Insanity

I thought I had covered this before, but apparently it is so easy for black writers to be published by positing a lack of support from African Americans for Barack Obama that instead of the surgical strike I had hoped I am going to have to follow a strategy more akin to whac-a-mole.

Let me say this again, this time as slowly as possible: as much as some folks would like see a divided Black electorate - it just does not exist. Descendants of slaves, immigrants from the Caribbean or South America or Europe or Africa - we all vote the same way: in our best interests. And in a country where people's voting interests can only be given voice through one of two outlets - Democrats or Republicans - is it really so surprising that black people would be so united?

This latest Time magazine article posits that a polling advantage for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama among black voters more than a year before the first vote is cast for the Democratic primary, translates to a lack of support for Obama from some in the black community - due to his biracial and non-slave descended heritage. This conclusion is no more than a theory, of course, and I happen to have one of my own: Senator Clinton is a former two-term first lady who has been on the national political scene for more than 15 years, whereas Senator Obama is a first term senator who has had national exposure for little more than two years. Instead of a national poll of black voters, how about a poll of black voters in Illinois - the state where Senator Clinton was born and raised and the adopted home of Senator Obama? Until someone shows that Clinton has a 40-point lead in Illinois amongst the black electorate, perhaps the difference is solely due to comparative knowledge of the candidates.

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Poor Christopher Hitchens

One of the saddest things to see is watching someone you had long admired cast themselves off into the great unknown. "Sure," you tell yourself, "he has wondered off alone before and he always makes it back." But for each of us, I guess, there comes that time when we sally forth to return no more.

It is time to bid farewell to Christopher Hitchens. Yes, he has had a long and stormy career tilting at windmills; and he has felled a few (why people still book Kissinger to talk shows amazes me endlessly). Yet for all his successes he has allowed his once erudite mind to become consumed by the fear engendered by the attacks on his adopted homeland on 11 September 2001. Since that time, he writing has been consumed with vengeance. And while we all lusted for the blood of Usama bin Laden, Hitchens enlisted with the neocon cabal, into the seemingly mindless "War on Terror" and now he continues to release periodic drivel based upon nothing more than the ever shifting sands of "we must not allow ourselves to lose".

Lose what? What are we fighting? How can one wage war on a tactic?

In the article linked to that is the basis for this post, you can witness the degraded Hitchens of 2007 before your very eyes as he takes the tiniest shred of truth ("Iraq's problems existed long before 2003") and weaves them together with classic neocon fables to build the case for continuing this catastrophe. Here are some simple talking points that you can use with those you love, should they also be experiencing the same degree of delusion that has engulfed our President and timid folks like Christopher Hitchens:

• Of course, Iraq's problems existed long before 2003.
• Indeed, this was the main reason given by opponents of this war plan back in 2003. Do not to topple that particular house of cards as it will be exceedingly hard - if not impossible - to resurrect.
• The problems with Iraq are irrefutably linked to its creation by the British Empire, cutting it whole cloth from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after WWI - something a child born of the United Kingdom should know in depth.
• Starting a war against a Sunni dictator - and really the last holdout of Arab Nationalism - only to now find ourselves enmeshed in a Shia/Sunni power struggle - for which we blame the Persian Shia's of Iran - was imminently predictable from the beginning.
• How many times will we allow ourselves to be told, "No one could have foreseen"?
• The last best hope for reasonable adults is the prescription provided by the Iraq Study Group - although I would not give it more than 1 chance in 10 of leading to a peaceful, stable Iraq.

Salon has a riposte to Hitchens et al that we all should read - several times a day. This author - Gary Kamiya - has the historical context to place his thinking on a solid foundation, as opposed to the fanatical rantings about an all powerful al Qaida that has been created in Iraq by American actions merely to provide the basis for conducting a war against a nation that had never caused harm to a single American citizen and possessed neither the ability nor the intent to do so in the future.

$1 Billion a day for war in Iraq, all charged to a debt to be paid by generations yet unborn. Shame on us America.

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