Grand Canyon - Democratic Underground

McCamy Taylor

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Aug-02-08 05:07 PM
Original message

Grand Canyon

I. It’s Big. Too Big to be Healed by One Feel Good Public Event in Unity, New Hampshire

Unity is the opposite of “Chaos at the Convention” which is what John McCain and all his little (or in Rush’s case not so little) right wing helpers have been trying to achieve for the Democrats. If you have not read my journals, please do so. They start back last fall, which is when I detected the scheme. Some people, like Joe Connason at Salon saw the writing on the wall as early as January, 2007 when he wrote about how the Obama/Moonie/Madrassa story

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/01/26/obama/

was the exact same ploy that Nixon’s CREEP (here is a description for those too young to remember)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/buchananmemo.htm

under the direction of Pat Buchanan used to sow seeds of disharmony among the ranks of the Democratic contenders and their supporters in 1972. The next link gives a scary summary of dirty tricks played on Muskie, which included slipping him drugs and making it looked as if he was guilty of doing awful dirty tricks against other Democrats.

http://www.woodstockjournal.com/elections.html

CREEP II, the operation to make it look like Clinton was guilty of dirty tricks against Obama and vice versa, was a tremendous success, even at DU, even with people like me blogging about it on a regular basis. By the time the first stage of the Republican dirty tricks operations were over, Obama supporters were talking about cattle futures and Vince Foster and Clinton supporters were talking about how Obama was owned by the Chicago Daley machine. Obama people were convinced that Clinton had used race, and Clinton people were convinced that Obama had used gender. In fact, most of the damage came from the corporate media working for the RNC. MSNBC lead the way with their election night coverage. Nora O’Donnell instructed Republicans in Wisconsin in how to last minute register and vote in the Democratic primary to interfere with the Democratic selection process—while interviewing a guest who described Chicago 1968. Rush openly dreamed of “Chaos at the Convention.”

Now, the Democrats are pretending that the gaping chasm in the middle of our party does not exist. That is called denial. If we are not careful, we are going to fall into the Grand Canyon, and the country will get four more years of Bush-Cheney policy.

II. Grand Canyon

Danny Glover: So what do ya think?
Kevin Kiline: I think it’s not all bad.
Grand Canyon

My mother, the yellowest of yellow dog Democrats could probably replace Gallup Polls when it comes to accessing how Democratic professional women think. She is a retired computer scientist from NASA. She was with me in NOLA in 2005 for the Jazz Funeral for Democracy. She supported John Edwards until the notorious dog pile on Hillary Clinton during the New Hampshire debate, when she switched her allegiance to Hillary, because she got fed up watching two men attack a woman. She and her husband contributed the maximum to Clinton. She was a community organizer. She absolutely despises Barrack Obama, because of the way that he and David Axelrod attacked Hillary Clinton during the campaign, and she swears that she will not send him a cent and does not care who wins this fall and she is considering going to Denver to picket the convention. This from a woman who has never voted Republican in her life.

I was discussing various things about the upcoming general election with her, and the only scenario that gave her pause was when I asked “How would you feel if Hillary Clinton was the Vice Presidential candidate?” That made a difference. In that case, she would care about the election again. In that case, she would actively support the Democratic ticket.

The last thing that John McCain wants is for people like my mother---who are currently on one side of the Grand Canyon---to find a way to cross over to be with the rest of the party. He wants them to be so disaffected that they do not contribute money, they do not go out to volunteer, they do not even bother to vote and---in extreme cases---they vote for him. Keep in mind that we are talking about middle aged and older women, the kind that are often active in election politics because they are used to volunteering for political causes.

III. CREEP II Round 2 Has Begun, Operation Keep Hillary's Supporters Pissed

John McCain was so desperate to introduce race into the race that he produced a series of ridiculous attack ads, each sillier than the one before. Finally, he produced one in which “big” Barrack Obama’s penis was represented first by the leaning Tower of Pisa and then by the Washington Monument. The world’s two most famous white women who do not wear panties, Brittney and Paris walk by. Obama does the classic “rubberneck” and music simulates the sound Woah! or maybe that is supposed to be No!. Fear the sexuality of Barrack Obama is the message. Pretty corny stuff.

Obama responded by warning that some were trying to make people fear him. He referred to an ad in which his face was superimposed on a $100 bill. The John McCain campaign seized their opportunity to interject race into the race, even though Obama had not mentioned race----the Paris-Brittney ad could be interpreted as fear of a handsome virile young man of any race (think JFK or Bill Clinton). Republicans always smear young Democrats with sex.

Many members of the press have claimed that introducing race in the general election is supposed to benefit only John McCain. I disagree with this, but that is for a different journal. Here, I want to talk about why McCain brought up the Race Card now as opposed to saving the topic for September or October, when it would have more impact on the general election.

What is happening this month? The Democratic Convention.

Who still bears a grudge? A whole lot of Hillary Clinton supporters who know that their candidate was unfairly labeled as a racist by the press and by fellow Democrats and by progressive bloggers and who have waited for the Obama campaign to issue some kind of public acknowledgment that almost all of the claims of race baiting made in the name of the Obama campaign by supporters were bullshit. Hillary Clinton has no problem waiting, because she knows that once the books are written, history will exonerate her. However, supporters do not have the patience of politicians. They get emotional. They get invested. They get angry. Especially when they have been keeping their tempers in check, as their candidate has instructed them to and supporting the Party’s nominee for the good of the country.

Anyone who thinks that this repressed anger is unimportant needs to go back in time to 1972, when Hubert Humphrey was vilified by supporters of McGovern. Though Humphrey was a good Democrat who fell in line after the convention, his people knew what had been said about him----and what dirty tricks had been done to him and attributed to McGovern. So, on election day, many of Humphrey’s Black supporters did not turn out to vote for McGovern and many of his white supporters crossed over to vote for Nixon.

Anyone who thinks that Karl Rove, Pat Buchanan and John McCain have given up on this plan, just because Hillary Clinton personally plans to support Barrack Obama has a screw loose. They have worked too long and hard on “Chaos at the Convention.”

That is why you are going to see a lot of stories in the coming weeks like the ones I will show you in the next section of this journal.

IV. Deconstructing the Democratic Convention

The press is not just going to let us have a Democratic Convention in peace. They were promised this…

And they are going to get that if it kills them.

John McCain introduced The Race Card (which is subtly different from race ) in the month of August, in order to remind a bunch of former Hillary Clinton supporters that they have a grudge against a bunch of fellow Democrats, progressives and Barrack Obama campaign workers (especially David Axelrod).

Keep in mind that their anger may be at least partially misplaced. There is at least a 50% possibility that the so called “Race Memo” was written and disseminated as part of an effort to recreate the dirty tricks that Nixon and Buchanan used so successfully in 1972 to divide and conquer the Democratic Party. The question here is not who is to blame, but rather who is going to pick up the pieces?

Now that John McCain has re-introduced the phrase “Race Card” to the election dialogue, certain publications have been quick to remind their readers that Bill Clinton also accused Obama of “playing the race card. These include the LA Times, which is now part of the empire of billionaire Republican Sam Zell who is subject to blackmail by the Bush FCC in order to keep his media empire together:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-campaign1-2008aug01,0,923336.story

In the hard-fought Democratic primaries between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, race flickered on and off as an issue. Obama supporters took umbrage on several occasions at remarks uttered by Clinton surrogates. Former President Clinton, in turn, complained at one point that Obama had "played the race card on me" -- a comment that McCain echoed Thursday.

The LA Times rubs salt in the wound by linking this article to one about how Hillary Clinton is being snubbed by the Obama campaign and cut out of the Democratic Convention bit by bit.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-clinton1-2008aug01,0,2128273.story

The Guardian UK----which was stridently pro Obama during the primaries---has had a change of heart now that Obama is the nominee. First they did an article about how Hillary Clinton was the victim of unfair attacks. Now, they bring this up---

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/01/barackobama.uselections2008?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Race first surfaced as an issue in December in the contest between Obama and Clinton, when Obama's team blamed Bill Clinton for bringing it up. The former president later complained that Obama had "played the race card on me".

Snip

Obama's team denounced as "outrageously offensive" the Ludacris song Politics: Obama Is Here. In it, Ludacris says: "Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant ... McCain don't belong in any chair unless he's paralysed. Yeah I said it 'cos Bush is mentally handicapped." Bill Burton, Obama's spokesman, said: "As Barack Obama has said ... rap lyrics too often perpetuate misogyny, materialism and degrading images that he doesn't want his daughters or any children exposed to ... While Ludacris is a talented individual, he should be ashamed of these lyrics."

Oh my! Since Obama denounced the song, why on earth did the Guardian publish those offensive lyrics in their paper? Are they trying to claim that Obama is somehow responsible, because he is Black and the artist is a Black supporter, the same way Clinton was responsible for what Ferraro a women supporter said? Are they trying to piss off a bunch of Clinton supporters? Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant.

As I have mentioned before, I suspect that a primary concern for the British newspapers may be Northern Ireland. The Clintons may have been unacceptable, because they treated Catholic Northern Irish leaders as leaders and not terrorists. With the recent move to label Northern Irish independence leaders as “terrorists” again, it is likely that the British press will begin to support Republican candidates, since the Democratic base contains so many Irish-Catholics. Therefore, take everything you read about the U.S. election in any British newspaper with a big grain of salt.

As usual, the worst offender is Ben Smith at Politico. Here is a man who can be credited with starting the whole Clinton is a racist bitch issue in the primary . He misquoted Clinton about her remarks on LBJ and JFK (initially her comments were only indirectly about MLK Jr until Ben Smith altered them and then KO aired the altered version and everyone began repeating the distortion even after Ben Smith printed the retraction and Media Matters kept slapping wrists left and right but not KO. Maybe if they had slapped KO, people would have stopped.)

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/#

]But Schmidt said McCain had learned the lesson of Clinton's campaign, which began by taking her and her husband's affinity with African-American voters for granted but wound up seeing days and weeks consumed by racially charged gaffes and allegations, ranging from a New Hampshire supporter's suggestion that Obama had dealt drugs to Bill Clinton's own comparison of Obama's campaign to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's.

Remarkably, in fact, Schmidt sees a sort of political soul mate in Bill Clinton. "Say whatever you want about Bill Clinton," Schmidt said, "but it's deeply unfair to suggest his criticism of Obama was race-based. President Clinton was a force for unity in this country on this subject. Every American should be proud of his record as both a governor and president. But we knew it was coming in our direction because they did it against a President of the United State of their own party."

More from the article that this is taken from

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/12224.html

A former chief strategist to Hillary Clinton, Howard Wolfson, echoed Schmidt's comparison.

"I think the McCain camp watched our primary on the Democratic side very carefully and they know that any accusation of racial divisiveness can be very, very harmful for a candidate's prospects," Wolfson said on Fox News Thursday, adding that the allegations against Clinton were unfair. "They heard something that Senator Obama said and they felt they had to respond quickly to make sure that nobody got the impression that they were engaged in those kind of racial politics."

Schmidt said McCain's aides felt forced to talk about race, and that they don't plan to do it again.

Pardon my French, but this is bullshit. Accusing your Democratic opponent of using racist tactics in the primary will destroy the competition. It is an almost sure fire win strategy for a Democratic candidate, the same as accusing your opponent of having an illegitimate Black baby in the Republican primary. Accusing your Republican opponent in the general election of using racist tactics will only provoke yawns---and John McCain and Ben Smith know it. There is no way in hell that John McCain played the “Obama played the Race Card” card as a pre-emptive attack.

Bottom line, John McCain wants the words “Race” and “Card” out there in the mainstream media during the month of August, because those two little words have been bugging the hell out of a whole lot of Democrats and Republican women and Independents who were set upon voting for the first female president of the United States.

John McCain is trying to stir up a hornets nest at the upcoming Democratic Convention.