Two days into blogging, and what do I discover?
Someone else who also agrees that Ma'at's Feather is a perfect symbol for political discussion.
Giving this person, whose blog has existed since November, 2004, his/her due:
Ma'at's Feather
Needless to say, when I did my search for whether this name existed, I clearly missed a platform. Oh, well, obviously I cannot keep this blog name, whatever the case. Damn.
Well, off I go to try to think of a new one, so I can port everything over to the new name.
UPDATE: The new site is Political Sapphire
Good question. It depends on how you define the word "Me".
If I am looking at myself as a politically active Democrat, then the answer is obvious - of course he does. He is the chosen, and rightfully so, Chairman of the Democratic Party. Chosen by the grassroots, and therefore with far more legitimacy with me as a Democratic voter than Terry McAuliffe and other handpicked members of the DNC ever had.
On the other hand, if you define "Me" in broader terms, I'm not so sure he always does. Some of the views I hold line up perfectly with his. Others do not. The two that definitely do not are the view that no Republicans have ever really worked for a living (last week's tempest in a teapot), or this week's current fervor -- Howard Dean's statement earlier this week that "the GOP is a White, Christian, Party". Chairman Dean sticks by his story that his criticism, as originally expressed, is valid:
Dean Defending Dean
On the leftists side of the debate over these words, folks are in a frenzy about members of the Democratic Party leadership who publicly distanced themselves from this statement (as well as the earlier one, to the effect that Republicans are folk who don't work for a living). Depending on whose words you listen to, each and every one of them is a "traitor" "sell-out" or even "the enemy". It's gotten to the point where there is now a petition drive called "Howard Dean Speaks for Me":
Dean Speaks for Me Campaign
I have to wonder when folks believe that a petition somehow is a valid indicia of the validity of any particular sentiment within any political party....(although the poster Glynis deserves serious props for doing what so few are willing to do - take her viewpoint and invest her own time and energy to run with it politically. I have nothing but respect for that.)
Indeed, the actual policy positions taken at critical junctures by some of this week's Dean critics (Biden and Feinstein and Lieberman come most to mind) could indeed justify these labels. But Barack Obama? John Edwards? These folks have demonstrated that they too can get down and dirty in the grassroots when they had to. Given this, watching their progressive "credentials" rhetoric-buried out of existence merely because they aren't 100% on board with Howard Dean's divisive remarks is a depressing sight.
On the other side? Well those in the GOP leadership who are not gleeful over Chairman Dean's remarks feel very hurt because what he said was "mean" or "unfair." When it comes to the leadership of the GOP, Howard Dean was right beyond right, all tokens notwithstanding. That being said, I personally could care less about whether Howard Dean said something "mean" about Republicans. Mean doesn't bother me, since I say some pretty mean things about Republicans myself from time to time - when some policy or position taken by their party leadership is deserving of it (and far too many positions are). Republicans who do not distance themselves from those policies cannot complain of getting that which is rightfully coming to them.
However, neither party discipline or meanness is the issue here. The issue is accuracy, truth, and viewing our two-party system in non-simplistic terms. Simplistic terms that you get to only if you're not willing to actually look beyond the faces at political conventions and actually look at the grassroots. The truth is that there are huge percentages of nonwhite, non-Christian folks who are registered Republicans, no matter how they actually vote come election time. This is nothing new - it has been true for a very long time. If the Democratic Party hopes to bring them into the Big Tent, our party leadership, starting with Howard Dean, needs to stop following the exact same playbook followed by the Republican Party where it comes to these crucial voters: Stop acting like they don't exist unless you can score political points from, identifying, and using them, only when it gains you some tactical or rhetorical advantage.
Finally, in defense of Howard Dean, I think he has been and continues to be an excellent choice for Chairman of the Party if he can just get a bit more used to hearing himself talk before he actually opens his mouth. His heart is in the right place, and he is 100% right when he says that now is not the time to speak softly when it comes to what's going on in our country. Dean just needs some "seasoning" speaking to audiences just a wee bit more diverse than those he found in Vermont and in the caucuses before he pulled out last year. Some common sense about how to fire his base up -- by more than just primal screaming, itself a useful tool for which he took way too much unfair heat -- without simultaneously showing the back of his hand to folks who are registered the way they are for reasons having nothing to do with being white, being Christian or being wealthy. Folks who with time and guidance could be shown that they really need to be on board with the Democratic Party when it really counts - at election time. It tells you something when Barack Obama and John Edwards -- not exactly DLCers -- are themselves given pause by what Dean said this week. These are not the "Old Guard" of the party, folks who are wholly bought and paid for by corporate interests, but its future.
I have a lot of hope for Howard Dean, going forward. But one can support him, believe in him, and still refuse to get on board or tolerate silently his myopia when it comes to the question: "Who is a Democrat and Who is a Republican?".
So does Howard Dean speak for me? It depends. When it comes to taking political positions and holding the GOP to task for its relentless attack on American values and American rights, yes, he does. When it comes to claims that the Republican Party is a white Christian party, no, I'm afraid that he doesn't.
The First World(TM) murmur over the ongoing genocide in Darfur stuns me. I know there is a lot going on in the world, but at what point does systematic extermination of a people begin to demand some SERIOUS hollering from us so-called generous caring Americans? The roots of the current genocide go back to at least 2000, yet here we are in 2005 and it's getting no better. The extermination of Black Africans in Darfur and Southen Sudan continues to be a blip on our national consciousness. Our collective discussion about it? An intermittent whisper, and not a roar.
The racial cynicist in me understands it intellectually: Black folk. Dead Black folk. Murdered Black folk. This narrative doesn't get much media play here in the US when it happens here every day (unless it both evokes and reinforces neat, racist stereotypes of Black dysfunction). So there is no rational reason to expect any different apathy when we're talking about Black folks more than 10,000 miles away, who most Black Americans don't appear to feel any meaningful solidarity with.
I'm not sure which troubles me more - the willful lack of caring of the political right, who I truly don't expect to give a damn about human suffering no matter how much they claim to be Christian Soldiers fighting for Life (TM) or the equally bad shrug of silence from most of the political left. Whatever the case, both approaches result in more people dying.
So, perhaps the eloquence of living and dying history, written today in the LA Times by a journalist who spent a week in 1994's Rwandan hell, will shake enough people awake to *do* something meaningful -- and I'm not talking about sending in "peacekeeping forces" with no ability to actually do anything but watch -- before Darfur makes the genocide of nearly a million people in Rwanda look like just a trial run:
There is Evil
No similar, human, stories have yet come out of Darfur - but if the experience described in today's LA Times shares any parallels, we can only imagine what it must be like. Maybe if George Romero made a film about it we'd get the picture.
I'm not a big believer in slogans when people are dying, but here's one we should all be able to get behind:
Darfur: A Genocide We Can Stop.
Open your hearts. Open your wallets. Save lives. No Blood for Oil, or whatever else political activists need to chant to get truly fired up. For those who are truly not in-the-know, there is reportedly a lot of oil in southern Sudan. Folks like Amnesty International have made a pretty compelling case that this is the major reason why nobody with the power to put a rapid end to the human suffering seems to really mind what is happening in the Southern Sudan:
Sudan: The Human Price for Oil
Whatever the reasons, the Powers that Be(TM) starting with the Sudanese government itself and ending up in the First World (TM) fiddle away while the Janjaweed - Arab mercenaries - systematically exterminate and displace the entirety of the native Black African tribes, most of whom are agrarian and live a way that hard-core oil exploration simply finds inconvenient for its robustness.
The LA Times article linked above has a quote from Elie Wiesel that resonates with me, so it's today's money quote:
...[T]he role of the journalist is to speak for those who have no voice.
I'm no journalist, but I'm speaking anyway.
(Finally, because I believe in props for doing the right thing, a sincere thanks to my alma mater for this week divesting itself of its direct investments in the companies involved in Sudanese oil production:
Stanford's Sudan Divestment.)
I love law. I usually love lawyers. Well, OK, except for the ones currently working on the criminal side of Dubbya's "war on terrorism".
It tells you what kind of world we live in post 9/11, and definitely post-Bush Administration. Today, we have attorneys admitting, with a straight face, that the highly-damning, detail-loaded "affidavit" regarding the "Lodi Terrorists" (TM) they trumpeted all over the media as the smoking gun of Terrorists in Our Midst (TM) could not be submitted to a judge so that he or she could actually test its factual merit in a way that the media and most of the public are totally unqualified to do:
"Lodi Affidavit" Bait and Switch
For those who missed it (and you shouldn't have), five Muslims were arrested yesterday in Lodi, California in what was described as a roundup of terrorists in California's beautiful San Joaquin Valley. Two of them, father and son, allegedly confessed to having sent the son to an al Qaida training camp in Pakistan so that the son could be "trained to kill Americans." (Of course, we could spend hours talking about why American citizens needed to undertake expensive travel to someone else's country to do what they could learn to do right here at home from the same organization that taught Timothy McVeigh the tricks of the trade, but that's another discussion for another day). And kill us in some of the most vulnerable locations - hospitals and large grocery stores. When the few media skeptics demanded to know what proof they had to support this extraordinary story, DOJ press representatives insisted that there was a confession from the son, and disseminated to the media an affidavit which allegedly set forth the factual basis for their arrest of father and son.
That affidavit was nowhere to be found, however, when it was time to actually file it with the Court to support a finding of probable cause for these men to stand trial for something. The stated reason that different versions of this key document were being used in different contexts? It was ""An unfortunate oversight due to miscommunication".
Miscommunication about WHAT exactly? I can't speak for you, but it seems to me that it is pretty hard to "miscommunicate" about someone having a terrorist plot to target hospitals and supermarkets and Kill Americans.
I don't know - maybe it's just me.
Here's the money quote:
Sacramento FBI spokesman John Cauthen said the deletions in the document were made because the original details were "not relevant or not accurate in context" for the purpose of proving a probable cause to arrest Hamid Hayat and his father.
I have to ask: Is this man saying with a straight face that these alleged details
are more accurate when they were used yesterday morning to incite folks in the San Joaquin Valley into fear-induced incontinence over the thought of being victimized by a terrorist attack while they were visiting a sick relative in the hospital or picking up their evening dinner than they were when it was time to present those details to a detached neutral?
Why, yes, I believe he is.
Who are these folks trying to kid? Dumb question, because I already know the answer - the vast majority of Americans who do not practice criminal law and/or have a law degree, and therefore do not know the difference between an affidavit showing probable cause (sworn under oath) and a press statement/release (say whatever you want). Even if one concedes the "irrelevant" part to the government, since after all no lawyer includes all of her/his factual detail in pleadings, how in the hell can anyone defend disseminating facts (and I use the term loosely) which had to be left out of a legal pleading because they were
inaccurate?
The government has told so many lies and 1/2 truths at this point about imminent terrorist threats right here on American soil I can't even keep them straight anymore. Of course, a careful observer cannot help but note that they are almost always carefully timed to coincide with the release and/or increased dissemination of the
real news occurring at the same time. Yesterday's "real news" was the five brave Marines blown to bits during the military and moral nightmare that is Iraq post-US invasion; DOJ's belated release of its own scathing report confirming that our government blew at least
five chances to catch up to some of the 9/11 terrorists in the months immediately preceding 9/11; and of course the increasing drumbeat for accountability that is finally beating in earnest about the Downing Street Memo.
Of course, we all know that the best way to keep a questioning, thinking public from questioning and thinking about what their government is up to is to keep them scared to death. Even if you have to lie.
Oh Hell, What on Earth am I Doing?
Well, I finally took the plunge into the moving surf that my toe has been dipping in for over a year. I started a "blog."
What on earth does that mean? I guess it means that I have come -- or am trying to come -- full circle. To reintroduce, without fear, the little Brooklyn Black 6 year old womanchild who once readily put forth the maelstrom of her thoughts about everything to the womanist that has emerged following the next 38 years of being friend, lover, wife, mother, activist, scribe, lawyer and political blog participant.
It's a scary process, coming "home" in that sense.
What prompted this? Well, it's either a sense of impending mortality I never possessed before, a frustration that I have a lot to say but precious few to say it to in more than passing snippets, or, perhaps most fundamentally, a sense that I was writing my thoughts, my opinions, my political self, to expand everyone's thought process but my own. On other blogs. Chiming in as a voice, whether seen as harmonious or discordant, instead of singing my own lead based on my own experience. I'd speculate that the reason why this has been the case, even though thoughts are constant for me, is the fear of being judged unworthy to write, unworthy to be heard.
We'll find out, I guess.
