There’s A Riot Goin’ On (Say What?!)

by matttbastard

Doughy Pantload (“ZOMG NEGRO RAMPAGE!!11”) + The Ole Perfesser (“Heh, indeed”) = dogwhistlin’ racist dumbfuckery at its finest.

Glenn Greenwald, dnA and Athenae do the heavy lifting so I don’t have to (hooray for lazy Sundays!)

Related: Pretty safe to say that Bill Bennett provided the ultimate Biden moment during the Iowa Caucuses:

Barack Hussein Obama, a black man, wins this for the Democrats.

I have been watching him. I watched him on “Meet the Press,” I’ve watched him on [Anderson Cooper’s] show, watched him on all the CNN shows — he never brings race into it. He never plays the race card.

Talk about the black community — he has taught the black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton. You can talk about the issues. Great dignity. And this is a breakthrough. And good for the people of Iowa.

Yes, well done, BHO–I for one have learned my lesson: down with uppity (if that’s alright with Massa Bennett, o’course)! And golf claps for the (white) people of Iowa. Jon Swift might just be bang on here:

The other big winners were white voters and white members of the party establishment. By voting for Barack Obama, they were able to prove that they are not racist. The fact that Obama is young, charismatic, inspiring, a mesmerizing speaker, has fresh ideas and appeals across the partisan divide will make no difference in the general election where it is a well-known fact that the American people will be afraid to vote for a black man with a funny name who is inexperienced and might secretly be a Muslim. By letting him win this one, and giving us a historic moment that we can tell our grandchildren about, we can all feel better about ourselves.

Ahhh, I think that Obama’s rhetorical MDMA has finally begun to wear off. It’s the morning after in America. Sketchy cynicism FTW.

h/t GG for both the Bennett and Swift quotes.

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Dream Country

by matttbastard 

“Hope is what I saw in the eyes of the folks going to caucus last night… . If you ware willing to reach for what you know in your gut is possible. If you believe, as I believe, that we have to reach out and give the next generation the same chances that somebody gave us, if you believe in keeping the dream alive for those who still hunger for opportunity and still thirst for justice, then I am absolutely convinced that we will win the New Hampshire primary in four days.” 

 – Barack Obama, from a campaign rally in Portsmouth, N.H., 01.04.08 

I left the humans that very day, to spread the good news. And now I travel from place to place. I have walked for leagues beyond measure. I have starved, sometimes, and often I have been hurt. But I have walked on.

In a metal machine I crossed the cold waters. I have preached to solitary feral cars in empty places. I have shouted my message to the stars from rooftops and whispered it to dying cats in alleyways.

I have spoken to one cat, and to many. And wherever I have gone, my message is the same…

Dream it!

Dream the world. Not this pallid shadow of reality. Dream the world the way it truly is. A world in which all cats are queens and kings of creation. That is my message.

– Neil Gaiman, A Dream of a Thousand Cats (Sandman #18)

Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa this past Thursday–and that wonderful, spine-chilling speech–seems to have instilled quite a lot of hope within so many–“resonance”, as my friend Gary Farber put it over @ Obsidian Wings.

As displayed by his caucus performance, Obama really connects with disparate groups of people. His appeal defies–obliterates–demographics, with youth, women, and white independent midwesterners all coming together in enthusiastic support.  And then there are so-called ‘Obama Republicans’ like Andrew Sullivan, who believes that Obama could turn out to be “the Reagan of the Left”, a transformational figure who could “do to conservatism what Reagan did to liberalism” in 1980: give it a well-deserved “shellacking.”

Obama also seems to hold great respect for the Executive Office and American democracy, as displayed by the almost reverential manner in which he refers to both within his speeches. In contrast, the current resident-in-chief, with his willfully indifferent scorn and disregard for the Constitution and the Rule of Law, appears entirely possessed by partisan contempt for everything that is supposed to make America ‘America’, to the detriment of the nation both domestically and globally. I really believe that, fundamental policy and ideological differences aside, an Obama presidency would be healing, a symbolic catalyst that could help unify a world still desperately seeking post-9/11 (and post-November 2000) closure.

Above all, Obama is the first truly presidential candidate in years, someone who seems entirely comfortable and confident in the role for all the right reasons. Not because he harbours a lust for power, a pathological need to make it to the top no matter what; but out of a genuine sense of resposibility and civic duty: because serving the public is the right thing to do. That refressing ingenuousness touches something in people, melts away well-deserved cynicism hardened by years of politics-as-usual.

Resonance. 

Hope. HOPE! A dream can still transform a world consumed by darkness, “this pallid shadow of reality.”

“Dream the world the way it truly is.”

More from Atrios and Kevin Drum, who, though still somewhat skeptical, are both beginning to sense something big may be happening.

(Expanded from a comment @ Politics’n’Poetry.)

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Obama’s Victory Speech 01.03.08

by matttbastard

“Where where you last night?”

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Iowa Aftermath: The Republican Identity Crisis

by matttbastard

(originally uploaded by mikehuckabee08)

Robert G. Kaiser on the apparent collapse of the GOP big tent:

…The Reagan coalition is indeed fracturing, and the Republican Party is now certifiably in the midst of an [identity] crisis. This does NOT mean there is no hope for the Republican candidate next November, but it does mean that the Republican Party we have been living with since 1980 is on its way to the dust bin of history, to coin a phrase.

[…]

My thinking is this: Reagan brought together evangelicals, old-fashioned country-club Republicans, southern middle-class voters and the group that became known as “Reagan Democrats.” [Huckabee] wins Iowa without bringing together any broad coalition at all; he got evangelicals and a few others, it looks like. Other Republicans fractured in many directions.

I agree with the now-common commentary that there is no heir to Reagan now, or even to President Bush. Fred Thompson was, for ten minutes, the guy tapped to play that role. He did very poorly in Iowa tonight–14 percent.

I also confess to thinking for a couple of years now that the Republican coalition was in danger of fracturing. I may be looking tonight for evidence to support my own theory. But I don’t think so. I think it’s really happening.

More on how the Republican race is now “in disarray” from John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin, who note that “the weeks ahead will in some ways be a referendum on the identity of the Republican Party” and the results “could say much about what issues are paramount to a party in transition.”

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