Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016
Tonight as the (mostly) white voters cast their highly anticipated votes in the New Hampshire Primary the rest of the nation can start breathing a sigh of relief as the formal start of ending a Black man's residency in the white house can begin. Actually this presidential primary "season" started about 8 years ago when Barack Obama was elected President - it began the day of his inauguration when Republican leaders led by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Newt Gingrich and a contingent of Corporate Media owners and hacks decided to see that Obama would be a one-term president. They would do nothing to help him help America. We know some of that story by now and it still lives in the constant coverage of these 2016 primaries and selections of the mostly unqualified candidates.
The news coverage tonight and during the day was a culmination of the constant speculating, goading, and teasing that cablenews America has been serving up for the past 8 years- it seems most of the time they were featuring potential candidates to replace the Black man in the white house- as if they couldn't wait to see who would replace him. Their excitement is palpable. As their poll readings and numbers game continues they like to talk about "the mood" of the voters- they use phrases like "the electorate is tired of the lying and procrastinations of the pols in Washington", their "distrust" of government, they're "suspicious of Washington insiders"- and if you hadn't been paying attention yourself these past few years you would think they were talking specifically of Obama himself for they never articulate the reason for such an impasse or call out the Republican candidates willful mendaciousness and hypocrisy.
They prefer the train wreck of a Trump candidacy, the pathetic posturings of a Ben Carson, the hysterics and defamations of a Carly Fiorina (that is when she is mentioned), the slime and shame of a Cruz speech, the belchings of a Christie and the whinings of a Rubio and the "sudden" moderateness of Kasich- the questions posed to both Clinton and Sanders are posed as if to set off a cat fight- it makes for better TV- not necessarily a better electorate- lets face it- of all these political heroes only Sanders-it seems- has not been pre-selected by the corporate barons and their media. There are other voices that should be heard during this charade- i.e. Jill Stein of the Green Party-but we will never hear them on Chuck Todd's marathon newsfest every week or the Sunday pundit panels that feature the same people week after week- (sometimes Peggy gets to do all three shows) No. Tonight, America gets to begin to "be White again".
"Conservatism, not Radicalism, threatens the free exchange of ideas, intellectual tolerance, and the life of the mind in Academia." - Herbert Shapiro
"In any discussion of the problems in our world today, racism must rank high. Not because we are soft-minded liberals obsessed with countless crimes throughout history induced by colour, religion, tribalism or chauvinism of one kind or another. But because the poison which we hoped and believed had been eradicated in our own time by the knowledge of the ultimate evil- the gas-chamber murders committed by the Nazis--is in fact still present, not in any one area of discrimination or racism, or in a restricted number of specific rulers or governments, but in all humankind. I call it "Inner Racism."-
Gitta Sereny, "The Healing Wound"
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