Best of the Blogs

Justice Served

Jose Padilla has won a big victory for all Americans over our imperial president and his administration's outrageous, illegal and immoral efforts to concentrate all power in the Executive branch. A federal appeals court just ruled that the president does not have the power to detain an American citizen seized on U.S. soil as an enemy combatant. Little by little, the courts are rolling back the excesses. I don't think even the Supremes are going to go along with Junior on this one.

posted by Jerry Bowles 4:21 PM

When Push Comes to Shove

If you've wondered how Howard Dean would respond to all the crap thrown at him last week, why not listen to the man himself. Then, ask yourself why the following Newsweek interview is a Web exclusive and doesn't appear in the print edition. (John McCreery)

posted by Jerry Bowles 2:51 PM

Old Times There

It’s about time the Times covered the Strom Thurmond revelation that he had fathered a daughter by his family’s maid on page one. They buried it in main news last Sunday.

I first came across this stunning piece of information in Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book about the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. McWhorter used the bombing as a climax to a long history of race relations in the South, so that it was not out of place to mention what had been known but largely hushed-up, that one of the South’s staunchest warriors for segregation had engaged in a little mingling of the races. McWhorter also points out at the end of a brilliant passage on the role that fear of miscegenation played in Southern history and politics that in the South race relations was always “as much about Freud as Marx,” (I may be paraphrasing slightly since I loaned my copy of the book). In other words, the need to preserve economic privilege alone did not explain the motivations of the white South and the accompanying violence.

Over a long family reunion weekend in Virginia I had the chance to discuss this topic with my cousin, professor of Southern history at – where else – Washington and Lee University and he agreed that the farther you dig into the Southern psyche the closer you get to the root source of the region’s peculiar history: sex. It wasn’t for stealing bread that young black men were lynched; more often than not, it was for looking the wrong way at a white woman walking down the street. And remember the Scottsboro boys?

Psychoanalysis teaches that the first few months of life are critical for forming lasting impressions of intimacy and self-worth. Chances are ol’ Strom, like many of his white gentry contemporaries and predecessors, was nursed by a black nanny. So for white men to gravitate later to black women for sexual intimacy was not only because in many cases the women couldn’t refuse but also because of their connection to white men’s deepest sexual drives. At some point the Dixiecrat, like others in his race and class, was taught that the same skin to which he had formed his earliest bond was also inferior to his own, and that those to whom it belonged were to be subjugated to the Southern way of life (keeping “them” down.) When you imagine the enormity of this crack in the soul you get the key to the violence and self-delusion that fueled politics, and gave birth to Quentin Compson and Atticus Finch.

So Strom was just the longest lasting of a long tradition of Southern cultural chasm-reinforcers. With his death and with this revelation, can we and have we moved on? Well, it helps to finally put this story on the front page (perhaps the Times was originally hesitant after making such a big deal out of Hootie Johnson under its previous regime). I have not lived in the South for a long time, but my impression from infrequent visits is that while racism still exists it is more of the Northern variety, less overt and a lot less intimate. But as Brent Staples points out on the Times editorial page today, the Strom story, like that of countless others, gives the white community, like Strom Jr., an opportunity to acknowledge their kin and perhaps, in the bargain, to feel a lot more at home in their own skin.

posted by Evelyn 1:35 PM

PR, Iraqi-Style

Got to hand it to the Pentagon's boy Ahmad Chalabi who used his own newspaper, Al-Moutamar, to flood Iraq with a picture of himself leaning over Saddam Hussein, who appears to be huddled at his feet. No sign of the three other Iraqi Governing Council members who were taken to see the former dictator on Sunday. Chalabi, the chubby convicted bank robber and international fugitive, left Iraq when he was 14 and returned only a few months ago. It is quite possible that Saddam doesn't know who this strange little man is. Despite his claims to gullibles like Paul Wolfowitz to have a large popular following inside Iraq, most Iraqis didn't know who he was until recently and now what they know is that he is the American stooge apparent. The photograph of him lording over Saddam is obviously a cheap publicity stunt designed to give the little thief some credibility.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:09 PM

Clark gets “Bush bounce” in Arizona poll

A poll of 414 Arizonans “certain” to vote in the coming Democratic party primary conducted by New Jersey-based Survey USA indicates that Wes Clark is closing on Howard Dean. Released on Tuesday, the poll indicates that 31% of those asked favor Dean, while 29% now say they favor Clark. Joe Lieberman was favored by only 10% of the voters and only 9% said they’d vote for Dick Gephardt in the primary. The poll was conducted on the heels of a Clark TV ad blitz that saturated the Phoenix and Tucson markets… just days after US troops “found“ Saddam in a spider hole disoriented from the possible effects of inhalation therapy correctly administered, unlike the Russian botch job that killed over 200 in a Moscow theatre last year.

A poll conducted by Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and released Monday shows the effect of Clark’s “Bush bounce.” Taken before Al Gore’s endorsement of Dean and prior to Saddam becoming an unpaid demonstrator for Sargent’s Flea & Tick spray, the NAU poll found that 22% of those Democratic queried said they would support Howard Dean in the primary while only 12% said they would support Wes Clark.

For a fistful of dollars…

To what can we attribute the mighty Wurlitzer suddenly pumping out planet news that the Israelis had low cost a plan to take out Saddam in 1992? Hanukah? Christmas?

“Operation Bramble Bush” it was called and everyone’s saying that the op got 86ed after five Israeli commandos were killed during a test run. This mellow little number wasn’t Likud stuff; it came down on Labor’s watch, green lighted by then-prime minister Ehud Barak.

The intelligence was there. The psychological tendencies of Saddam gave the op a very high probability of success. And why, after Shrubby signed an Executive Order green lighting assassination of foreign leaders by US operatives, couldn’t we have gone in and done a similar surgical strike. When you consider that Americans spent $47 billion last year (2002) on supermarket purchases (not including megastores like Sams, Costco and K-Mart) and we’ve pissed away about $100 billion so far this calendar year on Shrubby’s unilateral war, the sheer folly of the exercise becomes, as Dick Nixon used to say “perfectly clear.” If we had the cojones, Saddam could have slipped down some stairs and banged his head like diet Dr. Robert Atkins and the American people could focus on rebuilding their own crumbling democracy.

posted by Groom 6:29 AM