Chris Matthews Hands Talk Radio Host Kevin James His Ass

Oh Lord this is fun. Matthews makes an error late in the clip attributing the USS Cole bombing to the first Bush administration, but other than that he just kills this dude. KILLS him. Oh thank you. Thank you thank you for calling this loud, screaming IDIOT on his b.s.

Rev. Michael Pfleger Holds It Down In Fox Interview On Wright, Farrakhan and "Hate"

This is an incredible interview with Rev. Michael Pfleger He does a phenomenal job of trying to have a conversation with a "reporter" who has no interest in listening. Almost everything wrong with conversations about race, class and politics in America is on display in this exchange. America is not ready to have this conversation. But, then again, America is never ready for real change or enlightenment. It must be dragged toward both by people of conscience.

Money quotes:

"If you took a sound bite of Jesus, saying 'You've gotta hate your brother and your mother and your sister and brother and your father in order to love me,' and you looped that around, they'd say, 'Jesus was a mad man.' If you did a visual of Jesus turning tables over in the temple, and that's all you showed, you'd say he was crazy."

"It is interesting to me that when white people criticize America, they're critical. When black people criticize America, they're haters of America."

We all know this. Certain white people can blame tragedies on women and gays. They can claim there's a war on the "white race." They can make blanket, false statements about entire groups of people, and they are rewarded with book deals and radio shows and television programs.

Based on this, I can only assume Fox News will be offering Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright their own syndicated shows as well. You know, so they can criticize America.

I've Had Quite Enough Of Christopher Hitchens

The ultimate irony of Christopher Hitchens is that a man who endlessly presents his own atheism as moral superiority comes to the same conclusions about war, colonialism and race that the most fundamentalist Christian warmonger does, so what's the point?

Aside from devoting his life to the world's stupidest argument, whether or not God exists, something that cannot be conclusively proven or disproven, Hitchens spends most of his time alternating between furiously beating straw men to pieces and explaining that killing people is a great way solve problems.

Today's straw man from Slate is titled "Obama is no King". No shit? Well I guess we oughta just bomb Iran then.

In any case, Hitchens, uniquely immune to self-parody, lists Obama associates that he describes as having extreme views (I have to take his word for it, since I don't know these people):

The thing that this gaggle of cranks and parasites has in common is the extreme deference with which it is treated by the junior senator from Illinois. In April 2004, Barack Obama told a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times that he had three spiritual mentors or counselors: Jeremiah Wright, James Meeks, and Father Michael Pfleger—for a change of pace, a white Catholic preacher who has a close personal feeling for the man he calls (as does Obama) Minister Farrakhan. If Obama were to be read a list of the positions that his clerical supporters take on everything from Judaism to sodomy, he would be in the smooth and silky business of "distancing" from now until November. And that is why he hopes that his Philadelphia speech, which dissociated him from everything and nothing, will be enough. He seems, indeed, to have a real gift for remaining adequately uninformed about the real beliefs of his "mentors." This crossover stuff is not as "inclusive" as it might be made to seem: Meeks' main political connections in the white community are with the hysterically anti-homosexual wing of the Christian right.

Referring to Minister Farrkhan as a Minister, is apparently the height of racial extremism.

Keep in mind that Hitchens hasn't made the argument that Obama holds these beliefs, or that they are somehow represented in Obama's policy ideas, merely that his association with these people means something, despite the fact that even a quick glance at some of these folks reveals that some of their more extreme views contradict each other (if Meeks is a homophobe, Wright was famously not).

After declaring that Obama should be held accountable for the views of his supporters, Hitchens laments that Martin Luther King was targeted for having communist sympathies because of his associates.

This is a lot sadder, and a lot more serious, than has been admitted. Four decades after the murder in Memphis of a friend of the working man—a hero who was always being denounced by the FBI for his choice of secular and socialist friends and colleagues—the national civil rights pulpit is largely occupied by second-rate shakedown artists who hope to franchise "race talk" into a fat living for themselves.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson really should find new jobs. "Race Talk" after all isn't nearly as profitable as "War Talk," which has the added perk of making you a Very Serious Person in foreign policy circles.

There is not a hint of self-awareness in Hitchens smearing Obama with the views of his supporters and his frustration that the same thing was a pretext for government abuse of power against Dr. King.

Moreover, while Hitchens claims to have read Taylor Branch's retrospective of King, he seems to have missed the point:

Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power grows against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the cold war and South African apartheid ended to the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” defying all preparations for Armageddon. The civil rights movement remains a model for new democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace. In Iraq today, we are stuck on the Vietnam model instead. There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.

It's a field I suggest Hitchens study before he begins to align himself with Dr. King, for whom non-violence was more than a concept.

So amnesiac have we become, indeed, that we fall into paroxysms of adulation for a ward-heeling Chicago politician who does not complete, let alone "transcend," the work of Dr. King; who hasn't even caught up to where we were four decades ago; and who, by his chosen associations, negates and profanes the legacy that was left to all of us.

Again: I don't see anyone comparing King to Obama other than people who want to explain how much better King was than Obama. They're not in the same fucking league: Obama is an elected official, and the very nature of his position means that he will have to compromise his ideals. And I have yet to see a white politician held to such an absurd standard: It's as thought because Obama might be president, he has to be implicitly compared to the only other black guy who was a national figure that all Americans can agree on liking (even if they have to make him up to do so).

As for "negating and profaning" the legacy that was left to "all of us," I would suggest that description probably better fits the warmongering Hitchens, who can find no worth, value, or meaning in the faith of a man he claims to admire so much. Hitchens' admiration of King is so much racial posturing, a flimsy pretext for the staggering entitlement he takes in presuming to define the legacy of King for the rest of us, despite having failed to learn its most basic lessons.

Obama & The Right Wing: Is it All About Race, Or Not?

I enjoy surfing the net to find interesting articles, and I came upon one that I thought was pretty good. I don't know if I completely agree, but it has its merits.

This is from Brian Francis at PoliticalInaction.com, and I yield the floor to him:

Saturday, March 22, 2008
All About Religion NOT Really About Race

In the wake of the pastor Wright faux-controversy....the guy said some crazy stuff, but he is preacher and it wasn't uttered or affirmed by Obama....I think that we on the left need to determine and investigate The Right's motivations for pushing the Wright storyline. In the era of dog whistle and just the surface media coverage, every network and even the major papers have called this a problem of race. That Obama goes to a black church with a black pastor and they discuss black issues and America isn't ready for this. America is taken aback by what these black people say in their churches. Do they hate America? Do they really believe that America is a bad place....etc., etc. It is all utter non-sense.

They have a total of 60 seconds, or there about, of Wright saying some very crazy and off the wall things...and they were crazy. Obama has said he believes what Wright said is reprehensible and he doesn't agree with it, as well as he doesn't believe or support a lot of Wright's political views. Obama had to give a major, and brilliant, speech on race on Tuesday about this issue because of how bad the media coverage has been of this issue. Obama distanced but didn't disown Wright or leave the church. He had to do this to try and ease the fears of working class white people. To that end, by the end of the week, the media coverage in the papers and most of the network news casts had shifted...but not Fox News and Right Wing Radio. The clips of Wright continue to play endlessly on Fox News and Right Wing Radio. "How can a man be trusted who goes to that church?" they're saying. "What, exactly, does Barack Obama believe?" followed by "What kind of Christian is Barack Obama, anyway?"

The Right is assuredly happy as hell to use race against Obama. They were going to do it with or without Wright. The Right is happy as hell to use patriotism against Obama. The Right desires to portray Obama as less American, and they would have done this regardless of Wright because of the lapel pin and pledge controversies they already created. But what they have never attacked until Wright, and what they fear the most, is Obama's Christianity. This is why the Muslim smears started the moment he entered the race in February 2007. The Right is deathly afraid of Barack Obama, not because he is a liberal, not because of his policies, not because of his race,