2008 President

Why I'm Voting for Barack Obama on November 4

dlindorff — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:04:31 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I was going to vote for Ralph Nader this November 4.

It was an easy decision. I live in Pennsylvania, which is now,
according to all the polls, reliably in the Obama column, with the
Democratic candidate holding an insurmountable lead in the polls of 14
percent over Republican John McCain—enough to overcome even the most
devious Republican vote suppression techniques and voting machine
chicanery.

I was going to vote for Nader because I find Obama to be a
seriously flawed candidate. He ran early on an anti-Iraq War platform,
saying not that invading Iraq was wrong legally and morally, but that
it was “the wrong war.” Since then, he has backed away even from saying
he wanted the war ended, opting for a 16-month withdrawal timetable
that would have the killing and dying in that sad land going on longer
than most wars this nation has fought. He has also called for an
escalation of the war in Afghanistan, despite clear evidence that more
troops just will make the situation there worse, and has called for an
expansion of the US military budget, to increase the size of the Army
and Marines, which will only encourage more warmongering, more killing
and more waste of precious resources.

Obama also sold us all out by going along with a bill sought by
President Bush granting immunity to telecom companies that aided and
abetted the illegal and unconstitutional spying on Americans by the
National Security Agency—spying that we now know is massive almost
beyond our imagination, even including the monitoring of private family
conversations of American service personnel in Iraq, of journalists,
and almost certainly of Bush administration political “enemies.” By
backing that obscene bill, Obama has made it almost impossible for
victims of this police-state surveillance campaign to sue and find out
what the Bush/Cheney administration has been up to all these years.

In so many ways, Obama has tacked to the middle or even the right, while spouting soaring but empty rhetoric about “change.”

Meanwhile, everything Ralph Nader says makes perfect sense. He has
consistently called the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the crimes that they
are. He has consistently called for a nationalized health care system,
which every other modern nation has long since proven to be a more
cost-effective and health-effective way to run a medical system than
the failed free-market approach advocated by Obama and the rest of the
Establishment political system. He has correctly denounced the economic
bailout as welfare for the rich and for the corporate criminals who
have been sucking the life out of the US economy for years.

And yet, I think I have to vote of Obama this year.

The reason is partly because I know I would vote for Obama if I
lived in Ohio or Indiana, where the race between McCain and Obama is
too close to call, and so, to vote for Nader when it is simply safe to
do so here in Pennsylvania is really a cop-out.

But even more important, when I see the hate-filled racists and
right-wing yahoos braying at McCain and Palin rallies, when I hear
people calling for Obama to be killed or lynched, and when I see the
rabid hate mail circulating in email inboxes falsely labeling him as a
secret Muslim, a terrorist, a Marxist and a black nationalist, I want
to see the man resoundingly win this election.

But it’s more than that. I also, perhaps against all logic and
experience, admit that I expect something good of an Obama presidency.

Call me naïve, but based upon my own life experience, I keep
thinking that a guy who has worked as a community organizer, a Harvard
Law School grad (and even law journal editor!) who could have named his
price at a Wall Street law firm, but who chose instead to be a
political and community activist, a guy who has relatives who live in
humble surroundings in Kenya, and who spent some of his childhood
actually living in a Third World Asian nation, not to mention a guy who
has surely felt the sting of being called a nigger, has to bring
something new to the White House. Certainly no other president in the
history of the country has come to the office with such a background.

Sure Obama is no leftist candidate. But if he were, he wouldn’t be
heading for an election victory. He wouldn’t even be the Democratic
nominee. He’d be, at best, where Dennis Kucinich is—holding a seat in
Congress where his every progressive effort would be stymied or mocked
by the House leadership.

The unfortunate reality is that the true left in the US is a joke
(many of its purists even mock successful left candidates political
figures like Kucinich, for god’s sake!). Fractured and fractious small
groupings have little or no link to the organized labor
movement—traditionally the bedrock of any successful left political
power. And the labor movement itself is as weak as it has ever been and
keeps growing weaker. The left in the US, such as it is, has even less
connection with the broad mass of the American public, thanks to years
of successful propaganda linking it to Stalin, Mao and Soviet Communism.

I have no illusions about the progressivity of the Democratic
Party. Certainly it has its progressive elected officials who have made
it into office—people like Kucinich, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Russ
Feingold, Rep. Maxine Waters and the like. But clearly, the Democratic
Party has shown itself to be in thrall to the moneyed interests on Wall
Street and in the corporate suites.

That said, there are important things that could happen—and I
stress the word could, not would—if this election were to be won by
Obama and by Democrats in the Congress. One of these things is that
there will be new Supreme Court justices named over the next four
years. Some will inevitably replace some of the aging “liberals” on the
bench (some of whom have not always been so liberal on economic
issues). Some could also replace current conservative justices
(Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both obese men, don’t
look terribly healthy to me, Justice Kennedy is getting on in years,
and even Chief Justice Roberts, while looking hale, has a problem with
epilepsy or some other ailment that has caused him to collapse in a
frothing fit of unconscious on occasion).

Also important is legislation to make it less of an obstacle course
for workers to win union representation and labor contracts on the job.
A major reason that unions have shrunk from over 30 percent of the
workforce in the 1950s to just 9 percent of the private workforce (and
13 percent of all workplaces, public and private) today, is that labor
law has been whittled away and turned to management’s advantage to such
an extent that it is almost impossible now to win a union election.
Employers who break labor laws suffer no penalty even when found
guilty, and workers who are unfairly fired for union activity can hope,
at best, if they are lucky, to win reinstatement and back pay after
fighting for years. Most just give up.

If a Democratic Congress passed new labor legislation and a
President Obama signed them into law, as he has promised to do, and if
new pro-labor officials were appointed to the national, regional and
local labor relations boards that adjudicate labor issues, we could see
a genuine revival of the labor movement in America with consequences
for workers’ lives, and for the political system that would be far
reaching and profound—and that could even pave the way for a resurgence
of a left/labor political movement.

Finally, with respect to war and militarism, I tend not to take
Obama’s warmongering seriously. Given the man’s background, I am
confident that he is not a militarist by nature. It may be politically
opportunistic for him to try during this campaign to out-tough McCain
on Afghanistan while calling for a wind-down of the war in Iraq, but it
would be a disaster for him to pursue a wider war in Afghanistan after
taking office, ensuring that his presidency, like Bush’s, Lyndon
Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s before him, would be dragged down by an
endless bloody conflict.

A President Obama will have his hands full trying to deal with an
unprecedented financial fiasco, and will want the wars off his plate as
quickly as possible. Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I simply can’t
see a smart guy—and Obama is a smart guy—getting dragged into another
quagmire.

Besides, I have a darker vision, which is that the crisis of global
warming, so long denied by the Bush administration, is going to make
itself felt soon in ways that will be impossible to ignore, and which
will demand a crisis response. Obama, I believe, will be the right
person at the right time, to lead that response.

And that brings me to the final reason I am voting for Obama. As
crazy as John McCain clearly is, with his default setting on war as a
solution for all problems, this sickly and possibly terminally ill old
man has chosen to have a certifiable right-wing, closed-minded, bigoted
and stunningly ignorant religious zealot as his back-up. Sarah Palin,
as vice president, would in all probability end up becoming president
during a McCain first term.

This country and the world simply cannot risk having as the leader
of America an end-of-times believer at this critical moment. It’s not
just the polar bears and the wolves in Alaska who would suffer under a
Palin presidency. It would be all life on earth.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Presidential Campaign Enters the Silly Season

dlindorff — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:12:11 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I’ve been getting some emails that refer to Barack Obama as a
“Manchurian Candidate,” a guy who is somehow hiding a secret radical
and/or Muslim jihadist agenda that will burst forth if he’s elected
president. There is a certain idiot factor at work here, since if Obama
were a closet Weatherman, who somehow learned of and adopted that 1960s
college dropout organzation’s creed at the tender age of 8, it would
have clashed badly with any Muslim teaching he might have picked up as
a student in an Indonesian public school at the same time (he attended
an Indonesian public schoolfrom the age of 6 to 8 before transferring
to a Catholic-run institution).

But since some low-wattage and conspiracy-minded people seem ready
to believe this kind of stuff, let’s consider John McCain’s early
background, and the possibility of his being a Manchurian Candidate
too. Fair’s fair, right?

Okay. McCain, it turns out, was actually born outside the US, in
the Panama Canal Zone, which in 1936 was territory leased from Panama.
His father, a Navy officer, was stationed there with his wife at the
time of McCain’s birth. Now it’s a safe bet that McCain was largely
raised—fed, diapered, and spoken to—at that age by a local Panamian
woman. That’s what, after all, you do when you are an elite officer and
the wife of an elite officer in a foreign country where low-wage help
is abundant. Who knows what subversive ideologies were poured into the
young McCain’s tender ears at that vulnerable period of his life by his
Panamanian nurse? Maybe that would explain McCain’s support for an
amnesty program for immigrants from Latin America a few years back.
Does he have a secret agenda to throw open the doors of America to
Latin American immigrants once in the White House?

And worse yet, maybe his Panamian amah was a Marxist! Lord knows
that Central America in the mid-1930s was a hotbed of revolution. The
dreaded Augusto Sandino had only just been executed in Nicaragua, just
north of the Zone, two years before McCain’s birth, following a bloody
guerrilla war against US Marines, and the region was full of bitter and
vengeful nationalist and Marxist revolutionaries bent on throwing the
US out of Latin America. Could his nurse have been one of these people,
whispering and implanting the language of liberation into the young
boy’s still unformed mind, ready to spring to life once he assumed high
office in Washington?

Then we turn to McCain’s prisoner of war days in the hands of the
North Vietnamese. Certainly his mind was weak and vulnerable to
control. While many of McCain’s fellow POWs endured five, six or more
years of torture without cracking, he is said to have begun spilling
secrets and agreeing to broadcast anti-American propaganda statements
after only four days of torture shortly after his capture. We also know
that the Communists had a sophisticated system of mind control
developed, which was shared among the Communist nations of the USSR,
China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Were these techniques applied to
the captive McCain, and did they leave him after five long years of
captivity robotically programmed to seek and win the presidency, only
then to launch a campaign of sabotage to soften America up for
Communist takeover?

This prospect seems much more likely than that some Muslim teacher got to Obama in his grammar school in Indonesia.

Actually, I find the Obama Manchurian Candidate theory much weaker
than the McCain Manchurian Candidate theory, just based upon my own
experience. I was, after all, put through some serious indoctrination
by my own family. My parents sent me to Sunday School at the local
Congregational Church, from the age of six to the age of about 11. I
can still remember the earnest parent volunteers teaching us all the
nonsense about the earth being formed in six days, about Adam and Eve,
the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the Virgin birth (What
was a virgin, I wondered? They wouldn’t say…), and the crucifixion and
resurrection. None of it stuck. Despite the indoctrinators’ best
efforts, I left Sunday School an atheist and remain one today. The only
thing I really learned in Sunday School was how to smoke—something a
number of us learned together while skipping class and hiding out in
the church attic. Is Christian dogma that much weaker that it can fail
to impress a young mind while Muslim dogma can take a firm hold in an
even shorter time? What an insult to Christianity!

My daughter too, is testimony to the limits of early childhood
propaganda efforts. At the age of 7, we brought her to Shanghai, China,
where for a year, she attended first grade in a local Chinese public
school. She learned excellent Chinese there, but though there was
considerable indoctrination in Maoist theory, with special focus on the
life of the young Mao and also of the selfless workers’ hero Lei Feng
(they actually had one daily class called “Loving the Country class”
and most other subjects had a propaganda aspect), and though she also
attended a fifth grade Chinese public school when we returned to China
a few years later, for a stay in Xi’an, at 24 she is hardly a Commie or
a Maoist, I’m sure though, that should she someday decide to run for
president, some of the same people who suspect Obama of being a closet
Muslim terrorist will say she harbors secret Communist sentiments from
her early school years.

Such is the state of some American minds.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. HIs
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n I’ve been getting some emails that refer to Barack Obama as a “Manchurian Candidate,” a guy who is somehow hiding a secret radical and/or Muslim jihadist agenda that will burst forth if he’s elected president. There is a certain idiot factor at work here, since if Obama were a closet Weatherman, who somehow learned of and adopted that 1960s college dropout organzation’s creed at the tender age of 8, it would have clashed badly with any Muslim teaching he might have picked up as a student in an Indonesian public school at the same time (he attended an Indonesian public schoolfrom the age of 6 to 8 before transferring to a Catholic-run institution).\r\n\r\n But since some low-wattage and conspiracy-minded people seem ready to believe this kind of stuff, let’s consider John McCain’s early background, and the possibility of his being a Manchurian Candidate too. Fair’s fair, right? \r\n\r";
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The Power of "No"!

dlindorff — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:53:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Congressional switchboard is jammed. You can get through, but it
takes a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators
at the Capitol say it's been that way for a week now, as Americans
across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations
with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote "No" on the
Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today is no exception, after Democratic Party leaders (and both
major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama)
bought into the plan after adding some window-dressing measures
designed to make it look more palatable. This shows that the public is
not fooled.

People see clearly that this is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the
very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the US economy
for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do
whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant
oversight or regulation.

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written
of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the
financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one--getting
the toxic mortgages off the banks' books and onto taxpayers' hands.
Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks' balance sheets in the form
of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which
will mean they still won't start lending money again. Left unaddressed
too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably
lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz
says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system--a
major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.

Stiglitz doesn't even address a fifth problem which is that this
trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank
failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you're already talking
$1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money, the stage
is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that
will reverberate through the economy. Consider: if the dollar
collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of
huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in
dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that
Americans import--more than half of everything we use in daily life
thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing--will rise
dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding,
interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what's left of the
economy to a grinding halt.

All of this is readily predictable--and indeed a group of over 200 prominent economists has written Congress
joining Stiglitz in opposing the bailout plan--but that doesn't matter
to the proponents of the bailout in Washington. What they want is to
get past Election Day, and the bailout may do that, unless the public
gets really aroused.

The tsunami of calls and emails to Congress, and last week's
nationwide demonstrations against the bailout suggest that the public
is waking up to this looming disaster and to the fact that they are
being sold a bill of goods.

If you haven't made an effort to call your two senators and your
representative to demand that they vote "No" on this bailout, do it now
(the number is 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121), and don't give up when
you get a busy signal. That's a sign that you are not alone. Just keep
hitting "redial" until you get through. At that point, get the
operator, before switching you, to give you direct numbers for your
three members of Congress, so you can bypass the main switchboard
number after that.

Unlike the 2002 rush to war against Iraq, this latest bum's rush can still be stopped.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Does Anyone Want to Buy a Private Pension Plan? Going Once...

dlindorff — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:17:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

That deafening silence you hear coming from the McCain campaign is
straight-talkin’ John touting his plan for privatizing Social
Security...not.

With Wall Street banks falling like dominoes, a hundred billion dollars vanishing overnight, and the Treasury
Department scampering about trying to prop up failing enterprises
from Bear Stearns to Fannie Mae, and with domestic and global equity
and bond markets swooning, Americans are afraid to open those envelopes
that come every quarter telling them the value of their hard-earned
401(k) retirement plans.

No wonder John McCain isn’t touting privatizaton these days.

It’s not just that many of those private 401(k) plans McCain and
his ilk so love for the working stiff were invested in the very
financial institutions that have seen their share values drop to zero,
or in other financial institutions that were themselves heavily
invested in the stocks or debt instruments of the growing list of
failed institutions. It’s that the tottering US financial edifice is
shaking the broader markets, making stocks, bonds, and even giant
insurance companies like AIG look like houses of cards, and a poor bet
for funding one’s dotage.

Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, says that the Federal
Reserve Bank and the US Treasury Department, in letting Lehman Bros,
the nation’s fourth largest investment bank, go bankrupt, instead of
doing yet another government bailout, was a kind of financial Russian
roulette. Could Lehman’s collapse lead to a wholesale collapse of Wall
Street and the US banking system, ala 1929-31? Krugman says,
incredibly, that nobody really knows, including Fed Chairman Ben
Bernacke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

That’s not the kind of thing you want to hear when you’ve managed,
over the course of a working life, to save maybe a few hundred grand in
a tax-deferred retirement plan that is all invested in stocks and
bonds. Nor is it very comforting, if you are one of the millions of
Americans who put your money into some kind of insurance annuity,
expecting to get a guaranteed stream of income for life, to hear that
AIG, the largest insurance company and one of the biggest issuers of
such “private pension” programs, is struggling to come up with $40
billion in cash to avoid going belly up itself.

Now fortunately, for nearly all American workers, there is a
backstop: Social Security, which is not invested in any financial
instruments, and which pays out monthly benefits to retired and
disabled workers and their dependents based not upon the whims of the
markets but on the lifetime earnings of the worker in question. Unlike
a 401(k) investment, which is dependent for its size and reliability on
the performance of the financial markets in which its assets are
invested, or an annuity, which is dependent upon the financial survival
and viability of the insurance company which issued it, Social Security
is a program in which the payments of benefits are an obligation of the
federal government, and are paid from a fund of money that has been
paid into by the retiree and her employer in earlier years, by current
workers and their employers who pay a tax on current earnings, and, if
necessary, by supplemental funds allocated by the Congress. Social
Security benefits are adjusted each year for inflation (though since
President Bill Clinton, those adjustments have been reduced because of
a sleight of hand that makes inflation appear to be less than it really
is).

McCain, and Republicans in general, have been pressing for years to
have Social Security privatized, or partially privatized, with at least
some of the money taken from employees and employers for Social
Security invested in financial instruments such as stocks or bonds.
They’ve tried to sell this snake oil to young workers by pointing to
the rising stock market, and claiming ominously that some day, with so
many current workers approaching retirement, Social Security will go
“bankrupt.” Last year, the Bush Administration, which has filled the
Social Security Administration with GOP hacks, actually had notices
sent out to every American worker warning that “unless something is
done,” Social Security might not be there for younger workers when it’s
their turn to retire.

This kind of cynical scare tactic is beneath contempt, and is
designed to weaken support for one of the most significant progressive
legacies of the New Deal. The reality is that as the Baby Boom
generation reaches retirement, starting with the first Boomers who will
hit 65 in 2011, the elderly lobby, already enormously powerful, will
swell to become perhaps the most powerful “special interest” voting
bloc this nation has ever seen. Retired Americans will have the
electoral clout in another 10 years to make Social Security whatever
they want it to be.

They (we really, since at 59 I am part of that generation) will
insure that the government pays us and our fellow retirees a decent
retirement stipend, and we will also insist that reforms be undertaken
to insure that our kids also get secure retirements.

We will do this not by undermining the program, as McCain and other
Republicans have called for, by privatizing all or part Social
Security, but by making sure that every dollar earned by even the
richest of people is taxed, instead of having the social security tax
limited to the first roughly $100,000 of earnings. We will demand that
if more taxes are needed, they be paid by employers, not workers.
Currently employers and employees each pay about 7.5% of wages as a
payroll tax into the Social Security Trust Fund. There is no reason why
that split should be 50/50, though. Employers could pay a bigger share.
(Right wing economists try to argue that any tax paid by an employer
ultimately comes out of the employees’ wages, but this ignores the law
of supply and demand: workers don’t negotiate wages, or accept a job at
a certain pay level, based upon the gross wage being paid, but on what
they will be taking home each payday. Extra taxes paid by an employer
could not be automatically taken out of employee pay. They would have
to come out of corporate profits.)

The timing of the current spreading financial crisis has exposed
McCain’s call for privatization of Social Security as a bad idea
masquerading as reform. Since McCain can be expected to pursue the idea
if elected, it’s just one more reason for American voters to reject his
candidacy.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/36027';
digg_title = "Does Anyone Want to Buy a Private Pension Plan? Going Once...";
digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n That deafening silence you hear coming from the McCain campaign is straight-talkin’ John touting his plan for privatizing Social Security...not.\r\n\r\n With Wall Street banks falling like dominoes, and the Treasury Department scampering about with trying to prop up failing enterprises from Bear Stearns to Fannie Mae, and with domestic and global equity and bond markets swooning, Americans are afraid to open those envelopes that come every quarter telling them the value of their hard-earned 401(k) retirement plans.\r\n\r\n No wonder John McCain isn’t touting privatizaton these days.\r\n \r";
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Experience is Over-Rated

dlindorff — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:25:42 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Sarah Palin stated again, most recently in her interview yesterday
by ABC’s Charlie Gibson, that she has foreign policy experience because
as governor of Alaska she has been in charge of that state’s National
Guard, and because Alaska is, doggone it, “right next” to Russia.

This made me feel pretty good, because it made me realize that I
have a whole lot of skills and experience which I hadn’t really
appreciated before and that I could perhaps use to get myself out of
this freelance journalism profession, which is not all that great from
a financial perspective.

I, for instance, live very close to the garage where my mechanic
works (I mean, I drive past the place every day and even buy my gas
there), so I’m ready to be a car mechanic (I can’t tell you how many
cars I’ve seen being gone over there, and have even sometimes watched a
bit as my own vehicles were up on the lift). I also live literally
across the street from a large forest, which qualifies me to be a
number of things—forest ranger, lumberjack, and perhaps naturalist.

I’ve also been to the doctor many times, so maybe I should hang a
shingle and open up a medical practice. I swear I’ve got all those exam
questions by memory at this point, and they’ve got nurses to do the
stuff with the arm cuff and the stethoscope.

Of course, the real money these days is in law, and there I’ve really got it nailed. Not only do several lawyers live right in my neighborhood,
but I’ve actually been in court and seen lawyers at work. For that
matter, I even had a lawyer argue a case for me once, when I was being
charged with trespassing at the Pentagon. He wasn’t successful at
getting my fine and jail time dropped, but hey, you learn from other
people’s failures, too. Furthermore, I actually wrote a book with a co-author who is a lawyer. With all that experience, I could certainly be an attorney.

Over the years, I’ve spent time at the seashore, and even went on a
one-week ocean sailing trip, so you’d have to admit oceanography is
almost in my blood. Or perhaps I could be a sea captain. I’m sure I
could do at least as well as the captain of the Exxon Valdez tanker.

Come to think of it, back when I was 16, I hitchhiked up to Alaska
with a friend and spent the summer thumbing around the state, so I know
that place like the back of my hand, which means if Sarah Palin gets
elected and goes to Washington, maybe I could be governor of Alaska.
And then, as governor I’d be commander of a National Guard unit, so I’d
be qualified to be a vice president, or, should the opportunity present
itself, even president of the United States. Actually, I’d be maybe
more experienced than Palin for the job, because I grew up in
Connecticut, and thanks to the small size of the states in my native
New England, have actually been living closer to a foreign
country—Canada—than she, living in Wasilla, has been living to Russia.
In other words, when you think of it, my foreign policy experience is
much greater than hers. Besides, I’ve actually visited Canada a few times, which really boosts my experience in international affairs.

I know some people think that jumping into jobs like president or
vice president of the United States based upon what they might perceive
as limited experience is presumptuous, but that’s because they aren’t
being fair and open-minded. And I’ll admit that it’s hard, with
relatively limited experience, to expect someone like Palin or me to
measure up to the standard of someone like our current vice president,
Dick Cheney, who came to his position after having served previously as
presidential chief of staff, as secretary of defense, and as a member
of Congress. I mean, that’s real experience, and it shows in the fine
job he’s done as VP.

But we shouldn’t let examples like Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld,
another guy who took an important government post—in his case Secretary
of Defense—after having considerable prior experience—make us obsess
about experience. I mean, look at our current president. George W. Bush
got elected in 2000, when his experience consisted of just two terms as
governor of Texas, a state where the governor has a largely ceremonial
role and most of the real work of government is handled by the
legislature, and look what a great job he did in the White House!
Furthermore, his only military experience was as a pilot in a Texas
National Guard unit, most of which tour of duty he missed because he
decided to work on his father’s failed election campaign instead, and
because he didn’t want to take any drug tests, and look what a fine job
he’s done as commander in chief.

This should all make Americans lighten up and be less snooty and
judgemental about what they demand in terms of experience in
presidential and vice presidential candidates. Palin in my view has proved her qualifications for the job. Yesterday she sent her young son off to battle in Iraq to fight against "the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans" on 9-11 seven years ago. What better evidence do we need of this woman's solid grasp of foreign affairs, history and combat?

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

McCain/Palin Campaign Relies on Lazy Thinking and Prejudice to Win

dlindorff — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:17:45 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I got an urgent email from an uncle of mine yesterday evening. A
sweet man, retired career military and very religious, he was genuinely
worried about an email he had received purporting to convey an article
said to have been written by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and
published on June 29, 2008 alleging that much of the Obama campaign's
"small donations" over the Internet had actually come from several Arab
sources overseas.

Now I could see before reading two paragraphs of the alleged column
he forwarded to me that it was not Dowd's acerbic and witty writing
style, but I cannot expect most people who don't even read Dowd to know
that. Two minutes at the computer, however, and I was easily able to
confirm, as anyone could do, that Dowd had never written the article. A
search of the New York Times archive showed she had written on a wholly
different topic--Hillary Clinton--on that day, and moreover, the
non-partisan truth-checking website Snopes.com had a full documented debunking of the scam.

Why this particular campaign dirty trick--and with Karl Rove in the
back seat of the McCain campaign bus I have no doubt that it originated
in the bowels of that campaign, which has not disavowed it--works, and
why the many other vile efforts, like the latest shameful official
McCain TV ad claiming that Obama backs "sex education for
kindergartners," work is that many otherwise decent Americans like my
uncle first of all are primed to believe such crap by a deep-seated
prejudice against people of color, and secondly that the corporate
media which are supposed to be informing us are afraid to call out a
mainstream political candidate for lying and deceiving the public.
Some, like Fox, actually promote these falsehoods.

Look at the news today. Instead of exposing the blatant campaign of
character assassination by the McCain/Palin campaign, it is focused on
the bogus (and frivolous) claim by the McCain campaign that Obama has
called Palin a "pig with lipstick"! (What did Obama really do? He said
that the McCain/Palin ticket's attempt to portray itself as an
anti-pork, anti-Washington, reform campaign is like putting lipstick on
a pig--a common expression used by McCain himself.) The issue becomes
not "Is the McCain campaign charge true?" but rather "Should Obama have
to apologize to Palin?"

What's depressing about this is how well the McCain campaign's swim
in the sewer is working. A nice kid I know who works at our local
garage told me that he couldn't vote for Obama, despite liking his
policies, "because he'll take his oath of office on the Koran." Aside
from the anti-Muslim bias inherent in this statement, it is based upon
false information being spread virally through the internet falsely
claiming, on the basis of no evidence, that Obama is a secret Muslim
and that he took his Senate oath of office on a Koran.

People on the left may wish that Obama were a more overtly
progressive and more expressly anti-war candidate. I certainly do. But
let's get real here for a minute. With the black-baiting that is going
on by the other side, and the gullible and terribly uninformed or even
misinformed electorate out there, and with a national media that will
simply repeat and spread whatever bilious and false charges are made by
the McCain campaign, what chance on earth would a candidate like Obama
have if he were to call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, or for a
government-run medical insurance program? Those who call angrily for
such unambiguous positions by Obama are deluding themselves.

I really have to laugh. He'd be labeled a traitor and a communist,
and you know what? Absent a real analysis and absent critical reporting
by the mainstream media, 90 percent of the American public would
unthinkingly buy that false and ludicrous characterization.

I used to have a higher opinion of my fellow Americans, who had a
reputation for common sense. I used to believe that if a candidate told
them that it made no sense to put insurance companies in charge of
their health care and that people were much healthier and less anxious
about their health and their lives, and spent less on health care in
countries like Canada or Sweden or Germany or France where their health
care was guaranteed by the state, if a candidate told them that half
the money being spent on the US military was a waste and did nothing to
make the nation safer, if a candidate told them that human life on this
planet was in grave danger if nothing was done to seriously reduce
carbon emissions by half or even more, that they would listen and vote
accordingly. I used to think that if only Ralph Nader could shoehorn
his way into the national debates, a wave of popular support would
sweep him into the White House. (And let's be honest here. We on the
left are not immune from this poison of ignorance. I cannot tell you
how many otherwise intelligent people on the left keep writing me to
say that the entire foreign policy of the United States is being
secretly run by "Israel and the Zionists.")

I no longer hold that high opinion. Sure, if this nation were
educating people to think critically--which is not being done--if we
had a media that had a core ethos of getting at the truth and making it
known--which we don't--I would have that confidence. But I think it is
clear that we have traveled so far down the road of creating an
ignorant and fearful electorate that any candidate making such bold
claims would be doomed to either a devastating loss, or to minor party
status. Nader, for example, whose ancestry is Lebanese Christian, were
he to begin to rise in the polls to become a serious candidate, would
certainly be portrayed as a Muslim Manchurian candidate, and it
wouldn't matter what he said or stood for after that.

I don't know what this dismal state of affairs means in terms of
the future direction of American politics, but it doesn't bode well for
the future of third parties, or for the Democratic Party, or for the
country, or for the fate of the world.

And that is the truth.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

This Country is Nuts!

dlindorff — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:45:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I have to vent here. We all get a little crazy sitting alone
at our keyboards in this business, and it's finally gotten to me.

I know there are serious signs of a complete mental breakdown in the
US, with polls reporting that millions of people are actually excited
at having a low-rent religious fanatic who consistently mispronounces
pundit as "pundint" (shades of Dubya!), pilfers state funds for her
family's personal use, lies about her alleged opposition to Washington
pork, claims the bloody war in Iraq is "God's will," forces her
17-year-old daughter to make a momentary mistake into a lifetime one by
marrying the kid who got her pregnant, and refers to blacks as "sambo"
and to Alaska's indigenous people as "arctic arabs," running for vice
president on the ticket with a man who is a walking medical disaster
waiting to happen.

These are probably the same people who still give the worst
president in the history of the Union a 30 percent approval rating, who
keep watching reality TV shows (perhaps thinking they're real), and who
still think having 180,000 US troops indiscriminately slaughtering
Iraqis, Afghanis and Pakistanis is making the US "safe."

But right now I want to talk about Homeland Security and the US Postal Service, two small examples of domestic insanity.

I tried to mail a book to my father last Saturday for his 86th
birthday. In order to make sure it would get there by Tuesday, I sent
it in one of those flat-rate Priority Mail envelopes--the ones that
promise two-day delivery. It cost me $4.80 (five 90-cent stamps, one
24-cent stamp and two 3-cent stamps). I drop the little package off
after hours into the mail slot in the lobby of my local post office.

Yesterday, my envelope was in my mailbox, though, with a blue
sticker attached headed: "Important Customer Information: We regret
that your mail was not collected or is being returned to you due to
heightened security requirements. All mail that bears postage stamps
and weighs more than 13 ounces MUST be taken by the customer to a
retail service associate at a Post Office."

Okay, so dad won't get his present on his birthday.

I called the local PO to ask what was going on, and was told that
any package over 13 ounces with stamps has to be handed in person to a
counter employee.

"With stamps?" I asked. "What if I had worked at a company and had a
metered stamp put on it and then dropped it in a mailbox or mail slot?"

"Then it would go," I was told. "Because we'd have a meter number to trace who mailed it."

Let's see. The meter would trace the package to whatever big company
I might have worked at, but I don't see how that would help them trace
it to the actual mailer.

Now, what about if I brought my package to the counter? Would it be
opened and checked? No, I was told. I would simply be asked by the
counter clerk whether the package contained any banned substances, like
bodily fluids, liquids or bombs. If I said no, it would be accepted for
mailing. ("I know this sounds silly," the postal worker on the phone
told me, "but I don't make the rules. It's Homeland Security.")

Wow. The Post Office and the Department of Homeland Security are
sure keeping our mail trucks and our airlines safe with this clever
policy.

I mean, we can be sure that those stoopid Ayrabs wouldn't think to
put a metered stamp on the bomb they send through the mails. And that
asking at the counter thing, that would sure catch anyone trying to
slip some deadly substance into the mail stream. The clerks are
probably trained to look for certain kinds of markers of suspicious
behavior--a tic, a shifty look, or some reticence in the answer given.

Right.

So this is what it has come to in America. We're ready to put an
refugee from the "Jerry Springer" show a missed heartbeat away from the
White House, and we keep our mail and our aircraft industry safe from
terrorists by returning (through the mail, mind you!!) packages that
are left in a mailbox if they have postage stamps on them.

Dad, if you're reading this, I'm sorry your present is going to
arrive late. Take it up with Mike Chertoff, the guy who made sure
everyone got out of New Orleans alive when that city was hit by
Hurricane Katrina.

Is this a great country or what?
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Palin: The Real `American Taliban'

dlindorff — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:33:39 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Back in the early days of the seemingly interminable Afghan
conflict, a young American, trapped in Afghanistan by the US invasion
of that country, was captured along with Taliban fighters and, after a
bit of captivity and “enhanced interrogation” at the tender mercies of
US troops, was transported back for trial in the US, where then
Attorney General John Ashcroft excitedly labeled him the “American
Taliban.”

But John Walker Lindh, railroaded into a 20-year jail sentence and
slapped with a gag order that bars him from talking about how he was
tortured for the entire length of his incarceration in Afghanistan, is
not the real American Taliban. That title surely belongs to our new
Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.

According to reporting in the latest edition of the National Enquirer,
a paper routinely maligned as a grocery-store scandal sheet, but
actually boasting a skilled investigative reporting team that makes
what passes for investigative reporting these days at most corporate
media shops look like bad jokes (it was the Enquirer that
exposed John Edwards’ extra-marital affair and blew his political
career out of the water), Palin sought to cover up, perhaps even from
John McCain, her 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy until after she was
safely nominated. Her plan, says the Enquirer, which spoke to
acquaintances and neighbors in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, had
been to get through the convention, then get daughter Bristol married
off to the infant-to-be’s father, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, and only
then disclose the pregnancy.

That devious scheme was reportedly scotched by Bristol, who the Enquirer reports was “at war” with her mother over the idea of a politically motivated shotgun wedding.

According to the Enquirer, it was that paper’s disclosure
to both Palin and the parents of Johnston, that it was ready to publish
the pregnancy story, that led Palin to break the bombshell news about
the pregnancy ahead of her nomination—a move that left the McCain
campaign embarrassed and exposed to ridicule over its obvious haste and
undeniable lack of any vetting of its vice presidential nominee.

Why should we care about this domestic melodrama? Because, besides
revealing the casualness with which the 72-year-old, health-impaired
McCain is willing to treat the job of picking his alternate and likely
mid-term successor, it reveals the deceptiveness and the inhumane,
ruthless fanaticism of Palin, a candidate who is trying to market
herself to voters as “Everymom.”

Few real moms or dads in their right mind would try to force a
17-year-old daughter and an 18-year-old boy to get married, simply
because they had accidentally conceived a baby. All the odds predict
that such parentally imposed pairings are doomed to failure, with much
unnecessary trauma and psychic damage to both kids and to their future
child along the way. Is Palin afraid her fellow believers on the
religious Right would condemn her if her daughter were allowed to bear
her child as a single parent? Is she afraid the child would be a (gasp)
“bastard”?

This kind of religious fanaticism, in which the welfare of young
children is run roughshod over for the sake of biblical correctness,
has been evident and roundly condemned by Americans when practiced in
Taliban-run Afghanistan, or Wahabi-run Saudi Arabia, where women don’t
get any choices about their futures. We don’t need it coming from the
White House.

I say, three cheers for Bristol for standing up to her tyrannical mom and saying no instead of “I do” on command.

Given the domestic drama, it was shameful that the Palins dragged
their daughter and Johnston down to the Twin Cities to be paraded in
front of the nation for the sake of their self-described pit bull mom’s
political career in a faux display of family togetherness. You knew
what the real story was by the embarrassed deer-in-the-headlight looks
on the two unsmiling teens’ faces as they were on put on display. You
knew it too by the way Palin, who devoted a considerable portion her
acceptance speech to talking up her family life, said not a word about
her daughter’s impending marriage—the date for which has been left
unstated.

My guess is that the supposed wedding will be conveniently pushed
back past Election Day, after which, if those two kids are lucky, or
plucky enough, it will be quietly forgotten.

With any luck, Palin’s vice presidential hopes will be history by
then too, and with them, the era of “Just Say No” sex education in our
nation’s schools.

Teens have enough trouble making their way in this crazy,
high-pressure world without having loopy, self-involved, religious
fanatic parents mucking their lives up further. And the last thing
they, or the rest of us, need is a national “imom” pushing her Taliban-like moral agenda on the whole nation through laws and the appointment of like-minded judges.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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The Things They Left Behind (or Didn’t Remind You About)

dlindorff — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:02:23 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The introduction to John McCain at the Republican National
Convention last night was all about family values. There was the paean
to his mother and father, the touching story of his and Cindy’s
adoption of a baby girl from India, and then there was Cindy herself,
who was the focus of much of a gauzy introductory film on McCain, and
who also did the introductory speech, and who brought all the kids up
on stage with her at the end.

Oddly missing from this warm, feel-good picture, however, was a
single mention of McCain’s first wife Carol Shepp—the one who stood by
him, raising their three kids, through his trying five years in a
Vietnamese prison, only to be dumped upon his heroic return for a
younger woman, despite, or because of, her having suffered permanent
disabling and disfiguring injuries in an auto accident during his
absence. As in a Stalin-era photo, she had been air-brushed from the McCain family tableau, even as her offspring were up there on the stage on display with the rest of the Senator's spawn.

Now I’m not faulting McCain for leaving his wife for a younger,
richer woman. Who knows what the relationship was like at the time.
Maybe Shepp wanted him out of her life by the time he started slipping
off to date beer heiress Cindy Lou Hensley. But if McCain and his
campaign staff wanted to make him a poster child for “family values,”
they should have had the basic integrity to explain that he didn’t
always consider marriage a binding covenant, for better or worse,
richer or poorer, and in sickness or in health. (If you want an
unvarnished view of the real John McCain, read an interview with Carol
McCain published last June in the UK newspaper, The Mail, headlined The Wife US Republican John McCain Callously Left Behind.)

McCain’s party, and his fundamentalist Christian backers, are
always attacking efforts by gay Americans to win the right to marry by
saying that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, but
clearly, with over half of all those marriages between a man and a
woman ending in divorce, it’s not all that sacred, and McCain is living
testament to that hypocrisy.

But this was just the most blatant of a string of hypocrisies that ran on for four days in the Twin Cities.

There was the long list of speakers touting America’s “freedoms”
as, outside the convention hall, police thugs dressed in military gear,
and armed with huge batons and assault weaponry were bashing in doors
and terrorizing journalists, arresting others and dragging them face
down along the street, using teargas against peaceful demonstrators and
arresting them by the hundreds.

There was McCain talking about how everyone, including the “child
of Latino immigrants,” is an American, to an audience of Republicans
that was so embarrassingly white that you had to shield your eyes from
the glare of the screen.

There was Sarah Palin, complaining about a media focus on her
pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol, all the while shamelessly
parading that same daughter and her 18-year-old impregnator, who was
dragged down to the convention to be shown off after the two had been
somehow convinced to get married and make the baby “legal.”

There were the repeated characterizations of McCain as a battler
against corruption and the influence of “special interests,” without a
word of mention of his having been the recipient of over $100,000 in
cash from Charles Keating, a corrupt banker whose interests McCain
shamelessly pimped for in Congress, only narrowly escaping indictment
himself.

Perhaps the most outrageous hypocrisy of all was claiming that the
McCain/Palin ticket would be “taking on” the corrupt Washington
Establishment, as though that establishment hadn’t been predominantly
Republican for most of the past decade, and as though McCain and Palin
hadn’t been an integral part of it. McCain, after all, has spent those
years dutifully voting with his Republican peers over 90 percent of the
time, shoveling out perks to the rich and the corporations, while
Palin, first as mayor of the small town of Wasilla, and then as
governor of Alaska, employed an Abramoff-linked Washington lobbyist to
help win massive amounts of corrupt “earmarks” for her town and state.
She even backed the notorious $400-million earmark for the “Bridge to
Nowhere” until it became a national joke, yet there she was, in her
acceptance speech, claiming to have opposed that outrageous taxpayer
ripoff.

Republicans are claiming that this election will not be about
issues as much as about character. But given the incredible fraud that
was perpetrated on viewers by the four-day Republican extravaganza, I’d
say it’s more about caricature.
_________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at: www.thiscantbehappening.net

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Meet the Truth-Challenged GOP Vice Presidential Candidate: Sure A. Pallin'

dlindorff — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:20:27 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Now that we’ve had a chance to see Sarah Palin and to hear her speak—or at least read the big rolling white block letters on the teleprompter in front of her—we can see that she’s prone to telling whoppers.

Now we know politicians as a group have a propensity to embellish the truth—particularly when describing their opponents or themselves—and even to lie outright, but Palin does it so well, she’s like a George Bush with reading and pronunciation skills.

In her acceptance speech last night, Palin told a whole string of lies. My favorite was talking about little Trig, her latest offspring, who was born with Down syndrome. Looking right out into the camera, she told the parents of America with special needs children that if she and John McCain win in November, “You’ll have an advocate in Washington.”

Hard to square that with the truth, though, which is that as governor, Palin as proposed a reduction in funds for special needs grants to schools in both her budgets—this at a time that the state of Alaska has been benefiting from record oil tax revenues, which Palin is pushing to return to citizens as cash rebates.

Left unsaid by Palin was the fact that McCain himself, in Congress, has voted against funding for the Head Start program, an early childhood program particularly important to children of teen mothers, and that he has opposed bills to increase funding for special education. So in fact, parents of children with special needs like Trig not only won’t have an advocate in the vice president’s office; they won’t have an advocate in the White House either.

Palin has also tried to turn a family tragedy—her 17-year old daughter Bristol’s getting pregnant by a local self-described 18-year-old “redneck” athlete from the same high school—into a virtue by saying that she and her husband will be helping their daughter “keep the child” and raise it. To keep things cool in the eyes of god, she also announced that the two teen parents would be getting married. Both kids were prominently on display at the Republican National Convention during her speech.

What Palin didn’t tell convention-goers or the national viewing audience was that as governor she cut the funds for a program in the state to support single teen mothers and that as a PTA member, mayor and finally as governor of Alaska, she has opposed sex education in the schools—something that her daughter and future son-in-law clearly could have used. Less advantaged single mothers in Alaska and, should she be elected, in the rest of America, will not have a friend in Blair House. She also failed to mention that McCain has voted against funding of teen pregnancy prevention programs in Congress.

Palin continued, in her acceptance speech, to spout another lie which she had already been making in her first days on the stump since being picked by McCain as his choice for running mate: that she had said “No thank you” to the $439-million “Bridge to Nowhere” which, as perhaps the biggest single earmark in a year of record earmarks last year had become a national joke line. The truth: Palin backed that bridge, and was even ready to add state funding to get it built, until it became a national joke. Then she thought better, and killed the bridge, while still taking the money, which the state’s senior senator, Ted Stevens (now under indictment for taking bribes from contractors), had earmarked.

Palin went on to lie about her opponent, Barack Obama’s, tax plan, saying it would raise taxes on businesses and on all Americans. In fact, Obama’s plan calls for lowering the corporate profits tax, while increasing the tax on dividends and capital gains, both of which fall not on businesses but on investors, and for lowering taxes on most Americans, while raising them for people earning over $250,000.

John McCain likes to ride around in a bus he dubs the “Straight-Talk Express.”

Sarah Palin, in her debut on the national stage since being named as McCain’s Number Two, has lied enough times to deserve the sobriquet “Sure A. Pallin’.
___________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net