Talking white
Considering that Ralph Nader is "irrelevant" and has "almost zero influence" in Democratic, so-called "left-wing" circles," the circle-dwellers sure spend a lot of time talking about him. Today, we've got Salon's Joan Walsh, on-line attackers named Craig Crawford and RJ Eskow, a whole host of anonymous commenters on story threads, even an Obama advisor.For the record, here's the text of Nader's race-related comments to The Rocky Mountain News earlier in the week, criticized as "reprehensible," "delusional," even "racist" by Democratic party loyalists:
"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.
"He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up."
I would add to Nader's list Obama's failure to tackle other would-be African-American priorities such as voter protection, income disparity and regressive taxation, workers' rights to unionize, public education, universal health care, Katrina, the disastrous "war on drugs," and the reform of our criminal justice and prison systems-- unless by reform, we're talking about an unprecedented expansion of the death penalty, as Obama was today, concurring with a Supreme Court dissent by Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts.
Go ahead and dispute Nader's contention all you want, but it was Obama's team that pitched a fit when Bill Clinton compared their candidate to Jesse Jackson. We're now to believe that whole dustup wasn't about Obama's fear of being cast as "a politically threatening African-American?"
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In case you missed this in a linked story above, Obama just choked on the FISA bill.
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Roseanne Arnold is promoting Cynthia McKinney for president.
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Happy Belated Summer Solstice. Sixty-two-year-old Bill "Spaceman" Lee was mowing them down at the annual Midnight Sun ballgame on Sunday.
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Why is Tony LaRussa taunting me as though I was Scott Rolen?
posted by CM @ 8:37 PM
2 Comments:
FISA Bill: This is why we need more limits on the power of the Federal Government instead of handing them more power by nationalizing industries.
TA
The whole Red Sox revival the last few years is not my favorite thing as New England sports teams have now replaced Chicago sports teams as my least favorite. I'm really sick of them and now pull for the Yankees when they play each other.
But I love Spaceman Lee.
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