On the Health of the Republic

The embarrassment that passes for investigative journalism in the United States tried as hard as it could to bury the Pentagon Papers on the Iraq war. In case you missed, and you would have if you received your news from any of the major outlets, the Pentagon planted and paid for a number of former brass to sound off in support of Gen. Petraeus' last act before Congress to push the idea that the tide truly was turning. In a concerted effort, across all the major and minor networks, the Pentagon had paid agents acting as network "experts" to talk about their view of the Petraeus hearings and what they meant about how well things were progressing in Iraq. There are several good stories on this, but this one really chronicles the arc of deception exercised by this administration and connects the dots on an orchestrated campaign that makes Goebbels look like an amateur. T

Here are a few others, just so you get an idea of the scope of the negligence of our once mighty press, now co-opted and co-conspirators:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/316086/clinton_obama_finally_slam_pentagon_propaganda_mccain_silent
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/washington/26analyst.html?ex=1366948800&en=6a36ee3881246be7&ei=5124&partner=digg&exprod=digg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/20/AR2008042002131.html
http://archive.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/22/analysts/index.html

Update: great read here on what this means to the Republic.

RFK, Jr gives the next President some excellent advice

I've read a half-dozen articles by RFK, Jr. over the last year or so and he reliably demonstrates a razor focus on the issues he covers. This one is no exception and represents the most level-headed approach to the energy crisis this country has nursed these last 40 years.

The Next President's First Task [A Manifesto]
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Vanity Fair

May 2008 Issue

Last November, Lord (David) Puttnam debated before Parliament an important bill to tackle global warming. Addressing industry and government warnings that we must proceed slowly to avoid economic ruin, Lord Puttnam recalled that precisely 200 years ago Parliament heard identical caveats during the debate over abolition of the slave trade. At that time slave commerce represented one-fourth of Britain's G.D.P. and provided its primary source of cheap, abundant energy. Vested interests warned that financial apocalypse would succeed its prohibition.

That debate lasted roughly a year, and Parliament, in the end, made the moral choice, abolishing the trade outright. Instead of collapsing, as slavery's proponents had predicted, Britain's economy accelerated. Slavery's abolition exposed the debilitating inefficiencies associated with zero-cost labor; slavery had been a ball and chain not only for the slaves but also for the British economy, hobbling productivity and stifling growth. Now creativity and productivity surged. Entrepreneurs seeking new sources of energy launched the Industrial Revolution and inaugurated the greatest era of wealth production in human history.

Today, we don't need to abolish carbon as an energy source in order to see its inefficiencies starkly, or to understand that this addiction is the principal drag on American capitalism. The evidence is before our eyes. The practice of borrowing a billion dollars each day to buy foreign oil has caused the American dollar to implode. More than a trillion dollars in annual subsidies to coal and oil producers have beggared a nation that four decades ago owned half the globe's wealth. Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.

We know that nations that "decarbonize" their economies reap immediate rewards. Sweden announced in 2006 the phaseout of all fossil fuels (and nuclear energy) by 2020. In 1991 the Swedes enacted a carbon tax - now up to $150 a ton - and as a result thousands of entrepreneurs rushed to develop new ways of generating energy from wind, the sun, and the tides, and from woodchips, agricultural waste, and garbage. Growth rates climbed to upwards of three times those of the U.S.

Iceland was 80 percent dependent on imported coal and oil in the 1970s and was among the poorest economies in Europe. Today, Iceland is 100 percent energy-independent, with 90 percent of the nation's homes heated by geothermal and its remaining electrical needs met by hydro. The International Monetary Fund now ranks Iceland the fourth most affluent nation on earth. The country, which previously had to beg for corporate investment, now has companies lined up to relocate there to take advantage of its low-cost clean energy.

It should come as no surprise that California, America's most energy-efficient state, also possesses its strongest economy.

The United States has far greater domestic energy resources than Iceland or Sweden does. We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind; indeed, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone produce enough harnessable wind to meet all of the nation's electricity demand. As for solar, according to a study in Scientific American, photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation's electricity needs without any rooftop installation, even assuming every American owned a plug-in hybrid.

In America, several obstacles impede the kind of entrepreneurial revolution we need. To begin with, that trillion dollars in annual coal-and-oil subsidies gives the carbon industry a decisive market advantage. Meanwhile, an overstressed and inefficient national electrical grid can't accommodate new kinds of power. At the same time, a byzantine array of local rules impede access by innovators to national markets.

There are a number of things the new president should immediately do to hasten the approaching boom in energy innovation. A carbon cap-and-trade system designed to put downward pressure on carbon emissions is quite simply a no-brainer. Already endorsed by Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama, such a system would measure national carbon emissions and create a market to auction emissions credits. The supply of credits is then reduced each year to meet pre-determined carbon-reduction targets. As supply tightens, credit value increases, providing rich monetary rewards for innovators who reduce carbon. Since it is precisely targeted, cap-and-trade is more effective than a carbon tax. It is also more palatable to politicians, who despise taxes and love markets. Industry likes the system's clear goals. This market-based approach has a proven track record.

There's a second thing the next president should do, and it would be a strategic masterstroke: push to revamp the nation's antiquated high-voltage power-transmission system so that it can deliver solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy across the country. Right now, a Texas wind-farm manager who wants to get his electrons to market faces two huge impediments. First, our regional power grids are overstressed and misaligned. The biggest renewable-energy opportunities - for instance, Southwest solar and Midwest wind - are outside the grids' reach. Furthermore, traveling via alternating-current (AC) lines, too much of that wind farmer's energy would dissipate before it crossed the country. The nation urgently needs more investment in its backbone transmission grid, including new direct-current (DC) power lines for efficient long-haul transmission. Even more important, we need to build in "smart" features, including storage points and computerized management overlays, allowing the new grid to intelligently deploy the energy along the way. Construction of this new grid will create a marketplace where utilities, established businesses, and entrepreneurs can sell energy and efficiency.

The other obstacle is the web of arcane and conflicting state rules that currently restrict access to the grid. The federal government needs to work with state authorities to open up the grids, allowing clean-energy innovators to fairly compete for investment, space, and customers. We need open markets where hundreds of local and national power producers can scramble to deliver economic and environmental solutions at the lowest possible price. The energy sector, in other words, needs an initiative analogous to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which required open access to all the nation's telephone lines. Marketplace competition among national and local phone companies instantly precipitated the historic explosion in telecom activity.

Construction of efficient and open-transmission marketplaces and green-power-plant infrastructure would require about a trillion dollars over the next 15 years. For roughly a third of the projected cost of the Iraq war we could wean the country from carbon. And the good news is that the government doesn't actually have to pay for all of this. If the president works with governors to lift constraints and encourage investment, utilities and private entrepreneurs will quickly step in to revitalize the grid and recover their investment through royalties collected for transporting green electrons. Businesses and homes will become power plants as individuals cash in by installing solar panels and wind turbines on their buildings, and by selling the stored energy in their plug-in hybrids back to the grid at peak hours.

Energy expert and former CIA director R. James Woolsey predicts: "With rational market incentives and a smart backbone, you'll see capital and entrepreneurs flooding this field with lightning speed." Ten percent of venture-capital dollars are already deployed in the clean-tech sector, and the world's biggest companies are crowding the space with capital and scrambling for position.

The president's final priority must be to connect a much smarter power grid to vastly more efficient buildings and machines. We have barely scratched the surface here. Washington is a decade behind its obligation, first set by Ronald Reagan, to set cost-minimizing efficiency standards for all major appliances. With the conspicuous exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger's California, the states aren't doing much better. And Congress keeps setting ludicrously tight expiration dates for its energy-efficiency tax credits, frustrating both planning and investment. The new president must take all of this in hand at once.

The benefits to America are beyond measure. We will cut annual trade and budget deficits by hundreds of billions, improve public health and farm production, diminish global warming, and create millions of good jobs. And for the first time in half a century we will live free from Middle Eastern wars and entanglements with petty tyrants who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-governmental organization that promotes clean water throughout the world.

Read it twice

This is one of those articles - straight from a real, old time newspaper - that really makes you pause and wonder what on earth is going on. In a world where the number one target of forward-looking speculators is water, this is amazing:


Water's trip to your glass is complicated
Nestle came into Florida and managed to pull off quite the coup.

By Ivan Penn, Times Staff Writer
Published Saturday, March 15, 2008 3:16 PM

The company got a permit to take water belonging to Floridians — hundreds of millions of gallons a year from a spring in a state park — at no cost to Nestle.

No taxes. No fees. Just a $230 permit to pump water until 2018.

Nestle bottles that water, ships it throughout the Southeast — much of it to Georgia and the Carolinas — and makes millions upon millions of dollars in profits on it.

The state granted Nestle permission to draw so much water against the strong recommendation of the local water management district staff. Because drought conditions were stressing the Madison Blue Spring, the staff said the amount of water drawn on the permit should be cut by more than two-thirds.

So while Florida is in a bitter dispute with its state neighbors over water use, it's giving its water away to a private company that bottles and ships it to those very same states.

Nestle says Floridians should be grateful. Its bottling plant has generated taxes and created jobs. "You're talking about millions and millions of dollars in tax benefit,'' said spokesman Jim McClellan. "It's a very good deal for the state of Florida.''

• • •

In northernmost Florida, Madison County runs right up to the Georgia border, mostly vast stretches of rolling farmland. The entire county is home to about 20,000, with a claim to fame that the late, great rhythm-and-blues singer Ray Charles lived here as a child.

In a wooded area between Interstate 10 and the Georgia line flows the deep, cavernous Madison Blue Spring. Locals frolic in its year-round, 70-degree waters; divers troll its narrow underwater caves.

Anna Bruic of the small town of Lee owned 65 acres surrounding the spring that she was looking to develop. In 1998, Bruic received a permit to bottle water from Madison Blue. She never used the permit.

In October 2000, she sold 38 acres to the state. The spring, which bubbles up to a limestone basin on the west bank of the Withlacoochee River, became Madison Blue Springs State Park.

Months later, she sold 2 acres of her land and her water-bottling permit to Blue Springs LLC, owned by Bill Blanchard of Tampa. He in turn negotiated to sell the land and the permit to Nestle.

To those pushing economic development in Madison County, an international corporation wanting to build a huge manufacturing plant there was a dream come true.

Since 1972, the only major manufacturing operation was a meat-packing plant operated by Winn-Dixie. Smithfield — which produces sausage, hot dogs and lunch meats — bought the plant in 2004, the same year Nestle opened its bottling facility, promising hundreds of new jobs and an economic windfall.

Rural, small towns are almost a signature for Nestle's bottling operations, which include 21 plants in the United States and two in Canada.

The Swiss company holds about one-third of the bottled-water market in America. When Nestle made overtures to come into Madison County, it already had bought up many of the nation's major water brands, including Arrowhead, Ice Mountain, Ozarka and Deer Park.

Nestle initially planned to produce the Zephyrhills spring water brand at the Madison plant, but the company changed up. It made Deer Park, a brand originally from western Maryland, the focus in Madison, with Zephyrhills a smaller component.

But by the time Nestle was ready to close its deal with Blanchard, the staff at the Suwannee River Water Management District, which oversees the Madison Blue Spring, recommended several permits related to the spring be revoked or changed.

Part of the concern was about speculation on selling permits for big money, and part of it was about drought.

In a memo dated Nov. 15, 2002, the water management district staff recommended reducing the amount of water Nestle could draw under the permit it would obtain from 1.47-million gallons a day to 400,000 a day.

Historically, the average flow of the spring is 55-million gallons a day, but it was down to 34-million gallons a day.

"The current drought has reduced the flow of Madison Blue Springs to record lows," Jon Dinges, director of resource management, wrote to the water management district's governing board. "The drought has become severe since the permit was issued, thus requiring a reduction of the (average daily withdrawal) to ensure resource protection."

In January 2003, the governing board — gubernatorial appointees who make final decisions about water use — heard Nestle's pitch to continue the permit as originally approved.

The company promised to invest $100-million in the plant over seven years and create 300 jobs — but only if the permit remained as it had been when first approved for Bruic.

"The volumes and all of that are critical to Nestle's long-term investment," S. Austin Peele, a Lake City lawyer representing the company, told the governing board.

Nestle had a key ally at the meeting: the state of Florida, in the form of the economic development entity, Enterprise Florida Inc.

"We have been working with representatives of the company for about two months, in trying to secure 300 jobs that will be present at this facility upon build out," Bridget Merrill of Enterprise Florida told the board. "It is with certainty that the company has to proceed."

To the disappointment of those working to protect the springs, Nestle got its wish.

Jim Stevenson, chairman of the Florida springs task force, said that with the staff recommending against the permit, the governing board should have made some adjustments.

"I would side with the staff," Stevenson said. In protecting the springs, "the responsibility lies with the water management district. They're the ones that have to ensure that our springs remain healthy.

"Once you get up to the board, these are political appointees," he said. "The step up from that is governor, in that he appoints the board members for the water management district."

Jeb Bush, who was governor at the time, did not respond to questions about Nestle's Madison County operations.

• • •

The state did much more than fight to get Nestle the right to pump as much water as possible from the spring.

As an added incentive for Nestle, the state approved a tax refund of up to $1.68-million for the Madison bottling operation. To date, Nestle has received two refunds totaling $196,000 and requested a third tax refund.

Nestle had promised to create 300 jobs over five years. The most people it has ever employed was about 250. The number dropped to 205 late last year, 46 of them from Georgia, which Nestle defends as common for a work force along a state line.

The state estimated that the plant, which has a payroll of $6.5-million, would bring some $12-million a year in direct economic benefit to the county and the region.

The state says its work on behalf of Nestle was well worth it because the county was dealing with the shuttering of its other major economic engine, the meat-processing plant.

"This project was very important to the economic health of this rural county as the community recently suffered the closure of a major private-sector employer with the resulting loss of several hundred jobs," Page Bass, spokeswoman for the state Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development, said this month.

The Nestle plant opened in 2004. The Smithfield meat plant closed in 2006.

• • •

Nestle touts the 470-acre, "eco-friendly'' plant in Madison as its premier water bottling facility in America. Under the permit that started with Anna Bruic, the company will receive for free the product it sells, through 2018.

"Everybody owns the water," said Tim Sagul, assistant director of resource management for the Suwannee River Water Management District.

In essence, the government never charges for water. For tap water, the charge is essentially a processing and delivery charge, but not a water charge. Agriculture, which uses the most water, is not charged, either.

McClellan, the Nestle spokesman, said bottled-water companies should not be singled out.

"Treat us like any other user," he said. "People do not take bottled water and wash their dog. They do not wash their car with it. They drink it. That's the highest and best use of water."

Stevenson, the state's spring expert, says to look at the big picture. "As I see it, a real problem is the public thinks of water as limitless and valueless. ... The less water you pull out of the ground, the better for the spring,'' he said.

"The bottled water companies serve as a lightning rod for those concerned about water because they're located near the spring.

"Yet we're all robbing water from those springs. Our springs are silent. They've got no voice."

Times researchers Shirl Kennedy and Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Ivan Penn can be reached at ipenn@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2332.

McCain is simply full of shit on the subject of Iraq

With all the narratives being propagated about the fighting in Iraq, it is amazing how often the basic facts elude those responsible for keeping the facts straight. The one thing I really like about Frank Rich is that, agree or disagree, he sets the record straight more times than not. This is worth reading if for no other reason than the fact that the "up is down, left is right" crew is going to be spinning heavy this week (the telegenic GENERAL is in town after all) and we should do our collective best to keep the facts straight - this includes our candidates most especially!

(The version on the NY Times is fully annotated, so if you want the sources, I recommend that you get them here.)

Tet Happened, and No One Cared
By FRANK RICH

REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.

What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.

But Mr. McCain shouldn’t protest too much about the Democrats’ bogus attack. For him, this sideshow is a political lifeline, allowing him to skate away from his many other, far more worrying canards about Iraq. If anything, that misused quote may be one of his more benign fairy tales. How delightful to fantasize that staying the Bush-Petraeus course will transform Iraq into pacific postwar Japan. Iraq’s sects have remained at each other’s throats since their country was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Perhaps magical thinking can bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians, too.

Everything else Mr. McCain has to say about Iraq is more troubling, and I don’t mean just his recent serial gaffe conflating Shiite Iran and Sunni Qaeda. The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.

So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats’ din. They’ve also been underplayed by a press that coddles Ol’ Man Straight Talk and that rarely looks more deeply into the “surge is success” propaganda than it did into Mr. Bush’s announcement of the end of “major combat operations” five years ago. The electorate doesn’t want to hear much anyway about a war it long ago soundly rejected.

For the majority of Americans who haven’t met any of the brave troops who’ve been cavalierly tossed into the quagmire, the war is out of sight and mind in a way Vietnam never was. Only 28 percent of Americans knew American casualties in Iraq were nearing 4,000 last month, according to the Pew Research Center. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that by March 2008 the percentage of prominent news stories that were about Iraq had fallen to about one-fifth of what it was in January 2007. It’s a poignant commentary on the whole war that Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the nonpartisan advocacy group, was reduced to protesting the lack of coverage.

That’s why it’s no surprise that so few stopped to absorb the disastrous six-day battle of Basra that ended last week — a mini-Tet that belied the “success” of the surge. Even fewer noticed that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed at least as oblivious to what was going down as President Bush, no tiny feat.

In Mr. Bush’s telling, Basra was a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq.” He praised the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and boasted repeatedly that the Iraqi forces were fighting “in the lead.” The Pentagon spokesman declared that this splendid engagement was “a byproduct of the success of the surge.”

It was a defining moment all right. Mr. Maliki’s impulsive and ill-planned attempt to vanquish the militias in southern Iraq loyal to his Shiite rival, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, was a failure that left Mr. Sadr more secure than before. Though some Iraqi armed forces were briefly in the lead, others mutinied. Eventually American and British forces and air power had to ride to the rescue in both Basra and Baghdad. Even then, the result was at best a standoff, with huge casualties. The battle ended only when Mr. Maliki’s own political minions sought a cease-fire.

Mr. McCain was just as wrong about Basra as he was in 2003, when he said the war would be “brief” and be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. Or as he was in the 1990s, when he championed extravagant State Department funding for the war instigator Ahmad Chalabi, who’d already been branded untrustworthy by the C.I.A. (The relationship between Mr. Chalabi and the former lobbyist Charles Black, now a chief McCain campaign strategist, is explored in a new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” by Aram Roston.)

As for Basra, Mr. McCain told Joe Klein of Time in January that it was “not a problem.” He told John King of CNN while in Baghdad last month that Mr. Sadr’s “influence has been on the wane for a long time.” When the battle ended last week, Mr. McCain said: “Apparently it was Sadr who asked for the cease-fire, declared a cease-fire. It wasn’t Maliki. Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a cease-fire.” At least the last of those sentences was accurate. It was indeed the losing side — Maliki’s — that pleaded for the cease-fire.

Perhaps all these mistaken judgments can be attributed to the fog of war. But Mr. McCain’s bigger strategic picture, immutable no matter what happens on the ground, is foggier still. Like Mr. Bush, he keeps selling Iraq as the central front in the war on Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda was not even a participant in the Basra battle, which was an eruption of a Shiite-vs.-Shiite civil war. (Al Qaeda is busy enough in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the actual central front in the war on terror.)

Mr. McCain is also fond of portraying Mr. Maliki’s “democracy” in Iraq as an essential bulwark against Iran; his surrogate Lindsey Graham habitually refers to Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army as “Iranian-backed militias.” But the political coalition and militia propping up Mr. Maliki are even closer to Iran than the Sadrists. McClatchy Newspapers reported last week that the Maliki-Sadr cease-fire was not only brokered in Iran but by a general whose name is on the Treasury Department’s terrorist list: the commander of the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

So this is where this latest defining moment in Iraq leaves us: with victories for Iran and Mr. Sadr, and with Iraqi forces that still can’t stand up (training cost to American taxpayers so far: $22 billion) so we can stand down. The Baghdad Green Zone, pummeled with lethal mortar fire, proved vulnerable once again. Basra remains so perilous that Britain has had to suddenly halt its planned troop withdrawals. Tony Blair had ordered the drawdown a year ago, after declaring that “the next chapter in Basra’s history will be written by the Iraqis.”

The surge is a success in exactly one way: American forces, by putting their lives on the line and benefiting from a now-defunct Sadr cease-fire, have reduced violence in Baghdad (though only to early 2005 levels). But as the Middle East scholar Juan Cole has written, “the ‘surge’ was never meant to be the objective but rather the means.”

None of the objectives have been met. Remember that “return on success” — as in returning troops — that Mr. Bush promised in January’s State of the Union? We will end 2008 with more Americans in Iraq than the 132,000 at the time the surge began. Even Gen. David Petraeus said last month that there has not been “sufficient progress” on the other most important objective, Iraqi political reconciliation. Mr. Maliki’s move against Mr. Sadr in Basra, done without even consulting Iraq’s “democratically elected” Parliament, was an attempt to take out his opponent by force rather than wait for the October provincial elections.

Not that other metrics are any brighter. At last, oil production sometimes reaches prewar levels. But a third or more of the oil, as The New York Times reported, is siphoned off to the black market, where it finances the insurgency. The projected date for turning over security operations to the Iraqis — first set for the end of 2006 by Iraqi officials, then moved up to the end of 2007 and July 2008 by our own Defense Department — is omitted entirely in the latest Pentagon report.

“We’re succeeding,” Mr. McCain said after his last trip to Iraq. “I don’t care what anybody says.” Again, it’s the last sentence that’s accurate. When General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before Congress again this week — against the backdrop of a million-Iraqi, anti-American protest called by Mr. Sadr — Mr. McCain will ram home all this “success” no matter the facts.

The difference between the Democrats and Mr. McCain going forward is clear enough: They want to find a way out of the morass, however provisional and imperfect, and he equates staying the disastrous course with patriotism. Mr. McCain’s doomed promise of military “victory” in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote’s perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, with much higher carnage. This isn’t patriotism. As the old saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping you’ll get a different result is the definition of insanity.

The Democrats should also stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.

More on McCain's spiritual advisor...

It is inconceivable to me that the little factoid that several of Senator McCain's "spritual advisors" to Evangelical America hasn't received some attention in the MSM, particularly given the amount of press provided to Rev. Wright.

Here's one of my favorites... Rod Parsley. Favorite quote - that the Islam prophet Mohammad "received revelations from demons and not from the true God."

McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam
Televangelist Rod Parsley, a key McCain ally in Ohio, has called for eradicating the "false religion." Will the GOP presidential candidate renounce him?"

David Corn, 2008

Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a "war" against the "false religion" of Islam with the aim of destroying it.

On February 26, McCain appeared at a campaign rally in Cincinnati with the Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, a supersize Pentecostal institution that features a 5,200-seat sanctuary, a television studio (where Parsley tapes a weekly show), and a 122,000-square-foot Ministry Activity Center. That day, a week before the Ohio primary, Parsley praised the Republican presidential front-runner as a "strong, true, consistent conservative." The endorsement was important for McCain, who at the time was trying to put an end to the lingering challenge from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a favorite among Christian evangelicals. A politically influential figure in Ohio, Parsley could also play a key role in McCain's effort to win this bellwether state in the general election. McCain, with Parsley by his side at the Cincinnati rally, called the evangelical minister a "spiritual guide."

The leader of a 12,000-member congregation, Parsley has written several books outlining his fundamentalist religious outlook, including the 2005 Silent No More. In this work, Parsley decries the "spiritual desperation" of the United States, and he blasts away at the usual suspects: activist judges, civil libertarians who advocate the separation of church and state, the homosexual "culture" ("homosexuals are anything but happy and carefree"), the "abortion industry," and the crass and profane entertainment industry. And Parsley targets another profound threat to the United States: the religion of Islam.

In a chapter titled "Islam: The Deception of Allah," Parsley warns there is a "war between Islam and Christian civilization." He continues:

I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.

Parsley is not shy about his desire to obliterate Islam. In Silent No More, he notes—approvingly—that Christopher Columbus shared the same goal: "It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492…Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America." He urges his readers to realize that a confrontation between Christianity and Islam is unavoidable: "We find now we have no choice. The time has come." And he has bad news: "We may already be losing the battle. As I scan the world, I find that Islam is responsible for more pain, more bloodshed, and more devastation than nearly any other force on earth at this moment."

Parsley claims that Islam is an "anti-Christ religion" predicated on "deception." The Muslim prophet Muhammad, he writes, "received revelations from demons and not from the true God." And he emphasizes this point: "Allah was a demon spirit." Parsley does not differentiate between violent Islamic extremists and other followers of the religion:

There are some, of course, who will say that the violence I cite is the exception and not the rule. I beg to differ. I will counter, respectfully, that what some call "extremists" are instead mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam.

The spirit of Islam, he maintains, is one of hostility. He asserts that the religion "inspired" the 9/11 attacks. He bemoans the fact that in the years after 9/11, 34,000 Americans "have become Muslim" and that there are "some 1,209 mosques" in America. Islam, he declares, is a "faith that fully intends to conquer the world" through violence. The United States, he insists, "has historically understood herself as a bastion against Islam," but "history is crashing in upon us."

At the end of his chapter on Islam, Parsley asks, "Are we a Christian nation? I say yes." Without specifying what actions should be taken to eradicate the religion, he essentially calls for a new crusade.

Parsley, who refers to himself as a "Christocrat," is no stranger to controversy. In 2007, the grassroots organization he founded, the Center for Moral Clarity, called for prosecuting people who commit adultery. In January, he compared Planned Parenthood to Nazis. In the past Parsley's church has been accused of engaging in pro-Republican partisan activities in violation of its tax-exempt status.

Why would McCain court Parsley? He has long had trouble figuring out how to deal with Christian fundamentalists, an important bloc for the Republican Party. During his 2000 presidential bid, he referred to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance." But six years later, as he readied himself for another White House run, McCain repudiated that remark. More recently, his campaign hit a rough patch when he accepted the endorsement of the Reverend John Hagee, a Texas televangelist who has called the Catholic Church "the great whore" and a "false cult system." After the Catholic League protested and called on McCain to renounce Hagee's support, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee praised Hagee's spiritual leadership and support of Israel and said that "when [Hagee] endorses me, it does not mean that I embrace everything that he stands for or believes in." After being further criticized for his Hagee connection, McCain backed off slightly, saying, "I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics." But McCain did not renounce Hagee's endorsement.

McCain's relationship with Parsley is politically significant. In 2004, Parsley's church was credited with driving Christian fundamentalist voters to the polls for George W. Bush. With Ohio expected to again be a decisive state in the presidential contest, Parsley's World Harvest Church and an affiliated entity called Reformation Ohio, which registers voters, could be important players within this battleground state. Considering that the Ohio Republican Party has been decimated by various political scandals and that a popular Democrat, Ted Strickland, is now the state's governor, McCain and the Republicans will need all the help they can get in the Buckeye State this fall. It's a real question: Can McCain win the presidency without Parsley?

The McCain campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding Parsley and his anti-Islam writings. Parsley did not return a call seeking comment.

"The last thing I want to be is another screaming voice moving people to extremes and provoking them to folly in the name of patriotism," Parsley writes in Silent No More. Provoking people to holy war is another matter. About that, McCain so far is silent.

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington, D.C. bureau chief.

American Conservative article on why Obama is "The Right Choice"

I believe in the honest tension that exists between classical liberalism and traditional conservatism. I believe that the best actually is developed in that tension when it is healthy (i.e., when disagreeing is not equated with being the "enemy").

This article is a great example of what real conservatism is - and I have nothing but respect for it's point of view and the eloquence with which it is stated. Good stuff!!

March 24, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative


The Right Choice?

The conservative case for Barack Obama

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Barack Obama is no conservative. Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives—and the state of the conservative movement—they could do worse.

Granted, when it comes to defining exactly what authentic conservatism entails, considerable disagreement exists even (or especially) among conservatives themselves. My own definition emphasizes the following:

a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;


a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;


veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for Creation;


a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;


respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;


a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.

Accept that definition and it quickly becomes apparent that the Republican Party does not represent conservative principles. The conservative ascendancy that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has been largely an illusion. During the period since 1980, certain faux conservatives—especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire—have prospered. But conservatism as such has not.

The presidency of George W. Bush illustrates the point. In 2001, President Bush took command of a massive, inefficient federal bureaucracy. Since then, he has substantially increased the size of that apparatus, which during his tenure has displayed breathtaking ineptitude both at home and abroad. Over the course of Bush’s two terms in office, federal spending has increased 50 percent to $3 trillion per year. Disregarding any obligation to balance the budget, Bush has allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 trillion. Worse, under the guise of keeping Americans “safe,” he has arrogated to the executive branch unprecedented powers, thereby subverting the Constitution. Whatever else may be said about this record of achievement, it does not accord with conservative principles.

As with every Republican leader since Reagan, President Bush has routinely expressed his support for traditional values. He portrays himself as pro-life and pro-family. He offers testimonials to old-fashioned civic virtues. Yet apart from sporting an American flag lapel-pin, he has done little to promote these values. If anything, the reverse is true. In the defining moment of his presidency, rather than summoning Americans to rally to their country, he validated conspicuous consumption as the core function of 21st-century citizenship.

Should conservatives hold President Bush accountable for the nation’s cultural crisis? Of course not. The pursuit of instant gratification, the compulsion to accumulate, and the exaltation of celebrity that have become central to the American way of life predate this administration and derive from forces that lie far beyond the control of any president. Yet conservatives should fault the president and his party for pretending that they are seriously committed to curbing or reversing such tendencies. They might also blame themselves for failing to see the GOP’s cultural agenda as contrived and cynical.

Finally, there is President Bush’s misguided approach to foreign policy, based on expectations of deploying American military might to eliminate tyranny, transform the Greater Middle East, and expunge evil from the face of the earth. The result has been the very inverse of conservatism. For Bush, in the wake of 9/11, ideology supplanted statecraft. As a result, his administration has squandered American lives and treasure in the pursuit of objectives that make little strategic sense.

For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it is.

Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.

Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.

The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home. The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.

So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.

To appreciate that possibility requires seeing the Iraq War in perspective. As an episode in modern military history, Iraq qualifies at best as a very small war. Yet the ripples from this small war will extend far into the future, with remembrance of the event likely to have greater significance than the event itself. How Americans choose to incorporate Iraq into the nation’s historical narrative will either affirm our post-Cold War trajectory toward empire or create opportunities to set a saner course.

The neoconservatives understand this. If history renders a negative verdict on Iraq, that judgment will discredit the doctrine of preventive war. The “freedom agenda” will command as much authority as the domino theory. Advocates of “World War IV” will be treated with the derision they deserve. The claim that open-ended “global war” offers the proper antidote to Islamic radicalism will become subject to long overdue reconsideration.

Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes. This explains the intensity with which they proclaim that, even with the fighting in Iraq entering its sixth year, we are now “winning”—as if war were an athletic contest in which nothing matters except the final score. The neoconservatives brazenly ignore or minimize all that we have flung away in lives, dollars, political influence, moral standing, and lost opportunities. They have to: once acknowledged, those costs make the folly of the entire neoconservative project apparent. All those confident manifestos calling for the United States to liberate the world’s oppressed, exercise benign global hegemony, and extend forever the “unipolar moment” end up getting filed under dumb ideas.

Yet history’s judgment of the Iraq War will affect matters well beyond the realm of foreign policy. As was true over 40 years ago when the issue was Vietnam, how we remember Iraq will have large political and even cultural implications.

As part of the larger global war on terrorism, Iraq has provided a pretext for expanding further the already bloated prerogatives of the presidency. To see the Iraq War as anything but misguided, unnecessary, and an abject failure is to play into the hands of the fear-mongers who insist that when it comes to national security all Americans (members of Congress included) should defer to the judgment of the executive branch. Only the president, we are told, can “keep us safe.” Seeing the war as the debacle it has become refutes that notion and provides a first step toward restoring a semblance of balance among the three branches of government.

Above all, there is this: the Iraq War represents the ultimate manifestation of the American expectation that the exercise of power abroad offers a corrective to whatever ailments afflict us at home. Rather than setting our own house in order, we insist on the world accommodating itself to our requirements. The problem is not that we are profligate or self-absorbed; it is that others are obstinate and bigoted. Therefore, they must change so that our own habits will remain beyond scrutiny.

Of all the obstacles to a revival of genuine conservatism, this absence of self-awareness constitutes the greatest. As long as we refuse to see ourselves as we really are, the status quo will persist, and conservative values will continue to be marginalized. Here, too, recognition that the Iraq War has been a fool’s errand—that cheap oil, the essential lubricant of the American way of life, is gone for good—may have a salutary effect. Acknowledging failure just might open the door to self-reflection.

None of these concerns number among those that inspired Barack Obama’s run for the White House. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s habit of spouting internationalist bromides suggests little affinity for serious realism. His views are those of a conventional liberal. Nor has Obama expressed any interest in shrinking the presidency to its pre-imperial proportions. He does not cite Calvin Coolidge among his role models. And however inspiring, Obama’s speeches are unlikely to make much of a dent in the culture. The next generation will continue to take its cues from Hollywood rather than from the Oval Office.

Yet if Obama does become the nation’s 44th president, his election will constitute something approaching a definitive judgment of the Iraq War. As such, his ascent to the presidency will implicitly call into question the habits and expectations that propelled the United States into that war in the first place. Matters hitherto consigned to the political margin will become subject to close examination. Here, rather than in Obama’s age or race, lies the possibility of his being a truly transformative presidency.

Whether conservatives will be able to seize the opportunities created by his ascent remains to be seen. Theirs will not be the only ideas on offer. A repudiation of the Iraq War and all that it signifies will rejuvenate the far Left as well. In the ensuing clash of visions, there is no guaranteeing that the conservative critique will prevail.

But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation’s heedless march toward empire will continue. So, too, inevitably, will its embrace of Leviathan. Whether snoozing in front of their TVs or cheering on the troops, the American people will remain oblivious to the fate that awaits them.

For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.
_________________________________

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His next book, The Limits of Power, will be published in August.

George Lakoff on Obama's "More Perfect Union" Speech

My brother turned me on to George Lakoff, a linguistics professor from Berkeley and founder of the Rockridge Institute, who I believe provides the only rational basis for why the NeoRepublicans have become so successful in elections despite the fact that they provide little nutritional value. His books on the framing of discussions and topics is very illuminating and worth the time to read.

In any event, as the chirping heads went on about the "race speech" Obama gave the week before last, Lakoff uses his expertise to dissect the speech for what it really was - a speech on unity, and perhaps the best ever given. In all the bobble-headed talk about Obama's oratory skills, it's important to remember that it is the content that is what is truly different.


What Made Obama's Speech Great
By George Lakoff, Open Left
Posted on March 26, 2008, Printed on April 2, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80549/

We are on the cusp of a new politics in America. It should be dated from March 18, 2008, the date of Barack Obama's landmark speech "A More Perfect Union." The usual pundits have looked mainly at the speech's surface theme: race. They weren't wrong. It was indeed the most important statement about race in recent history.

But it was much more. It was a general call to a new politics and an outline for what it needs to be. Just as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was about much more than the war dead on that battlefield, so Obama's speech -- widely hailed as in the same ballpark as Lincoln's -- went beyond race to the nature of America, its ideals and its future.

To get an appreciation for the greatness of Obama's speech, we have to start with its context: What were the problems Obama faced in writing it, and what were the constraints on him?

He was under severe political attack, both from Republican conservatives and from the Clinton wing of his own party. Here's what he was facing:

Racial divisions and identity politics had been injected into the campaign by his opponents and the media. The effect was to position him, as an African-American, as being opposed to the interests of whites and Hispanics.

An attack on his and his wife's patriotism.

A claim that he was really a Muslim.

A repeatedly shown film clip of his long-time pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who had married him and his wife and baptized his daughters, making embarrassing remarks taken as anti-American and anti-Semitic.

One of the hallmarks of his campaign has been good judgment on foreign policy; his opponents claimed that his connection to Wright had shown bad judgment.

Another hallmark of his campaign has been authenticity, telling the truth. Two of his advisors had made remarks -- one on NAFTA and one on Iraq -- that opponents had twisted to make it seem that he was lying. He had to establish himself as truthful.

Another hallmark of his campaign has been values. His opponents had claimed that his values were unknown and that the public didn't know who he was.

His opponents had claimed that he could not stand up to strong opposition.

He was in the center of an intensely divisive campaign while pressing unity as a major theme.

His opponents had claimed that his eloquence was all talk and no action.

In addition, Sen. Obama faced certain constraints on what he could say:

He understands that people vote primarily on the basis of character and how he would govern: on values, authenticity, trust and identity, and only secondarily on fine policy details (See Thinking Points). He could not ignore the problems and hope they would go away. They wouldn't. Since he was being attacked on all of these character and governance issues, he had to confront them all.

He had been putting forth a vision of bipartisanship opposite that of Sen. Clinton. In her bipartisanship, she moved to the right, giving up on fundamental values. In his bipartisanship, he understands that "conservatives" and "independents" often share fundamental American values with him. Instead of giving up on his values, he finds those outside his party who share them. His speech had to have such an appeal.

The honesty and openness of his declared new politics required him to be consistent with his previous statements.

He could not explicitly go negative and still continue to campaign on civility and unity. He could only go positive and evoke implicit negatives.

He could neither accept his opponents framing of him, nor argue explicitly against that framing. If he did either, he would just strengthen their frames. He had to impose his own framing, while being true to his values and his campaign themes.

He could not go on the defensive; that would just encourage his detractors. He had to show leadership.

Though he might have felt frustrated or even angry, leadership demanded that he be his usual calm self, embracing, not attacking, even those who opposed him. He had to be what he was talking about.

Try to imagine being in this position and having to write a speech overnight. And yet he wrote not a speech, but the speech -- one of the greatest ever.

As a linguist, I am tempted to describe the surface features: the intonation, the meter, the grammatical parallelisms, the choice of words. These contribute to eloquence. I'm sure the linguistics community will jump in and do that analysis. Instead, I want to talk about the structure of ideas.

Any framing study begins with communicative framing, the context. Contextual frames carry ideas. Sen. Obama is patriotic, and he had to communicate not only the fact of his patriotism, but also the content of it. And he had to do it in a way that fit unquestionable and shared American values. Where did he give his speech kicking off his Pennsylvania campaign? Not in Scranton or Pittsburgh or Hershey, but in Philadelphia, home of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and at once home of one of America's largest African-American communities. What building was it in? Constitution Hall. How did he appear onstage? Surrounded by flags. He is tall and thin, as were the flagstaffs, which were about the same height. He was visually one with the flag, one with America. No picture of him could be taken without a flag shaped like him, without an identification of man and country.

How did he start the speech? With the first line of the Constitution: "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union ..." He called the speech "A More Perfect Union." And that's what it was about. Union: about inclusiveness not divisiveness; about responsibility for each other not just oneself; about seeing the country and world in terms of cooperation, not competition or isolation. More perfect: admitting the imperfections of being human and making a commitment to do better; distinguishing the ideals on parchment from the reality that our actions must forge. A more perfect union: looking to a better future that it is up to us to make, and that can only be done by transcending divisiveness and coming together around the ideals of our Constitution.

That is what he has meant by "hope" and "change." It is the general message. And race, though a special case, is one the hardest issues to address. And though his opponents will continue to promote and exploit racial divisiveness, race is an area where huge progress has been made and needs to be made visible. If there is to be a test of character and leadership -- a test of honesty, openness, strength, and integrity on his part, and good will and American values on the part of American citizens, race is as tough a test case as any. Not a test of Obama, but a test of America. A test of whether Americans will live American ideals. No pussyfooting. No sweeping it under the rug. This election sets a direction for the country. Will we face our problems and follow our ideals or not? Obama can hold the mirror up to us, and he can endeavor to lead the march. What he asks is whether we are ready to continue the march, "a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America."

Most of the adjectives are familiar in political speeches: just, equal, free and prosperous. What is the crucial addition, right in the middle, is "caring." A day later, Anderson Cooper asked him on CNN what he meant by patriotism. His response began with "caring about one another." The choice of words is careful. In his Martin Luther King Day speech this year, Obama spoke repeatedly of the "empathy deficit," the need to be "more caring."

Empathy, as I showed in my book Moral Politics, is at the heart of progressive politics in America. And as UCLA historian Lynn Hunt has shown in her book Inventing Human Rights: A History, the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness became self-evident by 1776 through the development of empathy. Democracy is based on empathy, on the bonds of care and responsibility that link us together and make us a nation.

It is the mark of a great speech, not just to mention its themes but to exemplify those themes. Empathy, union and common responsibility are the ideas behind the speech, as well as the ideas behind the New Politics; and as the speech shows, they are behind the idea of America itself. The speech works via empathy, via the emotional structure built into the speech and into our national ideals. The speech works because, almost line by line, it evokes those foundational ideals -- the ideals we have and feel, but that have been far too long hidden behind political cynicism, political fear, and the concern for advantage. And it is the mark of political courage to confront those monsters head on at the most critical point in a campaign for the presidency, when one could play it safe and just count delegates but instead chooses the right but difficult path.

At this point, the symbolic structure of the speech becomes easier to see.

He begins by discussing the achievement of the Declaration of Independence in uniting the states, while seeing its flaw -- the country's "original sin of slavery," part of the deal to get South Carolina to join the union. The nation is great, and still flawed -- and loved for its greatness despite its flaws.

The same is true of Reverend Wright. Reverend Wright's history symbolizes the history of his generation of African-Americans -- a bitter history of oppression by whites in an America in denial: segregation, legalized discrimination, lynchings, a brutal fight for basic civil rights. His bitterness and that of his generation is real and understandable. We can empathize with him. And we empathize even more when we learn of his positive accomplishments: service in the Marine Corps and speaking to Obama "about our obligations to love one another, to care for the sick and lift up the poor. And he lived what he preached: "housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS." He preached empathy, he lived empathy, and we empathize with him for that.

And yet Reverend Wright's statements as shown in the TV clips were wrong. Not just incorrect, but morally wrong: divisive and harmful, raising what is wrong with America above all that is right with America. Obama condemns those statements. But he won't fall into the same mistake, raising what is wrong with the man above all that is right with the man. Obama loves and is loyal to his flawed country, just as he loves and is loyal to this flawed but fundamentally good man. Just as he loves his wonderful white grandmother who is flawed by occasional racial stereotypes. His relationship with Reverend Wright shows in Obama a positive character: love and loyalty while acknowledging the reality of flaws and not being taken in by them. It is good judgment, not bad judgment -- about Wright and about America.

But Obama is not just black; he is half white. His wife has in her veins the blood of both slaves and slave owners. Obama's empathy is not just for black America but equally for white America. He speaks of the real troubles of poor white Americans, and their real and legitimate feelings of anger and resentment. But both black anger and white resentment are counterproductive. They create divisiveness when unity is needed to overcome "the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many." The poor -- black and white and brown -- are all victims of the real culprits, whose weapon is fear and divisiveness. Race gets in the way. It is a distraction from dealing with corporate greed.

Another culprit that stands in the way is the media, which uses race for its own ends -- as spectacle (the O.J. trial), tragedy (Katrina), and "fodder for the nightly news." Obama is courageous here. He is taking on a media that has been especially underhanded with him, helping the Right spread guilt by association by showing the Reverend Wright tape snippets over and over. For a candidate to talk straight to the media about what it is doing to harm the country is courageous, to say the least.

A bit of courage for a candidate who seeks the votes of Republicans is to point out that a serious flaw of Reverend Wright's is also a central flaw of conservatism: "the notion of self-help, or what conservatives call individual responsibility. It is central to conservative Christianity as well: whether you go to heaven or hell is a matter of individual responsibility. It is a mistake in both religion and politics.

What is called for is nothing less than what all the world's great religions demand -- that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect our spirit as well.

American politics and religion come together on these moral grounds: empathy and responsibility both for oneself and others.

And with all the Christian references in the speech, it is hard to imagine him as a Muslim.

Obama begins the close of his speech with a riff on how talk is action: "This time we want to talk about ..." followed by the plights of Americans, plights that arouse our empathy -- or should. Speech, Obama tells us, is action. Collective speech changes brains and minds, and when the minds of voters change, material change is possible. And if ever a speech was an act, this speech is it.

The closing portion is pure empathy -- the story of Ashley and the old black man. Ashley, a white girl, out of empathy for her struggling mother, ate mustard and relish on bread for a year to save on food money. She became a community organizer out of empathy for those in her community who were struggling. At an event she organized, she asked everyone to say why they were there. She told her story, others told theirs, and when they came to the old black man, he said simply, "I'm here because of Ashley." The empathy of an old black man for a young white woman. A moral for us all.

The true power of the speech is that it does what it says. It not only talks about empathy, it creates it.

The speech achieves its power not just through the literal and the obvious. Family metaphors abound: the nation is a family; the nation's future is its children; it's flawed past is its older citizens, scarred by past flaws. "The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids ..." The nation is a family, and we have to care for our kids.

It is a common metaphor that an institution is seen as a person, with the special case that a nation is understood in terms of its leader. In this speech, Obama becomes contemporary America: as America is of mixed race, he is of mixed race; as Americans have benefited from advances over past flaws, so he has benefited. His story is an "only in America story," an American dream story. His candidacy is only possible in America. Indeed his genes are only possible in America. How could he be anything but patriotic when he is America? And how can we, identifying with him, be anything but patriotic when we are America?

No, this is not, as the New York Times says on its website, "a speech on race." It is a speech on what America is about, on what American values are, on what patriotism is, on who the real culprits are, and on the kind of new politics needed if we are to make progress in transcending those flaws that are still very much with us.

Finally it is a speech about policy and how he would govern. When he says "This time we want to talk about ..." he is listing a policy agenda: education, healthcare, overcoming special interests, creating good jobs, saving homes, fighting corporate greed that works against the common good, creating unity, bringing the troops home from Iraq, and taking care of our veterans. As a list, this looks like Sen. Clinton's list. But there is a crucial difference.

Sen. Clinton speaks constantly of "interests." In doing so, she is doing what many other Democrats have done before her, engaging in interest group politics, where policy means finding some demographic group that has been ill-served by the market or government, and then proposing a governmental redress: a tax break here, a subsidy there, a new regulation. Obama does not speak of interests and seeks to transcend interest groups and interest group politics. That is at the heart of this speech. When we transcend interest groups, we transcend interest group politics.

And when he says, "I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents ..." he is making a foreign policy statement, that foreign policy is not just about states and national interests, but about people and the world's family.

What makes this great speech great is that it transcends its immediate occasion and addresses in its form as well as its words the most vital of issues: what America is about: who are, and are to be, as Americans; and what politics should be fundamentally about.

The media has missed this. But we must not.

The media has gone back to the horse race, reporting counts of delegates and superdelegates, campaign attacks, who endorses whom, and this week's polls. Hardly irrelevant, but not the main event.

The main event is the new politics, what has excited Americans about this election, what has brought young people out to political speeches, and what has led voters to wait for hours in the cold just to catch a glimpse of a candidate for president who has been saying what they have been waiting to hear. It is this:

The essence of America was there in its founding documents, carried out imperfectly and up to us to keep alive and work toward as best we can.

At the heart of our democracy is empathy-made-real, a political arrangement through which we care for one another, protect one another, create joint prosperity and help one another lead fulfilling lives.

America is a family and its future is our children -- to be nurtured and attuned to nature, fed and housed well, educated to their capacities, kept healthy and helped to prosper, made whole through music and the arts, and provided with institutions that bring them together in these ongoing responsibilities.

The strength of America is in its ideals and how we act them out.

Americans have come here from around the globe, with family, ethnic and cultural ties to virtually every country and with human ties to people everywhere. Our actions in the world must reflect this.

All of this is politics. Politics is essentially ethical, it is about what is right. And the nuts and bolts of determining legitimate political authority -- the fund-raising, the on-the-ground organization, the speeches, the campaign ads, the voter registration and the counting of ballots -- should reflect these values as well.

That is the politics Americans have yearned for, and though we don't have it yet and it won't be here tomorrow, it is what so many of us are working for and that we have glimpsed through this speech.

No matter who wins the Democratic nomination and the presidential election in 2008, these ideals are not going to be fully realized right away. No candidate is perfect on this score, nor could be. But this is the vision. It sets the goals that I believe most Americans seek. We can make progress toward it in hundreds of ways. But in its vision it will always be the New Politics we seek as Americans, in 2012, 2016, 2020 and beyond.

George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley; senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute; and author of the forthcoming The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain (Viking/Penguin), available June 2, 2008.
© 2008 Open Left All rights reserved.
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