As we all know, a couple of clean-cut, innocent young Republican activists got the great idea, all by themselves, with no prompting or funding from anyone else, (yeah, umm hmm, right) to go undercover as a pimp and his ‘ho, or, an aspiring politician and his ‘ho, depending upon their whim du jour, and entrap ACORN volunteers into advising them as to how to break the law.  According to their edited videos, posted and promoted on Andrew Breitbart (Matt Drudge’s Bitch)’s launched-just-in-time Big Government website, and, coincidentally, as well as every other blog to the right of common sense, these exposes successfully lead to the group being defunded, and publicly denounced, by Congress, including by many members formerly in bed with them.  ACORN, natch, cried foul, and sued.

They won.

Now, since I have little first-hand knowledge of the group and its activities, and, as I understand it, even the Motor Voter, and Project Vote campaigns that lead to their “unofficial” marriage to Obama was at least partially designed to help get Bill Clinton elected, I find it hard to get with the ACORN angst currently prevalent throughout the PUMAsphere.  Seems to me, before ACORN jumped aboard the Obama Train, most of the same detractors now singing the ACORN Blues were perfectly a-okay with whatever their tactics were and are, and are now just pissed that the group used them against their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton.  I can get with that, I supported Hillary Clinton, too.  But, since I doubt ACORN’s changed much since the days when they were doing whatever they do for Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, etc., many of whom I now despise, it seems kinda hypocritical to me to get all pissy about their modus operandi and very existence.   It also seems hypocritical to me for the party of CREEPy dirty tricks (including Donna Brazile’s dinner partner, Karl Rove) to gripe about anything even potentially underhanded that anybody else does.

Speaking of the GOP, (and, in case you missed it, I was) according to Think Progress, Rep. Jim DeMint suddenly wants his party to claim the TEA Party movement under its tent, like it hasn’t always been, since it seems that as a separate, third party entity, it would beat the pants off any Republican running.  DeMint’s comments came in a National Review article claiming he’s about to endorse African American Michael Williams to replace  retiring Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchnson.  Given the “mums the word, Republican party needs to get back to its values” noise being made by Sarah Palin, it’s probably the prospect of an, oh, say, Palin/Bachmann 2012 ticket that’s got the GoOPer boyz running scared.  WaPo’s Chris Cillizza reported on the 8th:

An astute Fixista flagged a fascinating interview that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gave to conservative talk radio host Lars Larson last Friday in which she appears to leave the door open to a third party bid for president in 2012. Asked by Larson whether she would consider running as a third party candidate, Palin said: “That depends on how things go in the next couple of years.” Larson told the 2008 vice presidential nominee that answer “sounds like a yes” to which she responded: “If the Republican party gets back to that [conservative] base, I think our party is going to be stronger and there’s not going to be a need for a third party, but I’ll play that by ear in these coming months, coming years.” Which, to the Fix’s delicate ears, sounds like Palin leaving the door wide open. As we have written before, Palin is not — and never will be — a candidate of the Republican establishment. Given that, and the unpredictability she demonstrated in her stunning decision to resign as governor over the summer, no potential avenue to the presidency should be ruled out. [emphasis mine]

In light of last week’s Congressional Black Caucus vs. former member and current pretendident, BahRock (Da Dry-buh) Obama showdown, and subsequent win (despite undue pressure from Da Oba-see-uh) and other race-is-still-an-issue news, Politico claims that race barriers still exist in the post-racial, post-Obama South, and use a contest of wills between two African Americans to illustrate the point.  Rep. Arthur Davis, (D-Obot) who nonetheless, voted against “Obamacare,” is running for governor of Alabama, and is being bucked by “old school” black politicians, like Dr. Joe Reed, Associate Executive Secretary of the Alabama Education Association, and head of the Alabama Democratic Conference, who, according to Politico, don’t think Davis is “black enough,” and so, are backing Davis’ white opponent:

As Davis pointedly noted in his statement earlier this week, Reed supported Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential primary out of concern that an African-American couldn’t win the presidency.

Davis, by contrast, was an early supporter of Obama’s.

Now, Reed and some other members of the party’s establishment, black and white, are supporting or leaning toward Davis’s white primary opponent, Ron Sparks, the state’s agriculture commissioner, out of the same nagging concern over viability.

Of course, no black person could possibly think Clinton was a better candidate, right?  For the record, CNN reported on Reed’s supposed comments re: Obama’s viability with white voters the night of the Iowa caucus, and, this Left In Alabama post looks at the issues head on.

In Tiger news, seems he’s going into hiding before the fallout from his “indiscretions/transgressions” with paid to service ‘ho-stesses, lands all over World Wide Celebrity-ville, Lame Scream Mee-Dee-Yah included.  However, as it turns out, he’s not the only tiger with questionable friends:

Moving on, it’s not a particularly good time to be gay in Uganda, even if you are black, not much better to be an Italian woman on reality TV, (but what do I know?) and, the news about young Hispanics is mixed, depending on how you look at it, I guess…

The survey and analysis of census data found the high school dropout rate among all Hispanic youths ages 16-24 was 17 percent, roughly three times higher than white youths and close to double the rate for black youths. But when looking only at second-generation Hispanics born in the U.S., the dropout rate falls to 8.5 percent, roughly the same as youths of all races.

Huh?  Anyhoo, the brother in one of the videos below says Disney could have gone to Uganda, or somewhere else in Africa, and gotten an authentic princess fairy tale that didn’t turn the heroine into a frog for most of its first animated film to feature an African American princess.  I haven’t seen “The Princess and the Frog” myself, was oblivious to the controversy surrounding it, and am a little ambivalent about seeing for myself just how adroitly, or, heavy handedly the story was handled, but I must say I find Hillbuzz’s description of the film’s exhortations to blacks to be disturbing:

The most interesting thing about “Princess and the Frog” (hereafter, PatF) is how loudly, FREQUENTLY, it looks directly at the black community and tells it to get off its a**, work hard, stop blaming others for their problems, and take ownership of their lives.

It’s disappointing to see how the fellas over there regard black people as they bemoan false allegations of racism.  I suppose they prefer real racism.  Anyway, as for The Princess and the Frog, I’m just glad Disney didn’t turn their first adaptation of a novel to feature an African American woman into something called “Dirt Black and the 7 Pimps.”  Though, if they were going to romanticize a story about an independent woman in New Orleans’ Voodoo past, the legend of Marie Laveau would have been interesting.  Even though she is usually referred to as “Creole,” what that means is not always clear.   However, through her daughter, Marie Glapion, whose own legend is inexplicably entwined with her mother’s, she may be an ancestor of White House Social Secretary Desiree Glapion Rogers.  Now, there’s a movie for your ass.

Happy birthday PUMA!????

Somehow, that doesn’t sound right.  Look right.  Feel right.  When I think of what happened a year ago today, what it meant, and where it’s lead us, I’m not happy at all.  In fact, the more I think about it, the pisseder I get.

I could rehash the events that lead up to today’s festivities, but, not only is it more cathartic to just visit PUMA sites and use the search features to find the gut wrenching words written in real time, but itemizing and chronicling the step-by-step process by which we came to be feels more like the stupid torch carrying ceremony on Survivor, or, the let’s-stop-the-party-and-show-you-who-died part of the Oscars.

The truth is, as I see it, none of us wants to be here.  If we had our druthers, there’d be no PUMA.  And, truthfully, there might not be a Clinton in the White House, either.  Whoever had won fairly, by the rules, with even a modicum of integrity, honor, and dignity, would probably have been fine, and not sparked the kind of explosive rage that the piss-in-your-face hijacking the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party had to engage in to prop up it’s shallow sham of an unworthy, unqualified, incompetent, “B” actor wannabe with the way cool money machine, did.

And, make no mistake, it was rage that was sparked.  But, the self-blinded, power hungry adolescents with the dollar signs in their eyes, supposedly in charge of desperately trying to be in charge after years of being relegated to the kiddie table, were far too preoccupied with dreams of finally getting the keys to the Porshe to recognize that the explosions their actions were likely to spark weren’t the “oh, for God’s sake!” just for the moment expressions of frustration and annoyance.  This was a long, low simmering kind of pre-boil with the heat suddenly jacked up immediately after the lid was placed on the pressure cooker.  Now, though the greedy kids have done the kind of spot cleanup that busy, self-absorbed kids always do, they’ve neglected to consider what happens

You know what?  Fuck this.  There’s no poetic way to express this shit.  May 31, 2008 sucked big hairy weenies.  Donna Brazile and her mama pissed me off no end.  Thinking about Alice Germond whining about whatever the fuck she was whining about whenever they gave her the mike and let her whine, still pisses me off, and Howard Dean was even more annoying than she was, and he usually is.  His drippy-assed, “I know what it feels like to be disappointed” happy crappy speech set the stage for a major greaseless assfuck, but, hey, I’m an optimist by nature, so I kept my fingers crossed and hoped for the best.  Silly me.

I don’t remember exactly who said what every moment, or in what sequence, but I do remember watching the proceedings all day, hoping that the wise “leaders” of the Democratic Party (oh man, that even feels like a bad joke in a horror movie to type) would find some Solomonaic way to resolve the thorny Florida/Michigan issue they created.  That is, if they weren’t going to do the right thing and tell the wimpy wussy name-removing, system gaming  jerk they were in lust with to go suck eggs, like they should have.  Had he left his name on the ballot, none of them would have even been there.  He made the mess, then, they turned around and rewarded him for it.  And told me to get over it.  Fuck them and the brokeback donkey they rode in on.

Barack Obama should not have received one fucking delegate from Michigan.  Not one.  Period.  He’s the one who said he didn’t want to play in that particular sandbox, nobody told him he couldn’t.  And, on top of that, he broke da fucking roolz!  He wasn’t supposed to campaign, but “Vote for me, I’m “Uncommitted,” sounds like campaigning to me.  However, Slick Slim would never do any dirty work himself, in public, out front where people could see him, but “Vote for him, he’s Uncommitted” is just as bad when you get foot soldiers and lieutenants to do it for you.

From the Associated Press, February 8, 2008:

Hillary Rodham Clinton will get the lion’s share of Democratic national convention delegates after winning the state’s Jan. 15 presidential primary.

The Michigan Democratic Party said Friday that Clinton will get 73 pledged delegates after winning 55 percent of the statewide vote.

Another 55 delegates will be uncommitted since 40 percent of the Democratic voters chose uncommitted. Because Barack Obama and John Edwards had taken their names off the ballot, many of their supporters voted for uncommitted.

From the Washington Post, January 9:

“People are already frustrated here in Detroit because they can’t cast a ballot for Obama. Many on their absentee ballots many have tried to write in Obama, but they have spoiled the ballots,” said Sam Riddle, Monica Conyers’s chief of staff. “We know we’ve got to educate the voters in a hurry.”

edit

This is the script of the John and Monica Conyers radio ad, which will be broadcast on Detroit-area stations. Monica Conyers is president pro-tem of the Detroit City Council.

MALE: THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IS CONFUSING. I WANT TO VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA BUT OBAMA’S NAME IS NOT ON THE BALLOT.

FEMALE: THERE IS NO ONE ON THAT BALLOT I WANT TO BE PRESIDENT.

MALE: WELL, THESE FOLKS CAN HELP US. EXCUSE ME, CONGRESSMAN CONYERS AND COUNCILWOMAN CONYERS, WE NEED YOUR HELP.

FEMALE: HOW CAN WE VOTE FOR OBAMA ON TUESDAY?

Rep. Conyers: YOU CAN’T. YOU CANNOT EVEN WRITE IN OBAMA’S NAME. IF YOU DO YOUR VOTE WILL NOT COUNT BECAUSE OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN CHOSE NOT TO PLACE HIS NAME ON THE MICHIGAN BALLOT SO AS NOT TO VIOLATE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY RULES. BUT YOU CAN VOTE UNCOMMITTED

Councilwoman Conyers: IF AT LEAST 15% OF THE PEOPLE VOTE UNCOMMITTED, THE STATE DEMOCRATIC PARTY MUST SEND THAT PERCENTAGE OF DELEGATES TO THE NATIONAL CONVENTION UNCOMMITTED.

Rep. Conyers: MY WIFE AND I ARE VOTING UNCOMMITTED. WE WILL WORK WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY TO MAKE SURE THAT UNCOMMITTED DELEGATES GO TO THAT CONVENTION TRULY UNCOMMITTED SO THAT OBAMA CAN COMPETE FOR THEIR VOTE.

MALE: THANK YOU CONGRESSMAN CONYERS AND COUNCILWOMAN CONYERS. I WILL JOIN YOU AND VOTE UNCOMMITTED ON TUESDAY.

FEMALE: ME TOO – AT LEAST MY VOTE WON’T BE WASTED

Councilwoman Conyers: THIS TRUTH IN POLITICS MESSAGE WAS PAID FOR BY FRIENDS OF MONICA CONYERS
Posted at 5:45 PM ET on Jan 9, 2008

He took his own name off the fucking ballot!  Nobody made him do it!  Uncommitted delegates were supposed to go to the convention “uncommitted!”  So were the “superdelegates” or Party Leaders and Elected Officials  (PLEOs) + add-ons, from the Green Papers:

Terminology:

• PLEOs = Party Leaders and Elected Officials.
• Unpledged PLEOs + add-ons = Superdelegates.
• District + at-large delegates = Base delegates.
• Base delegates + Pledged PLEOs are the only delegates chosen through a Democratic presidential Primary or Caucus/Convention procedure and, thus, allocated to presidential contenders.

It was a ploy all along, and the Obagandists played it for all it was worth!  “We can’t vote for Obama,” they whined all over the media and blogosphere.  Well, whose fault was that, KoolAid Sheeple?  Paid, fucking Astrorovian shills.  You set the shit up, then you waited for the chance to knock all the pins down with your convoluted, twisted Donna’s mama bullshit.  I’m still so pissed at being raped, then kissed on the forehead, and being forced to watch the smug-assed loser who cuffed one of my hands to the bedpost, as he left a fiver on the nightstand before he whistled and sashayed his ass outside to his Sheriff’s car, from which he now winks at me as he drives by, that I could scream.  “Get over it, sweetie, you know, you did almost bust my ear drum when you screamed,” only makes it much, much, much worse.

Oh, yeah, I remember.  I remember an over-long lunch break, after which Obiteme resigned from his church before they gave him Clinton’s delegates.  Coinky-dinky up the ass right there, huh?  I remember.  Yeah, I remember.  And for all those Obites who wanna claim “politics,” I agree with you.  Both sides were playing politics.  It’s just that your side played dirty, just like they always did, and still do.  That’s what pisses me off, you dipwads!

So, not speaking for all PUMAs, nobody does that, we’re too fond of thinking for ourselves, even when we’re wrong, for that to ever be possible, but, speaking for myself, I’ll never get over it.  I’ll never celebrate what happened May 31, 2008.  But, I’ll never forget.  Bet your ass, I’ll never forget.

Get over that.

Fuckers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUUVRUjvM2s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvaCx-GWxY

I am a black, gay, woman.  According to popular conventional wisdom, being black and gay means I should hate myself, and be extremely grateful that, as a woman, I’m powerless to do anything about it.  There are so many things wrong with politicizing fairness and equality that it makes the one thing that’s right about it, using it as a tool to effect change, sometimes seem hardly worth the cost.  “Fair is fair” should be a no brainer any oppressed, or formerly oppressed, person should be able to wrap their heads all the way around.  Yet, as an “African American” who, like most of my gleefully downtrodden brothers and sisters, has never seen the Mother Land, I am expected to be far more politically motivated by my victimization a a black person than by the exact same sort of victimization I might have experienced as a woman. I say “might have experienced” because the reality of gender oppression is not a recognized “given,” no matter how high the mountain of evidence proving it might be.  I’m not even technically allowed to even call myself gay, either, since “gay” is an appellation appropriated by male homosexuals, me being relegated to the “L” in “LGBT” or, “GLBT.”  Even if I don’t want to be referred to as an African American Lesbian woman, and prefer to be called a  black gay chick, a politically correct, clued in observer will insist upon recognizing me as the former.  Sometimes it’s a real pain in the ass to keep things straight.

For example, when I say “gleefully downtrodden” in relation to black Americans, I’m not talking about the millions of blacks, if not most, who experience some sort of discrimination, no matter how innocent or clueless  the perpetrator, damned near every single day.  Most of these slights, affronts, and transgressions occur with such regularity that they barely register on the upper levels of our consciousness, we simply expect to be followed in stores, passed up by cab drivers, seated near the kitchen, and hired as a last resort, unless there’s a quota to fill.  We are rarely disappointed.  As the website experiment Black People Love Us shows, people wanting to touch our hair and “know what it’s like” to be us happens on far too regular a basis for us to do much more than grin, bear it, and file it under the “idiot” category in the back of our minds.  No, the “gleefully downtrodden” are those savvy enough to tap into that reality and exploit it to their advantage.

Barack Obama is such a person.  So is Jesse Jackson, a fact which allowed Obama to paint Jackson in a corner and nullify any criticism from him.  Pots and kettles, after all.  The difference between the two men is, Jackson made his mark playing both ends against the middle, righteously and rightfully championing the cause of the under-represented while picking up a little sumpin’ sumpin’ for himself under the table along the way.  Man’s gotta eat and feed his family, doncha know.  However despicable you might find Jackson’s behavior, at least he did fight for the people while he was dipping in the till.  Obama, on the other hand, runs like his drawers are on fire whenever 2 or more black people who might not be willing to kiss his ass come within a mile or two of anywhere he might be thinking about visiting in the next month or so.  In other words, while Jackson has been known to exploit us, Obama prefers to see us as “them.”

Martin Luther King and others in the Civil Rights Movement saw how working the system from the outside in, by turning its own lens around and showing its true face to itself and the rest of the world, could be an effective tool in the struggle to change it.  Jesse Jackson learned this lesson well and soon realized that some members of the system did not like being placed under its microscope and would pay to get out from under.  Often, this lead to jobs and considerations for the people Jackson represented.  Just as often, it lead to jobs and considerations for people a little closer to Jackson’s home and heart.  Barack Obama saw how turning the lens around and merely threatening to show the reality of the racial dynamics in this country was enough to sway massive groups of guilty-minded people on both sides of the aisle, black and white, to do his bidding.  Telling black people in effect, “they ain’t gonna do nothing for y’all,”  while telling whites with similar dog-whistle tactics, “you don’t wanna piss them off and let everybody know how you really feel, do you?” allowed him to manipulate the masses and seem to be avoiding the issue at the same time.  He never had to really offer to do anything for anybody.

Obama earns his Berry Waffles nickname by employing similar tactics in just about any situation he faces.  He waffles, he equivocates, he “sees your point,” he “empathizes,” all the while promising to “look into it.”  That would be bad enough on its own, but in the Great and Powerful Obama’s case, it’s merely a tool to manipulate and effect a desired outcome.   However, this skillful tightrope act has been very effective and beneficial.  For one thing, it allows him to appear to be in control and enigmatic at the same time.  “He’s gonna fix whatever ails ya, golduggit!’  Got no idea how, but um sure he’s a-gonna get ‘er dun!”  So, he’s a radical feminist for whom the Freedom of Choice Act is not a priority at the same time he’s brushing bitch problems off his shoulders, he’s anti-war while he’s escalating them, he’s filibustering bills he votes for, he’s advocating bailouts he doesn’t approve of in front of the Senate as a candidate lambasting his opposition party’s “failed policies.”

He’s also a Christian without a church who wants to continue faith-based programs.  Of course, that means he has to see, evaluate and incorporate diametrically opposed viewpoints in everything he deals with, no matter what, if anything, he truly believes.  So, since black people are disproportionately represented by the “black church,” their (our) interests must be considered in that light.  Whether most black people go to church any more often than he does is irrelevant.  Our “leaders” who influence decision-making, are primarily “faith based.”  Since he’s black, and committed to “faith based” policies, all of our concerns are naturally filtered through that lens.  White people, be they common citizens, politicians or media, have no basis for dissent on this.  They accept the “reality” as gospel, and why wouldn’t they?  That’s the way it is.  And, since most of our accepted (by them, if not us) “leaders” are indeed church oriented, they unduly influence all aspects of every issue affecting us.

Thus, when it comes to things like “gay marriage,” black people are expected to be against it, regardless of what we may truly feel.  When folks like Donna Brazile and Leah Daughtry spout the “your issues are not equal to mine” line, it is unassailable, regardless of Donna’s own sexual orientation, whatever it is.  The fact that Donna’s stance is politically, not morally, motivated is equally irrelevant.  And, since she has had people like Eddie Long and Martin Luther King’s daughter, Bernice, banging the “blacks don’t support gay rights” drum for years, the perception of that perspective as representative  reality is reinforced.  It matters not that Bernice King’s mother and close associates of her father vehemently disagree with her stance, the black spokespeople given the White Guys In Charge’s rubber stamp of approval prevail.  Before her passing in January of 2006, Coretta Scott King spoke on the issue of gay rights in March, 2004:

The widow of Martin Luther King Jr. called gay marriage a civil rights issue, denouncing a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban it.

Constitutional amendments should be used to expand freedom, not restrict it, Coretta Scott King said Tuesday.

“Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union,” she said. “A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.”

Yet mere months later, Bishop Long and Rev. Bernice King lead a march against “gay marriage:”

Invoking the memory of the slain civil rights martyr, the Bishop Eddie Long and King’s youngest daughter, the Reverend Bernice King, led thousands of predominately African American Christians in a march supporting a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

Bishop Long, who pastors one of the largest churches in the Atlanta area, told his supporters that it was time for the black community to be heard.

“We can’t be silenced,” Long said to cheers in a parking lot outside of Turner Field. “We are not marching against folks,” he said. “We are marching for folks.”

Though Rev. Bernice King eulogized her mother, many blacks spoke out against the conservativization of the black church and agenda that Rev. Bernice and her cohort Bishop Eddie represent:

Importantly, we also cannot be fooled by the Black Faith-based, self-anointed “Bishops” of mega churches who seduce and beguile depressed, often defeated African Americans, whose largess allows them to fly their private jets, drive Rolls Royces and live baronial existences. Instead of advocating to their congregations that they should organize and take direct political action, even civil disobedience as Dr. King consistently urged to secure the “blessings of liberty ” to which they are entitled, these “Bishops,” whose already sizeable incomes are supplemented by the Republican government’s Faith-based Initiative grants, use powerful propaganda oratory to convince their congregations that God will take care of their needs, and, not incidentally, to support President Bush and vote Republican.

“Bishop” Eddie Long, in whose New Birth Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia where Mrs. King’s funeral was held is typical of the increasing number of money driven Black preachers. It is a cruel irony that the funeral was held in Long’s church rather than Ebenezer where Coretta Scott King was a member, where Dr. King was pastor and where his funeral was held.  Preacher Eddie Long is the very antithesis of what Dr. King and his wife, Coretta, stood for. In 2004, Bishop Long led a demonstration in Atlanta to the tomb of Dr. King to protest a woman’s right to choose and to denounce the right of individuals to marry persons of the same sex. Among the thousands of supporters who marched with preacher Long was Dr. King’s daughter, Bernice, a minister at New Birth. Instead of the social justice and freedom advocated by the Kings, preacher Long endorses the conservative mandates of the Republican government. Coretta Scott King opposed the march, and reaffirmed her stance for human rights and social justice.

This same sort of emphasis on the more conservative black church positions has lead to a poisoning of the collective black mind, at least as it is portrayed in the media.  Just as the support for all things Obama is now being reported as factually monolithic, black disapproval of all things gay is depicted as equally pervasive.  California’s Prop 8 marriage ban amendment is held up as proof that blacks hate gays.  Some reports claim 70% of blacks voted for the measure.  Whether that number represents all blacks who voted, or all blacks who voted for Obama, or all Obama voters regardless of race, or, is even accurate, is often unclear.  Be that as it may, black people voted to defeat gay marriage because we hate queers and don’t think they’re struggle is our struggle ‘cuz they can choose to be gay and we can’t.  Or something.

How much of this perception existed before Axelrove’s AstroTurf Army got involved is as relevant a question in my mind as whether or not it’s true.   Washington, D.C.’s recent passage of a bill recognizing gay rights whose only dissenting vote was cast by Council member and former mayor, Marion Barry of all people brings this point home.  Barry, said to have always been a supporter of gay rights, justified his nay vote as representative of the will of his constituents.  Barry, who in the face of a clergy-led demonstration against the measure, predicted “civil war’ and “hell breaking loose” over the decision, based his opposition on rather dubious grounds:

“What you’ve got to understand is 98 percent of my constituents are black and we don’t have but a handful of openly gay residents,” Barry said. “Secondly, at least 70 percent of those who express themselves to me about this are opposed to anything dealing with this issue. The ministers think it is a sin, and I have to be sensitive to that.” (my bold)

But Barry said he disagrees with the ministers’ antics today at the Wilson Building, saying the chaos “sets the movement back.”

The vocal rabble-rousing of a possibly very small minority of residents can be made to seem overwhelming in a vacuum.  Nobody looks at a few hundred, or less, demonstrators protesting and counts the thousands, millions who couldn’t be so bothered to join them; probably because they either disagree completely, or just don’t care one way or another.  Ta-Nehis Coates in last week’s Atlantic, and Earl Ofari Hutchinson in 2003, give a conventional wisdom-jarring counter perspective to the “whose rights are they, anyway?” debate.

Opposition to “gay marriage” as the ridiculous debate over equality for all is now being framed, is not based on reason and logic by opponents of any color, as this article from New Jersey attests.  When commenters are questioning if extending marriage rights to homosexuals means that they can now marry their dog, or if a Lesbian can marry her grown daughter, you know you’re not dealing with people who can be persuaded by a cogent argument.  But, as we move ever onward, before we dismiss blacks as a community of gay bashers, I think it’s safe to say that thinking people must remember that Obama has been pimping faith and black people for a long time, and avoid falling into the Obama Generation “pseudo unity as a divide-and-conquer technique” trap by recognizing it as the latest stage of Bush/Obama morphing evolution that it is.  The “faith based” erosion of long held Democratic principles could lead us to a progressively supported repeal of Roe v. Wade as well as the erosion of the hard-won illusion of gay rights as we happily march all the darkies back to the plantation.

And a fierce and fabulous “doo dah” to you, chil’.

Amen.

As the PUMAsphere rightly, and righteously, continues to rail against those responsible for inflicting the festering wound of Obamanism upon the Democratic party, it might be useful to take a moment to examine exactly where the blame belongs.  While there is no doubt that Joe Cannon at Cannonfire and John-South of Melrose at Liberal Rapture are absolutely correct that the Hopium-hooked of Huffcheetoville have caused irreparable harm to the party with their over-the-top, irrational, indefensible, threats, taunts, and vitriolic rants against anyone and anything daring to express anything approaching the appearance of the possibility of potential criticism of the Unworthy One, one must ask oneself, “who are these idiots, and who let them out?”  The answer to that question is at once, obvious and, a little convoluted.

We all tend to point fingers at the people who gave these rabid mobs a platform from which to rant, but, that might not be quite fair.  While the Arianna-heads and Kossacks of the blogosphere certainly must own up to their fair share of responsibility, the bulk of the blame lies in the laps of David Axelrove’s Astroturfing Army, who, in many instances, hijacked website comment sections freeper-like, with military-style precision, often in response to articles posted on even those sites that don’t fit the Obots’ email ordered acceptability standards.  It’s not hard to imagine that this online campaign began with the employment of a relatively small number of paid Obots and their sock puppets, and morphed into the larger online force via the drafting and careful cultivation of inferiority complex-plagued basement dwellers into Axelrove’s email army via their vaunted big donor-hiding, “small donor” list.

Joe Trippi, the architect of the “bottom up” approach to politics, is often blamed for causing this “revolution,” but I’m not sure that this actually holds up.  More likely the damage has been caused by the deliberate misappropriation of Trippi’s overly idealistic tactics by the far more Machiavellian Axelrove.   While Trippi certainly has done his fair share to advance the cause of Obamanism, that’s probably most due to the fact that Obama is the guy whose campaign most wholeheartedly embraced his concepts.  However, when it came right down to it, the Obama campaign rejected Trippi the man, outright.

Early on, Trippi shopped his services around to both the Obama and Clinton campaigns and was turned down flat.  Even then, though, it seems his heart was with Obama, leading to speculation that his eventual employment with John Edwards was as an Axelrove-approved plant.   In early November of 2007, The Garance posted the info that, though employed by Edwards,  Trippi was a member of Obama’s Facebook group, and featured a screenshot supporting their claim.  They also quoted Noam Scheiber’s 6-page Trippi profile in The New Republic:

Trippi guest-lectured at Northwestern for a class taught by Obama strategist David Axelrod, and the two men briefly discussed how he might join the campaign. Several weeks later, Trippi met with Clinton strategist Howard Wolfson to discuss a possible role in Hillaryland. When neither option panned out, an acquaintance put Trippi in touch with John and Elizabeth Edwards. He flew down to North Carolina for a three-hour conversation and accepted a job with Edwards a few weeks later.

Around the same time, Allegre on Daily Kos, was asking outright if Trippi was an Obama plant in Edwards camp.   Coupla days later, Politico’s Ben Smith revealed Trippi’s Iowa cheerleading for Obama in front of a Des Moines hotel bar crowd including of a group of 20-something organizers clad in Obama-red “Fired Up! tee-shirts, and Terry McAuliffe:

When a man on the edge of the group yelled the slogan, they answered with the response they’d been chanting all night: “Ready to go.”

“Fired up!” the rumpled, older man yelled again.

“Ready to go!” the crowd shouted back again. “Fired up!” he called. “Ready to go!”

“Let’s kick her ass,” the cheerleader finally called out, and the crowd roared.

The cheerleader — Joe Trippi, chief adviser to Sen. John Edwards, new-politics guru, and all-around mischief maker — glanced gleefully over at McAuliffe.

Smith claims Trippi was just “having on” with McAuliffe, but, only backs that up with the fact that there’s no evidence to the contrary.  However, in June of that year, when Joe was warning the British about the old ways of “top down” politicking via  The Guardian, and scolding TechRepublican’s David All for threatening to “flood the zone” by screwing with search engine keywords to divert attention from potentially embarrassing You Tube “macaca” videos, Trippi’s alumni was already on the Obama/Axelrove payroll, wreaking havoc on the internet.

In February of this year, I did a post tracing the genesis of obscene ObamaLove back to the insidious, insipid, ubiquitous You Tube video,  “I Got A Crush On Obama,” which lead me back to the earlier “1984” anti-Hillary video, traced directly back to the Obama campaign via a company called Blue State Digital.   BSD, credited with creating and maintaining Mybarackobama.com through its various incarnations to its present-day Organizing for America persona, signed onto the O-Train possibly as early as 2006, (a fact once touted on their website) but definitely by February, 2007, a week after he announced his candidacy for president.  BSD has also worked for George Soros, Ted Kennedy, and AT&T (co-incidently, a company that has employed the services of Axelrod’s recently former Astroturfing company, ASK).  By May, WaPo was reporting on Obama’s baby web-guru phenom, Joe Rospars, of Blue State Digital fame, who was also a Trippi trained Deaniac.  Rospars is a big proponent of innovative, viral You Tube video tactics, as well as co-opting other people’s websites.

The point of all this is that even though Trippi is intricately involved in all things Obama, I’m not sure he has the huevos to play as dirty as the Axelrovians.  He seems more like a professorial sheepdog, brilliant at what he does, intentionally, if not lovably, clueless about the darkside of his own innovations. In fact, sometimes Joe seems downright, well…trippy. Axelrove, demonstrably, is not.

In January of 2007, the New York Observer traced a website named Obama4America back to a Trippi-founded company, which disavowed any then-current association with Joe Trippi.  However, the Observer didn’t explore whether Joe Rospars or any othe Blue State Digital employees were involved, which seems more likely.  At any rate, by November, Time Magazine was asking whether Obama could “rock the nomination,” quoting both Axelrod and Trippi, and by December, Trippi was accusing Camp O of using cheap tricks as a result of being in “deep shit.”  By November, ‘08, Trippi was panelizing with Arianna Huffington, patting themselves on the back for being partially responsible for the internet-based foisting of Obama on America:

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president,” Huffington said. “Were it not for the Internet, he would not have been the Democratic nominee.”

This is definitely true, but the “small donors ” and “bottom up” happy crappy they’re pushing is not nearly as important, in my opinion, as the Obotomizing of the comment sections of “progressive” bloggerizers.  Those bullies hellbent on crushing the opposition on blog sites large and small, across the blogosphere, are the reason the narrative of Obama “inevitability” was allowed to take root and grow into the illusion of overwhelming support.  From MSNBC to sister site The Root, from HuffPo to WaPo and all sites in between, a handful of paid hopium-heads wielded undue influence on the process.  It only takes a few useful idiots on a website, or radio station, or even better, radio station website, to make themselves seem like a groundswell of outrage representative of all of black America’s wrath over “unfair” criticism of the stereotyping Undercover Brother Pretendident.  The same is true for all other incidences of feigned righteous indignance throughout the media, mainstream and otherwise, in support of Obama.  Such outpourings of offense soon became postulates, self-fulfilling prophesies based upon nothing but the illusions generated in David Axelrod’s war room.  One need only to revisit posts throughout the “progressive” blogosphere, critical of, or waffling about, Barack Obama’s viability to see the Obots’ handiwork.  In fact, re-reading Joe Cannon’s rant, one cannot escape the fact that it’s the commenters spewing the venom at everybody, PUMAs in particular.  In my opinion, the smartest thing PUMA bloggers have ever done, besides come to exist, is to diligently block the KoolAid Brigade from our sites.

Of course, Trippi, and others, like, oh, say, Donna Brazile, have made it their business to take turns driving the O-Train down our throats, but, ultimately, they merely disseminated the Camp O-provided ammunition for Axie’s Army to spray aound the blogosphere.  And, though the mindfucking and manipulation was oppressive and, to my mind, unethical, it was probably no moreso than Madison Avenue’s relentless selling of junk food to kids; reprehensible, but, not illegal, and, with proper parenting, only marginally effective.  Without the relentless jackbooted force-feeding of Obacrap from the Obacolytes, cluelessly devoted to the Obamessiah either out of the misguided love of the preternaturally loney, or by the inflated-ego exploitation of the  intellectually self-impressed, or simply motivated by the love of money, Barack Obama would not be president today.  That’s the dirty underwear little secret, Arianna and Joe.  It ain’t what you said and did, it’s what you let them say and do in your name.

So, for those concerned that Joe Trippi’s involvement in the New Way Forward protest agenda taints the process, I would say, probably not.  Even the presense of a lot of the seemingly rabid, “progressive” bloggers is probably not a big deal, since they all got played, too, and some of them are slowly awakening to that fact.  But, it’s hard to admit you got seduced, used,  and discarded like an old condom by a geek.  I don’t feel sorry for them, they should all know a geek when they see one.  But, like the bleeding heart, tree-hugging, ultra liberals who sleep with the thieving gardener because he’s a fatherless minority whose pain they feel so acutely that only giving him a blowjob on Mommy and Daddy’s sheets will assuage their conscience and satisfy their rebellious spirit, while validating their well-intentioned, good-person-ness, they got fucked.

So, did we all; but I’ll save my real anger for the scheming butt wipes who got them together so they could clean out the safe while they thought nobody was looking.

And, if Joe Trippi turns out to be one of the latter, then fuck him, too.

“Leave my president alone!”

That’s what Alan Colmes says.  Just leave the Obamessiah alone while he does whatever the hell he wants to do, says the Man Nobody Listens To.  Colmes is just too too miffed at all those people who have an opinion about the Baraculator.  The commenters on his blog post say you can almost see him stomping his widdle foot as he writes that, gosh darnit to heck, the poor Urkelbama hasn’t even figured out where the bathrooms are, fuhgoodnesssake!

I have a great idea. Leave the guy alone. Yes, LEAVE OBAMA ALONE. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t hold our government officials accountable, but how about giving the new chief time to find out where the men’s room is in the White House?

Alan says the Teflon TelePrompTer Reader is coming under fire for doing a lot of stuff, but he doesn’t go so far as to say Obie has done anything particularly well:

Monday, March 30, is just the 70th day of the Obama presidency. He’s addressed the economy, health care, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our relationship with Iran. In fact, he’s even been accused of doing too much too soon –as if he wouldn’t have faced criticism for doing too little had he not taken the steps he’s taken. One of the reasons he’s had to be pro-active is because he inherited a mess. And climbing out of a ditch takes longer than it did to get in it because to climb out you’re going against gravity.

Well, yeah, he addressed health care, as in making speeches and forming study groups, but, if we’re any closer to actually insuring the uninsured than we were say, at any time before Oblahblah was elected, I must have missed it.  And, if his Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran plans are markedly different from the ones he “inherited,” nobody’s shared it with all those mean ol’ poo-poo heads Alan’s fussing at.  Alan’s knickers are also twisted because some folks don’t think making jokes at the expense of people with disabilities on late night talk shows is presidential, and, oh by the way, he does have that economy thing that’s not getting any better to deal with, too, ya know?  Poor Alan, I guess it must be hard to defend a guy who you think needs over two months to locate the men’s rooms, but Our Al sure gives it the old college try:

Leave Obama alone. Stop it. Stop it now. We’re not headed toward communism. We’re not becoming a socialist nation. (We already became one under Bush). The middle class is not disappearing. (That, too happened during the last 8 years and the stimulus will hopefully bring that back.) Leave him alone. The next election will be here soon enough. Leave him alone. Go about your business. And have a nice day.

Poor Alan, it must suck to be the last guy Rahm Emanuel calls on after Donna Brazile.

Donna Brazile, who claims her life is going to crap since her “Mama Factor” was elected, nonetheless says when it comes to bashing the Baby Prez on Training Wheels, everybody should just shut the hell up and keep sucking.  Okay, she didn’t say that; that’s the punchline to an awful joke, but I thought that, given what she did say, it was a pretty apt interpretation.  The Object of Donna’s Desire has been having a pretty rough go of it, lately, and DB is just sick of it, sick I tellya, and hates all the haters hating.

Donna’s mama would be proud that her baby girl is so kind-hearted and forgiving, considering all that her KoolAid-fueled infatuation has cost her.  But, Does Donna blame Oboyfriend?  Did Juliet blame Romeo?  Cleopatra blame Antony?  The chick on Dancing With The Stars blame The Batchelor?  Noooooo!  Whatareyounuts?

Over the last two months, I have seen my hours cut back, a newspaper column canceled, clients unable to renew their contracts with my firm, and others needing to renegotiate my modest fees. Business is drying up, and despite all my frantic maneuvers to move my little retirement funds out of harm’s way, my 401(k) is disappearing faster than the snow from the recent storm. I don’t want to see this president fail, and I suggest that to do so is a partisan luxury none of us can afford.

So what if he’s insensitive to heroes?  Who cares if Hugo Chavez calls him “ignorant?”  Of course Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s peeps say he wants Obie to grovel in order to prove he means what he says on tape, what else did you expect?  When Steve Kroft asks the TelePrompTer-less Teflon TelePrompTer Reader if the reason he’s sitting there laughing like a loon is because he’s punchy, well, everybody knows Kroft, like everybody else on 60 Minutes, is just a big, ol’ meany-poo.  Donna B. says her boo (not Anderson Cooper) is Teh Shit because he can multitask his ass off, a view shared by none other than her galpal, Connie:

“What might look like a distracted focus to some,” wrote another friend, Connie, from Illinois, “looks like a multiphased strategic attack to me. Without it, where would we be right now?” She’s right. Where would some states and localities be right now without the stimulus money to keep teachers at work, police on the beat, and funds flowing to millions of newly unemployed folks whose families have lost their health insurance and are in jeopardy of losing their homes?

I hate to break it to you PUMA Creator, but, watching him fail just might be unavoidable, no matter what you want.  When his minions, like Christine Romer, are claiming that our financial well being is based on policies akin to a garage sale for a burned out neighbor, one doesn’t have to be Paul Krugman or Miss Cleo to see failure in the offing.  On Fox News Sunday, Romer said private investors are “kind of doing us a favor” by buying toxic assets out of the goodness of their little hearts:

“We’ve got banks with a lot of toxic assets, what ‘toxic’ means is they are highly uncertain … so that is certainly the big picture, and that is going to be the main reason for doing this … We simply — we simply need them. We need them — you know, we’ve got a limited amount of money that the government has to go in here, so we need to partner, not just with private firms, but with the FDIC, with the Fed, to leverage the money that we have,” she said.

Romer also told CNN’s John King that the economy would “bottom out this year,” and that the government should “keep an eye on” businesses that are “too big to fail” like AIG, even though it probably wasn’t “useful” to try to figure out who put the bonus-allowing loophole in the stimulus bill.  I’m sure the fact that some of AIG’s “counterparties” and other TARP recipients have been giving money to politicians’ campaigns lately have nothing to do with Chrissy’s “move along, nothing to see here” stance.

We all know that Donna feels that all those folks picking on Obama in the New York Times today are just haters who refuse to understand that President Precious is doing the very best he can with the bad hand he inherited.  How was he to know when he lobbied for the first TARP bill on the advice of his then-economic advisory team that included two members of the New York Federal Reserve Board of Directors for sure, and one who probably was, (Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat, JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, and Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi) that things were going to turn out this way, huh?

And, how was he to know when he moved the DNC headquarters to Chicago before he appointed a Virginia guy to run it part-time as part of his Washington the Chicago Way program, that all those “little donors” would start keeping their ducats in their own pockets?  Guess all those bundlers and corporate fat cats didn’t make it to the 13 million strong magic donor list.  And, who could have possibly known that one of his biggest law firm donors, Skadden Arps would end up doing so much TARP related stuff?

So, Donna, while you may enjoy donning your little cheerleader outfit and climbing atop the ObaLoving pyramid in spite of your dwindling resources, many of your sisters-in-suffering, without the cushion the potential of being Anderson Cooper’s boo might provide a woman like you, find themselves having to pursue new career options:

The tough job market is prompting a growing number of women across the country to dance in strip clubs, appear in adult movies or pose for magazines like Hustler.

I guess in tough times a resourceful woman can find all sorts of creative ways to prostitute herself, huh, D.?

Barack Obama has been pimping faith, any faith, for political power since the beginning of his professional career as a community organizer.  Early on he made a conscious, callous decision to use the pulpit, any pulpit, to attempt to mobilize people into action.  This is not a secret, it has been documented repeatedly, yet it has been marketed as most things Obama have been, it is what it is, but it means anything you want it to.

Until recently, when Barack Obama touted his Muslim family members and growing up in a Muslim country on Al Arabiya TV, associating the word, “Muslim,” or anything that might possibly remotely hint at a relationship of any sort between Obama and anything Islamic, including his given name, was considered a completely out of bounds “smear.”  Even when he himself slipped up and referred to his “Muslim faith,” specualtion about the nature of the slip and what it might mean, was treated as being highly offensive and unfair to the “Christian” man.  The “Christian” man who, as far as anyone knows, has never been baptized, (if anybody has any evidence showing he has, I’ll apologize) who could divorce himself from his church and “pastor who brought him to Jesus” when it became politically expedient to do so, and has used every one of his rare church visits in the last 2 years of campaigning and being elected to the presidency as a photo-op, skillfully talks the Christian talk without being expected to walk the Christian walk.

In 1990 Obama wrote:

“Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and – most importantly – values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago. A fierce independence among black pastors and a preference for more traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for office, providing shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.”

Clearly, Obama is not embracing a religious philosophy here.  This article from the Catholic Citizens of Illinois, claims that Obama’s early community organizing efforts were almost exclusively funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development:

It is also responsible, in some part, for the fact that forty years later, we have a virulently pro-abortion, pro-homosexual presidential candidate whose principle political training has been in Alinskyian organizing. While he – Barak Obama – was lead organizer in Chicago for the Developing Communities Project, it received a $40,000 Catholic Campaign for Human Development grant in 1985 and a $33,000 grant in 1986.

While he was in Chicago Obama was trained by the top Alinskyian organizers. One mentor was the ex-Jesuit, Greg Galuzzo, lead organizer for Gamaliel. The Developing Communities Project operated under the Gamaliel Foundation, a network of Alinskyian organizations that receive 4-5% of all Catholic Campaign for Human Development grants each year.

The Developing Communities Project, which hired Obama as lead organizer, was an offshoot of Jerry Kellman’s Calumet Community Religious Conference. Kellman, another of Obama’s mentors, was himself trained by Alinsky. The network of community organizations Alinsky founded, the Industrial Areas Foundation, receives about 16% of all Catholic Campaign for Human Development grants annually.

After Obama went to Harvard Law School, he returned to Chicago and taught Alinskyian organizing to ACORN staff. Although ACORN has a different structure than other Alinskyian networks, its tactical philosophy and world view are formed by men who were trained by Alinsky, in a sort of diabolical apostolic succession. Obama ran ACORN’s 1992 voter-registration drive, Project Vote, and in turn received ACORN’s endorsement for Illinois senator. ACORN annually receives about 5% of Catholic Campaign for Human Development grants.

While working for the Developing Communities Project before he went to Harvard, Obama ran smack into his personal, yet unusual, “crisis of faith:”

Mr. Obama faced skepticism from Baptist and Pentecostal pastors unwilling to use their influence to help him organize their members. His group had consisted almost entirely of Catholic churches, and its top officials were white and Jewish.

“Barack had to get beyond the accusation that he was working for Catholics and Jews who were trying to make money off the community,” Mr. Kellman said.

Mr. Obama wrote that a minister suggested it would be helpful if he belonged to a church, and he joined the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s congregation after hearing a sermon about faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Wright’s sermons have been an issue in the campaign.

In his paramount achievement, Mr. Obama persuaded a number of these pastors to enlist their churches as members of the Developing Communities Project. Fortunately for Mr. Obama, a new wave of younger pastors was replacing the older guard.

So, it seems clear that Obama’s “faith” is pragmatically based.  Religion, throughout his career, has been a tool, first for community, then political organizing, and nothing more.  In 1995, the Chicago Reader reported:

In an interview after the class, Obama again spoke of the need to organize and mobilize the economic power and moral fervor of black churches. He also argued that as a state senator he might help bring this about faster than as a community organizer or civil rights lawyer.

“What we need in America, especially in the African-American community, is a moral agenda that is tied to a concrete agenda for building and rebuilding our communities,” he said. “We have moved beyond the clarion call stage that was needed during the civil rights movement. Now, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, we must move into a building stage. We must invest our energy and resources in a massive rebuilding effort and invent new mechanisms to strengthen and hasten this community-building effort.

How fortunate that the Democratic Party has been similarly influenced.  It is unclear just how much of that influence comes directly from Barack Obama, however.  In fact, a lot of it comes via Howard Dean, a guy who wouldn’t seem to know the difference between an Apostle and a Popsicle if it wasn’t for the stick.  He does seem to know a good idea from his chief of staff when he hears one.  The story goes that Rev. Leah Daughtry, a fifth generation Pentecostal minister who previously worked for former DNC Chair, Terry McAuliffe, and, who went on to organize the Democratic National Convention in Dever, got the gig because she put a particularly juicy bug in Howdy Doody Dean’s ear:

WHEN HOWARD DEAN BECAME CHAIRMAN of the Democratic National Committee in early 2005, Daughtry, who had been working as the chief of staff to Dean’s predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, approached Dean with the newly arrived results of a poll she commissioned to try to sort out John Kerry’s defeat in 2004. She didn’t expect to stay on during Dean’s tenure, but she wanted Dean to reckon with what the survey of voters in eight battleground states had found: that “nearly half of the electorate,” as the Democratic pollster, Cornell Belcher, explained in a memo accompanying his results, “place as much or more weight on their religious faith as they do other conventional issue considerations when deciding how to vote.”

Daughtry became Dean’s chief of staff and was allowed, even enthusiastically encouraged by the man some called “one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history,” to put her plan in action and hire a “Faith In Action” team, a group comprised of all the elements of a Borsht Belt comic’s joke: “three evangelicals, a Catholic, a Muslim and a Jew.”  The group, which at the time of the writing of the quoted New York Times article, July 20, 2008, was said to meet weekly at DNC headquarters in Washington, was also expected to be absorbed into the Obama campaign.

The shared political philosophy of Daughtry and Obama must have seemed pure serendipity, though Daughtry’s efforts are faith driven, while Obama’s are purely political.  No matter, both are equally committed to the principle of taking one’s help where one finds it.

To forge bonds with the faithful, the party has not relied solely on its six F.I.A. members. Daughtry also assembled a 60-member Faith Advisory Council, consisting mostly of leading representatives of the clergy, to help make it clear that the Democrats care about religion. She oversaw the purchase of radio ads promoting the party on Christian stations during the 2006 elections. Her role is personal as well as programmatic. She helps Dean lace his speeches with, as she puts it, “the language of values rather than what Democrats are known for, which is facts and figures.” When Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign and is now a Democratic National Committee member, called, wanting to include a strong woman from the Bible in an address she was preparing to give at a Catholic university, Daughtry supplied her with the story of Deborah.

Another key member of the flock, Mara Vanderslice, a born-again evangelical who conducted the poll Daughtry, (a devotee of conservative scaring Black Liberation Theology proponent, Rev. James Cone like Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright) used to persuade Dean to embrace faith for votes, is now guiding Democratic candidates to glory through her Common Good Strategies consulting firm.  And, while not all Dems are quite comfortable with the pulpit pimping, the Democratic Party is committed to it as a viable, integral part of it’s long-term strategy.

Yet, as we’ve seen with Obama’s inaugural embrace of Pastor Rick Warren, and the bungling of the televising of the carrot-toss appearance of his opposite, Rev. Gene Robinson, as well as his protracted disentanglement from Jeremiah Wright, and the apparent capitulation to pro-life conservatives on funding for family planning, such blatant exploitation with no personal religious commitment is fraught with pitfalls, being as ugly and offensive as such behavior inherently is.  While tolerance of religious diversity should be a cornerstone of democracy in my opinion, it shouldn’t be a Democratic Party issue at all.

*NOTE: More on Obama and faith at No Quarter, and, at the Real Barack Obama here and here.

John Coleman, an Ohio fireman marching in the inaugural parade, winked and waved at President Black Obama in violation of “da roolz,” and was subsequently suspended for six months.  From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

“We had gone over and over time and again with everyone in the band that this was a military parade. Protocol and proper decorum had to be followed at all times,” said bandleader Pipe Major Mike Engle. “Unfortunately, John chose to ignore that.”

Coleman said he didn’t do anything grossly demonstrative: “I looked over, and he smiled and waved. I was just acknowledging the president, who was acknowledging our band.”

Engle, who said other pipe bands complained about Coleman’s gesture, said even sneaking a glimpse was out of bounds.

“He has to abide by the rules,” Engle said. “It had to be done.”

Too bad he wasn’t raised by Donna Brazile’s mama.

UPDATE: Per CNN, Coleman has resigned:

John Coleman resigned from the Cleveland Firefighters Memorial Pipes & Drums a week after the parade in Washington. Publicity about his suspension had gotten to be too much, he told CNN affiliate WEWS.

“It’s come to a point where I don’t want embarrassment anymore between the pipe band and myself,” Coleman, who is a firefighter, told WEWS on Tuesday.

Band manager, Ken Rybka,expressed shock and surprize at the resignation, and said he himself will take a leave of absense from the band:

The band has been inundated with phone calls, e-mails and messages on its Internet pages — almost all of them critical — since the story first broke on Monday, Rybka said.

“It is unfortunate that an internal band issue has raised so much discussion and ire from the general public,” Rybka said in the statement. “It has disheartened me more than you can imagine.”

Rybka said that he will be taking a leave of absence from the band because of the furor.

“The ‘afterglow’ of participating in the inaugural parade is gone,” he said.

Damned roolz.

Suppose The View’s Elizabeth Hasselbeck announced that she was running for president in 2012?  As a Democrat?  Feminist?  What if she hired a sharp, ruthless, barracuda of a campaign manager who stage-managed an almost flawless production, assembling bright, committed women and men willing to think outside the box in order to get the job done, using the mysteriously acquired unlimited funds at her disposal to get Elizabeth’s unique, yet poignant story to the masses?  If Elizabeth, who has always claimed to be politically independent, dramatically recanted all previously uttered conservative statements as having been made under duress; unduly influenced and perpetually frightened as she has been because of years of  abuse, would you buy it?  How would you feel as you watched millions of people leap aboard her bandwagon, commiserating with her misery, applauding her for her courage in freeing herself from her oppressor, as all women must be made to feel free to do?

As her campaign grew, with Caroline Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi enthusiastically endorsing her, and female Democrats and Republicans of every race coming forward to embrace her and her story, and every male, Democrat and Republican, hurrying to align themselves with her, too, lest they be tarred with the chauvinistic, closet abuser brush her campaign cleverly wielded as a sword of implication hanging perilously over their heads, would you be cheered by the prospect of the seeming inevitability of finally putting a woman in the White House?  Or, would you watch in horror, transfixed by the spectacle, with a permanent “what the fuck?!” expression etched upon your face, questioning her experience as your friends, family and co-workers questioned your sanity?

When prominent feminists appeared onstage with prominent celebrities and exhorted frenzied poor people to join hands in history as they supported the women they love as they finally take their rightful place in society, would you want to cry, pull your hair out, or join in?  As “Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves” segued into “Respect” at rallies where men women and children waved “It’s Our Turn, Now” and “We Came The Long Way, Baby” signs would you scream at the TV, “yeah, but it’s fucking Elizabeth Hasselbeck, ya shits?!”

When Jeff Probst appeared on the news claiming that Hasselbeck’s experience on Survivor showed that she was indeed capable of enduring hardship, and people cheered so much that Elizabeth joined with Beyonce at fundraisers, even going so far as to sing along when girl group ditching Lady Jigglebooty performed her “Charlie’s Angels” theme song, would you feel like you’d entered an alternate universe?  When Joy Behar guest-hosted the Larry King show and professed to the hour’s guest, Donna Brazile, that after 3 years of interacting with the diverse women on The View, Hasselbeck was uniquely equipped to handle the office of the presidency, a position Brazile heartily agreed with and expounded on, would you cry?

If Hasselbeck raised more money than anyone in the history of campaigning, supposedly from millions of women, young and old, sending in withheld portions of grocery, milk, lunch and tithe funds, supplemented by donations from Massengil, Playtex, Gardisil, Black and Decker and other companies eager to cash in on the “She Can Do Anything” theme of the campaign, would you wonder where the start-up money, not to mention rest of the gazillion, came from?

If the sale of blonde wigs went through the roof, with women of every color and stripe wearing them with their “Who’s Stupid, NOW?” tee shirts, in solidarity with their new shero, would you rush to renew your subscription to Ms. Magazine and all the other periodicals whose cover Hasselbeck graced?  When Vanity Fair featured her on the cover, naked under a flag with make-up bruises and a black eye, in their “We’re Not Gonna Take It Anymore” issue, would you wonder where the real pictures were and why none of her male family members, let alone the never identified abuser had been interviewed, and how come there were no police reports, or would you keep your mouth shut lest you be accused of blaming the victim?

What if she had won caucuses she didn’t compete in, or just barely pulled out the nomination after her primary opponent was subjected to months of incessant media accusations of his unnecessarily bullying and trying to intimidate her?  Could any male candidate, even one with an exemplary record of standing up for women’s rights, stand up himself under a well-coordinated media onslaught portraying him as an insensitive brute willing to beat up on a girl to achieve his goals like men always do?

When she gave tepid thanks to Hillary Clinton, before proclaiming a new way forward for today’s generation of women, encouraging them to move away from the strident voices and divisive tactics of the past, how would you feel?  And, when she improbably rode the media generated wave of public sentiment to the highest office in the land, would you be proud?  Or would the “what the fuck!?” expression you’d worn for moths now, become covered with tears, despite your best efforts to stop them?

No matter how strongly you believe that it’s time to have the woman president we need, would any woman really do, any way you could get her?  For this black woman, Barack Obama might as well be the blonde on The View.  They might both be swell, peachy people, but c’mon, president?

Nah.

Ain’t enough hype in the world.

I am a PUMA today for the exact same reason I went looking to become something that didn’t yet exist on May 31, 2008; I object to the manner in which Barack Obama became my president.  And nothing I’ve seen before or since has mitigated that essential truth in the slightest, in fact, the more I see of the way he operates, the more upset I get.  Barack Obama offends my sense of fair play.  From what I’ve been able to determine through my research of him, he has pushed the against “da roolz” envelope in every contested election he’s won.  Though he cannot be accused of outright cheating, he has built his entire pseudo-impressive career out of finding obscure loopholes to screw to his orgasm, thereby raping the process to his pleasure and advantage.

As has been extensively chronicled, in 1996, Obama won his first election to the Illinois Senate by contesting the voting petition signatures gathered for all of his challengers, getting them all disqualified, and running unopposed.   Before he could complete his second term of office, after winning re-election in 1998 over African American Republican Yesse Yehudah (whose name later emerged in Obama bribery allegations) he mounted a disastrous 2000 campaign for sitting Congressman Bobby Rush’s seat, who beat the pants off him like he was a red-headed stepchild, by playing his “my black card on the table trumps the Uppity Magic Negro card up your sleeve.”   It worked, and Obama never let that happen again.

Given Illinois’ convoluted system regarding Senate terms…

Every Senate district elects its members to serve two four-year terms and one two-year term per decade.

…and Obama’s predilection for reticence, the details regarding his Illinois Senate runs are rather sketchy.  However, considering that his opponent in  1998, Yehuda, won approx. 10% of the vote, and that in 2002 he ran unopposed, its safe to assume that, for some reason, Obama’s re-elections were basically a rubber-stamp formality.  Curiously, Wikipedia mentions that Obama was re-elected to the Illinois senate in 2002, presumably in November, yet numerous sources report that he had already begun preparing for a run at the U.S. Senate by June of that year.  From the Boston Globe:

In mid-2002, Obama began to focus on the upcoming US Senate race. The incumbent, Republican Peter Fitzgerald, seemed beatable, and it was not clear Carol Moseley Braun, who had held the seat before Fitzgerald, would try to reclaim it. Obama and his wife made a deal: This would be, as his wife puts it now, “the last hurrah.”

And, from a Chicago Maroon piece written July 12, 2002:

Democratic State Senator and University Law School Senior Lecturer Barack Obama has begun assessing his chances in the 2004 US senate race. Obama has commissioned a statewide poll by the Colorado firm Harstad Strategic Research, and he has filed for federal permission to begin fundraising. Obama will have to win the democratic primary in order to face incumbent Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald in ‘04.

Note the article from 2002 refers to Obama as a “Senior Lecturer” not “professor,” as he has claimed to be; a claim which was backed up, but “nuanced” (their word, not mine)  by Fact Check.org via the University of Chicago.  Another example of Obama’s fondness for “nuance”regards his now, much bally-hooed, then, largely ignored, unfilmed, 2002 Iraq war speech:

“My objections to the war in Iraq were not simply a speech,” Obama said. “I was in the midst of a U.S. Senate campaign. It was a high-stakes campaign. I was one of the most vocal opponents of the war.” (Obama delivered the speech in October 2002; he did not officially declare his candidacy for the U.S. Senate until January).

Even in this era of YouTube and camera phones, a recording of Obama’s speech is all but impossible to find. The Obama campaign has gone so far as to re-create portions of the speech for a television ad, with the candidate re-reading the text, with audience sound effects.

So, according to the above article from NPR, this cornerstone and centerpiece of Obama’s presidential campaign was actually an insignificant speech delivered to about 1,000 people by a little known guy running unopposed for the state Senate, at somebody else’s (Jesse Jackson) rally.    Even Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, has admitted as much.   Quoted in the New York Times Caucus blog lamenting the lack of recorded Iraq war speech material:

“I would kill for that,” he was quoted as saying. “No one realized at the time that it would be a historic thing.”

Similar “nuance” marks the man’s entire biography, yet he has somehow managed to create the illusion of transparency.  When David Axelrod joined (became) Obama’s team in 2004, the elements of Obama’s new, “I am, too, black enough, but not too black, just short of under-handed envelope pushing” political philosophy began to successfully knit themselves  together.  On his AKP&D Message and Media website, “the Axe” takes his full share of credit:

In 2004, Axelrod helped State Senator Barack Obama score a landslide win in his U.S. Senate campaign, developing a message and media strategy that enabled Obama to defeat six opponents in the Democratic primary with an astounding 53% of the vote. He is currently serving as media advisor to Obama’s presidential campaign.

Barack Obama was elected to the United States Senate as the second African American to do so from Illinois, amid scandal.  In fact, from the scandal surrounding Congressman Mel Reynolds in his first state Senate bid, to his predecessor Carol Mosely Braun’s legal troubles, to the fortuitous (for him) scandal and gossip swirling around two of his opponents in his U.S. Senate race that caused them to drop out, to the current Blagojevich brouhaha, somebody in Illinois is always getting into trouble for something that often ultimately benefits Obama, that he’s miraculously never really otherwise affected by.

The divorce records of Obama’s leading primary opponent in 2004, Blair Hull, as well as those of his Republican opponent Jack Ryan were not-so-mysteriously leaked to the Chicago Tribune, (given David Axelrod’s previous association with the newspaper) sinking their chances.  Obama/Axelrod could then employ their newly developed “blacker than thou” techniques against last minute, carpetbagging replacement Republican candidate, Alan Keyes, sweeping to victory.

In the presidential primaries, Camp Obama again pushed “da roolz” envelope to their advantage.  From the exploitation of delegate appropriation in the caucuses, to the active solicitation of “anybody but Hillary” Republican and Independent temporary crossover voting, to the deliberate, yet unnecessary, removal of his name in the Michigan primary, something he was forbidden to do in Florida,  Obama consistently pimped the process.  With the complicity of the DNC, the mainstream media and the faux progressive blogosphere, who rewarded, celebrated, and championed his every questionable move, he barely squeaked by enough to be ceremoniously handed the nomination, “fair and square.”  Those of us in his party who questioned his experience, qualifications, and tactics were belittled, bullied, and ridiculed when we couldn’t be ignored, as the Obama campaign and the DNC turned their heads and allowed his minions in the media and blogosphere to engage in misogynistic race baiting on his behalf.  None of which dampened our outrage in the slightest, in fact, as most any fool besides these would expect, the opposite is true.

Wickedly delightful, completely non-politically correct author Christopher Moore has brilliantly analyzed and explained the concept of “Beta Male” in much of his work.  While I recommend you read his books for yourself, and cannot presume to speak for him, the basic point, as I perceive it, is that the world is populated by far more Beta Males than Alpha, yet they tend to fade into the background of life because they’re…well…Beta.  Moore hilariously champions their cause.  Yet, as a female, I have a couple of observations about the concept of my own.  One, Alpha Male is not all it’s cracked up to be.  Basically, it just means “first guy through the door.”   While a man’s looks, wealth, education, whatever, might contribute to his cockiness, the bottom line is, it’s the cocksure confidence he exhibits that women and Beta Males respond to, often to their detriment.  Because, there’s no guarantee that the Alpha Male is the smartest, or best qualified guy in any group, he’s just compelled to go first.  This is not always a good thing for him, or the group, after all, the first bull off the cliff in a buffalo jump was probably an Alpha Male, too.

Secondly, not all Alpha Males are created equal.  Primarily because, not all male tribal affiliations, teams, clubs, cliques, squads, etc., are.  True, there are Alpha Males in Alpha Male societies, but even Beta, Gamma, Delta, Theta and Omega groups have Alpha Males, too.  And while those lesser Alphas might not fare well in clubs higher up on the food chain, in their little domains, they rock.

Barack Obama is not an Alpha Male, even in a Tau society.  He is an actor, adept at adopting the persona of an Alpha, (when he stays on script) but even then, only as top dog of a Gamma society, at best.  Therefore, his campaign, comprised of refugees from Revenge of the Nerds, had to be equally adept at crafting a message designed to dumb down the masses, get them to accept and embrace their Gamma society identity, so that they could then embrace their Gamma society Alpha Male leader.  “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” conjures images of clueless hordes standing around idly, with their fingers in their noses and their thumbs up their asses, waiting for somebody smart to come along and tell them where to go and what to do.  Barack Obama is that somebody, for those people.

I don’t want a nerdy fake-Alpha Male president of a Gamma society.  America is better than that.  I don’t want a president who gleefully resorts to racially guilt tripping a largely innocent society into voting for him so that they might avoid the undeserved lash of the stigma of racism, while the minority of the majority who are real racists, escape unscathed.  I want a level playing field.  I want the best man to not only have a shot, I want him to win, even if the best man is a woman.  I don’t care if state houses and government buildings have to add stalls to the ladies’ rooms to accommodate an arbitrarily mandated quota any more than I want any old black guy to be appointed or elected just because he’s black.  If the best government of the people ends up being comprised of an unusually large percentage of third world immigrants, Munchkins, and Buddhist transvestites, so be it.  I want to work for a world where those things don’t matter, not live in a country where we agree to pretend they don’t against any and all evidence to the contrary.

I don’t want to have to be political about being political, to activate and agitate society for my right to participate in it.  Why should I still be burning my bra and raising my fist, even in this era of “historic accomplishment?”  Why should I co-sign the tactics of a group of “win at all costs, by any means necessary” rulebook waving, loophole screwing, process rapists, hellbent on blackmailing the country into validating their Beta Male in a Gamma society  twerpitude?  What’s wonderful enough to celebrate about the election of a black Alpha Male of a society that has to tacitly agree to Gamma-fy itself in order to elect him?  Especially when there was an imminently qualified, female Alpha Male in the race, one who actually had to fight her way out of the shadows of a bona fide Alpha?

I thought leveling the playing field, championing the cause of the little guy, real dedication to fair play, and social responsibility in a color blind, gender neutral country was what being a Democrat was all about.

I found out through this election that I was wrong.

That’s why I am no longer affiliated with any political party.

That is why I’m PUMA.