These guys really are crazy

From ABC news:

President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner last night, discussing false claims made about the health care reform bill, told a little anecdote.

"I was up at the G20 -- just a little aside -- I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them," the president said. "One of the leaders -- I won't mention who it was -- he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind.

"He says, 'Barack, explain to me this health care debate.'

"He says, 'We don't understand it. You're trying to make sure everybody has health care and they're putting a Hitler mustache on you -- I don't -- that doesn't make sense to me. Explain that to me.'"

Well, I can't explain it. As far as I can tell, most of what is called the right wing in this country has gone completely insane because a black man is in the White House and (I'm guessing) they automatically assume he's going to screw the white race as badly as they have done to his race whenever they've inserted one of their own into the office. When I say insane, I do actually mean insane, this is not political rhetoric. They believe things that are blatantly obviously false and do not relate to reality, and then act on this and expect everyone else to act on it.

I don't think it's quite possible to realise how crazy they are, from outside the country. I'll try and provide some examples tomorrow & following, but ..... just the insane bullshit advertising that is getting run in prime time (paid for indirectly by deeply crazy right wing millionaires, of which there are a terrifying number), are just utterly incredible. Big deep booming scarey voices telling you that the Health Reforms will mean that old people will be denied all medical coverage and left to die, or that you wont get to choose your own doctors but faceless Washington bureaucrats will tell you who you have to see and what treatments you can have. And this stuff is running 4,5,6 times an hour in some program slots.

It's hard to believe it doesn't have some effect, but it's such an utter and total lie: and yet it doesn't even get denounced in TV 'news' or on a lot of the print media (buy thats a slightly different rant). You know, when the Clintons were talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy to pull them down and destroy them back in the '90s, I thought, yeah, yeah, right, sure: how could there be such a conspiracy. Watching them try to destroy Obama over the most idiotic of lies, I see what they mean. It's not a conspiracy per se - that would be logistically impossible plus half the conspirators would kill eachother if they met in the flesh - so much as an automatic and unspoken way of thinking, a modus operandi, which operates whenever the right sort of target pops up, and seems to be where all the old KKK-style open racism has been channelled.

To try and explain my political leanings, I keep telling people here that this country has a party of dangerously right-wing extremists, and then there are the Republicans as well - definitely in the ha-ha-not-funny category of joke, as far as I'm concerned. Of course they all look at me like I'm just pulling their legs and noone could actually think the Democrats are right wing. Oh, so wrong.

The really sad bit is, in England I'd be a centrist, and back home probably centre*-right (although I'm not sure I could ever grit my teeth long enough to vote National, Little Bobby Muldoon did a pretty good job of inculcating that feeling).

* I do find it alarming how much my spelling is deteriorating here, I'm starting to write center, color, Theater .. akk!! I'm sliding into decadence, and it's not even any fun!!!

Persia

Well, the more I watch the events in Teheran - inasmuch as we get to see anything of them - the more depressing it seems.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's wonderful that the people are demanding some real democracy: with any luck, in time that might lead them in the direction of more freedom, which would be a tremendous blessing.

But, when I see the people who are likely to benefit, it's a whole other story, as they say. Mousavi is a moderate, but only by comparison to the alternatives: by any external measure, he's still a mullah, repressive & torture-happy, just a bit less bat-shit crazy when it comes to external affairs, and better trained in buttering up foreign opinion. Ayatollah Montazeri, who appears to be trying to stir things up from within the religious power structure, is as thorough-going a bloodstained tyrant as Khomeini ever was, and his ally Rafsanjani is (merely) a plutocrat who wants better access to western luxuries, it seems.

And of course the current bunch, Ahmadinejad & co, are quite quite crazy.

Still, I suppose someone less elitist and more actually democratic might emerge from the scrum, if it goes long enough - look at how the French revolution evolved.

Of course, the real problem is, there's no real signs of disaffection in the police/military, which is really the sine-qua-non for a successful modern revolution - look at the Ukraine, Russia, & most of East Europe at one point or another.

And look at China after Tiananmen Square for what happens when there isn't a disaffected power structure. Uggh.

Still, so far, the powers that be don't seem to have exerted their military power to suppress the protests, so it's impossible to say for sure - maybe there's more disaffection than is obvious to us, or maybe the Supreme Leader (Khamenei) is losing his taste for bloodshed: and faltering determination at the top is just as lethal as disaffection in the military (and we're back to Louis XVI & the French Revolution again).

Of course the problem with that is, look how the French revolution evolved - first more democratic, then democratic tyranny, then massive bloodshed, then reaction into military tyranny. Oh goodie, just what we need in the middle east, another tyranny looking to foreign wars to curb the popular dissent.

Maybe I'm just being too pessimistic: after all, we've been blessed by quite a few miraculous liberations in the last quarter century, even if we totally squandered the possibilities of some of them (hello, Russia & Bill Clinton, I'm looking at y'all) - when I consider the freedom and hope in eastern Germany, and the liberation of Poland, Hungary, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Roumania, Bulgaria, and - most miraculously - the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which I never thought would be pried out from Russia's hands, there must be some cause for hope. So maybe, maybe, maybe, it'll come out right, somehow.

[Later Update] So it appears I was too optimistic about Khamenei, his dander is up and he's committed to the current fraud. Terrifying.

[Heartrending Update]

From NIAC, a translation of a blog post:

"I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I'm listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It's worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I'm two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow's children..."

* * * * * * * * * * *

The one thing about the whole situation that I find completely outrageous, is the rank and rancid Republicans here, criticizing Obama for not speaking out strongly in favour of the protestors, as - how did one put it last night? - 'representative of the US, the symbol of liberty and fairness in the world.' How stupid can you be? Doesn't he get it that the US is not a symbol of liberty, or of anything but rank oppression, in the Middle East?

And of course he does get it, he's just playing this for domestic political advantage - he's one of the many demented fools that - until last week - were urging the bombing of Iran in order to eliminate it's possible future nuclear facilities (despite Pentagon planners pointing out that this is impossible, short of a prolonged nuclear barrage over the bulk of Iran, which would also, yanno, destroy all its oilfields).

It's one thing I do find quite alarming, that the right here view everything solely through the prism of domestic advantage, and are so bitterly furious at losing power, as though they had a divine right to it, that they will resort to any craziness to criticize the current administration. It is a common occurrence to hear Obama reviled as a tyrant by radio talkback hosts here, and much worse than that - and that's even if you steer clear of the real crazies, who claim he's a muslim, or he isn't an american, or ... eh.

I think being in Arkansas, and immured in the middle of these people, is having a detrimental effect on our tempers, if nothing else.

Anyway, back to it - more next week

Makes everything go 'round, apparently

And let us not forget what made Obama's victory possible - Money. Money in gobs, money in torrents, money in spectacular waterfalls. So much money that the political experts were left sitting around, slack-jawed in amazement, wordlessly pointing and gobbling. So much money that they literally couldn't figure out what to do with it all.

And not money from Big Business, or even (ha) Big Unions, but money in $10 and $20 and $50 contributions from an enormous range of people, people who would normally never be interested in politics, but who believed in Obama from the start, and showed their (our) belief in the most direct way.

As for me, well, I couldn't vote for him, but I could contribute my support, and gladly did.