``The back story of how Senator Barack Obama's comments about small-town voters became news is getting almost as much attention in the blogosphere as the comments themselves...''
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So, here is a sample quote from a few days ago:
``The Illinois senator has spent two days on the defensive after comments he made at a San Francisco fundraiser suggesting working class people are bitter about their economic circumstances and `cling to guns and religion' as a result. Clinton has pounded him for the remarks, calling him elitist and divisive.''' (MSNBC, April 13th)
In other words, the white working class is easily manipulated by rightwing populist sentiments and the results have been very destructive to the political climate in the US. Gee, you think?
Last week on Air America Radio, Ed Schultz spend a couple of days on the rumor that the Clinton machine or those supporting it had started a whisper campaign against Obama for suspicions of anti-semiticism. Theories were flying around about the Israeli lobby and older Jewish voters.
The week before I think it was the Reverend Wright story for the weekly news cycle that lasted for two weeks on that one.
Each week we hear another smear that circulates and is either pushed by Clinton or picked up by her.
None of these stories have any issue content. It's all personality smear, supposedly revealing some putative unpleasantness in Obama's character. He has managed so far to dance an almost perfect cha-cha-cha through the mire. Dwayne would have it as a tango. I could go that far. It's pretty nice from here.
I regretted voting for Clinton the minute after I did it. It was based on the idea that Clinton could withstand a rightwing assault in the main election, and Obama would probably be eaten alive.
It's now obvious to me that Obama is the one who can withstand a character assault. I just didn't expect it would come from Clinton. I should have known. Her husband did the same thing to Bush, who was about two points to his right, which is on a relative spectrum just about the difference between Hilary and Barack in the other direction. It's the same old story. Since there is little substantive difference, the campaign turns to smear.
I think this parsing of difference that leads to smear is the consequence of no campaign's willingness to take a stand on anything or engage in education where voters are confronted with the trade offs for and against their positions in a realistic manner. For example, no political figure is going to step up to the podium and say the public infrastructure is falling apart because the majority of voters refuse to pay for the much needed county, state and federal projects needed to fix it.
So, I blame the voters. A bunch of wheenies who think all this shit is supposed to appear out of thin air or that somebody else is going to pay for it. The public mentality is what can you do for me? The honest answer is take your civic responsibilities seriously and understand you get what you vote for. You vote for lying, theiving jerks, then that's what you'll get. And indeed that's what we got.
You don't want to hear about taxes, fine. We'll tax your ass behind your back and out of sight. You want to play racist games over public education and public accomodation (i.e. public infrastructure), fine. We'll turn your ass out to the capitalist pigs and the religious nuts and see how you like privatization.
You are not sure you want to live in an urban neightborhood with god knows what next door? Fine we'll screw you up the ass, we'll screw up the environment, and give you a funky morgage a hundred miles from where you work. Get used to it.
The US middle class has persistantly pursed its little phobias over race and class for years---well for two and half centuries.... So here we are boys and girls...
``Dr. Dealgood: Listen all! This is the truth of it. Fighting leads to killing, and killing gets to warring. And that was damn near the death of us all. Look at us now! Busted up, and everyone talking about hard rain! But we've learned, by the dust of them all... Bartertown learned. Now, when men get to fighting, it happens here! And it finishes here! Two men enter; one man leaves.
Dr. Dealgood: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... Dyin' time's here...''