A clarification: where I really stand on Obama and Biden.
I received some baffled and rather negative comments from friends about my little item on Biden’s age and infirmities.
I should have been more direct. The allusion was to Cheney, and was meant to point out the weird mirror-like characteristics of the election. This time the Vietnam veteran is McCain, but while Kerry was a hero, McCain was a bumbling hot dogger who lost four planes in training before getting shot down while bombing innocent civilians. Could Kerry have ever run for dog catcher if he had publicly confessed to war crimes after (supposedly) breaking under torture?
The Democrats lost me when Kucinich dropped out, although I was concerned about his wife’s tongue stud. Do you think she takes it out when she gives him head? Even I am not radical enough to want tongue studs in the White House. But Kucinich came up 100% when I took one of those tests that recommend whom you should you vote for based on your beliefs.
Biden is all right, I guess, but I would have preferred someone younger and more progressive. He does have a lot of very bad anti-drug zealot karma, but finding a non-drug warrior was obviously too much to expect. Obama is not exactly the man from Norml either.
I unenthusiastically favored Hillary for president until she demonstrated that she was incapable of running a campaign and was confabulating. I felt that Bill Clinton was losing it and was going to be a pain in the ass because he couldn’t keep his yap shut, although I was also annoyed when the Obama people threw that bullshit racism slime at him.
A Democratic victory doesn’t offer me much except the hope that there will be a minor political thaw that will produce some progress on environmental issues, health care and modest reforms in the criminal injustice system, possibly including the decriminalization of marijuana (a long shot — but one can hope). Given the truly frightening economic panorama, it will be useful to have a wonky president and vice-president, too, so I have no real problems supporting the Obama-Biden ticket.
I felt (and continue to feel) a lot of anxiety about Obama because he is such an unlikely candidate coming out of nowhere. I continue to believe that the GOP somehow maneuvered him into position to get the nomination in the belief that an uppity smart-talking black man named Barack Hussein Obama whose father was a Kenyan could never be elected president of the United States. It was their only hope to survive in the post-Bush landscape. The United States is racist and xenophobic. During the primaries, I wrote to the newsroom-l list that when Republicans like Peggy Noonan start praising a Democrat, look out. I said that once Obama sewed up the nomination, the media would turn on him. And they did. But I also felt that the junta miscalculated and underestimated how much the country loathes them.
I am a Yellow Dog Democrat who votes in the Chelsea district in Manhattan so my vote doesn’t count much, but I will vote for Obama if only because he’s black. It’s time, isn’t it? If that makes me a reverse racist, so be it.
A while back, I read a really terrific book on the aftermath of Reconstruction, “Trouble in Mind” by Leon F. Litwack. One of his principal arguments was that Jim Crow was a reaction to the overwhelming technical superiority of blacks in terms of skills and business judgment compared to the general white population in the South. I agree fully.
John McCain is a creepy product of affirmative action for officer class whites who is living off his drug-thieving reprobrate wife’s inherited money. Even hardened Republicans must be gagging and holding their noses at the thought of voting for him. Barack and Michelle Obama are a self-made success story who represent the best of America to me, even though they are far more politically conservative than I am. How could they get where they are otherwise?
Barack Obama and Joseph Biden at their least are a million times better than the psychotic mass murderers, torturers and shameless crooks now holding power. I want a Nuremberg, but I will settle for leaders who are not criminally insane and/or senile.
