Kris Broughton's Blog

Kris Broughton Has His Say On BBC Radio

2009-11-18T18:01:44Z

I joined a panel yesterday on "World Have Your Say", a BBC Radio show that focuses on hot topics from around the world, to try to answer the question "if it's not racism, why do some Americans hate President Obama so much?"

The online article touting yesterday's show actually featured a link to a piece here at Brown Man Thinking Hard from last year, titled "Obama Hate: "Obama Loves America Like O.J. Loved Nicole". Even though I'd never done a group discussion via phone on live radio, it seemed to be right up my alley.

Now I've got an idea of what a rookie must feel like when he hits the floor for the first time in a big time Division I basketball program.

The producers or production assistants over in England were very nice and unfailingly polite. It was so interesting hearing the tart, lilting way their tongues herded each word in a sentence along, with an extra lash for the final word if they were asking a question, that it was a struggle to pay attention to what they were saying to me at first.

The guests were a mixed bag - a reverend/political activist from Louisiana, a radio host from Cincinnati, a reporter/columnist from L.A., and a newspaper person whose title I can't remember. The host was pretty good, keeping the show moving by alternating between our comments, real time emails that he read on the air if they illuminated a point someone had made, or took the conversation in a more interesting direction, and call-in listeners from around the world, although most of ours were from the States.

But back to this rookie thing.

I have a new level of respect for the amount of time Sean Yoes gives me twice a month on the AFRO/First Edition at WEAA to basically say what I want to say, at a pace with which I'm comfortable. My fellow panelists yesterday were old hands at this, experienced enough to know how to use their "radio" voices to elbow their way into the ring to say something. So I didn't get to say much. And they all seemed to lead with their standard talking points, which got me hot under the collar after awhile.

It was as if I was listening to a chorus of Baghdad Bob's, each of them valiantly pursuing their line of patter as if the host had simply gotten bad information about the racial overtones that are becoming more distinct in the criticism of President Obama by certain Americans.

It's moments like these when I feel a little guilty for falling down on the job sometimes, for not coming up with more posts on more topics, for not hitting the bricks here each and every day to try to counter some of the misinformation that so often becomes the dominant discussion by the media.

When I asserted that FOX News was unprecedented in its nightly vitriol against Obama, a chorus of voices raised to denounce MSNBC's treatment of President Bush, as if Keith Olbermann's rants were the equivalent of FOX's entire lineup, hour after hour, yelling about our "Muslim, radical" president.

The guy from L.A., Ben Shapiro, used the phrase "radical policies" so many times I thought the topic had changed and we were talking about another country. As I sat there, phone to my ear, I pictured a computer server somewhere, silently tallying all the on-air uses of these kind of key phrases and relaying the running totals via Blackberries or IPhones to the army (and it IS an army) of right wing political zealots across the country in front of TV cameras and on radio shows, helping them to calibrate their patter accordingly in order for the group to hit their daily target.

Later in the show, when I actually tried to talk about some of the research on race and politics I'd done for a blog series last year, the Cincinnati radio jock jumped in to agree with my assessment that the number of actual racists were small before quickly adding dismissively "that these are people who have no power."

I countered "but when the people in power let these people speak unfettered in this country, that's a problem." I was a statement Mr.Cinncinati took personally.

I actually wasn't talking about anyone down at his level, though. When Mr. Cincinnati calmed down, I told him "It's not you, but the people who run our media companies." When the executive suite allows this kind of ridiculous behavior to typify their networks, THAT is a real problem, one all of us should be up in arms about.

But I was glad to hear Mr. Cincinnati get all huffy for a moment or two before he segued back into his stock speech for someone with a different point of view.

It was the moment that made the whole hour worthwhile.

I'll be back.

Kris Broughton On BBC Radio's "World Have Your Say" Today

2009-11-17T17:21:41Z

Today Kris Broughton will be on "World Have Your Say", an hour long news discussion show on BBC Radio, this Tuesday afternoon at 1:00 pm.

You can click this link at 1:00 PM and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

Today's topic: If it's not racism, why do some Americans hate President Obama so much?

Enjoy.

Senor Dobbs: Adios!

2009-11-12T01:55:29Z

It just so happens that I was on the phone yesterday with a staffer from www.RedBrownandBlue.com, asking her about the reception they'd gotten from the black bloggers they'd reached out to recently as they launched their publication - we ended up talking about some of the very same attitudes towards our Latino brethren that cost Lou Dobbs his job today at CNN.

"Every...what's the phrase now...'undocumented worker'...every 'undocumented worker' is alright when they are cutting your grass or cleaning your house," I said to her. "If these 'undocumented workers' can do the work, and we want them to do the work, why can't they be 'citizens' and pay some taxes?"

I told her I was going to add their site to my blogroll. "Immigration is the next big issue coming up in Congress" the staffer reminded me. "Uh huh," I said. "I know. I might be interested in doing a column. Is that okay?"

She assured me that they were always on the lookout for good writing on relevant issues.

"Some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving," Mr. Dobbs said on his show tonight.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with ExecuSpeak, the English translation of Dobbs statement is "they told me to take my crabby ass home."

Dobbs may have quit today, but he had painted himself into a corner long ago.

Good riddance.

Sometimes, though, in a situation like this, you wonder, when a person like Dobbs leaves, if you are losing the devil you know to gain the devil you don't.

It's highly unlikely they will get anyone as cantankerously wrong as Dobbs.

But back to this new kid on the block, www.RedBrownandBlue.com...

...I'll have to admit that it was the name that drew me in. In fact, I had just spoken to my brother about this during our discussion the other day about the city of Atlanta mayoral race. "The only thing the AJC kept talking about were black and white voters," I groused. "The good only simplicity of the binary existence is all they want to deal with. I guess it makes for an easier story to report. But what about the Mexicans? What about the Asians? What about the Eastern Europeans? What about the Ethiopians? Did any of these campaigns have a significant presence on their campaign staffs of Spanish speaking people?"

Multiculturalism is more than a trendy moniker. It is a reality here in Atlanta. With the small number of votes cast in the mayor's race, I believe Kasim Reed, who so far is still my fantasy candidate (since I don't live in the city limits), would have had a chance to be the mayor last week if he had included a strong outreach effort to these communities.

To the people who feel a little discombobulated right now by all of this - to the people who want all of us brown and browners to hide under a rock somewhere, or go jump off a cliff en masse, or just simply assume our usual position of deference, waiting for them to take the lead, I'm not sorry to say it, I'm happy as hell to shout it - you are going to discombobulated for the rest of your lives.

And if you haven't visited one of my long time blogroll members Adventures Of The Coconut Caucus - "we put the panic in Hispanic" - you need to check them out. They are hilarious!

Watching By The People: The Election of Barack Obama

2009-11-11T16:39:01Z

I've been toying around with some comments on the Obama campaign documentary that aired last week, but every time I got started on them, something else came up. Election Night. The Fort Hood shootings. The healthcare bill passing in the House of Representatives. The latest goings on in the Atlanta mayoral race.

Now that there is a lull in the action, maybe I can get back to By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, the documentary directed by Alicia Sams and Amy Rice that HBO premiered last week.

Maybe it's the fiction writer in me, but somewhere around the forty five minute mark in By The People , I wondered how much more this would really resonate with viewers if, instead of watching this solo on a single TV screen, everyone who viewed it was sitting in front of a bank of flat screens, with the Obama documentary playing alongside Amistad, Roots, The March on Washington, Birth of A Nation and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, the sound turned down on all of the screens except for By The People, the images of the past flashing across the screens in your periphery as you watched the main event, creating the most meta of meta-narratives you had ever seen...

...and even then, I don't think any stretch of video tape could possibly begin to contain the enormity of the idea of a black man being the president of the United States of America.

For me, what this documentary showed more than anything was how constrained we are as a nation by the febrile and inadequate imaginations of our media, a group of people who often pat themselves on the back for their self described open mindedness when they are usually the most narrow minded link in the information chain.

Add to that the endless hours of cable news punditry that was dedicated to the fluff, gossip and innuendo rather than the things that really wins campaigns, the nuts and bolts business of organizing and registering people to actually cast a ballot, and it becomes apparent why we hold the news media in such low esteem, even as we take our cues from them, for we are too lazy or too preoccupied to search out the raw facts and analyze them for ourselves.

I wrote over a hundred thousand words during the presidential primaries and the presidential election last fall. And in going back through all of them to put together a retrospective ebook culled from this very blog - an effort which is a lot harder and is taking a lot longer than I thought it would have three weeks ago - I got a chance to relive some of the feelings I had during this ground breaking and historic race.

In some ways it was like being in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant while top chefs prepared a ten course meal - seeing all the hard work and planning that went into it made the end result all that much sweeter.

By the end of By The People, you sense that the editors have done their job well, because they have strung enough emotional wellspring moments together to have you yourself get a little misty eyed when they show Candidate Obama tearing up on stage the day before the election while he speaks of the death of his grandmother.

The most poignant part of the film for me was an unremarkable moment early on, when the cameras were whirring in the Obama kitchen, taking in the sight of Michelle Obama playing a game with her children at the kitchen table when the phone rang. Daughter Sasha rushed to the phone, her eyes glancing into the camera to her right before remembering to look away as if the camera wasn't there.

It was a telling reminder of the way we are all influenced by the presence of recording devices, and how our real life instincts are often muted when someone is watching us. The lives of the Obama family have been forever altered by this election. Every once in awhile, when I see a moment like the one young Sasha had during this film, I want to believe that we can give them their real lives back after this is all over.

But the reality is, we will be watching this family for a long time to come.

The Silent Halls Of Death

2009-11-06T15:43:43Z

It is a cruel kind of sadness that the families of the dead at Fort Hood will have to endure. I would not want to see the story of the military gunman who opened fire on his fellow soldiers yesterday incessantly played and replayed on all the news stations for the next two weeks if I were a surviving family member.

Even as I write these words, there are news producers in studios across the country who are estimating how much of a ratings spike this horrific event will give them the next few days. There are Aryan brotherhoods who are incorporating Major Nidal Malik Hasan's name into their recruitment speeches. Muslim American soldiers who are steeling themselves for a potential backlash within the ranks of their own fellow troops.

These are the kind of real life things, real life but nonsensical, that will go on the next few weeks.

The blood has long stopped flowing from the bullet holes in those thirteen people who died yesterday. The eviscerated flesh around the edges of their wounds have begun to harden. Loved ones, still in shock, are having to scurry about, quietly digging up life insurance policies, forlornly selecting the last pieces of clothing their dead family members will ever wear in this world.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

From Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant

I was required to memorize the phrases above by Bryant almost thirty years ago in high school. It is in times like this that it comes back to me, as clearly as if I had only committed it to memory yesterday.

Yesterday, as I turned the channel to get away from scenes of the chaos, in my mind's eye those thirteen people whose lives were so suddenly snatched from them took their own chambers in the silent halls of death.

Political Spin: The Media's Election Night After Party

2009-11-04T15:35:07Z

The perennial stereotype of the horse racing gambler has been recounted in books and movies as the kind of person who is able to see attributes in the horses that they inevitably lose money on that just aren't there. It almost seemed that they got more pleasure out of not winning than they ever could if their horse actually came in first.

The post race political spin last night was starting to sound the same way as the Democrats began to explain why losing the governor's races in New Jersey and New York wasn't indicative of anything at all other than the will of the voters. "The president", said the White House spokesman, "is not watching returns."

This was one of the funnier quotes of the night - what the hell else would a wonkish pol like Obama, who lives at ground zero in the most political city in the country, be doing? Bowling? Playing Scrabble with the girls? Updating his Fantasy Football picks?

The article "It's The Spending, Stupid" that was released before the results were final in New York's District 23 by Cynthia Lummis, a Republican Congresswoman from Wyoming, was just as funny. "Doug Hoffman's ascendance is a referendum on the reckless spending of the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress." It's kind of hard to call this race a referendum on spending when an unknown Democrat actually won the race last night in District 23, but I'm sure Rep. Lummis will come up with an inventive way to recast this outcome into a positive development.

The races themselves almost seem incidental, so hungry is our political establishment on both sides of the aisle for a chance to trumpet their agendas. I've often wondered why, in such a large country, we can't just accept the fact that people who call themselves Democrats or Republicans in one part of the country may not have the same ideological beliefs as those in another part - that the membership in a political party is an affiliation of similarly minded people in the truest sense of the word, rather than a brain washing syndicate that attempts to indoctrinate its ranks from coast to coast the way fascist dictators do.

The people of New Jersey and Virginia and New York's District 23 know these people running for office better than anyone on the national level ever could. When the smoke clears, and the cameras and the reporters are gone, the voters don't care about the national agendas - they care about what's happening on their streets, in their school systems, and in their neighborhoods and downtowns.

But reporters don't call regular citizens to ask them what they are thinking. They call experts and analysts instead. Then they call Sarah Palin and Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann to get the final word on the matter. They use old articles for research. They listen to other journalists and op-ed writers, and end up publishing coverage that reinforces a binary version of reality, as if we are not a multi-dimensional, multiple narrative population who may or may not act in ways that protect our own self-interests.

It would be easy to say that we have devolved into a nation that is all talk and no action, but that isn't really the case. In many ways, to the people who package and sell political talk, reporting on the saying is is much more lucrative than reporting on the doing - how many ways can you describe the construction of a new bridge that will take two years to complete?

But view that bridge through the eyes of an editor, or a public relations specialist, and all of a sudden the building of forms and the pouring of concrete take on a whole new light as we are bombarded by accusations of graft and corruption, payoffs and kickbacks, shoddy workmanship and back room dealmaking.

To the people who need the bridge, the politics of it is secondary to actually getting it completed so they can drive over it to get where they are going.

It would be disingenuous to write all of this and not admit that there is certain amount of irony in my writing this, since I have my own political and cultural opinion blog. At the end of the week, I've written a whole lot more than anything I've done to take action. Maybe what I have to say ads to America's political narrative. Maybe it doesn't.

The upshot of all of this is that for the next two weeks, you will be bombarded with headlines like "Palin's Candidate Loses In NY Congressional Race", "How Will Obama Respond To GOP Wins In VA And NJ?", "Dems, Incumbents Get Wake-Up Call", "Analysis: Elections Not A Referendum On Obama", "A Warning To Democrats: It's Not 2008 Anymore", "GOP Wins Reveal Cracks In Obama Coalition", and "VA and NJ Elections: Obama World Stayed Home".

These headlines, however stirring, will do nothing to alleviate the high unemployment rate, and will have no bearing on any efforts to stimulate the economy, the two things America is really interested in seeing improve.

Why Is Newt Gingrich On The Cover Of My Alumni Magazine?

2009-11-03T15:20:31Z

Newt Gingrich and I have the same alma mater.

I had no idea that we both graduated from Emory University.

The publication the school put out for alumni was in the mail today. Emory Magazine, which has got to be one of the best put together university communications out there, is used mainly to let us know what's going on back at the ranch, remind us of how much all the educational majesty leading up to pomp and circumstance for this generation costs, and prime us for the fundraising phone call from a student...

...a solicitation phone call that ironically came between the time I flipped through the magazine and the time, half an hour later, when I sat down to write this piece.

Gingrich was on the cover of this issue, his white capped head covering nearly half the page in a jowly pose similar to the one in the picture above that made me think of Tip O'Neill in the twilight of his career. I didn't know that he was the founder of Emory's Young Republican chapter. What I had always felt was a deep respect for his intellect, even if I didn't agree with many of the political positions he has espoused over the years.

His latest reincarnation, in which he is teaming up with Al Sharpton to push for improvements in the nation's educational systems, may seem odd from the outside, but I have always been amazed at the idea of a professor with a PhD turning his theories into action. No matter how much you may dislike the conclusions he arrives at, there is no way to deny that Gingrich is a first rate thinker.

One of my buddies, another Emory alum, thinks Gingrich is biding his time until the Sarah Palin types wear out their welcome, when my buddy insists that "Newt can take this thing." What my buddy doesn't realize is how much credibility Gingrich's association with Sharpton has cost him with the army of wingnut zombies following Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin, an army who mistakenly believe that they are real Republicans.

The reality for Gingrich is that his time to run for president has passed him by. As he comments in the Emory Magazine article The Man With The Plan, "I was in an airport, and these students came up and said, 'you're in our history book,'", Gingrich says. "I felt very odd at that point."

I don't know what he and Sharpton and Arne Duncan are cooking up, but I think Gingrich's academic background, his political instincts, and his stature will serve the groundbreaking educational tour well. As a matter of fact, this threesome will be in New Orleans tomorrow, November 3rd, and in Baltimore on November 13th.

In a recent interview that included both Gingrich and Sharpton, Sharpton told NBC, "The parents need to be challenged with the message of `no excuses.'" Gingrich responded, "I think that he has it exactly right, that education has to be the No. 1 civil right of the 21st century and I've been passionate about reforming education. And we can't get it done as a partisan issue."

"Amen" to that.

Where Should I Begin Today?

2009-10-27T13:40:14Z

Where should I begin today?

I'm not so sure.

But that's never stopped me before, so let's get this thing started with the topic that is on the tip of everybody's tongue in - healthcare reform. (Unless you're a FOX News political commentator, in which case the only thing on the tip of your tongue is the phrase "ObamaisaCommunistMarxistSocialistsecretMuslim", which has been repeated so many times it has now become one long word).

Senator Harry Reid seems to have gotten tired of being the Democrat's whipping boy - (can you still say that? - was that racist? - is it safer to just call him a CommunistMarxistSocialistsecretMuslim?) so it looks like a public option of some kind is going to be in the final healthcare bill that gets voted on. But whatever kind of option it is, you can be sure that it will be the variety Senator Olympia Snowe won't be able to support.

The White House spokesman says the president is happy with the outcome. I don't think he means Obama is "happy" like "happy he won the lottery" though. From the subdued tone coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave these days, it seems more like Obama is "gritting his teeth together 'happy' that these clowns didn't drag this out much longer."

Then there is the FOX News debacle that the White House has gotten tangled in. I wholeheartedly understand their point. I can't stand FOX News either. When I am out somewhere, like the McDonald's I used to frequent for breakfast, and they have FOX News on, I ask for the manager and demand that he turn the channel.

Not that CNN delivers the news the way Walter Cronkite used to - after all, they've got their own in house ingrate, Lou Dobbs, stinking up the airwaves nightly as he sneers into the camera and rants about illegal immigrants. Even so, CNN still does better than the Newsreader Barbies and Brylcream Bobs that FOX seems to swear by.

But the White House is in a pickle on this one, because as soon as some emergency other than swine flu comes along, they will have to abandon their stance to get back to taking care of business. (If you believe in Glen Beck, that "taking care of business" will be Obama instituting martial law so he can hypnotize us all and turn us into socialist communist do gooder Ivy Leaguers who will line up to check out books from the library by William Ayers and equip ourselves to DESTROY AMERICA).

Although it is good to see President Obama, in his remarks about FOX News, calling "a spade a spade" somewhere else besides a speech to the NAACP.

NOTE TO WHITE HOUSE: Let us out here in the general public take care of this dustup with FOX. I enjoy putting restaurant managers on the spot.

Although I did notice tonight, while flipping through the channels to Monday Night Football, that Bill O'Reilly was TAKING CARE WITH HIS WORDS when he spoke of the president. I don't mind you trying to indict Obama if he's screwed up, Bill, but you've got to move on from ACORN and William Ayers. Obama won. The race is over. He will be with you for another three years and three months. Guess what? Keep up this nonsensical conspiracy shtick, Bill, and it'll be SEVEN YEARS and three months.

Speaking of Monday Night Football - can ESPN send Mike Tirico somewhere? Ron Jaworski and John Gruden can call the game by themselves. All Tirico does is tell me statistics that I really don't want to know. Add to all of this the fact that I'm suffering from John Madden withdrawal since he left the National Football League's Sunday Night telecast, and that I am still P.O.'ed Madden had to leave Monday Night Footabll, and I am ready to eject Tirico from the broadcast booth my damn self. As a matter of fact, I'll give him a penalty myself - "unsportsmanlike commentating."

Maybe I need to get Glen Beck on the phone and tell him that Mike Tirico is a "socialist communist Ivy League pianist who only has six degrees of separation from William Ayers". While I'm at it, I might as well bend Beck's ear a little more, and throw in there that "having the World Series in NOVEMBER is a communist act, and unconstitutional, and has the potential to MESS UP THE FOOTBALL SCHEDULE...

..and what could be more UNAMERICAN than that?

Sarah Palin Is Giving Obama Foreign Policy Advice?

2009-10-08T15:17:42Z

Sarah Palin is giving President Obama foreign policy advice from her Facebook account...

...and the news media is eating up every word her ghostwriter writes.

In a nation of three hundred million people, there have got to be more than the three hundred names we see week in and week out who have opinions worth exploring.

In all the articles about policy, you never see the number "165 million dollars a day", which is how much it is estimated the U.S. spends each day we are in Afghanistan, mentioned at all. I guess the actual cost is just an abstraction that most of these commentators believe a cash strapped nation shouldn't be worrying about, but in my book, A BILLION DOLLARS A WEEK for anything means we are spending real money.

We are approaching the Afghanistan conflict as if we are engineering a corporate takeover - add a few troops here, deploy a few weapons there, redefine what a "successful" outcome is, and then call it a day...

...the same way we did in Iraq or the laundry list of other countries bigger than Grenada that we have battled over the years since World War II.

The last time we won a war where we crushed the enemy in body and spirit was World War II. Our leaders had a different mindset back then, namely, one that acknowledged more frankly, although not publicly, our vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Our nation wasn't filled with "USA! USA!" chanters but with people who all were related to someone serving in the war effort. We were a nation whose fear of the possibility that we could actually lose caused a large majority of us to understand that our way of life was on the line.

We are not willing to send the one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand troops it could take to crush the opposition forces in Afghanistan. Our allies aren't willing to pony up any more than a nominal amount of their own forces.

The way we felt for a few months after September 11th was the way we felt for years after Pearl Harbor. It was a fear so great that we locked up Japanese Americans by the thousands.

We are not yet afraid enough of the things that could happen to do those terrible things to another nation that we know will work.

I champion Barack Obama's presidency on this blog week in and week out, not because I believe he is a perfect leader, but because I believe he deserves a chance to succeed or fail like any other president. Most of us have normally forgotten we even have a president by now, nine months after a presidential election, but our parochial and narrow minded press will continue to report practically every breath he takes as long as the public keeps tuning in.

Obama's not seasoned yet, not by a long shot, but no other president in the modern era has been either, whether they acted like it or not, in nine months. Somewhere between the fading of the hoopla after getting elected and the re-emergence of the hoopla to get re-elected, you find out what kind of president you really have.

President Obama is a pretty smart guy, smart enough to know how much of a sticky wicket that "eeny meeny miney mo" warfare in Afghanistan has become.

Our leaders in the 1940's didn't have to deal with fighting only the parts of a country that opposed us in WWII - we were committed to killing everybody we could until our opponents surrendered.

If we had danced around the idea that "war=killing people" in World War II the way we do now, we could have very well lost that war.

We had to kill a million people in Iraq before we could convince ourselves that we could leave in good conscience.

So boil it down to number, Mr. Obama, the way they do in corporate boardrooms - how many Afghans do we have to kill to make this mission successful?

I know you can't say this, Mr. President, but that's pretty much it - how many people are we willing to kill to get what we want, and how much is it going to cost? Or in liberal speak, how rich are we prepared to make our defense contractors?

General McChrystal Needs To Run For President If He Doesn't Like His Orders

2009-10-06T13:25:03Z

General Stanley McChrystal needs to decide whether or not he wants to run for president.

Once he figures that out, he needs to pack his bags.

There are a number of ways built into military protocol that a general can express his displeasure with the ideas the White House has.

But at the end of the day, after all the advice has been given and all the scenarios have been hashed out, America expects its commander-in-chief to be the lead dog on any direction our armed forces take.

Period.

Generals are a dime a dozen. Ask Fmr General Schwarzkopf, or Fmr General Powell. One of the good things about our military is it is designed to operate at a high casualty rate, not only on the field but in the top brass as well.

All I've been thinking about is Al Haig ever since McChrystal began playing rogue general for the media.

If you were the chairman of a major company, and you saw your chief financial officer on CNBC telling their interviewer that they didn't agree with the direction of some of the corporate policies you had put in place, your chief financial officer would be gone by nightfall.

S. and I went to a backyard ceremony for a neighbor's daughter last Saturday. The groom was a soldier, a young guy in his mid twenties who looked just like a young movie star Ronald Reagan with a crew cut. A tank commander, he was chiseled and lean from spending long hours sweating inside the tank's hot interior in Iraq. The groom stared straight into my eyes and said "I'll do whatever the American people ask me to do" without reservation, a statement I heard him repeat numerous times to other guests as he made his way around the room.

Maybe the general needs to spend more time with his troops, and less with the press.

These soldier's families understand what it is they have signed on to serve, but they don't want their loved ones in harm's way a moment longer than is absolutely necessary.

And they certainly don't want their commander in Afghanistan playing chicken with the commander-in-chief while their child's life hangs in the balance.

Will Florida Brawler Inspire Democratic Crybabies?

2009-10-02T12:00:31Z

Alan Grayson (D) Orlando

How do you get everything you ever asked for as a political party - popular president, significant majority in the House, a majority a hair away from achieving critical mass in the Senate - and then find every excuse in the book for not being able to do what you want?

This healthcare bill fight has been so predictable you would think the Democrats own the trademark rights to the term "political failure".

Even though the reality is that we are very close to seeing some kind of healthcare bill hit the president's desk, the perception that the Democrats are fighting an uphill battle against an opposition whose forces are weak and tattered is the one that predominates political discussions.

Setting aside the differences in rhetoric for a minute, the one thing you know about a Republican is, even if he is outnumbered a hundred to one, he will try to dominate the situation, as if to rule is his birthright. If he is only outnumbered ten to one, he will start proclaiming victory immediately, as if by force of will alone he will negate the mathematical inequality staring him in the face.

Representative Alan Grayson from Florida has had enough. I know he doesn't read this blog or others like it, but he has done the very thing I and countless other bloggers have been trumpeting for weeks - he has simplified the complexities of the healthcare debate down to a few words the general public can get its arms around.

He did not dance around the issues.

He did not come up with a legal sounding rebuttal to the opposition that left enough wiggle room for him to deny it all later.

And he damn sure didn't consult his pollster to determine how this might make his approval rating or his reelection numbers fluctuate.

He boiled down the Republican opposition to ANY healthcare overhaul to simple, direct, visceral terms - the kind Democrats normally shy away from. The kind the Republicans normally come up with in their sleep.

"The Republicans have a backup plan in case you do get sick ... This is what the Republicans want you to do. "If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly."

Rep. Alan Grayson, Tuesday from the floor of the House of Representatives

Can this lone brawler inspire the rest of the Democratic crybabies?

America has made polio a disease found only in history books. Put men on the moon. We can even get our money out of the bank in the middle of the night after its staff has gone home by simply sticking a card in a machine.

We can do this. The Democrats can do this.

Are the Democrats waiting for perfect conditions? 75 or 80 Democratic senators and 300 or more Democratic members of the House? The way they look right now, I doubt if even those gargantuan majorities would be enough.

Maybe there are too many lawyers in the Democratic Party, including the president, who are prone to do that thing that lawyers instinctively do when they open their mouths - try not to get boxed into a corner.

Advocating for a client, ladies and gentlemen, is different than fighting for your constituents.

Quit playing to George Will and George Stephanopoulos - the Peorias around the country get their soundbites via Youtube just like everybody else does these days, and those websites with the weird names that slice and dice the news up into bits of entertainment, to be endlessly re-emailed, replayed and repeated.

The Democrats need to paint themselves into a corner on this one - they need to paint themselves into a corner and dare anyone to try and get them out of it.

Blind Arrogance: Governor David Paterson

2009-10-01T15:31:24Z

Sean Yoes, the host of the AFRO First Edition talk show I appear on from time to time at WEAA, shot me an email a couple of days ago asking for my thoughts on the recent dust up between Obama and New York Governor David Paterson. The political brouhaha between them ensued when a White House emissary allegedly sent word to Governor Paterson to stay out of the 2010 governor's race. You can read the article Yoes ended up writing, titled "Should WH Stay Out of Paterson's Way?", at Black America Web.

But back to the day I originally got the email - later that night I asked S. what she thought about the Obama/Paterson situation. "Obama needs to leave Paterson alone," she said. "Really, he needs to quit sticking his hand into so many things."

I talked with a buddy of mine from New York yesterday. "When did this happen?" he asked.

It was when I spoke to my buddy from Alabama that we got a little deeper into it. "Who gives a damn about a black president telling a black governor not to run? Its all about the politics. The president has no choice but to do what he did."

"You know," I said, "Paterson makes me think of Kwame Kilpatrick. His daddy was a long time state assemblyman from Harlem, the same way Kilpatrick's momma was a congresswoman. You would think the two of them would know better. Actually, now that I'm really thinking about it, you could ask the same thing about Jessie Jackson Jr., Harold Ford Jr. - who else am I missing? - all of these guys had head starts on this thing and look what happens?"

My buddy from Alabama answered before I stopped talking.

"They think they're white."

"Really?"

"Privileged black kids like them never dealt with the same stuff average black kids did."

It was an interesting way to look at it, especially coming from someone whose own African American mother was the mayor of his hometown.

I thought about some of my old associates who qualified as spoiled children of South Carolina's black political elite, people I frequently socialized with back when I was growing up, and the otherworldliness they exuded when we talked about getting into jobs or out of legal problems, as if there was a permanent red carpet rolling along in front of them, smoothing out the little bumps life presents when you least expect them.

To look at Paterson's recent actions and then juxtapose them with his extraordinary confessions during his first days in office was to see the mannerisms and the actions of some of these long lost friends come to life.

My man Sean goes into the technical aspects of the political calculations in his article. Personally, I understand where Obama is coming from. And since I'm not a journalist, and won't ever need to get a quote from anybody in Paterson's administration, I can say this - too many of our black politicians like Paterson have been raised to do anything but work. Even so, I think that the execution of sending the message to Paterson was too sloppily done for it to be coming from the White House.

How come the DNC didn't weigh in on this instead, with the White House's intentions deep in the background?

Paterson's blind arrogance is not a reference to his sightlessness - but it is a deliberately pointed description of his administration, as far as the internet and the New York Times tells me, seems so intent on serving Paterson's agenda rather than his constituents, almost every New York state resident wants him gone.

The president may not feel that this could happen to him, but as I listened to all the people I asked about the Obama/Paterson debacle the last couple of days, all of who are die hard Obama supporters, I sensed a certain amount of "Obama fatigue" setting in, a sentiment that his "be everywhere at once" strategy is not helping lately.

I'm No Foreign Policy Expert...

2009-09-30T05:08:39Z

I'm no foreign policy expert...

...in fact, I know next to nothing about what kinds of policies we have regarding individual nations with whom we are either allies or enemies.

But after watching parts of the G-20 summit, and the reactions by our esteemed political gabfest regulars, I am convinced that a seasoned kindergarten teacher could do as good a job as the so called "experts" when it comes to understanding the motivations behind the actions of our rivals.

Because if you look at the proceedings in Pittsburgh dispassionately, what you see is the same scuffling for attention that five year olds do when they are on the playground.

Now we see everybody under the sun howling about Iran gaining the power to arm their very own nuclear weapons. I thought our own president, Mr. Barack Obama himself, who, at the very same G-20 summit where all of the news about a secret reactor in Iran began to come out, said that "no one nation should try to dominate another nation."

"Responsibility and leadership in the 21st century demand more. In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War."

President Barack Obama
Address to United Nations General Assembly

Why do we say these things when we really don't mean them?

Because if I'm the ruler of Iran - not Ahmadinejad, but the people he answers to - and believe that my national sovereignty is as valid as any other country's ability to decide its own fate, then I'd probably tell the UN Security Council to go jump off a cliff.

In many ways, it is analogous to the "family meeting" concept that caught on in the 80's, where everybody in the household got together to discuss major issues affecting the entire family. Who had the veto power in those meetings? The parents - the people who were paying for the very room in which the meeting was held.

I'd much rather have my president tell it like it really is - that we get all the say so because we are paying the lion's share of the United Nation's bill with some of the money we've borrowed from the Chinese; that we'd really like to quit building these nuclear weapons because they cost too damn much, but we don't have the muscle to make India, Pakistan, North Korea or Russia give theirs up; that we consider the nukes in France and the United Kingdom to be the same as being located behind our borders; and that we give Israel a pass, mostly for having the moxie to claim an official policy of "nuclear ambiguity" with a straight face when we all know they've got them.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for anything like this to ever happen.

As a communication tool between sovereign nations, the United Nations was a good idea, but the pomp and circumstance and posturing that passes for diplomacy has gotten in the way almost since the beginning.

And if you stop a minute, and think about the facts that are involved - if you take a long, long look at the picture of the little boy in the picture above, who was burned to a crisp in Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 - the only country I can think of that has ever used nuclear weapons in a wartime conflict is...

...the United States of America.

Is Barack Obama More Like W.E.B. DuBois or Booker T. Washington?

2009-09-27T17:07:33Z

Last week, before rolling out to my hometown of Orangeburg, SC, I did another radio interview with Sean Yoes, who is the host of "The WEAA/AFRO First Edition", an hour-long political talk show on Baltimore's WEAA-FM (88.9 FM), which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m.

You can click this link and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

This week was a shorter segment. We talked specifically about how President Barack Obama has handled the realities of being an African American commander-in-chief amid the heightened racial tensions across the country.

Is Barack Obama more like W.E.B. DuBois or Booker T. Washingon? Find out what Sean Yoes and I think tonight on the show.

As always, it was fun. Check it out if you have a chance.

If You Call Me By My Real Name...

2009-09-21T13:04:26Z

9/12 Washington Tea Party
Picture by NineTwelvePhotos

If you call me by my real name, the legal middle name that I was given at birth, I won't hear you at first, because it is used so infrequently.

I chose instead to use a shortened version of my middle name.

If you keep at it, though, with the version I've mothballed, I'll respond, although inwardly I will feel that you have changed the nature of our relationship in a way in which I really don't want you to get too comfortable with.

But there gets to be a point, after I've heard you say it a half a dozen times, when I am liable to get ticked off, even though it says right there on my birth certificate and my bank statements and any other legal or business documents I posses that this is my actual name.

I imagine President Obama, who went by "Barry" for many years before reverting to his given name of "Barack", wrestled with the need to fit into a society chock full of Bills, Toms and Johnnys the same way I did with my given name "Krishna".

I brought this up because I can look at my hit counter and show you by the spikes in my visitor report just about every time I have used the word "white people" in a title. Those have turned out to be some of the heaviest traffic days I've gotten in the last year.

I can write "fringe", "subset", "few", or any one of those other words that mean "some" or "minority of" all day long, but it doesn't matter - to the many vocal critics on this blog and others who are turned off by this latest turn in our nationwide dialogue on race, any mention of the word "white people", it seems, is an indictment of all white people.

The one thing I have noticed in all my reading - and I have read many, many millions of words over the years - is how little the phrase "white people" is actually used in our newspapers or on our news reports. On the other hand, minority groups are identified by name so often, that to hear someone say "black people" or "asian people" or "Hispanics" sounds normal.

Kind of like hearing the shortened version of my name sounds normal to me.

Writing the phrase "white people" seems to really bother these folks who rush to fill the comment sections of this blog and others like it who are bringing a different perspective - a much needed different perspective - to political discussions. This indignation at being singled out formally is as if every usage of this phrase pricks away at what I can only assume is the neutrality that these sensitive folks feel they enjoy in America.

Talking about race in America is uncomfortable. It calls into question a person's own sense of morality. It forces people to examine closely all those inequities we have learned to rationalize instead of challenge.

Watching our punditocracy in action this week, both in print and on TV, twist Jimmy Carter's carefully chosen words into a blanket pronouncement fitting the narrow minded narratives of yesteryear that seem to run continuously in their heads, I have come to the realization that I am tired of seeing the same old same old AARP crowd holding the political conversation in this country hostage.

And I am not amused by the rest of the entertainers posing as political prognosticators who populate our airwaves with commentary that begins at the ridiculous and goes downhill from there.

One of the real challenges we face in America when we talk about race isn't just the empirical evidence and the undisputed facts - it is the degree to which we are willing to accept other viewpoints as legitimate.

George Stephanopolous asked President Obama the obligatory question on race and the statement made by Jimmy Carter better than I would imagine any of the other interviewers in the president's TV news show marathon did today, posing it not as a either/or, "is the claim legitimate or not" fill in the blank query, but in more realistic terms that asked instead to what degree is the claim relevant.

Stephanopolous asked, "Does it frustrate you when your own supporters see racism that you don't think exists?"

President Obama answered, "Look, I think that race is such a volatile issue in this society - always has been - that it becomes hard for people to separate out...race being sort of a part of the backdrop of American society versus race being a predominant factor in any given debate."

"A part of the backdrop of American society."

Like the names the president and I were given at birth, whether we wanted to acknowledge them or not, race is as important to the American story as the percussion section is to a symphony orchestra. Excluding any acknowledgment of the way race has helped to fuel the fire of discontent about the healthcare debate or concern over the notion that this particular president's administration is aiming to "take over everything" means we are not willing to fully explore the sources of the animus and vitriol that lie at the root of this subset of white America's recent group protests and individual protestations.

I will repeat the end of the last sentence - subset of white America's recent group protests and individual protestations - for those of you who eyes usually miss this explicitly stated demarcation.

The irony in all this is, the only time I am happy to hear my full name called is when the issue of healthcare is involved - specifically, when I visit the doctor's office - because when I hear the nurse with the clipboard read my name, it means it's time to head back to the examining room and see the doctor.