So a poster named "vastleft" posting on a supposedly left wing blog, argues that a black American preacher needs a white guy to blame for saying that 9-11 was "chickens coming home to roost". When did Fox media set the standards for what is acceptable rhetoric?

In fact, people "on the left" have long been warning that blow-back would be the inevitable result of American foreign policy. You can't go around the world arming and training Contras and Mujadeen, operating torture camps, and secret rendition facilities, building up dictatorships, and assisting secret police without any repercussions. In fact, The chickens come home to roost phrase was most famously used by Malcolm X. Is this analysis unacceptable to you - or is it only unacceptable when black people make it?

It's clear that the dynamic of the Obama-hatred here essentially launders all sorts of right-wing ideological constructs and makes them acceptable in polite "liberal" conversation. What a peculiar phenomenon. I guess that now Larry Johnson defines the permissable left limit of American debate on foreign policy and nobody, certainly nobody of color, better venture beyond the bounds.

When you say "here" and give no link, you're saying something about the entire blog and all the Fellows on it, and not a post, or the poster.

If you want to call out this post, or even this poster, on the issue, do so. But not "here." I've called you out on that before. Stop it.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

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The double standard applied to Wright versus so many right-wing folks who said the same thing after 9/11. Sure, many of those statements were called out for what they were, but there wasn't the same push by the media that the people be treated as pariahs and that they - rather than their comments - be denounced.

Although, now that I think about it, maybe this isn't a race double standard so much as a political double standard. Dinesh D'Souza isn't white. Susan Sontag was.

I've said before, and I'll say again, that I don't give two shits what Wright said. He's no crazier than Henry Kissinger (or any other religious leader, for that that matter). And it's also entirely acceptable to me to frame 9/11 as imperial blowback, which is how I read Wright's words, and is nothing more nor less than a truth that cannot be spoken.

What concerns me--and this has gone entirely unstated in the standard narrative, which parsing Wright's words and analyzing his oeuvre is only going to buy into--is that Obama, after positioning himself as post-racial, deliberately smeared the Clintons and his opponents as racist, and now claims to want to have an honest conversation about race. No sale. That's just a mindfuck of epic proportions.

However, because the media plays by The Clinton Rules -- and would in any case rather have feel good stories about race than confront its own sexism -- those smears go unremarked, and so it's possible for Obama to still make the post-racial claim with a straight face And so, Obama's deeply dishonest and politically tendentious speech, which is purely and simply an eloquent exercise in damage control, morphs into a fit subject for Easter Sunday sermons so pastors can boost his election chances from the pulpit, as the the Times notes approvingly.

What a steaming crock of shit.

NOTE rootless, you poor lost soul, see here.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

There is no rational basis for arguing that Bin Ladin's zombies killed 3000 Americans because God is mad at America for not hating lesbians and gays enough. That's pure bile and lunacy. But there is a rational argument that America's racist foreign policy - our repeatedly demonstrated willingness to devastate the lands of "sand niggers", "gooks", and "spics" and whatever other unlucky people are in the way - has "blown back" on the homeland.

There is no moral equivalence between Jerry Falwell's rejoicing in the destruction of a bunch of jews, gays, and foreigners in NYC and Wright's warning that you reap what you sow.

But if you start with the premise that everything associated with Obama is sleazy and bad, then you find yourself accepting a lot of right wing crap.

As to Wright's content....
Submitted by lambert on Sun, 2008-03-23 14:16.

is that Obama, after positioning himself as post-racial, deliberately smeared the Clintons and his opponents as racist, and now claims to want to have an honest conversation about race. No sale

Your problem is that by positioning himself in such a way that it is difficult to just smear him as a Al Sharpton nasty militant negro, Obama forfeits the moral grounds for making statements on race? Are you serious? Furthermore, you seem to believe that calling out Bill Clinton, a guy who has been happy to use racism to his advantage in the past, Obama's entire campaign is now totally discredited. How ridiculous can you get?

Nobody as plain spoken as Wright can win an general election in the USA because white people are racist and defensive about it. So a black politician has to thread the needle and position himself/herself as in the category of Michael Jordan and Oprah and Tiger Woods, and not in the category of Al Sharpton and the bad scary black men. That's the reality.

It's also the reality that Clinton has to thread the needle of being strong without appearing to be a threatening bitch.

Much of what I see in your post is resentment that Obama has been more adroit at navigating these minefields of prejudice than Hillary Clinton has been.

They are separate issues:

1. The content of Wright's sermon itself. As I say above, I don't give two shits about it (at least in comparison with plenty of things I care about more). The unfortunate thing about imperial blowback is that it does kill innocent people. (I'm actually with rootless on this.) But nobody has words to talk about that, least of all the two centrists running for the Democratic nomination.

2. The use that will be made of the speech by the Republicans. Anybody remember Willie Horton? That's the playbook. It may be played out by now, but that's a very, very big risk to take, and one of the issues with Obama is downside risk vs. upside potential.

3. The use that will be made of the speech by Obama. And I, for one, am not going to vote for Obama as a blow against racism, because I'm not going to buy into the mindfuck that you can smear your opponents as racist (see links and analysis above) and campaign as post-racial at the same time. And getting a damage control speech discussed in the pulpit makes me want to throw up a little in my mouth.

Of course, we could also talk honestly about sexism but that, it seems, is the conversation that we must not have.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

rootless:

Read and refute. Links, evidence, reasoning please. And before you replicate the standard OFB talking point that Clinton is racist -- you give no link, of course -- try reading this speech apologizing for the Tuskeegee experiment. Read, refute, links, evidence, reasoning. Clinton said:

To Macon County, to Tuskegee, to the doctors who have been wrongly associated with the events there, you have our apology, as well. To our African-American citizens, I am sorry that your Federal Government orchestrated a study so clearly racist. That can never be allowed to happen again. It is against everything our country stands for and what we must stand against is what it was.

So let us resolve to hold forever in our hearts and minds the memory of a time not long ago in Macon County, Alabama, so that we can always see how adrift we can become when the rights of any citizens are neglected, ignored, and betrayed. And let us resolve here and now to move forward together.

The legacy of the study at Tuskegee has reached far and deep, in ways that hurt our progress and divide our Nation. We cannot be one America when a whole segment of our Nation has no trust in America.

The fact that the Obama campaign is willing to torch the Clintons as racist to get a bump in the polls shows how deeply dishonest their post-racial claims are.

I have no idea what your nonsense about Sharpton might mean.

And, obviously, "hate" has nothing to do with it, unless hate be defined as not subcribing to the idea that Obama is Teh Awsum. "Hate" as the driver for opposition to Obama -- or revulsion at his campaign tactics -- is tactical language and a stale talking point from when the OFB drove the [not Obama] supporters off the site. Stop using it. Elevate your game.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Lambert - if you seek to prove something bad about Obama's "playing the race" card, surely you can do better than Wilentz's shoddy story.

First, let's note that Bill Clinton's campaign for President in 1992 featured a deliberate effort to show himself as "not a nigger lover". Bill didn't attack Sister Souljah, fly back to Arkansas to pull the switch on a retarded black man, or prominently feature "an end to welfare as we know it", without understanding exactly the reassurance he was sending to white America. Politics is not bean bag and he did what he thought he had to do, but let's not pretend that we have on one side a bunch of reformed boy scouts. When Bill Clinton said that Obama's SC win didn't mean anything because Jesse Jackson had carried the state too, he also knew exactly what he was doing.

And please, let's not try that lame "Clinton is obviously not a racist" line because, it should be evident that you don't personally have to be racist to use race to your advantage. Nobody has argued that the Clinton's are racist, just that they have used racial tactics.

As for Wilentz and the "even the liberal new republic" - "play the race card" is now a standard trope of right-wing ideology up there with "political correctness". Every time a black person identifies racism, we are treated to the pathetic spectacle of a bunch of self-described "color blind" white people bellowing indignantly. Wilentz's story in part reads like the script for a Colbert episode. If Donna Brazile found Clinton's remarks racist, she doesn't need Sean Wilentz' permission to speak.

The Wilentz story is such a mess of inaccuracy and nonsense that I'm amazed that you can even cite it. From his angry tantrum at the "false" (actually true) story about John Lewis switching sides to his fabricated defense of Clinton's imaginary opposition to NAFTA, to his insistence that remarks by some low level organizers and people not affiliated with the Obama campaign are evidence of conspiracy, his article is factually challenged and logically absurd.

Ambinder has a video currently circulating among Republicans using Wright to attack Obama not for what Wright said, but for Obama applying a different standard to Wright than he did to Don Imus. Now, I can think of a lot of ways to distinguish the Wright situation from Imus and we can debate whether it's a fair comparison, but that doesn't make this video any less effective. I think it would be even more effective if they compared what Obama said in the greatest speech with the standard his campaign has applied to the Clintons (but that would mean the GOP would have to say something nice about the Clintons and that won't happen because, unlike Obama, the GOP knows the benefits of branding and they like the Clintons branded as racists).

But that doesn't change the fact that Obama's real problem is that he's trying to have it both ways on race. Or as Bob Somerby, said

THE PART WE DIDN’T AGREE WITH: We thought one part of the speech was wrong. Here it is:

OBAMA: This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

Shorter Obama: Race only becomes divisive when it starts to hurt me! All that race-baiting aimed at the Clintons? That was OK, this text implies. At least, that’s how it struck us.

That's a real weakness, not a made-up one like calling him some sort of black militant who hates America, and it's totally self-inflicted. It directly runs counter to his campaign narrative of Unity. And, no, I'm not helping out the GOP by pointing this out, as the video makes clear, they are smart enough to figure these things out on their own.

3. The use that will be made of the speech by Obama. And I, for one, am not going to vote for Obama as a blow against racism, because I’m not going to buy into the mindfuck that you can smear your opponents as racist (see links and analysis above) and campaign as post-racial at the same time. And getting a damage control speech discussed in the pulpit makes me want to throw up a little in my mouth.

Who asked you to vote for Obama as a blow against racism?

And "getting a damage control speech discussed in the pulpit makes we want to throw up". Because it's bad for a politician to adroitly turn a problem into an advantage? We can only support politicians who suck at, you know, politics?

Well, you used up your education time for this morning. So do some more self study.

Got a link on Wilentz? I assume you don't, or you'd list it. Don't have time to do your work for you, sorry. Elevate your game.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

rootless:

"... the use that will be made ..." I'm calling my shot, not saying it's happening now -- though given the Times story, I'd say it's already happening.

As I said, a mindfuck of epic proportions.

I need to go away and deal with RL now. Please don't lie any more about the site in my absence. Thanks.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

I wrote this to a friend today:

While I am “boldly shrill” in opposing oppression and bad policy, American or otherwise, I draw a big, thick line at terrorism, as something I simply refuse to rationalize or justify.

For that reason, I was rather put off by Bill Maher’s suggestion back in the day that we build a “why they hate us” pavilion at Ground Zero. If someone murdered his family, even someone with plenty of reason to be pissed off at them, I don’t think he’d offer the killers such a tribute at his homestead.

In my book, when you practice terrorism, “you lose.” Your grievances should get no additional consideration, and arguably less, and the victims should never be blamed.

That said, suffering a terrorist attack doesn’t give one carte blanche to be stupid or evil. It doesn’t mean that you’ve never been wrong, or that your side has never committed terrorism itself.

And it’s plain idiotic not to be thoughtful about the sources of hate, and it’s more idiotic still -- and majorly evil -- to attack the wrong effing country when seeking revenge.

But, as I see it, dignifying the idea that “they had it coming to them” (or “we had it coming to us”) affords terrorism a legitimacy it should never have.

Of course, now you'll need a standard statement on plagairism. Because that's too good not to use.