Barack's "Sounding Board" Sounds Off...The Deep End.

Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has been described as "controversial" and "provocative" but as more and more of his ex cathedra pronouncements surface it appears that "paranoid", "extremist" and "lunatic" must be added to any comprehensive description of this man of the cloth.

Some of his positions are indeed merely controversial and provocative, particularly his views on Israel and the 9/11 terror attacks. The American view that total commitment to Israel is the moral duty of everyone of good will is nonsense. Strenuous opposition to the Arab desire for her extirpation is of course virtuous but to see the core Middle East conflict through manichean spectacles of absolute good pitted against absolute evil is wrongheaded and, as is clear, does nothing to bring about a peaceful - or even less blood-soaked - solution.

Similarly, one can condemn the 9/11 attacks as appalling terrorist atrocities calling for the most severe countermeasures and still argue that the policies of successive Washington Administrations contributed to turning bin Laden from just another sectarian hate-monger into the iconic leader of a worldwide jihad. Indeed an open exchange of views is the only way to develop a genuine strategic understanding of the militant Islamist mindset.

Now the Reverend's positions on Israel and 9/11 are more extreme than that but he is throwing his tuppence worth into what should be - though rarely is - a rational debate on vital issues affecting not only the US but the whole world. It is when he turns his baleful gaze exclusively upon his own country that Minister Wright takes flight into the higher reaches of paranoia and hate and becomes a full-blown blood-curdling, ranting, foaming at the mouth, anti-racist racist.

"Racism is alive and well," he thunders. "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body." To use such language in 1966 would have been unexceptional. It is difficult to argue that forty years ago such a characterization of America was anything other than at worst a slight exaggeration. But Reverend Wright was speaking in 2006 and these days his words are not simply hyperbolic they're downright inflammatory and paranoid.

He fleshes out this theory of rampant racism with fulminations that are as fearsome as they are fantastical. The US government developed AIDS to decimate the black population. It connives with international drug lords to flood the African-American communities with narcotics to the same end. Caring "nothing about human life if the end justifies the means", Americans are wedded to a brutal philosophy of "white supremacy and black inferiority". Indeed this is the true religion of a people who seek to "maintain [their] level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty".

This is not the whole story. As anyone who has witnessed him in the full frenzy of his rapture can attest, Jeremiah Wright is a powerful, passionate and gifted orator. In the pulpit he can "shuck and jive" with the best of them. He weaves, sways and swivels. He pumps the air with the vigor of a Tyson going in for the kill. He roars and bellows, cackles and growls. He scolds, excoriates and denounces with the divine disdain of an Hebrew prophet. He slips in sly asides and bawdy innuendos. His words come in a terrific torrent, driven by a pent up righteous wrath that will never know relief. Through his sermons he sculpts towering monuments of sound and fury to the eternal suffering, humiliation and despair of his people. He is the Black Milton of a Paradise Denied.

He is also a demagogue. And very dangerous because of his talents. Where Obama inspires, he inflames. Where Obama soothes, he rouses. Where Obama conjures hope in the heart, he calls up rage in the bowels. Where Obama brings the nation together, he cleaves it in twain. Where Obama transcends race, he lusts for it, seizes it, possesses it even as he loathes it and its power over him and his people. Where Obama senses he is a Great Man, he knows he is already a Mighty One for he has made his peace with his downfall and like Lucifer strains every sinew to drag us puny mortals into his fiery pit.

He is bizarro-Obama. Darth Vader to Obama's Anakin Skywalker.

This is why the Pastor wields power over the Senator who reveres him. Jeremiah Wright supplies his wants. Obama, for all his eloquence and magnetism, is a latté politician, blended and bland. There is too much milk in him to tickle the connoisseur's palate. He lacks bite, body. He is Beauty and Wright is the Beast to whom he is inexorably, inexplicably, irrevocably attracted. Like the timid boy to the bully. For Obama lacks courage. He is essentially effete, as are his devotees. This sets the bounds to his triumphant march. He cannot touch the hearts of the working class no more than Frazier and Niles can buddy up with Martin and his pal Duke.

Obama is still young enough and gifted enough to have all of life's great prizes in his reach. But he cannot grasp the greatest of them all which glitters tantalizingly just beyond his fingertips. As has been frequently remarked, he is no closer. Why? Because he has everything to lose and he fears a misstep - any misstep - that may cause him to stumble so near his goal. So he stands still, neither advancing nor drawing back. To gain his end he must fill the vessel of his candidacy, golden but empty, with something more nourishing that a double latté with a sprinkle of cinnamon.

In a word he must define himself. But he will not because he cannot. Not simply because he lacks courage but because he lacks guts. Guts, that which we find when we reach down deep, oh so deep into ourselves. That irreducible essence that makes us us. The self each individual refers to when he says "myself". It is our "No" to fate. Its what made Michelangelo paint the "Last Judgment", Lincoln fight a Civil War and - for it is admirable only if the person is good - it's what compelled Hitler to invade Russia.

Of course some of us never find it and let our lives drift in the meandering stream of the passing years.

Jeremiah Wright may be paranoid and delusional and a false prophet to his people but he has guts. He found them somewhere long ago in a childhood poisoned by hate and contempt.

Hillary has guts. She found them in 1992 with the Gennifer Flowers humiliation. And again this year in New Hampshire.

John McCain has guts. He found them forty years ago in Hanoi.

So now we know who the two candidates for the Presidency will be in the Year of the Lord 2008.

Spitzer - A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy!

As New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's career slips inexorably into a cesspit of his own making, the Left Wing, the ever-vigilant watchdogs of everybody's morality but their own, are beginning to circle the same media wagons which successfully held off Ken Starr's Comancheros in Buffalo Bill Clinton's day. Harper's Magazine sniffs out the real culprit in this whole sorry affair and it's not the horny Hillary-supporting Democratic Super Delegate. Nor is it the brothel keepers who oversaw a nationwide prostitution network from their New Jersey apartment. It is - yes, you got it in one - the Justice Department. The Bush Justice Department, to be absolutely precise which reporter Scott Horton indignantly informs us "has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican". Finally the progressives have found at least one preferential quota system they're more than happy to denounce!



Governor Eliot Spitzer unable
to conceal his dismay at
the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
about to engulf his crusading
reform Administration




But Scott wasn't satisfied with mere number crunching. He consulted the almanacs, lunar cycles, tidal data and various other arcane record sources and discovered that "a number of the cases seem to have been tied closely to election cycles". Seem to have been tied? Considering that the US, probably uniquely among the world's democracies, holds national, state and local elections every two years with long primary campaigns beforehand, it would be astonishing, nay impossible for "a number" of anything - baseball records, jaywalking convictions, births of ginger-haired infants - not to seem to correlate with increased polling booth activity.

Horton waffles on about the White-Slave Traffic Act which was passed in 1910 - imagine 1910 - which apparently makes it really too old to actually, well, enforce. This Act is, he proclaims, "highly disreputable"? Why? Because some well-known and some not really well-known folks were convicted under it way back when. Jack Johnson, a black champion boxer, Charlie Chaplin, an English comic actor, some professor from Chicago and a woman from Canada who wrote books. Oh yes, and they were all really horny.

Another give-away concerning this investigation is that enough resources were "dedicated" - smell the zealotry - to it so it could be done properly! But the real smoking gun is that the DoJ nailed Spitzer because "they were looking into Spitzer's payments". (Emphasis in original) A bank, concerned with the Governor's peculiar movement of monies, had informed the IRS, as they are mandated to do in these troubled times. In this way the Public Integrity Section of the Bush Department of Justice got involved.

Horton is exercised that the investigation discovered the prostitution ring through its probing of Spitzer's financial shenanigans (he was muddying the money trail that paid for his hooker habit through phony off-shore accounts) rather than the other way around! There is, apparently, a politically correct order in which crimes must be uncovered that the vast army of PR enforcers failed to inform the rest of us about - a unique oversight. The fact that the IRS and "a bank" were involved more or less clinches it for Harper's that this is "a politically motivated prosecution".

What next? The "discovery" that the Bush FBI suborned one of the kitchen staff to slip a fistful of Viagra into poor Eliot's o.j. every morning so that the rising Democratic star and anti-corporate White Knight became a helpless victim of his pharmaceutically inflamed libido?

This is beginning to take on a weary familiarity. It is Bill's legacy to us all. A President, who accepts fellatio oris linguaeque in the Oval Office, is still feted as the Great Leader. Why should not a humble Governor, who had the decency to pay the lady handsomely for services rendered in a mere public hostelry, not finish his term?

So, are we in for another display of Clintonesque lawyerizing? "Ah did not have safe sex with that hooker...uh...Mistress Kristen."

More toe-curling Bubba-like baring of the soul? "Ah have caused pain in muh marriage."

Further psychopathic clinging to power in the face of popular repugnance while media shills busily gnaw away at what's left of public integrity because the sanctimonious prig who disgraced himself is a Democrat and ipso facto as inviolate as...every other Democrat?

For Chrissake, Spitzer, you were caught with your fandango in the cookie jar three ways to Tuesday fortnight. Resign already!

And if he does quit, it's still not safe to breathe without a mask . Elect Hillary in the Fall and we will have the sewage running through our living-rooms for a further four years!






John McCain (R - Az)
prepares for yet another
Clinton Administration

The Governor And The Earl

Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), Whig grandee, man of letters, patron of the arts, quodam Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and life-long reprobate knew whereof he spake when he said of fornication:

The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous and the cost prohibitive.






Whadda ya sayin'? Chesterton? Speak up, Goddamn it. Oh, Chesterfield. Earl Chesterfield? Never heard of him. Must be a Republican.

NYT - McCain Addicted To...Cancer!

The New York Times have crystallized their strategy towards Republican nominee Senator John McCain (R-Az): if you can't smear him or get him to blow his top, kill him. Problem solved.

The 71 year old senator might seem as tough as a windswept craggy outcrop somewhere off the coast of Maine but, take it from the Times, he's DYING! Yes, Goddammit, dying, I tell you. If we elect him we're all doomed. Doomed. He's not immortal as his campaign have declared him to be from the beginning. How often have we all been suckered by those McCain flyers, posters, robocalls and ads declaring "Vote for McCain. He doesn't get sick. He'll NEVER die!" It was all a cunning ploy, my friends. John McCain, I weep even as I write this, will die. The day will come when he will draw his last breath, cease to be, shift off the mortal coil, as it were, become one with the ages. But that's not the worst part. There's more. Not only will he die but we don't even know when! It could be today, tomorrow, next week. Next year, maybe. Twenty seven months, 3 weeks and nine days from now. Or, perhaps, he'll break the century marker. We just don't know.

The NYT, famed the world over for its fearless, scrupulously fair-minded, no-holds-barred investigative reporting, tears off the mask of indestructibility behind which McCain has cowered until now to reveal the frail disease-riddled palsied reality that is this, alas, mere mortal man. Lawrence K. Altman of the Times is an M.D. and his trained medical eye noticed a bulge in the Senator's left cheek which had seemed to us laypersons merely a wad of chewing 'baccy to which McCain, being a Republican, was, among other loathsome right-wing habits, obviously addicted. The Doc probed further and discovered that instead of tobacco the Republican candidate is addicted to cancer! "Mr. McCain," he tells us ominously, "has had four melanomas." Count them. Shoulder (1993). Left arm, nose (2002). Temple (2000). Yup. Four. They were all surgically removed (the cool insider lingo is "excised", Latin for "cut out"). Only one was "serious", the lesion on his left temple. The surgery left the patient with the 'baccy bulge' the Doc so cunningly picked up on. McCain has been given the all clear in subsequent check ups.

Dr. Altman is still worried, very worried. After all we're talking a Republican candidate here with a real shot and the guaranteed cancer-proof Dems in disarray. All is not lost, thank Fidel. The Doc prognosticates that if someone survives the first five years (Mac is now seven years and counting) "the probability of recurrence during the [following] five years was 14 percent and death 9 percent, a study published in 1992 found". Yes indeed. Death. Say it slowly. Roll it upon the tongue. Savor its dismal delights. Death. Ah, yes, "easeful Death" in John (Note the same Christian name and he died too. Just a coincidence?) Keats' felicitous phrase. Ask not for whom the bell tolls 91 percent of the time, for the remaining absolutely vital 9 percent it tolls for...well, for someone, that's for sure, and it could be John McCain, who knows?

Voters, you have been warned. Elect John McCain at your peril. He will die sometime somewhere of something. Lawrence the Physician invites us by implication to imagine that when the dread phone rings in the White House at 3 am the War Hero President will raise it to his lips and drop dead on the spot of a veritable cascade of melanomas that were queuing up all these years waiting for their chance to pounce! Truly a jihad of skin cancers will carry off the Great Man.

But wait! The Vice President will take his place toute de suite . Another Republican! By the Beard of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, there's no end to them. Hope however is at hand. At the subdued swearing in the very next day a reporter from the Times notices that the new President has a slight cough...

Hillary Must Unleash The Hidden her

"[Raskolnikov] woke up late next day after a broken sleep. But his sleep had not refreshed;
he woke up bilious, irritable, ill-tempered, and looked with hatred at his room. It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with its dusty yellow paper peeling off the walls..."

Thus Dostoevsky describes his anti-hero's insalubrious situation in Crime And Punishment. Of course - it's Dostoevsky after all - this is as much a delineation of Raskolnikov's psychological dilapidation as it is of the squalor of his physical surroundings. As such it can also stand as a surreal metaphor for Hillary Clinton's equally desperate position. She pocketed Rhode Island with ease, triumphed handsomely in Ohio and half-nelsoned her opponent in Texas till he cried "uncle". What more can a gal do? Well something she's never done before if she is to have any hope of breaking out of that grubby room with the barf-colored wallpaper.

For all the grit and resilience she continues to display the nomination remains irretrievably out of reach. Irretrievably? Just so. As Jonathan Alter shows in a must-read analysis as brilliant as it is inexorable, even in the bizzaro-world of this year's Democratic primaries she cannot possibly make up the lost ground. "It's the math, stupid!" will be engraved on her political sarcophagus. This intractable arithmetic, of course, reflects simply the votes and victories Obama skillfully wove into a noose for her. His fifty state strategy, his netroots mobilization and his quasi-Messianic appeal together with the Clinton campaign's many hubristic miscalculations and the candidates clunky performance have built the gallows on which she now stands.

Will a pardon arrive before the bolt is pulled on her trapdoor? How? The Democratic Party with the cunning of a dedicated suicide has already cut off all possibility of second thoughts. The oh-so-representative proportional system they've installed precludes any blowout of delegate wins in the sixteen contests remaining. Ditto Michigan and Florida re-dos. The egregious Super Delegate bloc - the deus-ex-machina designed specifically to thwart a Jesse Jacksonesque hijack of the nomination - is rendered as helpless as a deer in the headlights of Obama's post-racial New-Agey bandwagon. The Blacks are solid for him, and who could blame them. The Uppity Whites find he gives meaning to their vacuous Godless existences filled heretofore with latte, botox, Al-Gorery, and self-righteous political disaffection bordering on treachery. They're his to the end. The Youth - all Game Boy and You Tube - are enjoying the Coolness, Like, Of It All and won't quit. Hillary, who was supposed to break the mold, is left with the old FDR coalition (minus the now republicanized South), and since the Daddy of the New Deal died three score and three years ago that's never going to be enough.

This is a tragedy for Hillary but for the Dems it's an unmitigated disaster. The Obama balloon, buffeted by sudden journalistic squalls, is beginning to leak. The oratorical tour de force of his Iowa speech - a truly magnificent performance - cannot be reprised even on a monthly basis and not become diminished. You can lose your virginity only once. More often requires painful and expensive reconstructive surgery and a prudish billionaire's desperate bride. So it is with those outside the Democratic Primary constituency yet to be enthralled by the Big O. With them he must go it again. If nominated he must burst upon the national scene fresh and unheard a second time and then weave his spell over voters not congenitally disposed to respond to his eloquent and elegant Buy-The-World-A-Coke persona. This is impossible. Those now unmoved and those initially impressed who now see his performance as just a particularly tony version of the usual politician's shtick will not be won over. He is just another liberal - very liberal - demagogue selling the same shop-worn bill of goods that Lyndon Johnson glorified as the Great Society. The intervening decades have rendered a merciless verdict on LBJ's Utopia. Obama is, therefore, unelectable. This will be clear to even the Swooners long before November. When that happens even his core support will melt like sea-foam on damp sand.

If Obama is a sprinter with only enough stamina to last a couple of laps, Hillary is made by nature and nurture for the forbidding steeplechase of a Presidential campaign. She has, as they say in sporting circles, "a good engine". What she doesn't have is a personality which can be put on public display. Like Dracula she must flee the light. So, as with Nixon, another unappealing hard-done-by individual with rampant paranoid tendencies, she is in a constant battle to remain invisible while at the same time commanding the attention of all.

This takes its toll on candidate and campaign alike. She takes refuge in wonkery, conjuring up a blizzard of policy minutiae to hide within. Like the homely girl at the Prom, deserted by her reluctant date, she disappears into her usefulness to others, laughing unnervingly before the punchline, fetching drinks, doing a running repair on her glamorous friend's dress, rehanging a drooping banner, pretending not to notice when the Prom King cuts her dead. Hence all the silly lies, so profoundly humiliating when they are revealed, as she must know they will be - she was named after the conqueror of Everest; she is a life-long Yankee fan; she's "fine" with the philanderings of that sorry excuse for a husband of hers; she helped broker peace in Ireland.

McCain's campaign is founded on what he is, Obama's on what he hopes to persuade us he is, Hillary vanishes into what she promises to do for us. It's not really about her per se but rather about the fighter she is, the policy maven she is, the symbolic woman she is, the social worker she is, the sympathetic friend she is, the dedicated public servant she is. She has deconstructed herself into an array of functions she can perform rather than standing before us as a whole person possessed of a variety of abilities but greater, far greater than the sum of them. This is why she seems such a phony, why everything she does, laugh, cry, whine, rage, declaim, empathize, seems coldly calculated to the extent that if she jumped off a cliff we'd reckon she was trying to corner the suicide vote. There is no personal context but rather the opposite of context, a disconnect between the what and the who. We know everything about her and more but she remains essentially a stranger, like an agoraphobic neighbor who only comes out at night. We have as little "feel" for her as we believe she has for us. This is why, once you conceive a dislike for her, as so so many have, it remains a constant unvarying response as no real person breaks through the defensive carapace to mitigate the negativity.

What all this tin-pot psychologizing amounts to is that Hillary is the Dems best bet. Her drawbacks are many, especially against McCain, but she has potential. If she is to muscle her way into the nomination against all the odds she must unleash the hidden her or at least grit her teeth and allow us a meaningful peek or two behind the iron curtain of her day-to-day persona. The sight may not be for the squeamish but it will enable us to see her as a human being and not an automaton of ambition, entitlement and dissimulation. That, unless she's the type that secretly strangles puppies in her free time, can only do good.

Those of us who don't go into convulsions of rapture at political rallies know our leaders are flawed in many ways. We vote for them if we figure those weaknesses are not such as to make them unfit to govern. Sometimes we even support them because of their imperfections. But we must be get to know them before we can make that judgment. If any politician is unwilling or unable to grant us that insight Democracy will chew them up and spit them out.

And that's as it should be.