Quotes of the Day

Quote #1: Clinton just can't stop herself from playing the divisive race card...

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Yeah, the "pattern" that is emerging is Clinton playing the race card out of desperation. Gotta love the not-so-subtle rhetorical link between "working," "hard working" and "white Americans." You hear that dog whistle everyone???

Obama spokesman Bill Burton responded to these comments, saying that in Indiana, Obama split working-class voters with Clinton and won a higher percentage of white voters than he did in Ohio last March. He said Obama will be the strongest nominee because he appeals "to Americans from every background and all walks of life. These statements from Sen. Clinton are not true and frankly disappointing."

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Clinton's comment was a "poorly worded" variation on the way analysts have been "slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms."

However, he said her primary support doesn't prove she's more electable. Either Democrat will get "the vast majority" of the other's primary election votes in a general election, he said.

So, the Clinton camp's so-called "nuclear option" apparently includes more than trying to ram through the completely undemocratic primary tallies in MI and FL. Perhaps she won't go quietly into that good night after all. If she doesn't cut this crap out, I hope party leaders step in to end it soon...

Quote #2: And this one from Bill Moyers to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:

"You know, Mrs. Clinton has a very serious issue to wrestle with in the next seventy-two hours. Is this race about the country, or is it about the Clintons? "

Well, I think we all know that from the Hillary side of things this race has always been about the Clintons over the country, but now, with the handwriting clearly on the wall, Hillary has the option of exiting with some grace and dignity, for which she will be handsomely rewarded with a leadership position in Congress, or as a selfish jerk, thereby jeopardizing her and her husband's political future. Ultimately, I think she'll do the right thing, but apparently Bill is counseling her to force the issue all the way to the convention in Denver... Of course, party leaders won't let that happen.

What we are seeing is a classic political moment: power is quickly moving from one place (the Clintons) to another (Obama). Thank you for your contributions Bill and Hillary. Now, step aside for the new guy. Do the right thing... if for no other reason, than for your own selfish legacy.

Bill Moyers Lays It Down on Obama, Wright and Race

Here is what Bill Moyers had to say about Obama, Wright and race in the U.S.

(If you are not familiar with Moyers' work, check out his television show on PBS.)

May 2, 2008
BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist. Many black preachers I've known - scholarly, smart, and gentle in person -- uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I've known many white preachers like that, too.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of a preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it?

Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".

What do you think?


UPDATE: Frank Rich strikes a similar chord in his NYTimes column today. The heart of the matter for Rich is this:

"... it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick...

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000."

Bill Moyers in dialogue w/ James Cone

This is a really interesting and insightful Bill Moyers interview with Christian theologian and philosopher, James Cone. During the Black Power era, Cone articulated what he called a "black liberation theology" and has since continued to put forth a radical and prophetic vision of Christ. "Any message that is not related to the liberation of the poor in a society is not Christ's message," Cone argues. "Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology."

The interview posted here is based on a lecture Cone gives, titled, "Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree." Here is what Cone has to say by way of introducing the topic:

I know that the cross and the lynching tree are not comfortable subjects to talk about together. Who wants to think about lynched black bodies in church worship? Or when doing a theological reflection on Bonhoeffer's question "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" This is exactly what I contend the Gospel requires Christians to do-especially preachers and theologians. I claim that no American Christian- white, black, or any other color-can understand correctly the full theological meaning of the American Christ, without identifying his image with a recrucified black body hanging from a lynching tree.

Black poets and other artists like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois realized the religious meaning and symbolic connection of the cross and the lynching tree. But this connection failed to ring a theological bell in the imagination of white theologians and their churches. Not many black theologians and preachers have made an explicit connection between the cross and the lynching tree either. So I want to start a conversation about the cross and the lynching tree, and thereby break our silence on race and Christianity in American history. I began this reflection in the only place I feel confident to speak as a theologian: the black religious experience. I was born into this reality, and have wrestled with these paradoxes and incongruities since childhood. If I have anything to say to the Christian community in America and around the world, it will happen as I stand as a theologian on the reality that sustains and empowers black people to resist the forces designed to destroy every ounce of dignity in their souls and bodies.

Cone is deep, a man of fierce intelligence. The Moyers interview (below) is worth some serious consideration... and is perhaps not a bad meditation for the new year:

part 1:
(9:33)

part 2:
(9:08)

part 3:
(9:42)

part 4:
(6:04)


Here is a well-known quote by Cone: "Anger and humour are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to opression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury."

If you'd like to watch a video of Cone delivering the full "cross & lynching tree" lecture/sermon at Harvard, click here:

James Cone, "Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree," Harvard University, October 2006