Please disappear forever

One sign that people in our city have not completely lost their minds just yet is the crushing defeat of the unspeakably loathsome Pedro Espada, Jr., the state senate majority leader [sic].

His concession remarks were characteristically evil-minded and included a gratuitous slap at unions (this from a Democrat representing one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city--in which he does not live, preferring the tony suburbs of Westchester).

Espada blamed the new voting machines for confusing the elderly and reducing his vote totals. The guy should apply for a slot writing for Jon Stewart given that his opponent beat him by 35 points. Espada also railed against 'outsiders', ironic given that he pulled in tons of campaign cash from Manhattan real estate developers.

The removal of the poster child of Albany dysfunction gives us a glimmer of hope, but given the disappointments of the national stage, one dare not breathe sighs of relief too deeply. Nonetheless, just not having to look at this thug's face counts for a lot.

Still the sovereign people

It’s primary day in New York State, and the scene at my local precinct resembled something between a Laurel & Hardy routine and a sketch from SNL. When the first thing you hear upon entering the area is two election workers arguing with each other—loudly—it is not a good sign.

We have new voting machines now, another technological answer to a problem we didn’t know we had. First, you have to fill in the little noughts like on an SAT, then the whole sheet goes into a scanner and, we assume, records one’s vote. The ladies showing me how to do it kept insisting that I unfold the ballot face up until I rather too firmly reminded them that the ballot is supposed to be secret. No doubt their training focused on the mechanics of the process rather than the underlying concepts.

We have several races of interest here, including the Republican governor’s primary between a Wall Street sharpie (Lazio) and a furry creature last seen scurrying through the pages of a Victorian horror novel (Paladino). We’re rooting for the latter because it would be fun to watch a race between a moderately functional biped (Cuomo) and a misfire of the evolutionary process. Cuomo could possibly lose the general election by being discovered fondling little girls. Short of that, um, not likely.

In the local races there is the ongoing saga of a true scumbag mafioso fighting to stay in the state Senate (of which he is the president, no less) and, not incidentally, out of jail. Pedro Espada, Jr., is the perfect example of that type of ruthless, amoral political operative who can sometimes attract remarkable loyalty because he steals so much money that he can spread some of it around to his thugs and the merrily corruptible. A competent campaign to oust him from his Bronx seat is given a chance, but by no means a guarantee, of success.

The real horse race is the job Cuomo is leaving behind, that of state attorney general. In New York that means you can investigate and prosecute big banks, insurance companies and other Wall Street criminals, so it has long been a step to higher things as it was for Cuomo and the notorious Eliot Spitzer before him. My old state senator, Eric Schneiderman, is in the running and deserves to win if only for his relentless, extremely patient and successful campaign to overturn the horrible Rockefeller drug laws. His main opponent is a careerist hack who was a Republican most of her life and didn’t bother to vote until she was 37, i.e. after we had suffered through two terms with W.

Hardly anyone bothers to vote in primaries, so those of us who pay attention to these things have a greater than usual chance of actually influencing the outcome. I was kind of sorry for snapping at the precinct workers who were trying to be helpful, but living in a military dictatorship gives you a perspective on what it means when these exercises are either fixed or non-existent. I take the suffrage seriously and like to see it done right. Okay, so the system’s a wreck, but the alternatives are worse.

The Middle Ground on Racism

Out of the mouths of the syntactically challenged: Here is an illuminating statement on the fight over Park51, the lower Manhattan Islamic center/mosque.

‘Perhaps we might think of supporting those families on both sides of this issue as all of us are and maybe step back and try to devote a week of peace’. –David Paterson

Thus does our governor-of-record attempt to regain relevancy as the voice of centrist reason: let us all come together and find a compromise solution that will satisfy both sides, comprised of reasonable, well-intentioned people.

How exactly does one situate oneself on both sides of whether worshippers of a given faith should be excluded from a portion of real estate because their religion is offensive to others? How can one be against racism, exclusion and bias and still satisfy those who express and promote these ideas? [Answer: you can’t. Opposing racism will make racists unhappy.]

Paterson reflects the most dangerous aspect of this increasingly successful Murdoch-led campaign against Islam by buckling to prejudice—along with the bulk of his Democratic colleagues—under the guise of moderation and understanding.

Paterson continues to make a fool of himself by trumpeting his idea of a ‘compromise’ solution, namely, moving the Islamic facility somewhere else. He keeps insisting that someone is going to come talk to him about it and having to backtrack on his announcements of these phantom negotiations.

As I am a tiresome old nag, I will repeat the relevant historical parallel: how about a compromise between the well-meaning opponents of racial integration and those purists demanding that black people not be forced to sit in the back of the bus? Maybe a special section in the middle for ‘non-white passengers and those who love them’? That way, no one’s tender sensibilities will be offended—except, of course, those of the non-white passengers.

The grotesque spectacle over Koran-burning has obscured the more insidious seeds of ethnic and religious intolerance planted by Republican opportunists and their echo chamber. Opposition to the downtown mosque and general hostility to Islam is now a badge of patriotism for them, and those who just assembled on the Mall to imitate Martin Luther King see no irony in their quick assemblage of a new hate figure to replace uppity ‘Negroes’.

I biked down the Hudson River greenway last Thursday and observed the Jewish celebrants of their New Year ending their ritual at the waterway. Would anyone dare to suggest that a Jewish temple be blocked from a given site because that religion makes people uncomfortable?

Ironically, Paterson ended his recent comments on the mosque by encouraging New Yorkers to ‘take a break from debating the planned community center in honor of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana’. This just seconds after stating that ‘the opposition [to the mosque] was not just coming from bigotry, that in other words there were legitimate people who were upset by this’.

Let's be reasonable, now

The successful press against the Florida preacher threatening to burn Korans illustrates just how easy it would be to suppress the entire wave of Islamophobia if it didn’t serve the short-term political interests of the official wingnuts. The secretary of defense and a flood of other public figures denounced the creepy stunt even though a few diehards like Boehner couldn’t quite spit out the required phrases.

So there will be no inflammatory photos of Christian bonfires, but the more insidious campaign against the Islamic Center in downtown Manhattan will continue along with the whispering campaign against Obama as a closet Mohammadan—as if that were some sort of crime.

I notice that Gates and the rest did not ask Pastor Jones to please move his Koran burning indoors or do it discreetly away from the glare of the cameras. They weren’t requesting a ‘compromise’ solution that will enable everyone to indulge his or her prejudices—no, they were saying, This is wrong. Stop it.

It would be nice if people could apply the same criteria to the campaign against the Sufi mosque. The Koranic bonfire panic over, all the reasonable ‘centrist’ types now will continue to push for the Islamic community center to be moved a few yards away from the Twin Towers site or placed in some other borough, as if the existence of a religious monument could offend on Cortlandt Street but won’t over in Jackson Heights.

Meanwhile, the people of Gainesville, Florida, are up in arms to try to dissociate themselves from the religious hatred fanned by their local storefront hype-artist. Gee, isn’t it terrible that a whole group of people are being slandered just because of the actions of a few?

I’m not against all Gainesvillians even though they have rabid assholes in their midst that have caused me great pain. So here’s my compromise solution: they can still come visit New York, but out of respect for our suffering, they can only visit Brooklyn and Queens. I don’t want them in Manhattan because they remind me of 9/11/2010.

Moral Bankruptcy

Obama so frequently seems to lack the required determination and feistiness in the face of attacks on common sense that it is particularly depressing to be reminded when he does show some spunk:


Yes, indeed, when it comes to defending the worst crimes of the Bush era and reasserting the most extreme claims of security-based secrecy needs, to the detriment of the rule of law, our president is not at all hope-y or change-y, but in fact entirely status quo-y.

Obama’s Justice Department went all out to insist on the Bush-era claim that torture victims could not have their day in court because Important State Secrets were involved. That is to say, you and me are effing retards who haven’t gotten out of our pajamas, but John Yoo and Jay Bybee and the other criminals are reasonable fellows who must be protected at all costs.

I wish there were a little more interest in the issue of how the United States of America officially caused defenseless prisoners to be tortured, but for the moment it is yesterday’s news. So we don’t have to be reminded how the plaintiff in this case was shipped off to Morocco and had his genitals sliced with knives. Et cetera.

That said, I repeat for the hundredth time that this issue is NOT GOING AWAY. Someday—and I hope and expect to live long enough to see it—the entire country will shudder with shame at how far we descended into the moral abyss.

When that happens, and the bill is presented to the criminals responsible for turning us into Torture Nation, they will defend themselves by saying, Yes of course, we were wrong to jettison our country’s principles out of fear. . . . But don’t forget! the pressure to do so was so overwhelming that even that GREAT LIBERAL BARACK OBAMA covered up for it afterward. So we eager John Yoo’s and Jay Bybee’s just got swept away—whocouldanode what the consequences would be?

That’s the scenario I will be thinking about the next time I get a letter from some Democratic Party money machine asking for contributions to this or that Defender of Regular Folks against bad old Sarah Palin and her tea drinkers. I should part with my money for you guys??

Muslim hatred fanned into an actual fire [updated]

Four days and counting before the Church of the Total Wackos in Gainesville, Florida, celebrates the Twin Towers attack by burning Korans.

I was waiting for someone to make the obvious observation that, for all the fetishistic talk about ‘supporting the troops’, these Christian crazies are about to put the grunts directly in harm’s way with their self-indulgent little stunt. Now General Petraeus himself has warned about the dangers of this gratuitous inflammation of religious sentiment among people who take their dogma extremely seriously.

Apparently, the Dove Outreach church is a two-bit storefront operation run by a smarmy entrepreneur like a million others in our gloriously tolerant land. No doubt the Becks and the Limbaughs will wash their hands of this event scheduled for the High Holy Days of September 11. Fill in their indignant responses here: We NEVER suggested [etc., etc.]

But not so fast. The campaign they drummed up against the Islamic Center/‘Ground Zero Mosque’ is now in overdrive with a recent New York Times poll announcing that a majority of local residents now oppose its construction. That’s interesting for those who care—I don’t. Nor do I care that in 1961 some percentage of white people in Birmingham, Alabama, were against sending their children to school with ‘Negroes’.

Of course, New Yorkers would never confess that their opposition reflects anything like crude prejudice--the very idea! Oh no, it’s all about being ‘sensitive’ to the relatives and ‘legitimate questions’ about the source of the funds and a lot of other bogus crap that no one would have thought of it it weren’t for the hate campaign itself. Somebody should dig up the old attacks on Martin Luther King and read how they also had nothing to do with race but rather his communist friends and all those annoying agitators from up north.

I regret that some kids from Nebraska are going to get shot up in Helmand province because these execrable bipeds are going to stage their little Hitler youth rally in on some backwoods shopping center parking lot and then bask in their 15 minutes of ignominious fame. But I suspect that it will take some sort of grotesque spectacle of this sort to generate the desperately needed backlash against the rising tide of idiocy sweeping the land.

This would be a good time to see our president lose a tad of his famous cool and share a few choice words about the impact of this madness on the soldiers he continues to send into the mountains of Afghanistan to face the enraged residents.

[Update with the ink barely set]: I particularly love the way self-proclaimed and -described liberals and moderates pile enthusiastically onto the racist mob. Here is the barely humanoid editor of The New Republic, once a magazine, now a screed-sheet inspired by the Israeli right, on how Muslims do not deserve the protections of the First Amendment.

Plus ca change. . .

I am among those who believed that Obama could learn from his mistakes and develop some political muscle, stop looking and sounding like a Jimmy Carter reincarnation, arrest the dangerously authoritarian tendencies afoot, jettison his consistently wrong economic advisers and rally what’s left of his troops for a comeback.

But there is nothing in the current environment that suggests I was right. Instead, Obama constantly recalls the presidential candidate who cast himself as post-racial, post-partisan and even post-conflict. His campaign call for national unity was sometimes inspiring boilerplate that one could enjoy while suspending reality for an hour. But now it looks as though he believed it was a magic wand, that this hold-hands-and-sing outlook really is his political strategy.

For example, who on earth can take seriously the latest round of ‘peace talks’ between the Israeli and Palestinian figureheads while spoilers on both sides easily can block any hint of progress? When an important rabbi calls for the Palestinians to be struck down by a plague from god and Hamas blows up a few settlers, does anyone give this exercise in fantasy even a monotheistic prayer? Why would Israel want to reward Obama, who can’t even successfully defend himself from a whispering campaign about being a secret Muslim, when they can simply wait out the clock on his term?

Many observers with more patience than I have taken apart Obama’s pointless and bland speech on the end of the Iraq debacle, but few have noted how downright offensive it was for him to excuse the Bushite neocons who started it. After nearly two years of vicious partisanship from his declared enemies, Obama’s continued peace offerings to the rabid right look insane, like a child’s sad pleadings to his abusive parents.

Meanwhile, Obama could not even clearly explain how the disastrous decision to conquer Iraq and not pay for it drove the country into its current recessionary hole, and his economic team predictably trots out the argument that ‘no one could have known’ how bad things were or how weak the stimulus package turned out to be. That’s just a lie because anyone who read the arguments at the time heard plenty of predictions that the stimulus—over which Obama was pilloried and the Tea Party rebellion generated anyway—was not sufficient to replace the demand wiped out by the financial panic of 2008. So we got the worst of all worlds: a weak, compromised non-solution that merely energized the social forces responsible for the original debacle.

On every front we see a neo-Reaganite program stealthily poisoning policy through the good offices of the Obama Administration—the bankrupting Bush tax cuts slowly accepted by the Democrats, Social Security falling under the axe-readying lens of Obama’s Catfood Commission, immigration policing jacked up to new heights while Mexicans are slaughtered by drug gangs in the desert, official assassination now a state consensus, a lost war in Afghanistan stretched out for fear of defeat, and on and on, making one wonder what good it did for us all to rise up against the plutocrats and warmongers in the first place.

If this is the best the Democrats can do, they may be doing more harm in power than out. At least during the dreary, depressing days of the Alfred E. Newman presidency, there was an opposition, weak-kneed and inconsistent, but opportunistic enough to slow down the march to disaster. What is there now? A broad underlying policy consensus down the wrong road while domestic racism with violent overtones is quietly encouraged by one side and dismissed as unimportant by the other. Under these conditions a mid-term Republican takeover of Congress will not be a new setback, merely a reflection of reality. They are running things now.