By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
President Barack Obama is an enigma. No one quite seems to know what he actually stands for.

Most progressives saw in the election of Obama, a Nelson Mandela figure. Based on his first year in office, many are understandably disillusioned.

Conversely, much of the right wing of this country demonize(d) him as a Joseph Stalin figure, this in a “right-center” country.

The context of the 2008 election is important in making sense of these views; it was a landslide. Obama garnered 54% of the electorate compared to 46% for McCain (Apparently, someone forgot to tell the electorate that we live in a “right-center” country).

Understanding this, the 2010 analyses of McCain/Palin and their supporters matter little because it is their views that were thoroughly repudiated in the 2008 elections. And their hostile opinions of the president have not actually changed. If anything, they’ve been emboldened by now having 41 votes in the senate – compared to 59 for the Democrats (Apparently neither party can count as Bush never needed 59 votes to govern forcefully, albeit for the wrong causes). They would be quite happy with a Torquemada figure, someone who governs from a place of fear, with an iron fist, who is not afraid to employ torture.

The Obama enigma has more to do with the expectations of those who swept him into office. In truth, those who thought they had gotten Mandela – a liberator – were few because most understood that Obama was elected head of an empire, not head of the UN Human Rights Commission. Many more Democrats and Independents thought they had elected a Martin Luther King figure – someone who would fight for the rights and dignity of all human beings. Unquestionably, Obama indeed can speak like MLK, but his actions, especially on matters of war and peace and human rights, have been much closer to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The Obama/Biden administration is clearly different than a McCain/Palin administration would have been. Obama has set a different tone worldwide, but he has not substantively altered the Bush-Cheney doctrine. And rather than investigate former administration officials for their roles in carrying out an illegal war, Obama unilaterally has given them “get-out-of-jail free” cards. Worse, he’s embraced most of Bush’s extra-legal policies in court. The only substantive difference has come in relation to Guantanamo. For conservatives, Guantanamo is Nirvana – a place outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. While he has moved swiftly to close it down, he has not repudiated its most reprehensible feature: indefinite detention of suspects without charges.

The context of the 2008 election was a clear repudiation of all things Bush-Cheney. Bush argued that September 11, 2001 had given him the right to ignore the U.S. Constitution, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, and international law. Beyond that, he crafted a circular argument for his assertion and exercise of dictatorial powers; we were a nation at war. That assertion depended upon a condition of permanent worldwide war.

That’s why people had hoped for an MLK figure. That instead we got a Clarence Thomas is not hyperbole. Time and again, the Obama administration has upheld virtually every Bush war policy in and out of court, including the notion of an all-powerful unitary executive, the right to permanent worldwide war, the right to hold prisoners indefinitely without charges and to rendition them and to illegally spy on Americans.

At home, Obama has bungled his electoral mandate, especially on health care, the economy and immigration. Rather than govern with a clear moral authority, he has instead governed weakly from “the middle,” as a naïve politician, appeasing the same right wing opponents that detest his every move. Ironically, Bush did not receive a decisive electoral mandate, yet he governed decisively. Contrarily, Obama was given a massive electoral mandate, only to govern timidly as though he owes his victory to the sore losers Tea Party Movement.

There are several precedents for governing from the middle. One came in the early 20th century in Mexico after the ouster of dictator Porfirio Diaz. The naïve new president, Francisco Madero, thought he could reconcile the nation by ignoring his own supporters while appeasing Diaz’s allies. He left them in power where they soon deposed him.

Hopefully Obama will not suffer the same fate. However, unless and until he begins to act upon his stated convictions, he will continue to find himself proverbially in the middle of the political highway as roadkill. He doesn’t have to be Mandela; the 2008 Obama will suffice.

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MediaMatters: Days before MLK Day, Beck again pilfers King’s words to promote himself — On the January 4 broadcast of his radio show, days before the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., Glenn Beck introduced a new promotion for his show that includes a clip of King saying, “Now is the time,” lifted from King’s “I have a dream” speech. Beck — who has a history of making racially charged remarks — has repeatedly appropriated King’s message to promote himself and his shows or defend against criticism. [ READ MORE ]

[ Glenn Beck's Record on Race ]

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Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president“? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There’s a reason they don’t call Afghanistan the "Garden State" (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan’s nickname is the "Graveyard of Empires." If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev’s number though. It’s + 41 22 789 1662. I’m sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you’re about to commit.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the “war president.” Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line — and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Choose carefully, President Obama. You of all people know that it doesn’t have to be this way. You still have a few hours to listen to your heart, and your own clear thinking. You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can’t take it anymore. We can’t take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of “landslide victory” don’t you understand?

Don’t be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn’t be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can’t be won over by abandoning the rest of us.

HATER #1

President Obama, it’s time to come home. Ask your neighbors in Chicago and the parents of the young men and women doing the fighting and dying if they want more billions and more troops sent to Afghanistan. Do you think they will say, “No, we don’t need health care, we don’t need jobs, we don’t need homes. You go on ahead, Mr. President, and send our wealth and our sons and daughters overseas, ’cause we don’t need them, either.”

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that’s what they’d do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam “might” be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish — the full terror of which we scarcely know.

When we elected you we didn’t expect miracles. We didn’t even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn’t even function as a nation and never, ever has.

Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God’s sake, stop.

Tonight we still have hope.

Tomorrow, we shall see. The ball is in your court. You DON’T have to do this. You can be a profile in courage. You can be your mother’s son.

We’re counting on you.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. There’s still time to have your voice heard. Call the White House at 202-456-1111 or email the President.

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   By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
The president’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has come during a most awkward time in the history of U.S. journalism, which many analysts claim is in serious decline, if not on life support.

What her nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less. Yet, to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include FOX News and virtually all the known right-wing radio talk show hosts, is the antithesis of journalism.

Their coverage of the Sotomayor nomination points to the need for honest debate, not simply on the issues of race, but on the right wing’s aversion to truth. It also points to the right wing’s pompous beliefs, on every topic, including affirmative action, that their positions are “American.”

Extremist politicos Newt Gingrich and Tom Tancredo, both of whom have zero credibility but are stars of right-wing media, have led the charge that Sotomayor is a racist. They have been joined by the usual wingnuts: Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, to name a few. Even Juan Williams of NPR, has parroted the claim that Sotomayor’s (out-of-context) statements are racist. The fact that the nation’s discussion centers on whether she is a racist or not — or that she is an “affirmative action” pick (Buchanan) — points to both the power of the wingnuts and also to the virtual impotence, or complicity, of mainstream media.

Historically, mainstream journalists have been taught that critical analysis constitutes injecting subjectivity into their reporting.

All this brouhaha is based on the Sotomayor statement that the experiences of a Latina might allow her to make better judgment in court than a white male. Her detractors say that if a white male had made similar statements he would have been automatically disqualified.

They conveniently ignore the fact that the Supreme Court has been virtually all-white for most of the nation’s history. It also ignores the fact that throughout U.S. history, white males have generally not been subjected to apartheid discrimination and segregation, let alone extermination, slavery, forced removals, extra-legal brutality and false imprisonment.

The charges against Sotomayor have a familiar ring. Staunch segregationists used to charge that Martin Luther King, Jr. was both un-American and a racist. President Ronald Reagan institutionalized that kind of thinking in defense of South Africa’s apartheid regime. For him, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, while the outlaw South African regime constituted a “democratic ally.”

Such thinking was also “normalized” during the affirmative action debate; those who attempted to dismantle the vestiges of racial discrimination were deemed “racists” or “reverse racists,” or communists by those working to maintain it (A reverse racist is precisely what Limbaugh labeled both Sotomayor and President Obama).

Those doing this labeling have well understood the nation’s changing political climate; they could no longer campaign as the defenders of white racial supremacy. Instead, they generally cloaked their views under the conservative-Republican mantle and wrapped themselves in the American flag.

They also knew that to win a debate required further subverting the nation’s political language. These same “patriots” began to reinterpret MLK Jr.’s quote about the dream of a color-blind society.

In public, they gladly accepted the “dream” without accepting the societal responsibility of dismantling and remedying centuries of institutional racism and discrimination in this country.

While the majority of Americans can see through the false arguments and the “clever” subversion of the political language by these so-called patriots, this does not hold true for the mainstream media.

As we are seeing with Sotomayor, all it takes is a handful of “extremists” to control and shape the media debate.

Perhaps the only upside is that Americans can now clearly see that the politics of Gingrich and Tancredo are the same as that of Limbaugh, Liddy, Beck, Buchanan and Dobbs. These pundits who daily rant against “illegal aliens,” and who daily clamor on the need to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, are quoted as credible sources by the mainstream press. They are generally the same ones who promote the politics of fear and hate, who believe in the use of torture, and who also believe that the United States is endowed with the God-given right to conduct permanent war against the rest of the world.

Truthfully, who can discern a difference between these right-wing fanatics and the positions of mainline conservatives within the Republican Party?

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•    Rodriguez can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com or PO BOX 85476 – Tucson, AZ 85754

•    NEW AMERICA MEDIA COLUMNS — http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/

•    ARCHIVED COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS — http://web.mac.com/columnoftheamericas/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html
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   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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