Exactly 45 years later

August 28, 1963, 344 years after the first ship loaded with slaves landed on our shores. Martin Luther King stands by the Lincoln Memorial. His voice rings out over a multitude of a quarter million people... "I have a dream...."

April 4, 1968. Martin Luther King is assassinated.

August 28, 2008, an African-American stands before 80,000 people in Denver and accepts the nomination to be president of the USA.

What a long, long way we have come. And what a week this has been. Many of my lifetime memories of political conventions can be summed up as boring, boring, boring.

But not this week. It was one excellent speech after another. Thank you, Teddy. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Hillary ("No way, no how, no McCain") and Bill. Thank you, John Kerry and John Lewis, Al Gore and Joe Biden.

And tonight most of all, thank you, Barack Obama, for those 42 minutes of firmness and frankness and fire and hope. I do believe you will lead the way out of this pit of hell that George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have held us in for the last eight years.

"Yes, we can!" Most assuredly, we can.

If McCain were to win...

In yesterday's New York Times, Frank Rich wrote about what Barack Obama has to do to take out John McCain. He concludes with these words: "R.I.P., 'Change We Can Believe In.' The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It’s Too Late."

Within the article, Rich says in a nutshell what we will get if McCain wins:

"What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold."

To say the least.

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To read Rich's article, paste this URL into your browser:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/opinion/24rich.html?th&emc=th

Seeing the real McCain

How is it possible that so many people are STILL planning to vote for John McCain? On Tuesday, CNN commentator Jack Cafferty wrote about what these voters are apparently not seeing. (Or maybe they just don't want to look.) Some of Caffertys points:

* McCain gives the same canned answers in the same speech every day.

* Asked about evil in the world, all he has to say is that he'll chase Osama bin Laden "to the gates of hell."

* He defines rich as those who have an income of $5 million. (His wife Cindy is reportedly worth $100 million.)

* McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. "His academic record was awful."

* "Unless he's reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost."

* Cafferty concludes: George W. Bush "will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been. I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him."

Yet more slime

I was standing in the gloom, thinking once again about John McCain's adoption of former Rove operatives into his campaign. And about Joe Lieberman's proclamation that Barack Obama "does not put America first." And about Mark Penn's memo that Obama "is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values." Utterly maddening, utterly depressing.

Then I learned about the latest book to hit the top of the NY Times bestseller list -- The Obama Nation, by Jerome R. Corsi. Yes, the same Jerome Corsi of "Swiftboating" infamy, slime dispenser par excellence. (One refutation source on the net is http://mediamatters.org/ -- see both their home page and their archives. And John Kerry has just now set up his own site to refute the Corsi slime.)

There are still 52 days before the election. Imagine how much more garbage is yet to be dumped upon us. When it's over, the whole nation is going to need a pass through the car wash.

What an 080808

It's not just those three eights that make this day easy to remember. Today the long-brewing confrontation between Russia and Georgia over Georgia's South Ossetia region exploded into real war. Apparently there have already been hundreds of civilian deaths. But much of US media attention was drawn away by a different kind of explosion: the John Edwards scandal.

I cannot imagine that anyone reading this blog does not already know about the Edwards situation. It is as sad--profoundly sad--as it is mind-boggling. And looking beyond the pain of family and devoted followers, I cannot keep from thinking about what would have happened this November if Edwards had been the presidential or vice-presidential candidate when this story broke. John McCain would automatically become president. And who could predict how many congressional races would be affected?

Just before jotting these notes, I looked at a very different scene, the last part of the opening ceremonies in Beijing. I can still see the beaming faces of marchers from all around the globe. You could feel the pride of the Chinese athletes, and especially of the towering basketball star Yao Ming and, at his side and eventually lifted up on his shoulder, the tiny 9-year-old Sichuan earthquake survivor Ling Hao. 91,000 people watched from the stands. It is estimated that four billion people were watching on television worldwide.

Surely many were also thinking of the Darfur-China relationship and Tibet. But the big picture tonight was one of hope. I'm very happy I got to see it. (And there was a sort of preface to this sign of hope with the news earlier this week that the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government may be approaching a compromise that would assure the protection of Tibetan culture.) In any case, today was a whole lot brighter in Beijing than it was on the shores of the Black Sea and the Potomac.

McCain's Bucket Brigade

Note to my readers: I wrote this entry on Thursday, July 31. When I tried to publish it, I saw that Blogger's automated spam checker had identified me as a potential spammer. I had to request a review, which I immediately did. Then I was to wait for a response within two working days No response yet, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway. It is 9:25 a.m. on Saturday, August 2, and it looks like I am now unblocked. (By the way, since I wrote this, we have had the huge fuss over Obama's statement about folks being told to fear him because he doesn't look like the other fellows who appear on our paper money. For a fine commentary on that, look at Bob Herbert's aticle in today's NY Times.)
ricardo
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OK, I promise. After this, no more blogs about McCain for a while. At least a week.

Can anybody remember a presidential campaign without some slinging of slime? I cannot. But this McCain chap and his coterie of bucket bearers are just too much. (Don't forget that good ol' Straight-talk John made a very big deal of promising "a respectful campaign.")

Some of the slime from their buckets: Obama is unpatriotic, even treasonous, ready to lose in Iraq for political gain. Obama dissed soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama voted 94 times for higher taxes. Then, very weirdly, a McCain commercial linked Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Seeing scatological content like that, it should be no surprise to learn that at least three of McCain's present operatives are from the Gang of Rove Their names are Steve Schmidt, Nicole Wallace and Greg Jenkins. It's not a curiosity that they have the same middle name. It's spelled S-L-I-M-Y.

So are these three Rovians just people off working by themselves while the boss innocently wanders through the supermarket aisles checking out escalating dairy prices? Nope. All four are rowing the same boat. For example, here is what McCain said about the Spears-Hilton thing: “What we are talking about here is substance and not style... We are talking about who has an agenda for the future of America... I am proud of the campaign that we have run… We’re proud of that commercial.”)

More devastatingly, as CNN reported last February 9, John "Mr. Clean" McCain said this: "I've always respected Karl Rove as one of the great smart political minds in American politics. I've always respected him. We never had any ill will after the initial South Carolina thing, after we had the meeting with President Bush. We moved on. I've seen Karl Rove many times when I've been over at the White House. We've always had pleasant conversations. It's not so much whether I approve of his tactics or not. It's that he had a very good, great political mind. And any information or advice and counsel he can give us, I'd be glad to have. I don't think anybody denies his talents. So I'd be glad to get any advice and counsel. We would obviously decide whether to accept it or not."

Well, McCain has obviously accepted the stuff of Rove. The proof is in the buckets.