than a month. As the decider on the Republican ticket, McCain is also responsible for the Arctic-chill media strategy that has almost completely muzzled Sarah Palin since her selection as his running mate.

Far more disturbing is that it has become difficult to believe that John McCain recalls the larger lessons about personal honor that he supposedly carried away from his Keating Five disgrace.

Indeed. Several years back when McCain was at his maverickiest, I remember thinking that he would be the only Republican on the stage that I would ever consider voting for. He was purportedly a man of integrity who, for all his faults, appeared to break from the GOP’s platforms where they made fiscal sense. As a person, McCain vowed never to take the low road. He was different than that, he said, especially during his presidential campaign in 2000, where he was accused by supporters of George W. Bush, and arguably by the Bush campaign itself, of fathering an “illegitimate black child” — Cindy McCain adopted their daughter Bridget from Bangladesh — that his wife Cindy was an drug addict, that he was gay, and that he was a “Manchurian Candidate” who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days. But today, members of McCain’s campaign staff include the old guard that once attacked him on these charges. And ironically, although they try to dogwhistle Americans who hold onto racist caricatures when they watch Barack Obama take the national stage, they may be sounding the death toll for the effectiveness of the Southern strategy.

And it’s sad, really sad, that this man whose entire political career was based on the idea of a different, more transparent kind of politics, has fallen to the level where he will sit idly by as he benefits from painting Obama as an untrustworthy, sinister Other. His supporters get it, too:

But it goes further than boos and hyperbole. During this Palin campaign stop in Florida,

“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

“Boooo!” said the crowd.

“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'” she continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

I wonder if Palin didn’t blink at that brand of domestic terrorism. But that’s me.

Please allow me to introduce myself…

Good evening, and be forewarned.  Jill has invited me to live-blog the next presidential debate, and I’ve wrangled the invitation into a de facto guest-blogging gig.  I warn you for a simple, but important, reason:  I have a strong tendency to try to say everything all the time, and to get wordy about it.  For example, by abandoned first draft ran nearly 400 words before I said anything relevant to the US Presidential Election.  I’ll try to behave myself.

My name is Ryan Rutley, I post in the comments, and you may remember my posting a few years ago under the name KnifeGhost.

I live in Victoria, BC (yes, Canada), and I’m an absolute geek for American Presidential politics.  As you may know, Canada’s in the middle of a federal election (we vote on the 14th of October), and although I care, and have made up my mind (Green!), Canadian Federal politics are at a low point and I can’t be bothered to may any attention to it.

I remember that Reagan was at some point the president, and then some guy named Bush was, but 1992 was the first year I was aware that the election was happening and that one guy or the other won.  I was 10.  In 1996, I was making cracks about Bob Dole with my friends over ICQ.  I was 14.  In 2000, I rushed home after school each day to mix up a big glass of chocolate milk and watch the primaries on CNN.  I was pulling for a Bradley-McCain election, had no particular love for Gore, and by November I was a big Nader fan.  (Hey, I said I’m Canadian.  I didn’t actually vote for him.  For the record, Gore ran a dismal campaign, and should have fired everybody remotely tied to the Clintons in June.)  I was 18.  In 2004, I read Salon.com religiously for election coverage, was pulling for Dean (pettiest scandal EVAR), tried to work up a good head of optimism for Kerry, but we all know how that ended.  I was 22.

Now, I’m 26, and the greatest leader of our generation (so far) is poised for a strong win in one month, and I think is on pace for a landslide.  I’m here to try to provide some perspective, some analysis, some dare-I-say wisdom, but at very least I can promise some smartass one-liners.  And that, ultimately, is enough to keep me happy.

I’ll wrap it up now because if I don’t I’ll write a novel.  I’ll save that for, at the earliest, Sunday evening.

Thanks, Jill, for the invitation, thanks, readers, for the indulgence, and thanks, previous bloggers on Feministe, for being such illustrious company to now be a part of.

(Register to vote, if you haven’t already.  I haven’t.  Because in Canada all you need to vote is to prove your identity and address.  And all citizens are eligible to vote.  Cause we’re wacky socialists about that kinda stuff.)