The Right Wing Propaganda Machine

After Obama was inaugurated, he made himself excessively visible.  Anyone in show business knows that you always leave them wanting more.  The problem is that Obama kept himself front and center, shoiwing up on TV virtually every day.  Before we had time to want to see him again, there he was announcing this or that new appointment, putting forth this or that new policy, or giving an interview.  As a result, Obama fatigue has set in and that has left him very vulnerable to the lies being told by the health industry about his and the Democratic Congressional health care bill, Fox News, and whoever else feels animus toward him, including especially those who harbor ill-feeling toward African Americans.

Naturally, the Antis will say they are pure of thought and that their objections to Obama are based on his actions as well as his apparent inaction.  The Rasmussen Reports don't bear them out.

Seventy-four percent (74%) of African-Americans Strongly Approve along with just 19% of white voters (see other recent demographic highlights from the tracking poll).
Among all voters, just 34% now give the President good or excellent marks on his handling of the economy while 47% say he is doing a poor job in that arena. On national security issues, 42% say good or excellent while 41% say poor.
Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters believe that political correctness kept the military from preventing the Fort Hood shootings. 

So, what we see is a striking division between Blacks and Whites as to how he is doing, which is a bit of a give away that racial attitudes are coloring perceptions.  That sort of thing didn't keep him from being elected but given the continued high unemployment and many other issues, he is guarnteed not to have a second term.  As James Carville famously said, "It's the economy, stupid."

The last of these three items is especially interesting.  It is clear that the military knew that Major Hasan was a Muslim and that he was disgruntled.  Naturally in a country Bush poisoned with his constant drumbeat of "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", "9/11", etc, and given the disposition of people to posit conspiracies wherever they see something they don't understand, right-wingers and various and sundry other nutcases are sure this was part of a terrorist plot.

Conspiracy theories are the refuge of those who have agendas or are laboring in ignorance.  I recall the theories graduate students had about admissions policies in my university department.  Early on we used  a Master's exam to help determine who would be admitted to the Doctoral progrm.   A minority would not be admitted and the theory emerged that we had a quota, never mind that limiting the number of students we admitted actually hurt the department economically.

I first encountered the theory that Major Hasan's actions were the result of a terrorist plot on the Dennis Miller show and that political correctness, the bane of right wing, was in full flower in this case.  I was rather surprised.  Naturally, the military is reluctant to jump to the view that Hasan was acting out of an anti-American or anti-military political stance.  That would be beyond stupid, bordering on being imbecilic.

Not so, the right wing in America tells us.  At Right Pundits we find

Why are we able to so easily label Malik Nadal Hasan a terrorist? The fact speaks for itself. He is just as much a domestic terrorist as Timothy McVeigh was labeled so for his heinous act in Oklahoma City. And while McVeigh perpetuated his act from afar in silence, Malik Nadal Hasan shouted anti-American political views at his victims as he mowed them down with automatic weapons.

 The first thing I learned about Major Hasan is that he really, really, really didn't want to go to Iraq.  The military is not disposed to worry overmuch about where soldiers do and do not want to be posted, but they probably should in some cases.  This would have been one.

The title of this article is "Malik Nadal Hasan: Muslim Terrorist Challenges Obama’s Timidity."  I suppose this could be more misleading but I don't know how.  I seriously doubt that Obama told the military how it should go about its investigation or how it should present the facts to the public.  Nevertheless, Obama is vulnerable to any attack on anything American by any Muslim.  Its a right wing freebie.

Obama neeeds to do the following by next year at this time.

1. Get the health care bill in place.
2.  Somehow get unemployment to turn around.  I can think of some ways -- how about using unemployment benefits as subsidies to businesses who hire the uneployed for a year, say.
3.  Get the hell out of Iraq.
4.  Render Al Queda and the Talliban totally impotent.

If he does 1 and 2, it is possible that he will get a second term.  If he does 1-3, he will get one.  If he gets all four he will be elected President for Life.

Barack Obama is a White Man

I don't get it. Obama is seen as a Black man. Why not see him as a White man. He is, if I understand his parentage, 50% White and 50% Black. Moreover, he went to Harvard. This constitutes unimpeachable evidence (sort of) that Obama is a White man. Tiger Woods is 50% Black and 50% Thai. How in hell does that make him into a Black man. His father raised him, it seems, to be White in that he taught him a mostly White sport and sent him to mostly White Standford University (the last is a guess). I suspect that Tiger has more White friends than Black ones. I hereby claim him as a White man.

Back when I was a full time faculty remember I looked over a class I was about to teach Sociolinguistics for the first time and remarked that it was too bad there were no African Americans in the class since we would be talking about issues of interest to them. A girl right in front of me said, "What makes you think that there aren't any Blacks in this room?" I took a good look at her essentially White freckled face and her red hair and said, on observing that her hair was "kinky" in the way the hair of Blacks can be and replied, "If you say so." The next class two relatively clear cases of Black students showed up.

Since that "error" on my part, I have observed all manner of athletes on TV whose race I find it impossible to tell. They could be very light skinned "Black" people or White people. Certainly their skin color is often lighter than that of certain so-called "White" people from Europe.

It seems that there has been a "one drop" rule for distinguishing Whites from Blacks in America. Wikipedia puts it this way;

The one-drop rule is an historical colloquial term in the United States that holds that a person with any trace of African ancestry (however small or invisible) cannot be considered white[1] and so, unless the person has an alternative non-white ancestry that he or she can claim, such as Native American, Asian, Arab, Australian aboriginal, the person must be considered black.

This is asinine. One might as well have a one drop rule for making someone White.

When I was an undergraduate at Rice, I wrote a paper on race in which I cited research that showed that if one abstracted away all of the defining characteristics of race -- hair color and consistency (straight, curly, kinky, etc.), lip shape, nose shape, skin color (taking shades seriously), butt size, etc. and valued them equally, we could come up with some pretty wild racial groupings if we were to take any one of them as the single most important criterion.

Should we take blackness of the hair as most important, we would be inclined to put Orientals and Blacks together. Were we to take the straight/kinky hair characteristic as definitive, we would lump together Blacks and certain Semitic peoples. Should we take straightness of hair as definitive, we might lump certain Whites, Orientals, and some or all of Amerindians together into one race. But we didn't do any of these things. The Black-White distinction was picked and in America and elsewhere, the one drop rule was adopted for racial identification. That is sad.

In fact, the Black/White thing is ethnic more than any other thing. On that ground alone, Barack Obama is more White than Black. I have seen him engage in certain sporting activities. He would be on the outer reaches of the Bell Curve for acquired and native athleticism of Black's based on what I have seen. He and his wife seem to be very different in their ethnicity but I surely have missed something. I would need to see him at, say, a family reunion of his wife's family. This is probably going to sound racist but I don't mean it to be. Michelle Obama acts more Black than Barack does and I suspect that at a reunion of her people, we might find him acting more like she does. Who knows? None of us should really care.

A year or so ago, I saw a film of a family reunion that might look a lot like Barack's parent's family reunions might look like -- lots of Blacks and Whites and In Betweens. They seemed to get along quite well with each other. Indeed they seemed to act quite lovingly toward each other. That should be the model for America. We have a chance with Barack Obama to make it so. We Whites should claim him for ourselves.

Race and Gender in the Democratic Race

Were it not for George Bush, the worst President in American history, and a dismal array of Republican candidates, I would be somewhat fearful of the fact that H. Clinton and Obama continue to be the leading candidates for the Democratic party, for we have never elected a woman or an African-American President before. People are slaves to their habits and voting for white men for President has been our habit from the beginning.

Democrats do have a white male in the race but he has not been able to compete successfully. How much this has to do with him as a campaigner and how much it has to do with the qualities of H. Clinton and Obama I can't say with any assurance. Since Edwards is a quintessential Democrat, in fact a liberal Democrat by today's standard (as opposed to the standard in the 1960's), and is quite presentable, I have to assume that it is H. Clinton's star power (fame and notoriety) and Obama's novelty (the first African American to run who did not come out of the civil rights movement) that is forcing him into the shadows.

Obama's initial appeal to Whites, I believe, was that he has not been running primarily to advance the cause of African Americans or what the very tiresome Jesse Jackson has called the Rainbow Coalition. Rather, he has represented himself simply as running for the Democratic nomination, just as Hillary and Edwards have been. That was a real novelty. African Americans could expect that he would look after their interests, although he was not saying so, but so would the other candidates I imagine.

Then Hillary said, what seems to me to have been a quite innocuous point that it took politicians to enact Martin Luther King's dream and Obama took exception to that. That was, I think, a very stupid thing to do. Her remark would not have been questioned were neither running for President. Obama knows that activists all by themselves can't accomplish very much of anything besides winning the hearts and minds of the people. It takes politicians to realize or, much more commonly, almost realize the reforms of activists. Obama knows this.

Why Obama simply didn't leave this alone I can't say. It has clearly helped him in garnering Black votes and, I suspect, he will win in S. Carolina today thanks to stripping away Black voters (especially women) who might have supported Hillary. But this victory will I think be a Pyrrhic one.

Americans, in contrast to others, have sometimes been described as less racist than racially conscious. Of course both could be true. A symptom of one's being racially conscious is feeling the necessity of including the word "Black" (or whatever other word you use) in sentences like, "I saw this Black doctor yesterday who said I have a stress fracture in my foot." Clearly, the doctor's being Black is totally irrelevant. This verbal behavior is a clear sign that you are racially conscious. Men very commonly would include "female" as a descriptor in the same sentence evidencing clearly that they are gender conscious.

Even if Obama hadn't taken issue with Hillary's statement, race would have become an issue because the media would make it one. It wasn't an issue in the early caucuses and primaries. They all occurred in states in which Blacks were a small minority. But it is an issue in S. Carolina and inevitably the media in analyzing pre-election polls, and the exit polls taken on election day and in post-election analyzes, will break down the voting by race. Once that has happened Obama is doomed unless something unforseable now occurs.

Why do I say he isn't going to win? A continuing problem in America is that while White Americans are often or even usually perfectly comfortable with individual Blacks they are not, I think, all that comfortable with Blacks in general. And in my experience, African Americans are no different from Whites in this respect (except it is Whites in general they aren't comfortable with). I will never forget a Black friend of mine telling me that he would root for an African runner in an Olympics event over a White American. I was stunned. And, I saw Black college students cheering the O. J. Simpson murder trial verdict on TV. That came very close to breaking my heart. They were no different in my mind from the racist Whites that cheered when KKK murderers were found innocent by White juries.

All of this goes back to the fact that we are hard-wired to be suspicious of those who are different from us. During the period in which humans were quite primitive, one's survival depended making sound judgments as to who were and who were not a threat to us. Strangers would normally I think have been perceived as dangerous until they showed they were not. This provides the seed for racist feelings today.

Here is my prediction: Obama will win S. Carolina. (I have not turned the TV on to any news or information channel so I am not cheating here.) This victory will be due to the fact that some whites will vote for him and most Blacks will. Hillary and Edwards will split the rest of the votes. I have heard that Edwards might edge Hillary out. This victory due to Black solidarity -- as ugly a phenomenon as White solidarity or male solidarity -- will, I think, inspire Blacks to gravitate to him and this will lead Whites to move away from him and toward Hillary and Edwards. The net effect will be that Obama will not get the nomination.

Many years ago, I heard a paper at a conference at Georgetown concerning a class room experiment the speaker had run at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He raised a question for debate that he had earlier determined was one that did not break down as to the yeas and nays on racial lines. He picked a Black male and a White male and gave one the nay and the other they yea. By the time the hour was up, the entire class had polarized along racial lines. In a nutshell (the speaker gave a deeper analysis) the division in the class had more to do with debate style than the arguments that were given. The Black speaker was more aggressive than the White speaker and Whites began to see the Black male as hostile when he wasn't at all and the Blacks saw the White speaker as lame though his arguments were as robust as the Black guy's.

I fear there will be considerable racial polarization within the electorate as the campaign continues. It is hard to say whether gender polarization will also occur but it will be very hard to tell sexist attitudes from anti-Hillary attitudes in such a case. What I hope is that Clinton and Obama quit fighting and spend their time and energy on presenting their views on the issues. I think Bill may not let that happen. One benefactor could be Edwards.