TW3 -- the Dub and the O's

[Political Waves]

That Was The Week That Was ... reflective of our changes; nothing on the wars, but plenty on the culture wars. I'm intrigued by the Pringles can -- my son commented that he wouldn't want to be the guy who invented the septic tank.

In other news -- seven years later, a dim little bulb is forming over George W. Bush's head, making him question the results of his belligerence. He regrets that he won't be remembered as a man of peace, and is scrambling in the last weeks of his reign to paint some lipstick on that pig. Poor bastard -- now's a hell of a time for a wake up call. But don't worry about him, it only lasted a few seconds; he got over it right away.

Here's reads on the Dubby, Barack and Michelle as bonus -- I'm posting both MoDo and Friedman today [wonders never cease -- I found something redemptive and informative in both.]

Don't eat any ball bearings!

Jude



HARPER'S WEEKLY REVIEW
June 10, 2008

Senator Barack Obama, having amassed more than the 2,118
delegates needed to secure a majority, was acknowledged as
the Democratic presidential nominee and claimed victory
before a crowd of almost 20,000 people in St. Paul,
Minnesota, knocking knuckles with his wife, Michelle, in a
gesture known as "dap." "It thrilled a lot of black
folks," said author Ta-Nehisi Coates. "He wears his
cultural blackness all over the place. Barack is like
Black Folks 2.0." Earlier that evening, Senator John McCain
delivered a speech to a crowd of a few hundred in Kenner,
Louisiana, in which he tried to rebuff Obama's charges
that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of Bush
policies. "That's not change we can believe in," said
McCain repeatedly. Pundits were surprised by McCain's
clumsy rhetoric, by his lack of teleprompter skills, and
by the fact that he stood in front of an ugly green
backdrop. "Content better than delivery," said Karl
Rove. "John McCain," said Mort Kondracke of "Roll Call,"
"sounded old." A messenger delivered a handwritten note
from McCain to Obama's Chicago offices inviting the
Democratic presidential nominee to a series of
Goldwater-Kennedy-style debates. Bill Burton, an aide to
Obama, told the messenger, "You know, you could have just
emailed this." Hillary Clinton announced that she was
"suspending" her campaign, and Yves Saint Laurent, who
popularized pants for women, died at age 71. "My small job
as a couturier," Laurent once said, "is to make clothes
that reflect our times. I'm convinced women want to wear
pants."

Unemployment rose half a percentage point to 5.5 percent,
the largest one-month increase since 1986. Oil prices
surged by more than $11 a barrel to a new high of $138.54,
and the stock market suffered a 3 percent drop. Officials
in Tanzania reported that witch doctors were harvesting
the hair, bones, and skins of albinos to make wealth
potions, and scientists who darkened the breast feathers
of male barn swallows with magic marker found that the
males attracted more females, lost weight, and exuded more
testosterone. "It's like you walk down the street and
you're driving a Rolls Royce and people notice," said lead
researcher Rebecca Safran. "Your physiology accommodates
this." The United Nations held a three-day emergency food
summit; the director of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural
Organization condemned U.S. subsidies for biofuel, saying
that they deprived people of food in order to "satisfy a
thirst for fuel for vehicles." For the third year in a
row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined
because people were too busy to peel the rind off the
fruit.

V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Literature,
declared that there are "no more great writers." Derek
Walcott, who won the Nobel in 1992, read a new poem,
entitled "The Mongoose," that viciously attacks Naipaul's
personality and his writing. "I have been bitten," the
poem begins, "I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as
dead as Naipaul's fiction." More than two dozen vandals
who hosted a party inside Robert Frost's former home were
ordered to take a class on his poetry, taught by Frost's
biographer. "This is where Frost is relevant," Jay Parini
said to the class, speaking about Frost's poem "The Road
Not Taken." "You come to a path in the woods where you can
say, 'Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my
mind?' Everything in life is choices." A housing
development in South Carolina was offering to any
customers who purchased one of its $1 million homes a
$400,000 home for free. "We thought," said developer Dawn
Berry, "'Why does it just have to be on Pop Tarts and
restaurants?'" The family of a former chemist for Procter
& Gamble who designed the Pringles potato-chip can buried
a portion of his ashes in a Pringles can, and Haley, an
eight-year-old Indiana girl who had emergency surgery
after eating more than 10 magnets and 20 steel balls, said
she swallowed the pieces because they "looked like candy."
Her parents said they were confused about how she could
have done such thing because "she gets A's and B's."
Scientists located the part of the brain responsible for
understanding sarcasm.

-- Claire Gutierrez
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/06/WeeklyReview2008-06-10

Bonus


President Bush regrets his legacy as man who wanted war
Times UK
June 11, 2008
http://tinyurl.com/5da969

President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a "guy really anxious for war" in Iraq. He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran.

In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric."

Phrases such as "bring them on" or "dead or alive", he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace". He said that he found it very painful "to put youngsters in harm's way". He added: "I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain."

The unilateralism that marked his first White House term has been replaced by an enthusiasm for tough multilateralism. He said that his focus for his final six months in office was to secure agreement on issues such as establishing a Palestinian state and to "leave behind a series of structures that makes it easier for the next president".

Mr Bush is concerned that the Democratic nominee Barack Obama might open cracks in the West's united front towards Tehran's nuclear ambitions. At the EU-US summit in Slovenia, he pressed for tougher sanctions against Iran unless it agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment programme verifiably: "They can either face isolation, or they can have better relations with all of us."

Mr Bush told The Times that when his successor arrived and assessed "what will work or what won't work in dealing with Iran", he would stick with the current policy.

Shaul Mofaz, a hardline Israeli minister, has suggested that a military strike on Iran is "unavoidable". But Mr Bush said: "We ought to work together, keep focused. His comments really should be viewed as the need to continue to keep pressuring Iran."

The President was keen to bind his successor into a continued military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, but offered only cautious optimism about a recent decline in violence. Asked about corruption allegations dogging Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, Mr Bush insisted: "I have found him to be an honest man."

He also offered words of encouragement for another ally, Gordon Brown, whom he will meet on Sunday. He said that he needed no advice on coping with political adversity. He is "plenty confident and plenty smart, plenty capable — he can sort it out".

But he delivered a thinly veiled warning to Mr Obama that his promises to renegotiate or block international trade deals were already causing alarm in Europe and beyond.

"There is concern about protectionism and economic nationalism," he said. "Leaders recognise now is the time to get ahead of this issue before it becomes engrained in the political systems of our respective countries."

Acknowledging that his refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol once created consternation in Europe, he said that there was now a recognition that that richer countries needed to "transfer out of the hydrocarbon economy". He insisted, however, that any binding emission targets would have to include China and India to be workable.

The President knows that Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain will have to distance himself from the current Administration. "He's an independent person who will make his decisions on what he thinks is best."

Asked if the US is ready for a black president, Mr Bush says: "I think the fact that the Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama is a statement about how far America has come.

"Having that [sic] all that, it's going to be important for the American people to figure out who can handle the task of the 21st Century. It's a challenging job." ++


Bush: No regrets over Iraq
CNN
1 hour ago
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/11/bush.europe/

MESEBERG, Germany (CNN) -- US President George W. Bush claimed Wednesday that he had no regrets about the decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein in 2003 and reiterated his determination to force Iran to halt its nuclear program...
 

Dennis Kucinich's Impeachment Resolution Could Be Helpful in a Future War Crimes Trial
Joseph A. Palermo, HuffPo
June 10, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/dennis-kucinichs-impeachm_b_106414.html

President George W. Bush has embarked on his "Farewell Tour" of European capitals. He will meet with heads of state and other national leaders. He will be received cordially and diplomatically and treated like a powerful foreign dignitary. But this European trip better be Bush's last trip across the Atlantic because if he travels there as a civilian after January 20, 2009 he stands a good chance of being detained and charged with war crimes. (Remember Augusto Pinochet?) All that is needed is one gutsy judge or magistrate from any of the nations that have signed on to the long-standing prohibitions against war crimes.

There exists no statute of limitations on war crimes; if there were then Klaus Barbie ("The Butcher of Lyon") and other aged Nazis would have been left alone to retire in peace. There are no international boundaries or sanctuaries for war criminals; again, if there existed such "war-crime-free-zones" then Klaus Barbie and others like him could have easily sought asylum in any number of nations governed by sympathetic dictatorships. And a war criminal does not have the power to "pardon" himself or others under his command; if he had such power then every tyrant and genocidal monster in the world would simply issue pardons to himself and all his co-conspirators on the way out of power, (the Nuremberg Trials never would have gotten off the ground).

Representative Dennis Kucinich's 35-count impeachment resolution that is currently being read into the Congressional Record is the most thorough chronicling of the many crimes (and war crimes) of the most venal, mendacious, and corrupt president in American history. It is an important document because it establishes for the record the litany of abuses of power and high crimes and misdemeanors of George W. Bush's nearly eight years of misrule. It is an official Congressional statement of fact that will come in handy in the future.

We all know the Democrats who control the Congress do not have the courage to pursue articles of impeachment against Bush. They long ago made a cynical political calculation that to do so would only bring the opprobrium of the Right and its allies and make the pivotal elections in 2008 more difficult for Democrats. That is their judgment call. But it is the wrong call because the republic cannot bear for long a succession of imperial presidents who build on the Bush record to upset the balance of Constitutional powers permanently. We may be looking back at the Congressional acquiescence in Bush's crimes as a step toward fascism in this country.

Dennis Kucinich has done the country an enormous service with this attempt to keep the record straight about this horrible "Decider." I can appreciate the Democrats' political hesitation, but I don't agree with it. The key question is this: If George W. Bush does not deserve to be impeached then what does a president have to do to be impeached?

Let's hope that sometime in the distant future that Bush lets his guard down and decides to take a vacation in England where he can be collared just like Pinochet. ++


Cairo
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NYT
June 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/opinion/11friedman.html

This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that's not my problem. I cannot tell a lie: Many Egyptians and other Arab Muslims really like him and hope that he wins the presidency.

I have had a chance to observe several U.S. elections from abroad, but it has been unusually revealing to be in Egypt as Barack Hussein Obama became the Democrats' nominee for president of the United States.

While Obama, who was raised a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father's family was of Muslim heritage. They don't really understand Obama's family tree, but what they do know is that if America — despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 — were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name "Hussein," it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.

Every interview seems to end with the person I was interviewing asking me: "Now, can I ask you a question? Obama? Do you think they will let him win?" (It's always "let him win" not just "win.")

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats' nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America's image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush's invocation of a post-9/11 "crusade," Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

Of course, Egyptians still have their grievances with America, and will in the future no matter who is president — and we've got a few grievances with them, too. But every once in a while, America does something so radical, so out of the ordinary — something that old, encrusted, traditional societies like those in the Middle East could simply never imagine — that it revives America's revolutionary "brand" overseas in a way that no diplomat could have designed or planned.

I just had dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with two Egyptian officials and a businessman, and one of them quoted one of his children as asking: "Could something like this ever happen in Egypt?" And the answer from everyone at the table was, of course, "no." It couldn't happen anywhere in this region. Could a Copt become president of Egypt? Not a chance. Could a Shiite become the leader of Saudi Arabia? Not in a hundred years. A Bahai president of Iran? In your dreams. Here, the past always buries the future, not the other way around.

These Egyptian officials were particularly excited about Obama's nomination because it might mean that being labeled a "pro-American" reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama's demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in — as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam — will be much more attuned to global trends.

My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times's bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo's famed Blue Mosque: "Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: 'Hillary-Obama tied?' in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn't have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage. 'For me and my family and friends, we want Obama,' he said. 'We all like what he is saying.' "

Yes, all of this Obama-mania is excessive and will inevitably be punctured should he win the presidency and start making tough calls or big mistakes. For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the "idea of America" — this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.

In his history of 19th-century America, "What Hath God Wrought," Daniel Walker Howe quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as telling a meeting of the Mercantile Library Association in 1844 that "America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations."

That's the America that got swallowed by the war on terrorism. And it's the America that many people want back. I have no idea whether Obama will win in November. Whether he does or doesn't, though, the mere fact of his nomination has done something very important. We've surprised ourselves and surprised the world and, in so doing, reminded everyone that we are still a country of new beginnings. ++


Mincing Up Michelle
MAUREEN DOWD, NYT
June 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/opinion/11dowd.html

Hillary and Bill are busy updating their enemies lists. And Obama is racking his brain trying to figure out where to stash his erstwhile rival.

If a President Obama put her on the Supreme Court, of course, we would have the infinite fun of hearing Bill rant about how Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts were dissing Hillary.

It's good news for Obama that Hillary's out of the race. But it's also bad news. Now Republicans can turn their full attention to demonizing Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of "Kill the witch."

There are some who think it will be harder for America to accept a black first lady — the national hostess who serenely presides over the White House Christmas festivities and the Easter egg roll — than a black president.

There are creepy Web sites, like TheObamaFile.com, dedicated to painting Michelle as a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman, the disgruntled, lecturing "Mrs. Grievance" depicted on the cover of National Review.

On that site and others around the Internet, the seamy rumors still slither that there's a tape of Michelle denouncing "whitey," a rumor that Barack Obama disdained last week as "scurrilous."

E.D. Hill, the Fox anchor who said that the celebrated fist pump between Michelle and her husband the night he snagged the nomination could be called a "terrorist fist jab," apologized Tuesday.

In their narrative of how Hillary lost in The Times on Sunday, Jim Rutenberg and Peter Baker said that Mark Penn argued that Hillary should subtly stress Obama's "lack of American roots."

That's a good preview of how Republicans will attack Michelle, suggesting that she does not share American values, mining a subtext of race.

She's a devoted daughter, wife and mother who has lived the American dream, from the humble South Side of Chicago to Harvard Law School. Hey, isn't it totally unAmerican to complain that being a black woman in the '80s at a class-conscious, white-bread college, Princeton, was somewhat uncomfortable?

Just as Bill and Hillary did the "Pssst! He's black!" thing on Barry, now the Republicans will use the same tactic on the strong and opinionated Michelle.

Unlike her husband, who wrote in his memoir that he had learned at a young age to smile and charm and disarm whites of the notion that he might be a bristly black militant, Michelle has not always hidden her jangly opinions so well. She has spent more time dwelling on the ways in which society can pull down the less privileged and refers a lot to a callous but unnamed "They."

"Michelle," as one political observer puts it, "is a target-rich environment."

Team Obama is hoping for the best. When she's on her game, after all, Michelle is a knockout. And as one Obama booster enthuses: "Michelle's story is a lot more mainstream American than Cindy McCain inheriting a brewery."

But the campaign is preparing for the worst, planning to shore up Michelle with her own slick and quick war room staffed by top operatives from previous campaigns.

David Axelrod thinks "there's a real recoil potential" if the Republicans go after Michelle. "I don't think she's projecting herself into the fray in a way that would justify that," he said, adding that her charming and polite daughters, Malia and Sasha, are walking testimony to Michelle's "loving parenting."

Mike Murphy, the G.O.P. strategist who worked for John McCain in 2000, but not yet this year, said Michelle is heading into her "big moment in the sun."

"She'll have the opportunity to do pretty well and the opportunity to really screw up." he said. "What I glimpse of her from far away makes me think there could be trouble, but anytime you have that size microphone, she will have some control over how she handles the pressure."

She's going to take her big microphone on "The View" as a co-host next week, when she will no doubt try to put her remark about her belated pride in her country in context. And she clearly scored a pre-emptive hit both with her chic style — Vogue's André Leon Talley declared in The Times the dawn of "a black Camelot" — and with her playful fist pump that now has older white guys, like North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, awkwardly trying to do it with Obama.

The dap or pound, as it's also called, was a natural and beguiling moment that showed the country that, even though she started out as her husband's boss and has a résumé that matches his, she likes him and is rooting for him, and is not engaged in a dreaded Clintonesque competition with him. (On the night of the Pennsylvania primary, Bill was eagerly checking to see who had swayed more voters — him or Hillary.)

"She isn't sitting with a fixed, adoring gaze," Axelrod said. "But she obviously loves him deeply and believes in him, and more than that, she believes in this. And that motivates him." ++

 

 

http://www.politicalwaves.net

 

"So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

 

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