This Guest Voice post is by Watching America translator Dorian de Wind, who is also a retired U.S. Air Force officer. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of TMV and its writers.
From the Frying Pan into the Fire, and Back to the Showers–at Home
by Dorian de Wind
Political scandals–there are so many of them these days-seem to have a very short shelf life, perhaps with the exception of those involving the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. These are kept alive forever on the now-famous “endless loop” by the righteous media.
One of those scandals rapidly fading from most people’s memories is Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s “episode” in that men’s restroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport almost a year ago now.
Somehow, that incident and its repercussions must have still been fresh on my mind when I was taking a shower at our fitness center recently.
Let me explain.
As a 68-year-old senior–straight, I should add–I am in dire need of some kind of physical activity to stay fit. So I do various stretching exercises while in the shower at home. One of these exercises involves standing tip-toe and stretching and rotating each arm in a circular motion high above my head.
After joining our local fitness center, I saw no reason for not continuing these exercises at the center while taking a shower after my swimming and steam room routine.
During one of my first exercise sessions there, I happened to glance at the opaque-glass separation between my shower and the adjoining one and saw the silhouette of another shower taker. I froze in mid-exercise when it suddenly dawned on me that my neighbor could surely see my hand and arm waving motions. Remembering the Larry Craig episode and not wanting my waving to be misconstrued, I instantly stopped my exercise and slinked out of the shower and eventually out of the center.
On my way home, I mulled the whole incident over and for an instant–just an instant–I felt a pang of pity for the senator. What if his gestures in that airport restroom had been misconstrued?
Just for an instant, because then I remembered the anti-gay words and anti-gay legislative initiatives by the senator from Idaho, and my compassion for him–gay or not gay–quickly evaporated.
On the way home, I concluded that the showers at the center were not the right place for my exercises.
Missing my exercise routine, however, I decided a few days later that the steam room at the fitness center would be a good place for resuming my stretching exercises–but only when I found myself alone there.
It was all going well until the other morning. That is when two concerned fellow fitness center enthusiasts, who had discerned my strenuous arm-waving through the thick clouds of steam, rushed into the steam room, ready to rescue me and to summon all kinds of medical assistance. After somewhat oafishly explaining that everything was OK, I decided that the steam room was not the right venue for my stretching exercises either.
So, it’s back to the showers for me now–the ones at home.
And it’s back to the other stories for the media—you know, the stories that keep on endlessly looping, and giving endless hope to Republicans.
Dorian de Wind is a retired U.S. Air Force Officer, born in Ecuador and educated in The Netherlands. He has a bachelor’s degree from of Texas A&M University and a master’s degree from the University of Southern Mississippi. Dorian has written opinion pieces and travel and other articles for the Austin American-Statesman and for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. He also translates Dutch press articles for watchingamerica.com.
ABC’s Jake Trapper, in a post on his blog almost written in dismay, notes how former President Bill Clinton is on now the hustings in rural West Virginia delivering a tough message that’s essentially divide-and-rule politics — the same he has delivered throughout much of the political season.
Trapper’s intro to the quotes nails the situation that is making the Clintons a political team that seemingly has decided to continue unabated to work to polarize their own party in order to generate poll turnout and then (presumably) plans to get in power and try to govern a unified country. Bill Clinton’s present campaigning and comments will likely seized upon as “proof” those who insist the Clintons (without proof) that the Clintons are really trying to lay the groundwork for a 2012 run, after a bruised Obama (largely bruised by the Clintons) flops at the polls.
Bill Clinton has the right to say whatever he wants, of course. But he’s a smart man. Brilliant, even.
He can do the math. He must know that it’s quite improbable that his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., will be the Democratic presidential nominee.
So what purpose does it serve for him to barnstorm a state like West Virginia and tell rural voters that Obama and his elitist political/media cabal allies are mocking Appalachia?
He’s using the kind of language Democrats typically use against Republicans — as in, stuff you say when you don’t want voters to vote for the other guy under any circumstance.
The blog Hypnosis Control has this You Tube goodie that purports to show subliminal advertising for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain on a Fox News broadcast.
Is it real? Imagined? Intentional sublimal? Unintentional picture placement? A doctored video put on You Tube? Who knows (and if Fox denied it some people would say don’t believe them anyway). We embed, you decide…
FOOTNOTE: I could never understand all the fuss about subliminal advertising, despite the research. If subliminal advertising (intentional or otherwise) truly worked, we’d have heard a lot of it by now and banned or otherwise the government (any government) would use it to influence and manipulate the population.
It’s like expecting that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh would ever follow Rush if he suggested, for example, that voters should vote in Democratic primaries or change their party registrations to vote in and sandbag the primaries. It’s as SILLY an idea as that! (Never mind…)
The events now unfolding in the Middle East, which have been set in motion by Hezbullah’s takeover last week of much of Beirut, do not bode well for American or Israeli interests, warns one of France’s leading historians and journalists, Alexandre Adler.
Writing for France’s Le Figaro newspaper, Adler writes that Iranian President Ahmadinidjad, hemmed in by opponents at home and abroad, has turned to one of the last cards he holds in his hand: the Lebanese Hezbullah:
“Let us first turn to Iran, which is in a fever and where the most decisive threats originate. Iran’s President and his trusted accomplices - and a pro-Iranian faction of al-Qaeda - hope to recreate unity among all people of Muslim faith for a renewed jihad against America and Israel. Voices have been heard, notably among the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, who hope for such an outcome and support Iran’s nuclear program, which many Islamists - not only in Cairo - regard as a liberating force that should be immediately employed against Israel, whatever the risks.”
“Israel cannot tolerate a military victory for Hezbullah over its [pro-West] Lebanese opponents - any more than it can allow Ahmadinejad to pursue nuclear blackmail, especially in this very strange context: There is the probability that a Democratic candidate - indeed an Obama election victory - could bring to the White House a supporter of negotiations at all costs. … Clearly, this is a distressing 60th anniversary for Israel.”
This is a seminal article about what the United States now confronts, and it should be read by anyone interested in understanding this very important and hard-to-penetrate topic. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in February, Saturday Night did a peppery parody of a CNN televised debate in which it painted the press as fawning all over Democratic Senator Barack Obama and dismissing and being hard on Senator Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s campaign and Clinton herself pointed to that parody in their argument that the press was going easy on Obama and part of “Obamanamia” and hadn’t been vetting or challenging him.
Shortly after that, what many believe was Obama’s “free” ride indeed ended — and some pundits attributed it to the SNL sketch and the Clinton campaigns use of it as an example of how it wasn’t only them that had this perception of the press’ behavior.
Obama supporters charged SNL was repeatedly biased in its parodies in favor of Clinton and skewering their candidate — and Dan Abrams on MSNBC noted in a segment that political supporters were going haywire…and that SNL was a political candidate equal offender (click on the link since he includes various excerpts).
The Clinton campaign loved SNL — but it’s likely the love affair is over now with last night’s latest parody which at times seems downright brutal.
Today John McCain is unveiling a sassy TV commercial with his 96-year-old mother to remind voters about his good genes and American values. Iffy as it may be to call attention to his age, the ad underscores the diversity of motherhood in this campaign.
Roberta McCain, who gave birth to her son at a Naval Air Station in Panama, where her husband, the son of an Admiral and a future Admiral himself, was based, radiates the aura of a strict, no-nonsense parent out of a bygone era. John McCain always knew exactly who he was.
Barack Obama’s mother was a dreamer with, in his words, a “combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in…but also a certain recklessness…always searching for something. She wasn’t comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box.” Her travels and exotic marriages produced a unique bi-racial man who has spent his life finding and creating himself.
Somewhere between these extremes of certainty and self-invention is Hillary Clinton’s biographical journey from a well-to-do suburban childhood that took her to college as a Goldwater girl, transformed her into a Eugene McCarthy protester against the Vietnam war and eventually the first woman within striking distance of the presidency.
In this post-Victorian, post-Freudian era, motherhood comes in all shapes and sizes, producing remarkable diversity in the generation that will define the 21st century.
Is the situation far more grim for the GOP than presumptive GOP Presidential nominee Senator John McCain and the Republican Party think and are they deluding themselves on the mega-grim picture the party faces in 2008? The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman writes:
Richard Norton Smith, a historian who has run the presidential libraries of Republicans Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, is pessimistic about the party’s prospects. He thinks the correct analogy is not 1988 but 1920 or 1952 — when an unpopular war and an equally unpopular president spelled doom for the party in the White House. He thinks 2008 is shaping up not only as a narrow defeat for the GOP but a decisive “repudiation.” Read the rest of this entry »
Senator Barack Obama got mired in the controversy over his former pastor. Senator Hillary Clinton got bogged down on her comments about dodging dangerous fire in Bosnia. And both of them took political hits that lasted a while and did some damage.
Now, Clinton is clearly — and truly — bogged down in her comments about white voters liking her more than Obama, even though her aides now insist that she regrets the comments.
The damage to Clinton’s image seems profound. And what better evidence of THAT then the once-unimaginable development that one of her most ardent African-American supporters Rep. Charles Rangle would bluntly denounce her remark?
One of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most important supporters, Charles Rangel, repudiated her claims she has broader support among “white Americans,” calling the comments “the dumbest thing she could ever have said.”
The Harlem congressman’s criticism of Clinton came as rival Barack Obama Saturday took the lead among superdelegates, the group that will decide the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Speaking to reporters before introducing Clinton at a Manhattan fundraiser Saturday, Rangel chastised the remarks as “very poorly worded.”
But the barrage doesn’t end just there. On newspaper op-ed pages from the U.S. to Great Britain Clinton is being denounced, usually on several key points: (a) her comments make her a more polarizing figure than ever, (b) her comments are unlikely to help her achieve her goals of winning the nomination and unifying the party and (c) her comments damage the Clinton’s legacy of good ties with black voters — a legacy already greatly strained by some of Bill Clinton’s race-raising comments.
A look at some of articles and recent columns indicates that if getting “good ink” and “good air time” is a goal, the Clinton campaign has been derailed even more than the 2000 original version of Republican Senator John McCain’s Straight Talk Express. Here’s a sampling: Read the rest of this entry »
‘Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in her whole aspect, and spite of all mortal men could do - the said solid white buttress of her forehead smite the ship’s starboard bow.’
(apologies to Moby Dick)
It seems that a global consensus against Senator Hillary Clinton is forming, after her razor-thin victory in Indiana and significant defeat in North Carolina.
This editorial from Lebanon’s Daily Star not only lambastes Hillary for pandering - pointedly in regard to her threat to ‘obliterate’ Iran - but it uses her bad example as a way of pointing out a glaring deficiency in Democratic government as it is presently conducted.
“Whatever she does in the future, nothing will erase her demonstration of the worst aspects of American politics - particularly her recent statement that she would ‘obliterate’ Iran if it ever threatened Israel with nuclear weapons … The context of her threatening statement is telling, in that it exposes the weak link in America’s democratic system - or any democratic system: the inclination of candidates running for public office to pander to the basest prejudices, sentiments and fears of the voting public.”
“The United States and Iran may disagree about many things; but for one to use threats of obliteration as a policy toward the other strikes us as a rather crude and offensive strategy, especially for a world power.”
One interesting question to ponder is whether Hezbullah’s takeover on Friday of much of Beirut, will also put an end the the independence of the pro-West Daily Star.
EDITORIAL
May 8, 2008
Lebanon - The Daily Star - Original Article (English)
In the coming days or weeks, Hillary Clinton’s fate as a presidential hopeful will be decided. But whatever she does in the future, nothing will erase her demonstration of the worst aspects of American politics - particularly her recent statement that she would “obliterate” Iran if it ever threatened Israel with nuclear weapons. The substance of the New York senator’s words are hard to evaluate due to the hypothetical nature of the damage she threatens to impose. Were she ever to become president and order such an attack, many other Americans would have to agree with the decision in order for it to be implemented, particularly the top military brass.
The context of her threatening statement is telling, in that it exposes the weak link in America’s democratic system - or any democratic system: the inclination of candidates running for public office to pander to the basest prejudices, sentiments and fears of the voting public. Clinton has been a particularly dynamic panderer this year, jumping on every opportunity to make her appear to be a woman of the people, whether drinking shots of whisky or calling for gas-tax holidays. In this case, she chose to play on widespread American opposition to Iran, which is in turn a function of several factors. In American politics these days, Iran is the bad guy par excellence, whether for its role in Iraq, its strategic ambitions in the Middle East, its nuclear policy, its rhetorical threats against Israel, or to its a general assertion of Islamist identity and politics. Americans also remain angry at Iranians for overthrowing the Shah in 1979 and then taking and holding Americans hostages for many months.
Obama Eager to Campaign With McCain. Newt Gingrich, who has advocated this, will stand up and cheer. It makes me shake with anticipation… Obama is receptive to the idea of a debate roadshow with McCain.
This would seem to benefit Obama by introducing him to a wider audience and contrasting him with the older and less rhetorically artful McCain. But beyond the contrast of candidates it is an exciting opportunity to engage in a sustained discussion of various world views by ideologically open minded spokesmen. Certainly each has their partisan credentials but they also have temperaments of pragmatism and realism.
And the audience for this would certainly not be limited to US political junkies, but the entire planet looking to see what kind of leadership the US intends to offer.
It’s as though anxiety around the world over the ongoing battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is just as strong as it is among U.S. Democrats.
“There are moments in life in which a person must make a decision, even if you don’t know what decision is the right one. You can weigh the pros and cons, draw on the council of friends or see a fortune-teller. But calculating the probabilities only gets you so far since no one can know all the variables. All of which is why one must act on the basis of the information available at the time.”
“If Hillary Clinton can’t recognize when its time to concede, then the remaining undecided superdelegates should offer a helping hand: with a swift vote in favor of the candidate who has emerged as the winner of primaries held so far: Barack Obama.”
By Sabine Muscat
Translated By Ulf Behncke
May 7, 2008
Germany - Financial Times Deutschland - Original Article (German)
Philadelphia: It’s about time that the superdelegates put an end to the clash between presidential candidates Clinton and Obama - even if Clinton doesn’t realize that it’s time to stop.
There are moments in life in which a person must make a decision, even if you don’t know what decision is the right one. You can weigh the pros and cons, draw on the council of friends or see a fortune-teller. Calculating the probabilities can only get you so far since no one can know all the variables. All of which is why one must act on the basis of the information available at the time.
That should be exactly the course of action now taken by the U.S. Democratic superdelegates, in whose hands lies the power to bring the clash of rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to an end. The information we now have is this: Obama’s has the balance of superdelegates needed to obtain the Party’s nomination.
With his huge victory in North Carolina, he neutralized Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania the week before. Clinton was unable to catch up to and overcome him. And the enthusiasm that a clear victory in Indiana would have generated is missing as well.
U.S. Democrats had half a year to compare presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and to verify that both uphold the same core Democratic values. At present, which of the two stands a better chance against Republican John McCain on November 4 is anybody’s guess. What’s clear right now, however, is that the margin between both candidates and John McCain is shrinking. The Democrats should worry less about …
One of the wags at The Onionwrote the other day that the number of acceptable phrases that a presidential candidate can use has dropped from 38 at the beginning of 2007 to a mere four.
They are:
Thank you all for coming, God bless America, These pancakes are great, and Death to the infidels.
Like all great humor, there is an element of truth to this, which leads me somewhat circuitously to get the jump on what is sure to be one of the more provocative story lines of the fall phase of the 2008 steel cage match for the White House.
That the race will be between a septuagenarian and an African-American.
John McCain’s age and Barack Obama’s skin color certainly would have come up however directly or indirectly. But we owe a debt of thanks (cough, cough) to Hillary and Bill Clinton for shamelessly lowering racial “discourse” to limbo-bar level.
Perhaps this is just the Clintons’ strange way of reaching out to the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency, but all it has done is drive blacks who were on the fence into Obama’s arms and further cement their legacy as a destructive team of which I can recall no spousal antecedent in American politics. (John and Abigail Adams didn’t behave that way, did they?)
My own view is simple:
Many factors were fair game as to whether Hillary was qualified to be president, but not her gender.
Many factors are fair game as to whether Obama is qualified to be president, but not his race.
Age, however, is an entirely different matter when combined with McCain’s refusal to share his health records, and these factors demand to be discussed.
This was quite a week — and not just because of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. It was a week when there were two TV moments when you could seemingly watch and hear the Democratic party starting to split.
First, brace yourself for Clinton supporter and strategist Paul Begala clashing with uncommitted superdelegate and former Al Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile. In her devastating recent Wall Street Journal column on Hillary Clinton titled Damsel of Distress, Peggy Noonan wrote of this piece of video:
The Democratic Party can’t celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.
Here’s the first place an outsider could see the tensions that have taken hold: on CNN Tuesday night, in the famous Brazile-Begala smackdown. Paul Begala wore the smile of the 1990s, the one in which there is no connection between the shape of the mouth and what the mouth says. All is mask. Donna Brazile was having none of it.
Next, there was Clinton backer (and occasional Huffington Post contributor) Lanny Davis, who felt he was treated shabbily by a CNN panel that he felt was stacked with people who favored Obama (you’ll see Brazile again). Details about his side of the behind-the-scenes story are HERE.
But you could again hear the riiiiiiiiiip. Watch this TPM montage and judge for yourself:
My take on it? I think Noonan’s piece, which contains some original reporting, sounds right on the dime.
She explains a lot of what is going on, and what is NOT going on and why. What seems clear from this is that the same attitude George Bush has shown in trying to impose his will on the legislative and executive branches, is what the Clinton campaign is now showing in its attitude towards the Democratic party and its long range goals — not just of winning an election but of burnishing its Big Tent, keeping that Big Tent stable, and opening it up, so more more people can pour in.
Davis? He tried making his case and clearly felt outnumbered.
And Begala? He talked about inclusion at the end, but his words meshed with the controversy later in the week centering on Clinton’s comments about her getting more white votes.
Begala was old-school divide and rule politics delivered with a pasted-on smile.
Here are four cartoons from abroad looking at the battle between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. Note that the cartoonists abroad see it in the same way as American cartoons do (there are still a lot of great American cartoons on the primary battle and we’ll run the backlog throughout the day).
Ask someone who works for either Barack Obama (Ill.) or John McCain (Ariz.) about the search for a vice presidential nominee and, to a person, the response you get goes something like this: “It’s way too early to even be thinking about specific names.”
Bring up potential VP’s with people outside the direct orbit of the campaigns, however, and you get a panoply of names, discussions of running mate strategy, and handicapping of strengths and weaknesses.
Welcome to the veepstakes — where those who know the most are saying the least and, unfortunately, vice versa.
The Fix, as always, navigates these tricky waters for the good of our readers. Conversations with a variety of operatives who are in a position to have a general sense of the veepstakes have produced the lists you will find below. When it comes to picking a vice presidential candidate, we acknowledge it is something of a moving target — so if your preferred guy (or gal) didn’t make the list never fear, they could show up next time.
Also, since McCain and Obama appear to have the nominations locked up, we are, for the first time, ranking the five most likely veep picks. The number one slot on the Line is the candidate with the best chance — right now — of being picked.
Agree or disagree? Have a favorite of your own? Or even a full list? The comments section awaits.
Why the heck does Susan Faludi think the sports metaphor is “a particularly lamentable white male construct” (New York Times, May 9)?
For that matter, why assign it to white males? I know black males, white women, black women, and athletes of all ethnicities who use sports metaphors effectively, some as early as third grade, without impairing their worthier values.
All else being equal, I would consistently prefer a sports metaphor to a conflict reality. There are so many conflict realities, and declarative nouns to describe them. War. Economy. Gas prices. Globalization. Global warming. Violence. Murder. Myanmar. Rush Limbaugh’s “chaos.” Racism. Gender wars. Divorce. Politics. Karl Rove politics. George W. Bush.
I cry for relief. Toss me a sports metaphor, please. Quick, somebody, hit one out of the park. That’s what sports and their metaphors are for. Relief. The nominative realities are never going to go away. Humans came to accept this several thousand years ago. I am no anthropologist, but the acceptance of nominative conflict realities may have directly preceded the invention of games and game metaphors. In fact I would be willing to contend that human awareness of games metaphors occurred not too long after the discovery of infidelity and long before the discovery of fire.
Sports provides all the conflict with none of the realities, and no one really loses in the end. Doesn’t anybody realize that sports is nothing more than a multi-billion-dollar business based on not knowing who is going to win? In the media business, it’s called the “threat to the status quo,” which is one of the two definitions of news: “News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.” It’s a dynamic, infinitely renewable definition. The Giants, third and long, two minutes left. Classic threat to the status quo. Memorable, even. They converted, scored, and New England didn’t make it to 19-0. Maybe next year.
This political campaign is another classic of the same threat. Lord have mercy, Ms. Faludi, if you want metaphors about who is going to win, listen to “Hardball” for an hour. Oops. “Hardball” must mean that Chris Matthews and his cohorts must make sense only to white males who know what it means to play hardball.
Do I sound a tad hot? I guess I am. I’m tired of being assigned white male constructs. For three minutes, I wish I was Don Newcombe on the mound, and Susan Faludi was at bat. Do you know how to spell chin music?
Lamentably, Faludi just grasped the idea of the sports metaphor and assigned it to white males to try to make a point about Hillary Clinton. How convenient. And then she closed her argument, not with a reality, but a metaphor. Glass floor. See how useful they are?
