'What They're Telling Us'

Mark Steyn, From Monday's National Review Online:

What They're Telling Us [Mark Steyn]

This piece by Lloyd Marcus, a black conservative, is called "Stop Allowing the Left to Set The Rules," and deals with the alleged racism of the anti-Obama opposition. As Mr. Marcus notes:

The Left published a cartoon depicting former black Secretary of State Condolezza Rice as an Aunt Jemima; another depicted Rice as a huge-lipped parrot for her Massa Bush. Neither were considered racist by their creators or publishers, or even widely condemned on the Left.

In opposition to black Republican Michael Steele's campaign to run for U.S. Senate, a liberal blogger published a doctored photo of Steele in black face and big red lips made to look like a minstrel. The caption read, "Simple Sambo wants to move to the big house". Not one Democrat denounced these racist portrayals of black conservatives.

True. Nobody minds liberal commentators expressing the hope that Clarence Thomas "will die early from heart disease like many black men," etc. Contemporary identity-group politics are prototype one-party states: If you're a black Republican Secretary of State, you're not really black. If you're a female Republican vice-presidential nominee, you're not really a woman. What's racist and sexist here is the notion that, if you're black or female, your politics is determined by your group membership.

But, if we're talking about letting the Left "set the rules," Mr. Marcus's column reminded me of a larger point: Don't take your opponents at face value; listen to what they're really saying. What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek's "Mad Man" cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have "civility" drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper's scrotal "teabagging" slur and characterized as "racists" and "terrorists" what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?

They're telling you who they really fear. Whom the media gods would destroy they first make into "mad men." Liz Cheney should be due for the treatment any day now.

Sad to say, many who should know better go along with it. Our old comrade David Frum wrote a piece called "Whose Side Is Glenn Beck On?" Well, in the space of a week Beck claimed the scalps of Van Jones, ACORN and that Yosi Sergant guy at the NEA, none of whom should ever have been anywhere near the corridors of power but who'd still be there if it weren't for Beck. So whoever's side he is on, it seems pretty clear he's not on the Obama administration's. Hence, Media Matters's sudden obsession with such pressing concerns as Glenn's mom's three decade-old suicide.

The media would like the American Right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that's the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That's the better guide to what they're really worried about.

Dawud Walid Deals His Own Race Card

Our favorite CAIR spokesman, Dawud Walid, has written a letter to the Detroit News explaining that Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s recent speech insulting Obama as a “house slave” doesn’t “speak for Muslims.” Rather, writes Walid, “From Senegal to Indonesia, Muslims have celebrated Obama’s victory,” and view his election “as a clear sign that America has taken a big step toward the fulfillment of its principle of racial equality.” (“Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader doesn't speak for Muslims”).

As Walid explains the feelings of the world’s Muslims--the majority of whom will not be eligible for Obama’s promised middle-class tax cuts nor his health care plan--the reason they’re all so geeked about Obama is that it proves America isn’t a “racist imperial power” after all. (In retrospect, that must explain what all those riots and beheadings were about!)

Now after days of holiday overeating I can’t see grabbing hold of that old tar baby about who does or doesn’t speak for Muslims, especially to take issue with Walid, who, to hear him tell it, does speak for all Muslims.

Frankly, I don’t really care if Zawahiri or bin Laden want to say our new president (by the way, Democrats, see how easy it is to say “our new president”?) is a house negro, or want to make any other provocative racial comments about Westerners they don’t like. It’s not these guys’ racial theories that earned them a spot on our Most Wanted List. What did that would be their religious theories, according to which murdering innocent Westerners gets them in really good with their deity.

And I’m pretty sure that the election of Obama notwithstanding, that religious point of view still is a big motivator for Muslims out there. Otherwise, to take a recent example (and when it comes to Islamic rerror, there is always a recent example), the Bombay jihadists would have been searching for tourists holding racist imperialist ideas, rather than only tourists with British and American passports. (“Terrorists said `Put your hand up if you're British or American'”)

Apparently, what’s been causing all the tension between the Islamic world and the rest of us all these centuries has been our stubborn refusal to embrace the enlightened racial teachings of Islam. Enlightened teachings that right now aren’t, curiously, offering much comfort to the millions of African Muslims in Sudan who are being systematically slaughtered by their Muslim Arab brothers in Darfur. “Darfur: the genocide is Islamic racism” ” Or the Jews who were specifically targeted, (again, to take only the most recent example) by the Bombay murderers simply because they were Jewish.

The overreaction to Zawahiri’s racial comments was ludicrous, as if a fugitive terrorist “playing the race card” somehow compounds the evil of using hijacked airliners to destroy American office towers and murder thousands of innocent people. Walid may think that he can use this phony race issue to distance CAIR and its radical Islamic mission from that of al Qaeda, and to falsely paint CAIR as a civil rights group when it actually is a jihadist front, but it won’t work.

Osama bin Laden declared religious war on the USA in 1996 because he saw us as infidel crusaders, who needed our civilization destroyed and replaced with Islam.

The Pew Poll in 2006 showed there was still huge support for that amongst the world’s Muslims.

Support for terrorism: All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8% (in Turkey) and 72% (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13% (in Germany) to 69% (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come. (“[Pew Poll on] How Muslims Think”).

Dawud Walid's CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood, (one and the same) have a mission in America, and it isn’t to foster our principle of racial equality. It is to further their anti-Western “’Civilization-Jihadist process... eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Since they share bin Laden's and Zawahiri's jihadist goals of destroying America and imposing Islam, what difference does it make if Walid tries to take the high ground over this silly race-card flap?

Not God DAMN Reverend Wright, God BLESS Reverend Wright

[Author’s Note: After the following was posted, an informed reader sent me a correction regarding Charlene Reynolds, namely that I misidentified her as being black, when in fact she is white. I’ve reviewed the post, and decided that removing the erroneous description detracts very little from my intended point. But I have made the correction and done some minor edits to close up any gaps. At DU we do NOT consider identifying someone as black to be a defamatory statement, so for that I feel no need to apologize. But we try to be accurate, and I apologize for any confusion. TRC]

Here’s a summertime activity that’s cheap, fun, and doesn’t burn gasoline:

Let’s all have a conversation about race!

I know what you’re thinking. Remember we did that one year, and what a lousy time we had all had!

But I’m here to tell you, the whole country’s going to be having this conversation one way or the other, whether we like it or not. (Okay, we’re not going to like it). So why not get started now?

Because something big is changing in race relations in America. And it’s high time.

But it’s not going to be pretty. And it sure won't be fun.

But it will be for the best.

And that's on account of this new conversation we’re all going to have--the one not being controlled by the same people who’ve been controlling it these last forty years. I don’t think when it comes it’s going to be controlled by anybody. It isn't Obama's idea. That was an accident. It's not Rev. Wright's idea. He's a classic controller of the ancien regime.

That’s all over. Done with. Finito. That's a page that's been been turned. Turned by accident. But turned nonetheless. And forever.

By way of illustration I ask you to consider Detroit Free Press columnist Stephen Henderson. He’s black, a self-admitted Obama euphoriac who sees Obama’s nomination as a sign of progress and falling “racial barriers.”

In his Sunday column Henderson was hard at work for his candidate, fretting that the a lot of the right kind of voters are failing to dig Obama the way he does. (“Racial attitudes that Obama must address”). Henderson specifically was worried about a woman named Charlene Reynolds, and “lots of people just like her.”

It seems Ms. Reynolds had written a letter to the Free Press in response to another black columnist, declaring, “I would not vote for Obama because he is inexperienced, has not earned the right to my vote, and he is black.”

Plain enough. Detroit’s full of racists, right? Or so we’ve been told for forty years. More than likely Ms. Reynolds is just an outspoken Republican, that other party that's made up 99 and 44/100% of Klansmen, and people who plan vacations around dragging black guys behind pickup trucks.

The strange thing is, Ms. Reynolds is a Democrat. And what's more, she’s “a retired civil servant and union member living in western Wayne County. She voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and twice for Gov. Jennifer Granholm. She's against the Iraq war, fed up with economic stagnation, thinks there should be broader access to health care.” Put another way, she’s supposed to be what Henderson calls a “gimme” for Obama.

Instead, he uses his column to call Charlene Reynolds an ignorant, bigoted, racist. He even went and met her in person after reading her letter, so he could accuse her of racism with even more authority. Sure enough, after finding her commendably honest in person, he wrote, “I find her bigotry is more complicated and nuanced -- but no less ignorant -- than the overt, cross-burning racism that gets portrayed as prototypical. Reynolds has reasons for her racism, she told me.”

(Now I seriously doubt that Ms. Reynolds described her own reasons to Henderson as “racism.” But Henderson had to fall back on paraphrasing Ms. Reynolds's actual thoughts. The Free Press refused to run Ms. Reynolds’s letter verbatim, out of fear, Henderson says, that “running it without any context would have sent the wrong message about this newspaper, and the discussion we're trying to cultivate in. [sic].”)

Henderson writes that Ms. Reynolds specifically refused any suggestion that she’s been “duped into her racial estrangement, she said. She's not some uneducated redneck who thinks blacks are dirty or stupid or inherently unequal. She comes by her views from experience.”

Ms. Reynolds spent her working career as a state employee, working first for several years as a case worker for the welfare department, and then as a probation officer. In any other context, she would be given the latitude of having come by her attitudes honestly.

Yet I think the problem arises when, as a prominent black columnist and, ergo, a voice for the lesser-voiced Detroit black community, Henderson sees himself as a gatekeeper for discussions on race. The duties of race gatekeeper are simple. If you’re white, and want to talk about race, the gate stays closed. In fact, how dare you? You don't talk--you just listen! (Characters like Fr. Pfleger are the rare exceptions--but only because they are the white equivalent of Stepin Fetchit, mocking their own whiteness in craven exchange for approval--but never the respect--of blacks. The Trinity Choir and Peanut Gallery in the Pfleger video aren’t laughing with him --they’re laughing at him.) But then if you’re black, and are critical at all of the "black experience," or any of the usual black leaders, or any of the tried-and-failed solutions of forty years of black liberal politics—then the gate also stays closed. This isn't exactly the narrow gate spoken of Elsewhere that few enter--it's much more restrictive.

This is gatekeeping, old school. Which is why Henderson just knew he had to shut the gate on Ms. Reynolds for daring to hold opinions like this one: “She believes middle-class blacks can be ‘normal’ in mixed company, but resort to conspiracy-laden anti-white rants when they're among other blacks; even educated blacks, she says, just don't trust whites.”

Henderson’s reaction is straight by the book: “Reynolds' generalizations aren't worth dignifying with a response.” And doggone it, he doesn’t respond. Instead he just burns up a lot of column inches calling his fellow black an ignorant, racist, bigot.

And that, friends, is why the racial conversation in America has gone No Place in an ever-tightening circle for forty years. Say something the gatekeepers don’t like, and the conversation is over.

Now I happen to think Ms. Reynolds’s point is worth dignifying with a response. Otherwise, the conversation Obama wants us all to have isn't going to last long, is it? Not every response has to be in agreement. Henderson could respond without agreeing. He could engage, persuade, he could offer contradictory facts. Isn’t that what columnists spend their time doing?

But Henderson skips all that, simply throwing up his hands and asking, “How on Earth do you refute what for Reynolds is a lifetime of encounters that have led her -- wrongly -- to her broad but firm conclusions?”

Well, how do you refute anything? By refuting it. (If you can.) Certainly you don't refute anything by telling someone whose conclusions are based on a lifetime’s observations that she arrived at her conclusions “wrongly.” How, if a lifetime of encounters led her to those conclusions, could she have been led there “wrongly”? Isn't that the meaning of the word, "experience"?

As a matter of fact, when Ms. Reynolds makes her observation that “middle-class blacks can be ‘normal’ in mixed company, but resort to conspiracy-laden anti-white rants when they're among other blacks; even educated blacks, she says, just don't trust whites,” she’s not even expressing anything that some blacks haven't said before, and recently--blacks who weren't called ignorant racists for it.

For instance, here’s Barack Obama during his Philadelphia race speech in March discussing the same point:

Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.

For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.

That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table . . . . And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Rev. Wright's sermons . . . .

“Those blacks who did make it” is a reference to the black middle class. And the surprising anger in Rev. Wright’s sermons was disturbing because it took the form of a bitter, conspiratorial mistrust—even hatred—of white people. And then how many times did liberal defenders of Trinity and Wright point out that the congregation includes some of the most prominent and successful people in Chicago’s black community? Obama was making the identical point as Ms. Reynolds, when she said, “even educated blacks . . . just don't trust whites.”

Yet Henderson isn’t calling Obama a bigot for acknowledging how blacks harbor secret bitterness that they try to shield from whites, or that they mistrust whites, or how the “resort to conspiracy-laden anti-white rants”-- illustrated so vividly in Rev. Wright’s sermons--is a reflects that very anger and bitterness. Even liberal white columnist, (and Wright admirer), New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, says he thinks what’s happening now “is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.” (“Obama and Race”).

(Some of us have known about the anger for a lot longer than that. But we haven’t been free to discuss it, don’t you see.)

So why is it Henderson is so hard on Ms. Reynolds and “lots of people just like her”? Aren’t they all just pointing out a social/racial rift that’s only going to be more widely obvious from here on out --the awful stalemate we're all living with between black anger on the one side and the rapidly depleting resource of white guilt on the other?

I think it's that Henderson's still locked in to the old racial regime, the rules of engagement of forty years, the ones that reject all criticism as bigotry per se, even if it comes from within the black community. Those rules don't converse, don't discuss--they only shut people up. Under those old rules all Henderson the gatekeeper can do is try to declare that Ms. Reynolds’s “generalizations aren't worth dignifying with a response.” The same rules that poisonously insist that conservatives who vote against Obama for his liberal politics are motivated only by his race.

But the gatekeepers aren’t stopping everybody as easily as they once could. More and more people are finding other ways in. Gates are being ignored, walls scaled. The scene will soon resemble that toked-up mob when they started ripping down the cyclone fences around Woodstock. (“This is a mind f***er of all times, man.”)

There are differences already. Slightly more than a year ago Al Sharpton was still hearing confessions from the likes of Don Imus. Now, after the race enforcers tried to rub out Geraldine Ferraro by calling her a racist, instead of languishing in exile, she's getting more face time now than she’s had since 1984. She’s even fighting back, sounding, if I may so, every bit like a “typical white person” or maybe even Obama’s grandma:

" 'Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up,' Ferraro said. 'Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?'...”

(And speaking of old-school black gatekeepers, Bob Herbert responded to Ferraro’s remarks this way: “Geraldine Ferraro’s rants are sad and not worth responding to.” Ha!)

WCHB even canceled Sharpton’s show last week. (Yes, Detroit is now an official No Justice, No Peace Zone). The listeners, apparently, demand more "inspirational" programming.

It's a new day. The race discussion's going to be open to anyone now, or soon will be. One side will no longer have to cringe silently through hectoring, uninformed lectures on the “legacy of slavery” and the “lessons of Katrina,” while social pathologies rage through entire communities immunized by race politics. The other side, if all goes well, will have the freedom to demand better leaders, better solutions, more choices, a better legacy.

Not that it's going to be pretty. It won't be. And it won’t be nice. But everyone, Black, White, American Samoan, or Other, will benefit.

This is long, long overdue.

'Won't Get Took Again'?

Anybody else hear a big cracking sound? That might be the backbone of the Democratic Party snapping. (Yeah, it doesn't make much of sound at that.)

Black voters in Detroit are angry at what, already, they consider the hijacking by Bill and Hillary’s team of Obama’s nomination for president.

Callers to WCHB this morning, (Detroit’s biggest black talk radio channel), were threatening to leave the Democratic Party, and either skip the election this year or vote “independent,” (presumably because folks aren’t independent enough to vote Republican yet).

Mildred Gaddis seemed to be stumping for a boycott of the presidential election so that Hillary loses. One of her callers described how she has always voted the Dem ticket, but now for the first time is going to vote “independent,” namely, make up her own mind based on a candidate’s qualifications—as if that is a novelty for American voters! (Unfortunately, it's too much of a novelty for black Democratic voters).

If blacks defect, I don’t see how the Democrats could win in November, nor recover as a national party.

The irony of it would be almost too much to take.

For nearly 40 years now Democratic leaders have counted on a loyal cadre of paid-for clergymen, corrupt local politicians, and other union and “civic” organizers/hustlers to feed a steady diet of sound-bites, rumors, half-truths and falsehoods into the black community to keep the knowledge base diluted and the electorate disinformed. The whole strategy was to persaude black voters that all that stood between them and the malevolent forces dying to push them back down into Jim Crow and second-class status was the Party of God and civil rights--the Democrats. It was bullshit then, and it's so far past bullshit now that it's not even funny.

But this is funny: Now, that same sound-bite machine is smoking and throwing off sparks, imploding with the news getting around in the black community that “they’re” trying to steal the nomination from Obama so they can give it to “Billary.”

And this time, “they” doesn’t mean Republicans, conservatives, or (as they are called by the precious black clergy) “the Bushies”: instead I’m hearing names being thrown around like Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow, Jennifer Granholm, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The fact that Obama’s nomination, while it still seems a live possibility, is not yet his officially enough to be hijacked, is beside the point. Facts have always been the least of it in this kind of politics. We’re talking here about catechism by sound bite, about a voting block of millions with a knowledge of history and political science based almost entirely on rumors and interpreters like Wright, Farrakhan, and Sharpton. Thanks in part to the endless, deliberate racial baiting of black Americans by the Left, the black community—as a political block, anyway—has been conditioned to respond to all “injustices” by embracing conspiracy theories and echoing fables that forever after cannot be disproved.

Facts were equally beside the point in the OJ trial, in Florida in 2000, or after Katrina. In November 2000 the lie was spread in Florida, (Democratic operatives abandoned this lie within scant hours once they realized how much attention was going to get paid) that police barricades and guard dogs had been used in Broward County to prevent black supporters of Al Gore from reaching the polls. Farrakhan stole this lie and re-used it in slightly modified form after Hurricane Katrina, claiming that black residents fleeing high water in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans were prevented from crossing an overpass into a dry “white” neighborhoods by police barricades and machine-gun nests, leaving them to drown or starve to death.

The real lesson in the Jeremiah Wright story isn’t that one Chicago preacher is either racist or anti-American, (though he’s both), or that Obama proved his cynicism by attaching himself to Wright just to have a channel into Chicago’s black community. The real lesson is that there’s a voting constituency eager to defend Wright by defining themselves as sharing a common black “experience” that transforms fables about AIDS being invented in a laboratory to kill blacks, or about the US Coast Guard blowing up the New Orleans levees, or that there is a mother ship hovering above Planet Earth to rescue blacks, into historical truth. (Some may object that I am painting with too broad a brush by ascribing this level of incredulity to the entire black voting block. But for weeks I’ve heard countless black commentators explaining that Wright’s remarks are not only understandable—but substantially true--if you are a black person).

What gives these stories their power isn't their fantastic quality so much as their reuse of the theme of black victimhood at the hands of tricky whites, stories that always trace out the same pattern of racial malice and deception as laid down, in one of its Ur-versions, by Malcolm X, and then re-told about the White Man in every generation since:

“Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had!

“Ya been took!

“Ya been hoodwinked!

“Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!

“This is what He does….”

“He” being the White Man.

Except in this case, “He” isn't Dick Cheney or Don Imus, or Trent Lott.

"He" is Carl Levin, or Howard Dean. Or Billary.

In fairness to the ancient tale of bamboozlement, I guess the Democrats really have bamboozled the blacks. That's what Democrats do best. They even know how to hoodwink themselves. And the blacks really did get took. Run amock. No doubt about it. How else to explain the blind devotion of the victims of Jim Crow and the KKK to the party of Jim Crow and the KKK??

That is some first class example of bamboozle.

But Democrats, by managing now to make themselves the villain in this most recent Jena-Selma-Katrina-Lynching serial drama, (the one where Obama gets screwed out of his God-given entitlement to be President), have practically invited 20-some million potential black voters to abandon the party all together.

Which is exactly how the Democrats getting blown ass-over-teakettle by their own dropped racial grenade reaches its highest altitude of irony.

They've spent forty years spoon-feeding black voters on the politics of envy, anger, victimhood, and racial resentment. They worked things so bad for their black constituency that political goals in that community--more than forty years afte the Voting Rights Act--still haven't even evolved beyond using political office to spite imagined enemies or enrich corrupt leaders. As Detroit is the living, bleeding embodiment, black support is never the reward for a record of any measurable political or social gain. The reward is just getting it from them, and keeping it for us.

But the lack of clear political goals and social benefits has been a real benefit for the Democratic operatives working to keep blacks loyal, on board, or at least only manageably disaffected.

The lack of measurable goals spares Democrats accounting for why their policies fail to improve the lives of blacks. If the objects were better schools, for instance, or more jobs, or restored cities, Democrats would have to own up to being total failures. It bears little reminding that the places where the most Democrats lord it over the densest black populations are the places where the short end of the stick is shortest--places like, say, Detroit or New Orleans. If you sell people vacuous buzz phrases like “racial justice” in place of rational political metrics like better schools, or business investment that bring jobs, Democratic candidates need only ask every election time (like they’re asking now): “Are you more angry, frustrated, and suspicious now than you were four years ago? You are? Then vote for me, because we hate those people too!”

In Detroit, there’s a high school graduation rate somewhere down around 25% (we can’t be sure because no one here ever learned to do percentages). But there'll be no political consequence for this failure. That's because control of the cash-rich district is a “prize” all on its own, even if only a few district cronies get to enjoy it. A public school system's got little, or--in Detroit's case--nothing, to do with enriching and educating the city’s young people or making the city a more attractive place to live. The purpose of a school district is its value as a political fief, and a jobs and retirement program for teacher unions, income supplement for crooked preachers who get rich selling service contracts to the district, and general money trough for hangers-on of the city’s decades-old Democrat machine.

Now, because the national Democratic leadership are beginning to discuss, just maybe, throwing over the faltering and unready Obama in favor of a Hillary candidate in November, black voters who've grown very fond of Obama are getting that old hoodwinky feeling again.

The Democrats are facing the unintended consequence of Obama’s unexpected success: that black Americans would support Obama for their own independent reasons of pride and hope, reasons unrelated to reflexive obedience to long conditioning to just keep pulling that lever, regardless, for the ticket with the donkey picture at the top.

I think Howard Dean and Carl Levin were so jazzed at the idea of one of their most leftist Leftists in the Oval Office, enjoying unfettered tax raising power and Middle East partnering in Democratic 2009, they couldn't be bothered asking themselves if Conyers’s and Waters’s and Jackson-Lee’s compliant constituents would march in on Election Day and vote for whomever they were told to--just as they were trained to do—even if it meant turning their back on one of their own.

Meanwhile, without waiting to be ordered to do so by the national party, black Democrats adopted Obama, the smooth-talking handsome upstart, and started seeing him as “our” candidate. And in the politics of race, and envy, and mistrust, you just can't have an "us" without an enemy “them.”

And if there’s one thing Democrats have told black voters over and over and over, it’s: "Can't trust 'them.' They're tricky! Don't get took!"

Which worked fine, as long as the Dems got to define who "them" was.

But now the party that perfected the campaign appeal of
"vote for us, and we'll keep you from getting took by them,"
now is "them."

Even if Dean and the rest try to enforce party discipline (hah!), or explain the advantages of winning the White House with Hillary over losing it with Barack, it will sound (it already sounds, from what I heard today on Detroit talk radio) like nothing more than more wicked trickery laid down by one more doctor with an advanced degree in bamboozleology--trying to hoodwink us, again.

This can only get better for everyone.

Hillary Searches for the Missing Lincoln

Hillary Clinton, secretly impressed with Obama’s speech on race, (the one he gave to deflect criticism of his close association with Jeremiah Wright, and that earned him comparisons with Abraham Lincoln), has decided, in order to deflect attention from Snipergate, to give her own speech setting forth her views on lying.

DU has been unable to confirm the authenticity of draft excerpts provided us, but we’re posting them anyway, because I'm tired and doing so just proves I'm human:

...This is the reality in which Bill and I and other sixties-style liberals of our generation grew up. We came of age when Richard Nixon was facing impeachment, and opportunity for dishonest statements and political hits on enemies was systematically constricted for all public officials. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of increased scrutiny of public statements, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way, like Bill and me, for example.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past. In fact, the past never even happened.”

But even for those ambitious political animals who did make it, habits of lying, perjury, and trickery continue to define our worldview in fundamental ways. And occasionally that dishonest worldview finds voice at political rallies, in press interviews, or in stump speeches we repeat over and over again. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear the falsehoods in some of my speeches simply reminds us of the old truism that the most gullible moments in American life occur during presidential campaigns. Our tendency to lie is not always productive.

But the dishonesty is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists among the voters.

I can no more tell the truth about things like the Bosnia visit than I can disown Bill Clinton. And I can no more disown him than I can my black grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, the typical black woman who taught me all the old Negro spirituals—(sings) “I aint no ways tard!”—and took me to march with her at Selma when I was only two, where we dodged bullets fired at us by police, which made me cringe.

I have never been so naïve as to think that I can get through eight years as President without ever once leveling with myself, or you, the American people, about anything.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in my own absolute correctness about things, and faith in the gullibility of the American Democratic voter - that working together we can move beyond some of the ridiculous things I say, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path to the more perfect utopian society I have so carefully planned for this nation.

Springsteen on Rolling Stone's 40th: 'A Low Point in American History'

Unlike the Rolling Stone interview with Bono, which we discussed below, where Bono showed some capacity both for reason and individualism, the interview with Bruce Springsteen followed the Rolling Stone line--shall I say slavishly--with the result that my plummeting opinion of the man can plummet--geologically speaking--no farther.

The interviewer's very first lob to Bruce, “On the whole, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?” got this response:

I’m optimistic as far as people go and pessimistic as far as the government goes, for pretty clear reasons. In 2006, the American people said, “Throw these bums out!” They would have voted Bush out at that moment if they could have. There was a clear message about the war in Iraq, and yet we sit here today with no front-running presidential candidate on either side who’s going to take us out of there.

Of course, we may just get out of Iraq the best way, victoriously, leaving behind a stable, secure, non-terror supporting, friendly Iraq, But who the hell wants to write a song about that?

Aside from this, Springsteen has nothing concrete to say about the challenge this nation--the heartland of which he is credited with speaking for-- has faced since 9/11. For him, the key issues are “race and poverty,” which he thinks were lost to the national discourse, “not unintentionally through the use of other issues.” (The war against Islamic jihadism, presumably.)

Springsteen really seems stuck on the poverty issue this time. He seems to think LBJ's plan was a good one. Or John Edwards's. Well, at least Edwards's anti-poverty plan worked for him. Maybe Springsteen's concerns for the impoversihed are why he's always photographed with the same old Telecaster with the worn-off finish, and of course, the Levis and T-shirt--that means he's poor, too, I guess.

You see, Bruce explains, the big movement of the powers that be in this country "is towards a plutocracy” [??], a movement which in turn is pushing the critical conversation about race and poverty out of the national discussion. But, he says, that conversation can’t be stopped all together:

I’ll tell you when it wasn’t stopped--when a guy that doesn’t care that much about it had to say something about it. [He’s talking about Bush, of course]. When people turned on the television during Hurricane Katrina and said “Where did all those poor people come from?”

You wanna give us a break, here, Bruce? I may not have known just how poor New Orleans was, but I always knew there were lots of poor people in every big city, because I grew up in one, and I still live right next to one. Does that mean I’m not a plutocrat?

Or maybe Springsteen was only expressing his own surprise at all these poor folks in New Orleans, because none of those impoverished black folks on TV getting pulled off their roofs looked familiar from the last time he’d played the Superdome for $100 a cheap seat.

Springsteen credits Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” with having an “enormous impact” on him, empowering him “to feel that in my small way, I had something to say, I could do something.” That something that he and the E Street Band can do, as we have note elsewhere, is to “sing.” To sing, and in 2004, to help raise money for that other working-class hero, and terror to plutocrats everywhere, John Heinz Kerry.

But for sheer historical myopia, nothing beats the response Sprinsgteen gave when he was aked how he thinks this time will be judged in 40 more years:

Many parts of it will be remembered with the same degree of shame as the Japanese internment camps are remembered --illegal wiretapping, rendition, the abuse of prisoners, cutting back our civil rights, no habeas corpus. I don’t think most people thought they’d ever see the country move far enough to the right to see those things happen here. And I don’t believe those are things that strengthen us. The moral authority to stand up and say, “We are the Americans,” is invaluable. It’s been deeply damaged, and it’s going to take quite a while to repair that damage, if we can.

This will be remembered as a low point in American history--as simple as that. People are going to go, “Was everybody sleeping?” But people get frightened, they get crazy. You wonder where political hysteria can take you--I think we’ve tasted some of that.

All I want to do is be one of the guys that says, “When that stuff was going down, I threw my hat in the ring and tried to stand on what I felt was the right side of history.” What can a poor boy do, except play in a rock & roll band?

Well,. Bruce, I'm not sleeping, but this kind of shit does make me crazy.

At least all this national darkness has given Bruce an excuse to update some of his old songs. I've even heard there's a new version of “Born to Run” the band's been playing around with in the studio:

Antiwar’s Way Too Much Fun

In the day I’m tryin’ to rhyme “habeas corpus” while I do my Nautilus routine
At night I preach ‘bout the last man to die and defective voting machines
Straight from the mean streets in John Kerry’s mind
"Rendition!" "Katrina!"
They’re clichés but I can’t change a line
Baby this stuff rips the soul from your rap
Sounds real dumb out loud, like rehashed Maureen Dowd
But those cheers make me feel I’m still young
So for chumps like us,
baby, antiwar’s way too much fun

Trendy set I’m in says they can’t be my friend
If I ain’t hawking the old sixties vision
It’s that iron hand in that velvet glove
That’s strangling all my good intentions
I tell myself, you gotta bust this trap
Gotta drop all this pap, can’t ya go back to just playin’ rock?
Singin’ platitudes makes my soul tired
But frankly I’m just a scared and lonely shaman
Who’s got a jones for the way that it feels
I gotta hear crowds go wild
So what if I don’t mean it for real?

At my shows each night mobs of middle-aged drones swoon when I say “times are dark”
I guess they live their lives in rearview mirrors
Because reality’s just too hard
The amusing thing's how we're getting paid to sing
Then get to brag we’re doing dissident work
I’d rather kid myself, baby, ‘neath these lights each night
Than admit I’m a political jerk!

Now the gossip shows glow with celebrity heroes all strugglin’ to stay alive
Every one of us knows that the Left’s in its throes
But there’s worse things than shuckin’ jive
The truth is we all hocked our brains away gladly
For a promise of more of that badly needed fame
Someday buddy I can’t say when
I’m gonna find my lost soul
The one that made all my old songs roll
even admit there’ve been victories won
But till then chumps like us
Think antiwar’s way too much fun