Columnist – John Sammon
I think I can pry open the mind of a conservative so we can all look inside, at what makes ‘em tick, by using myself, and confessing on this website, why it was that for at least 20 years, I was a Republican.

I can tell you because I was one. I now wonder what I must have been thinking to be a member of a party that I currently loathe. All I can say is, I was blind, but also, the party is so much worse today than it was back when I thought I believed in it.

After all, who would have thought, Americans, any Americans, would ever advocate the torture of prisoners and the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions?

The main driving engine behind the thinking of a conservative is fear. Fear that generates anger. Fear of change. Fear of people who look different. Fear of not feeling superior.

A feeling of inferiority is what motivates many ultra-conservatives. The way to not feel inferior, is to feel superior by scapegoating, coming up with people you hate, people with whom you disagree, someone you can blame for all the country’s troubles. This is what allows Republicans to ignore the past eight disastrous years of their own rule, and to blame Obama when he’s only been in office a few months.

At the root of conservatism is its inherent racism against blacks. They’ll deny it. But to them, blacks are simple-minded savages with bones in their noses living in mud huts like they often used to appear in movies and television.

Where would someone get a notion like that?

I learned it early. My father was a rock-ribbed Republican. My situation was different than being the son of a card-carrying, sheet-donning member of the Ku Klux Klan. My father was a reasonable man, at times, but he had the average ingrained racism of his day, of white suburbia, that he in turn had learned as a boy, like millions of others.

This is the kind of benevolent reasonable racism millions of Americans still have.

Back in 1962, my father said that Martin Luther King was “stirring ‘em up” (meaning blacks). He (King) was causing trouble talking about equality under the law.

Another time, Dad, who was a decorated World War Two veteran, was making fun of a black truck driver by recalling that the driver had taken the wrong road and blundered into a front line combat zone in France.

I vividly remember him imitating the black’s childish ignorant way of talking. Quaking with fear supposedly, eyes wide like the stereotypical frightened darkie, the black soldier told my father over and over “dis be not a combat truck, ‘dis not a combat truck.”

In other words, my father was not only mocking his ignorance, but his cowardice as well.

Even if we ignore the fact that millions of black Americans served in World War Two with distinction and were decorated, and many of them killed. They have served in every war. I still wish I had had the courage to look up at my father as a boy and honestly say, “Why should a man risk his life for a country that makes him sit on the back of a bus, or eat at a separate lunch counter?”

I would have faced his scorn and contempt if I had said it. But I didn’t. I laughed with him instead like it (his black imitation) was funny. I thought my father was always right.

That’s how I became a Republican.

But there were societal reasons too.

I went to a school where there were no blacks. Before blacks started causing trouble (according to my father) in the mid 1960s, I might have thought they didn’t even exist. They didn’t on TV, unless they were a butler. All the heroes were white.

The blacks. They kept to their side of town, the bad side.

I absorbed this attitude, which is that blacks by protesting were causing trouble. I will say that I think the late Malcolm X was right, that in the 1960s it was only the protests and confrontations that forced white Americans practicing passive racism to finally take notice of the inequities.

If blacks had been quiet, respectful, a credit to their race as racists used to like to say, nothing would have changed. The wrongs would still exist. After all, Republicans have never sponsored Civil Rights legislation.

Most ultra-conservatives today wish they could turn back the clock.

I remember one conservative recently describing liberals, including blacks and women and what he considered faggots as, “the forces of chaos.”

“Chaos” is important psychologically, because it’s a kind of Freudian slip. Central to the conservative is the feeling that the past, where white men used to run everything, was an ordered, peaceful world, the proverbial good old days that continue as a fantasy myth to live on in memory. This was an ideal world where women were always in the kitchen baking pies, where blacks knew their subservient place and were picking cotton or shining shoes, and where greaser Mexicans were where they belonged, in backward, ignorant, chaotic Mexico.

It is this fantasy vision of small town America in the Norman Rockwell mold, where there are no blacks, no crime, with idealized immaculate two-story houses and neatly trimmed gardens, with a Main Street shaded by stately elms, where everyone devoutly attends the same church on Sunday (some Republicans are sexual perverts), where women know their proper subservient roles, that propels today’s conservatives.

To people who like the status quo past, being on top means resisting change, any change, even if it’s for the better.

Conservatives like to view the world in simple terms. They are almost childlike in their concept of good and evil.

So, how did I fall out of the Republican ranks? It’s my wife’s fault. A liberal, she helped pry open my mind. Because I loved and respected her, I listened to her opinions. Ronald Reagan, whom I had voted for, cheated and shocked me in the Iran Contra scandal. Bush Junior launched a war in Iraq by making up the lie that it had weapons of mass destruction. I knew he was lying. The disappointments continued.

Honesty became important to me.

I also suffered the abuse and scorn of relatives who basically threw me out because of my anti-Iraq stance (I was foolish enough to state my opinion in their presence). Conservatives are not tolerant or open-minded people. They do not respect the rights of others.

I considered this a betrayal. Their treatment of me.

But I learned.

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I don’t expect a vice-presidential candidate to be familiar with all the nuances of the Kyoto treaty, but I do hope that he or she will know more about politics and current events than the average elementary school student.

Sarah Palin has all the gravitas of a feather duster, the former beauty queen is blissfully ignorant of the world outside of Alaska. The only time she comes in contact the outside world is when Putin’s head hovers over the governor’s mansion.

Palin proved herself to be an airhead when she flubbed her interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, but until now we had no idea about the breathtaking extent of her ignorance.

“Cameron, the Fox beat reporter for the Republican presidential ticket, said he had been told by unnamed sources — and on the condition he not report the details during the campaign — that Palin could not name all of the countries that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

He did not mention which one (or ones) she whiffed on, but there are only three: Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

Nor, according to Cameron, was Palin aware that Africa is a continent. (Perhaps she was hamstrung by the fact that no part of that land mass can be viewed from her homestate.)” — [MORE]

Palin’s handlers were handed a mission impossible, how could they possibly prep the clueless diva to face the media? No wonder that after the disastrous Couric and Gibson interviews, Palin had sit-downs only with Republican sycophants like San Hannity of Fox News.

John McCain ran one of the dirtiest and most inept presidential campaigns in history. McCain ran an undisciplined campaign that sifted focus every few days, but his most colossal blunder was selecting Palin as his running mate. With that one cynical, reckless, desperate and dangerous act, McCain forever ruined his legacy as a maverick and war hero. McCain put his own selfish ambitions ahead of the interests of his county.

McCain is guilty of treason, he put the security of the United States at risk by choosing a woefully unprepared and unqualified fool to be his VP.

In Japan when an individual commits an unforgivable transgression or a huge mistake he commits Hari Kari. I’m not suggesting that McCain commit ritual suicide, although I wouldn’t shed a tear if he did, but at the very least he should retire from Congress.

Sarah Palin’s Greatest Hits

This is an example of the CIA Meddling in African Affairs during the cold-war era
| Other CIA activities in Africa |

By Douglas Okwatch

Fresh details of a conspiracy that could have provided a motive for the assassination of Cabinet Minister Thomas Joseph Mboya have emerged ahead of the 39th year since his death.

Kenyatta
The CIA appears to have recruited the flamboyant minister and former trade unionist in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”

Declassified information in an undated issue of Ramparts, an American political and literary magazine published in the 1960s and early 1970s, accessed by The Standard at the Kenya National Archives, shows an elaborate conspiracy by CIA to prop up Mboya and isolate Kenyatta.

Ramparts closed shop in 1975. Whether this scheme sowed seeds of suspicion and mistrust between Kenyatta and Mboya, who at the time of his assassination was the Economic Planning minister and Kamukunji MP, is a matter for further investigation.

The revelations come four months after Mboya’s widow, Pamela, wrote to Mr Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general who also chaired talks that ended political violence in Kenya early in the year, asking that the matter be investigated afresh by a truth commission.

“The assassination of my husband, like others after him, is a matter that has remained shrouded in mystery and speculation, and which has been avoided by successive regimes in this country,” she wrote.

Trail of Questions

In a telephone conversation with this writer last month, Mrs Mboya promised to “drop the bombshell” in an interview. But she later changed her mind. Her last word was that she would spill the beans at an “appropriate time.”

Questions also abound on whether the convicted assassin, Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, was actually executed. The testimony of the assassin’s own brother and anecdotal evidence that he has been seen by a retired military officer, among other claims, pile on the doubts of his execution.

Mboya
Secret letters, also declassified, further show that Mboya had a particularly tumultuous relationship with Mr Mbiyu Koinange, a minister and power broker of the Kenyatta presidency.

In one instance, Koinange wrote an emotional letter to Kenyatta to defend himself against allegations of disloyalty by Mboya.

“Sir, you know my loyalty to you personally, to our Kanu party; of my long loyalty to Kenya and latterly my loyalty to our new independent Council of Ministers.”

“My loyalty is beyond doubt, therefore, my Prime Minister. I frankly feel that there is no need for me to reply to Mr Mboya’s letter.”

“It is unfortunate, ill-timed, egoistic and, if I may say so, an irresponsible letter which is skilfully designed by one of my colleagues to endanger the good working spirit among us.”

Koinange was then Minister of State in the Office of the President and one of the most powerful figures in the Government. He died in September 1981.

The secret letters in our possession cover the period between 1961 and 1966. Desperate to extricate himself from the tag of traitor, Mboya, in a letter on March 11, 1961, pleaded with Kenyatta, who was languishing in a Lodwar jail: “I’d hate to appear a hero at your expense.”

He attached copies of various statements he had made in meetings with the Governor for Kenyatta’s perusal. The move appeared to capture his own internal consciousness that Kenyatta may have begun to perceive him as a threat.

The letters also reveal how the CIA used Kenyatta to finish Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his Vice-President, politically by amending the Constitution to his office of all powers.

Traitor or nationalist?

Ramparts reported that: “The CIA programme in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficiary was Tom Mboya who, in 1953, became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour.”

Koinange
Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya who was popularly known as ‘TJ’, was ideal for CIA’s purpose. The main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Kenyatta, was not considered “sufficiently safe” owing to his initial deep socialist leanings, the dossier said.

Ramparts quotes Mboya as saying: “Those proven codes of conduct in the African societies, which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life.

“I refer to the universal charity, which characterises our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men, not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society.”

This powerful quote not only captures Mboya’s own prescription of African socialism, which endeared him to the West and made the CIA view his policy as safe, but it also paints the picture of an articulate, sophisticated and ambitious political thinker.

Soon after, Mboya joined the CIA jet set, travelling around the world from Oxford in the UK to Calcutta in India on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya’s independence through trade unionism, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc, according to Ramparts. The CIA allegedly funded operations at the time.

But when George Cabot Lodge, one of the directors of the ICFTU, made the statement (believed to have been in specific reference to Mboya at the time) that “the obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow,” he left no doubt about Mboya’s personal ambitions and by extension the CIA’s scheme of things.

Initially, CIA’s natural strategy was to underwrite Mboya and his labour federation as a force against Kenyatta. But when tact changed in accordance with the world order and the CIA’s new priorities, it was agreed that Western labour groups stop funding Mboya.

An accommodation with Kenyatta was now thought necessary, particularly to ensure that he did not support rebels in Congo, and to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left.

But the die had been cast. The CIA, through its activities, had effectively propped up Mboya as a possible future President of Kenya. That threat was real during Kenyatta’s time and even at the dawn of the second decade of his leadership, according to Ramparts.

It was a strategy that the CIA would use again to the benefit of Kenyatta against Odinga — use the credibility of the appropriate militant to crush the rest. The CIA link, which Mboya vigorously fought to distance himself with, would be used later to fight him politically by branding him a traitor and a man who could not to be trusted. He wrote lengthy responses in his defence.

But had the CIA sowed enough seeds of wrath between Mboya and the political establishment in Kenya to provide someone with enough reason to kill him?

REFERENCES:

1. Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya’s murder & the return of one-party State
2. Ready or Not – TIME
3. Setback for Tom – TIME

   Jesse Helms – Enlarge Image
No matter how much Republicans try to sanitize Mr. Helms — after his death last week, his legacy will remain that of Racism, Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and Confederate Segregationism.

The former North Carolina Senator was an unyielding champion of the conservative “Bigot” movement.

And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and beloved civil rights leader, for his “action-oriented Marxism.”

In an opinion piece, columnist DeWayne Wickham asserts that Helms subtly carried the torch of white supremacy during his lifetime:

“The former North Carolina senator seldom displayed the overt, incendiary racial prejudice that Ben Tillman, the turn-of-the-20th century South Carolina demagogue, often spewed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. But in many ways, Helms accepted the torch that Tillman passed to a new generation of white supremacists — and served the same cause with a tad more subtlety.”

While working as a television editorialist in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960, Helms called the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus the “university of Negroes and Communists.” That snideness echoed the ring of Tillman’s condemnation of education for blacks: “When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand,” …wrote Wickham

When President Theodore Roosevelt invited black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, Tillman was outraged. “The action â?¦ will necessitate our killing a thousand “niggers” in the South before they will learn their place again,” the senator said.

Ninety-four years later, as a guest on Larry King Live, Helms was greeted by a caller who thanked him for helping to “keep down the niggers.”

“Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” said Helms, sounding just a bit embarrassed — and a lot like the linear successor to Tillman.

That was “White-Sheet” Jesse Helms — a bigot whose “nobility” is being shamelessly parroted in the air-waves by right-wingers ….who have eagerly been linking his death to July 4th — Independence day!, to smother the ugliness of Mr. Helms’ White-Supremacist past.

What a Joke!

Teddy Partridge of firedoglake.com says:

“….don’t let the Independence Day paeans fool you. Jesse Helms was a bigot, a racist, a homophobe — and a media charlatan. America would be a much worse place if he’d had his way on his many signature issues. Our nation’s birthday is brighter for him not in it.” ….Click here for more

In an Aug. 29, 2001 piece, David Broder, a columnist for the Washington Post states:

“What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.”

“In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known, summed up what “some said was the meanest Senate campaign in history,” ….says Broder.

“Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable,” Peterson wrote, “but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and well. Helms is their master.”

In 1990, locked in a tight race with an African American Democrat, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Once again, he pulled through.

Jesse Helms’ White Hands AD

That is not a history to be sanitized.

Richard Nixon was one of the first Republicans to recognize Helms’ Racist utility.

From The Nation:

The North Carolinian was welcomed into the GOP by then President Nixon and his southern strategists of the late 1960s and early 1970s because they understood that Helms was skilled at working the fault lines that could turn white fears into Republican votes.

The Republicans are still working those fault-lines. Indeed, some of the people who worked most closely with Helms as he transformed what began as an anti-slavery party into a comfortable retreat for white-backlash voters are now key players in the campaign of John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

“Let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation,” McCain declared in a statement on the death of Helms, to whom he was compared favorably by former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole earlier this year. (Actually, Dole suggested that McCain was somewhat more conservative than Helms.)

In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Richard Nixon touched the essence of the southern strategy:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

Republicans have used this Racist strategy ever since — very effectively. Read more about The Southern Strategy.

Jesse Helms — May You Rot In Peace!

REFERENCES

1. The Republican Party and racism: from the “southern strategy” to Bush
2. Nixon’s Southern strategy — ‘It’s All In the Charts’
3. National Black Republican Association (NBRA) – Democrats are ‘More Racist’

Product Description: What If The South Had Won The War? What would it be like if they won?

C.S.A.: The Confederate States Of America through the eyes of a faux documentary takes a look at an America where the South won the Civil War.

 Columnist – John Sammon
Yeah man! Gas prices, higher, higher, higher.

I’m lovin’ it!

The higher the better!

What this will do is cause more Americans to cease being mass consumption glutinous hogs, and will ultimately help to save the North Pole from melting.

Let me explain. I know full well this will result in my branding as a left-wing traitor by right wing mass consuming racist nuts (I’m actually a former conservative who left the Republican Party because of their lying and cheating and lack of morality).

You might also try and call me a “negativist” who enjoys the misfortune of others. I on the other hand view myself as a “positivist,” a person who can see great possibilities in supposed dire situations.

Oh, I almost forgot. Gas prices may also help Americans to reclaim the lost soul of their country, a country evolved into greed, of feeling superior to other less abundant countries because of our material possessions, and our frequent purchase of “things.”

Let’s say you’re a typical greedy fat upper middle class guy who buys a new car every year because you discard the old car like a toy you’ve suddenly grown tired of, and you currently drive a huge, gas guzzling four-wheel-drive Hummer, a vehicle as big as the German tank that invaded Poland in World War Two. You smoke cigarettes and discard the butts. You carelessly toss trash at the beach and eat rich calorie-laden junk food like a hog at a trough. You have a three-story house that burns more energy than the entire consumption of Nigeria (that’s a country in Africa for those of you right wingers who are mad at this piece).

You’re a gas guzzling hog.

Rising prices huh? You can’t afford to be a pig anymore like two years ago. You have to actually put yourself on a budget. To conserve. The C word. Not the C word. Not that! Oh the pain of it.

You drive less, which causes less freeway congestion and less greenhouse emission melting the Polar Icecap (our natural air conditioning down here). You’re forced to cancel that automatic yearly Hawaiian vacation which in turn puts less pollution pressure there.

The irony here is, and it’s a supreme irony, is you’re forced into becoming a conservationist kicking and screaming even though you don’t like it by the very same people who made you an oil addict in the first place…..the oil companies and their secret cartels and their Saudi Arabian robber barons and their Washington lobbyists.

You’re forced to cut back on your lavish lifestyle you hog. To you, more is always better. The things you purchase make you feel worthy, temporarily, until you have to buy more things, and the money. There’s never enough, even though you have more than you need.

Right now, there’s a Chinaman who used to ride a bike in Beijing, but who now drives a car. He also wants to be a glutinous hog like you.

In fairness, I drive a car, though I’ve always left personally a very small ecologic footprint. I seldom buy anything. You might describe my lifestyle as that of an “esthete,” or “Spartan,” or “Ghandiesk.” For those of you right wing haters who never read a book, Mahatmas Gandhi was an Indian leader who stressed morality and restraint.

All I can say to those to whom any form of idealism and not just thinking only of themselves is real hell……welcome to my world.

Some people will lose their jobs because of oil prices, but they were probably jobs centered around addiction to oil which was wrong in the first place. Jobs can be retooled to meet the new demand for conservation and ecologically friendly living.

Rising oil prices will force Americans to seek alternative travel, mass transit, fuel efficient and hybrid and eventually electric cars, which will improve air quality and slow global warming. It will also teach you, the glutinous hog, that the world isn’t your private oyster to be abused any way you see fit. That every little you thing you do has an impact. Ultimately, it will also force you to become more humane, more aware of others who are less fortunate.

Being forced to walk a little more may help stall that heart attack you the hog are now working towards.

Rising oil prices will also help end the economic-political strangle hold the Saudis and others have over us because we won’t need their oil. It will end their outsourced power and put them in their proper place among the community of nations.

I’m lovin’ it!

I hope gas goes up to $10 a gallon.

Like we used to yell at the football game, “hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again..harder…harder!”

Copyright 2008 Sammonsays