Move over and move on, Saturday Night Light Live. The internet is rife with spoofs of Sarah Palin. Imagine, for a moment, that Palin was Black. What might a liberal media bashing Brooklyn Palin sound like? Check this out:
http://newsone.blackplanet.com/elections/black-sarah-palin-sketch/
As I write this, being Sunday, I have no doubt that we could wipe out the National Debt and bail out every Wall Street firm if we only had a dollar for each time someone recited “in Jesus’ name” today alone. Since Jesus has not yet returned (or surely Pat Robertson would have told us), there is no end of WWJD speculation over this election. In some parts of this country there is an idea that being Christian is the same as being Republican. Blessed are those who smear the character of their opponents: that’s what the Bible ought to say, according to Karl Rove. In the nation’s tightening Bible Belt there are those who think a Christian should never vote for a democrat, as though politics can be read the same way as apocalypse. So it should not be a surprise that the vitriolic rhetoric of Sarah Palin results in the kind of hate speech that makes Obama the same as Osama and rekindles the kind of KKK racism that used to lynch “uppity” black folk. Not long ago a black man could be beaten to death simply for daring to vote, so imagine how grating it must be to the kind of racists who are scared a black man might actually president. Didn’t God curse Ham?
There is no question that prayer is a much better option for this campaign than the hate speech heard at Palin and McCain rallies during the past week. But then, as the country song reminds us, be careful what you pray for. On Sunday at a McCain event in Davenport, Iowa, the crowd was warmed up by a local pastor of the Evangelical Free Church. Here was his prayer, as reported by a blogger at the event:
“There are plenty of people around the world who are praying to their god, be they Hindu, Buddah, or Allah, that (McCain’s) opponent wins. I pray that you step forward and honor your own name.” Ends with “in Jesus’ name.”
Let’s start with the Bible. “Whatsoever a man soweth,” says the King James Version, “that shall he shall reap.” I doubt the Apostle Paul would mind if this verse was clarified for 2008 as “Whatsoever a politician sayeth, that shall he also reap bigtime.” For the past week, as Wall Street was dodging fire and brimstone economic news, the McCain/Palin campaign let loose the doggone attack dog one-liners, claiming that Obama was “pallin’ with terrorists,” mocking the idea of an American with a middle name of Hussein, and asking rhetorically “Who is Barack Obama?” For the vast undercurrent of racist attitudes in America this was red heifer meat, fear mongering in raw form. So who do at least a few (and it seems more than a few) of those listening to McCain and Palin think Senator Obama is? Why, he’s an Arab, of course.
To his credit, John McCain stepped back from the flames of the fire he himself set and set the record straight that his opponent is a “decent man” and a family man and not a scary man. To his discredit, this racist comment is the logical conclusion of many who have listened to his “I am John McCain and I approve this ad” campaign spin. While the government was scrambling to bail out the major financial institutions, in some of the redder side roads off Main Street the Straight Talk Express was spewing out Rove-driven poisonous carbon-copy monoxide. Continue reading The Great Chain of Being Racist
The choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be the one-heartbeat-away running mate for Republican John McCain was not just throwing another hat into the political ring. No, this was a hunk of red meat, Red Heifer over moose flesh, for the hungry religious right to savor. Here was a born-again Pentecostal who overnight transformed the gambling non-Christian (just ask James Dobson before the epiphany) Navy war hero into a respectable church elder. The apocalyptic baggage of Palin’s Assemby of God church raised more than a few eyebrows outside the red-faced Bible Belt. If she became Vice-President (or President) would God finally let Satan unleash the Tribulation, killing off hundreds of thousands of Jews and millions of unborn-again Americans? What better place to hold out in caves and read those KJV blood-soaked Bibles than in Alaska, where the remaining believers could actually see Gog across the Being Strait? If Sarah Palin’s oil pipeline, like the Iraq War, was something the Redneck State God wanted, then surely Senator Obama is a perfect fit for the Antichrist.
But wait, it gets better than what the Prophet Daniel had to say about the Day of Jacob’s Trouble and the Apostle Paul predicted so rapturously about the Second Coming of Jesus. Now we know that Sarah Palin got onto the GOP ticket because it was predicted in the Torah. Move over De Vinci and make room for Josephus. Here is what the Ark of the Covenant Code says abut Election o8: Continue reading Holy Moses, Palin’s in the Torah
Last night Senators Obama and McCain squared off for the first debate, setting off a feeding frenzy among surrogate spinmeisters around the mediasphere. It was the Old Man and the Sea Change. So who won? Who landed the most blows? Who survived? If this had been a heavyweight bout, there would have been a decision ringside with judges who could tell real blows from low blows. The pandering of pundits only goes round and round with no “real” winner. The only way political debates ever matter is at the polls on election day. Of course, John McCain’s campaign knew ahead of time that he won. Even before McCain agreed at the last minute to honor his commitment to the independent debate commission and the American people (not to mention Ole Miss), his campaign (apparently not in suspension, just in free fall) put up an ad Friday morning on the Wall Street Journal that claimed McCain as the winner.
You could say it was a draw, although not with much blood loss. But there were a number of strategic errors and tactical mistakes. Continue reading A Strategic Error, a Tactical Mistake
GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin was interviewed on ABC, noting that she can handle foreign policy with Russia because from her state of Alaska she can actually see Russia. Perhaps not from her major’s office in Wasilla or capitol office in Juneau (which is off the map shown above to the bottom right)…
In the past month or so this blog has shifted emphasis from the large swathe of posts covering some aspect of the study of Islam or the Middle East to the current presidential election in the United States. In large part this is because the political game overrides the “united” part with a partisan division into red and blue states. The candidates have specific stands, as well as generic punch lines for the public, on a range of these issues. Certainly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which daily claim American military lives and many more civilians, are a major part of the electoral mix. Before the conventions it was John McCain, the proud war-first-not-country-first candidate vs. Barak Obama, who had the judgment to say going into Iraq was a big mistake.
But McCain surprised everyone (including party pooper — and I mean that literally — Joe Lieberman, no doubt) by choosing a VP candidate with zero foreign policy experience, who had never left the country (outside of tourist visits to Canada and Mexico) until a ceremonial trip to visit the Alaska National Guard troops (which she has no authority over when outside Alaska) in Kuwait, and who thinks being next to Russia across the Bering Strait makes her a specialist on post-Cold-War policy making. What I want to know is how strong the binoculars are from Juneau, where you can sure see Canada on a clear day, or Anchorage. It may not matter if the hottest governor in the nation is prepared to get even hotter and go to the gates of hell to look Putin (apparently she does not know how to pronounce Dmitry Medvedev’s name) in the face with that pitbull smile of hers. Of course, after all, as she stated, from her state of Alaska she can actually see Russia. If seeing is believing, Palin is the poster child for Republican optical illusions. Continue reading Strait Talk from Palin
The most fascinating thing about the GOP nomination of John McCain and Sarah Palin as their ticket to extend Republican control of the White House is that there is no accounting for family values this time around. Starting at the top, there’s John McCain himself. After fourteen years of marriage (the kind that most in the Bible Belt would say has “to-death-do-us-part” vows) he went to a party (not a revival meeting) and fell in love with a 24 year old socialite who just happened to be an heiress to a fortune from her father, who owned the main Budweiser Beer (a kind of alcohol that Christians must not let touch their lips) distributor company in Arizona. So he did what any other God-fearing gentleman would do, right? He dumped his wife, who waited patiently while he was a POW and had suffered a severe auto accident, and married the younger celebrity. Cindy’s daddy apparently had doubts about the love, since a pre-nuptial agreement kept John from access to her millions. Contrast this to Barack Obama, who fell in love with his wife, has two kids and is still married (imagine that, and he’s a radical liberal, no less).
Now we get to the bottom of the ticket, and indeed it scrapes the bottom. Enter stage right Sarah Palin, who virtually no one outside of Alaska had ever heard of until last Friday. Continue reading Accounting for Family Values
John McCain is running for President as the maverick, not any old maverick but “the” maverick frozen in American popular culture. The original Maverick was an ABC television show that ran from 1958-1962, starring James Garner as an inveterate (rather than a veteran) and not very chaste gambler. You have probably seen some of the reruns even if you did not see it in your living room (as I did) almost a half century ago, and, of course, you can always go to You Tube. Here is how the nostalgia site for the show describes the Black and White version of the Red, White and Blue riverboat gambler:
Maverick told the story of Bret Maverick, a card shark who lived during the Old West era. The show was originally a straightforward tale of his adventures, but it evolved when the writers began adding comedy into the scripts. Bret quickly became the television western’s first mercenary, a character who would help the forces of justice only if he stood to profit from doing so. Continue reading Maverick Rolls the Dice