Politics Make Strange Bedfellows!

               Hypocrisy in black and White

Evangelical Christianity Vs. Free Market Theology

The Republicans held a Family Forum on recent Saturday, in Iowa, the state where a current poll identified 37% as born-again Christians.  Romney and Huntsman did not accept the invitation to discuss the social value concerns of conservatives in Iowa.  The new frontrunner, Gingrich, participated, along with Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, Perry and Paul. 

In a time when the official unemployment rate is 9 percent, homes are being foreclosed in the millions and the economy is growing at a snail’s pace, the pre-occupation of the electorate is not on social issues but on jobs. But there is the intersection of family, morality and economic policy.  In the closing stages of the discourse, the moderator raised the question what is the moral justification for war.  As the presidential candidates spoke, the moderator kept repeating the question as no one was willing to wrestle with the moral question of war.

The Republican Party prides itself with having an evangelical base. During the Bush/Rove years of conservative ascendancy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the mobilization of the evangelical vote was critical to the electoral strategy.  It is not surprising that Mitt Romney despite the unpreparedness and moral baggage of his opponents has not been able to increase his percentage of support in the Party above 25 percent.  Romney’s baggage is his born-again transformation on abortion.  And there is also the hanging question about evangelicals and whether they are willing to accept someone of the Mormon faith as a Christian.

Mitt the Chameleon and his booster Jersey Fats

 Would you buy a used car from These Mugs?

Ron Paul was a presidential candidate in the previous cycle and as is the case this time around.  He has argued that the United States is a world trouble- maker and the troops should return home and the multitude of bases around the world closed.  Such a position does not sit well with conservatives or neo-conservatives that support the notion that America must be the policeman of the world and must continue to spend handsomely on national security.

The retort given to the moral justification of war was the moral imperative to protect America’s national interest.  Candidates like Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann and Cain expressed a willingness to order a pre-emptive strike against Iran to halt that country’s development of nuclear weapons.

The Family Forum failed to deal adequately with family or with moral issues.  There is a line of march which every Republican candidate is expected to drink from the communal cup.  All the candidates are expected to be pro-life although the discussion did not get into the controversial ballot issue that went down in defeat in Mississippi that presumably conception began with the release of the egg.

A for real Madman but……

The sanest Republican on Foreign Policy and the Military

All candidates are vehemently opposed to same sex marriage and favor a constitutional amendment that specifies that marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman.  Ron Paul accepted the creed but was opposed to “federalizing” the issue as he felt that is a matter for the church and the states.  Family is an important issue in American presidential politics.

Traditionally, America would not elect or select a Party nominee who was divorced.  Reagan shattered that tradition.  Americans want some family togetherness in the White House.  Herman Cain’s campaign has been damaged by the unproven charges of sexual harassment.  Newt Gingrich’s divorces will make his candidacy less palatable to those in the evangelical movement.

The question of family goes beyond that of abortion, divorce or same sex marriage.  A family is an economic entity and is assisted or affected by public policy.  Most advanced European countries offer benefits to a mother after giving birth.  The United States in terms of legislation, offers family leave but not a certain amount of financial support after the birth of the child as it is in the case in Canada.

There is a concern for the child until the child leaves the womb.  Justification is made for the state to protect life in the womb but once that child has entered the world screaming, the conservative values suffer the same fate as the umbilical cord.  In debate after debate, the line of march is that the market is the moral force.  When asked about the foreclosure crisis, the candidates invariably bellowed that the market should be allowed to resolve the situation.

The social gospel of Christianity does not synchronize with economic gospel of the market economy.  In many respects, this is a peculiarity of American politics. In Brazil and other Latin American countries, liberation theology emerged as a social movement that had its origins in the Catholic Church in the 1970s.  The Vatican hierarchy moved decisively to stamp out the social gospel of liberation theology, which took the position that the equitable distribution of wealth and the predicament of the poor were matters that were germane to the mission of the church.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was comfortable connecting the social gospel with the need to fight against the “banality of evil”, using non-violence and mass mobilization throughout the South and elsewhere where Martin Luther King, Jr. fought racism and Jim Crow.  The civil rights movement was integrally linked to the black church.

The Family Forum never raised the issue of poverty in America.  The Census Bureau has redefined poverty in America and has discovered that over fifty million Americans are in the category of near poor.  In a nation of over three hundred million, over a third of the populace are in the precarious position of being poor or near poor yet that is not a burning issue to evangelicals or those concerned with family values.

There is this great disjuncture between the values of Christianity and the market economy.  In the 2008 presidential election, there had emerged cracks in the evangelical movement as the younger generation became concerned with issues of poverty and the environment.  If the market economy is allowed to be the mechanism for solving all our social problems, there will be a tremendous upsurge of unrest all over the country.  People will demand some kind of redress of grievances and demand that the market economy be modified to serve the needs of people who have long since left the womb.

The Republican Front Runner

 Porky Pig!!!

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By: Dr. Basil Wilson

New York City

12/7/11

Death of a Salesman!

                   Herman Cain waves farewell to his supporters

 

Black Walnut really was Just the Flavor of the Month

When Herman Cain announced his withdrawal from the Republican presidential race it came as no surprise to most sane Americans; the guy was actually dumber than Sarah Palin on political matters!  And the principal contribution of the Alaskan Barbarian to American discourse is to make ignorance fashionable.  A Cain presidency was always an impossible dream even in his own eyes; that’s why he had no contingency plans to deflect or counteract charges that were sure to surface from the train of injured and aggrieved white women he had buried in his skeleton closet. What could this colored dude have been thinking?

I believe that Herman Cain is basically a salesman, and evidently a good one too, who is convinced that he can sell ice cubes to Eskimos.  As such he is imbued with what sociologist call “the eternal optimism of the hustler.” That’s why he continued to seem upbeat to the end.  A close reading of the lyrics to his swan song will reveal that he plans to continue to influence Republican presidential politics from his political grave.  Hence it seems that we have not seen the end of Herm, even though everybody now knows he is a worm.

While wiser heads in the Grand Obstructionist Party would rather “Sugar Cain” just disappear – after all he is an embarrassment to a party which continually scolds the rest of us with pious prattle about moral rectitude – Newt ‘The Poot” Gingrich is already assumed a lips to posterior position in the hope that the Atlanta Lothario will endorse him and urge his acolytes to follow his example…which could be curtains for Mitt, who really thought he was da shit!

Odd Man Out?

 The Mittster

Newt is a straight up ho: ain’t no shame in that peckerwood’s game!  It may very well turn out that, whatever his virtues, and despite the fact that he has been running non-stop for president for eight years, Mitt the Stiff might get steam rolled and obliterated by Newt’s momentum if he gets a ringing endorsement from his fellow Georgia boy.  However there is danger here for Newt; as too close identification with Sugar Cain will surely conjure up  “The Poot’s” own foul history of adultery, betrayal and unlawful carnal knowledge of his female staff.

Once that conversation starts it won’t be long before enterprising reporters and malicious dirty tricksters began pointing to the testimony of a male staffer who swears he saw Newt getting some head from a female staffer parked in her driveway, while her children was walking past the car.

This was at the same time that Newt was calling for the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about getting a Lewinsky in the Oval office!  Seems the good ol southern boys can’t keep their peckers in their pants!  It’s all so ludicrous, especially when we consider that Anthony Weiner, a stalwart Democratic warrior for the liberal agenda and powerful ally of the President, was driven from office just for flashing his weenie in cyberspace…and he never even got his weenie wet!

Newt The Poot: A Pompous Fraud

Shameless Sophist and Amoral Whore 

If it were not for the aggrieved women who spoke out about Cain’s voluptuous and sinful carnal life, he might have continued to fly under the radar and maintain his self-righteous pose as a saved Christian.  But once it became clear that that Bro-man was living double…his ebony ass was in a world of trouble!  Especially when it came out that the objects of his lust were alabaster blonds of the type that populate the wet dreams of NAZI’s.

However I continue to marvel at the fact that so many southern whites continued to support “Herm The worm” even after a posse of white women made scandalous charges of sexual harassment against him.  And this was the real deal; not just the verbal abuse Uncle Clarence Thomas was charged with; this joker was grabbing hands full of vanilla nookie without permission and trying to force women to polish his pipe in exchange for a job!  When Sugar Cain was growing up in Georgia, that kind of charge would have gotten him an invitation to a neck tie party which he would not have survived!

The way those Southern peckerwoods rallied around the Sugar Cain, while calling these blond “White Ladies” a bunch of lying whores is almost as amazing to me – a black male who grew up in the apartheid south and was the same age and weight as Emmitt Till, and well remember his gruesome crucifixion for merely whistling at a white woman –  as the election of Barack Obama to the presidency!  If you had asked me about the probability of either event four years ago I would have called it even Steven!

Even though he is an ignorant sleaze ball Cain, who didn’t know squat about politics, could still have gone a long way in this race.  He may be a good businessman capable of running a successful pizza parlor, but he constantly exposed himself as a political ignoramus who is definitely not ready for prime time.

Listening to him in interviews, I heard nothing that convinced me this political ignoramus could be a successful Mayor of Atlanta; hence the assumption that this fuzzy headed fool could be President of the United States is ludicrous on its face.  In fact, Rachel Maddow’s research staff showed that his major slogans including “999” came from cartoons!  But even so, this shameless charlatan took the signature quotation in his farewell speech from the Pokémon movie!

That such an incompetent poseur – who is a bit of a real life cartoon – could ever have been a leading candidate in the presidential campaign of a major American political party is a sad commentary on the shameful ignorance of the American electorate.  And the fact that big time Republican money men like the billionaire Koch brothers supported him shows how debased our political culture has become, as well as how little they care about the public interests.  All rich Republicans  care about is keeping the money they have and making more!

Left to their own devices I am convinced these people would privatize much of the public sector and create a caste society based on economic status that would be as effective as the old caste society based on race that characterizes all but the last 57 years of American history – it was finally dismantled in law, if not in practice,  by the Omnibus 1964 Civil Rights Act.  Herman Cain is a shill for the most avaricious and socially backward segment of the plutocracy.  He even called himself “A Koch brother from another mother!”  One would be hard put to find a more despicable intellectual quisling than this soulless charlatan who is a traitor to both the race and class from which he hails.

There are many reasons why the American electorate should kick such a man to the curb, and stomp him if he falls to be sure he does not rise again.  But I see no credible evidence that race was a major factor in his demise.  In fact, I think Cain’s experience as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination proves Dr. Basil Wilson’s thesis that class has trumped race in American politics for the first time in our history.

One could have made that argument with the election of Barack Obama, except that the rise of the “Tea Party Patriots” that changed the complexion of Congress and arrested the progress of President Obama’s agenda, was based on blatant racist appeals that were so virulent and shameless they reminded me of the racist white backlash that followed the election of the first black Americans to congress following the Civil War. But since many of the people who were frothing at the mouth in their passionate opposition to Barack ended up supporting Herman Cain, it is reasonable to assume that ideology had as much to do with this as race.

It’s not just that Barack is black – old “Black Walnut” is of a much deeper dye – but he was an ‘uppity” black who was always the smartest guy in the room and he knew it!!!  Plus he doesn’t even have a proper nigger name that we can recognize they agonized.  Southern whites figured if we got to have a nigger in the White House, then by God let’s put one of our boys in there who knows his place and does our bidding.  Let’s git us a real white folks nigger who will tell the world how good we been to him, and if the rest of them lazy trifilin coons  aint got a job or ain’t rich “They should blame themself!”  Herm the Worm was tailor made for the role.

Yet in the end he turned out to embody the worst stereotypes about black men – they are stupid,  oversexed and cannot be trusted around white women.  It is safe to conclude here was a prince who turned out to be a frog; a ding dong daddy who sacrificed his political potential to his passion for vanilla poon.  In the end Sugar Cain proved just another sleazy salesman who thought his pitch could fool all the people all the time, but only a handful of clueless fanatics and his silly wife were willing to buy what he is selling.  This goose is cooked!  The jig is up; that’s why he is getting out the game.

The worm couldn’t Stand the Heat

So he quit the Game!

 

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Playthell Benjamin

Harlem, New York

December 5, 2011

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

Black Walnut and Vanilla Ice

 

Is Hermain Cain a Sexual Predator?

Clearly the most impressive development thus far in the presidential campaign is the rapid rise of Herman Cain from an obscure business lobbyist to the leading contender for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.  As I struggled to understand the reasons for his ascent, I was reminded of what Dr. WEB DuBois said about the rise of Booker T. Washington from a slave shack to the most powerful black man in America, who beguiled “Captains of Industry” and dined with Heads of State,  in the post Reconstruction period that followed the reunification of the nation after Civil War.

Dubois observed that Washington’s spectacular success was due to the fact that he was in step with the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the age – in America at the turn of the twentieth century.  “In an age of triumphant industrial capitalism,” said DuBois, “Washington preached a gospel of work and money.”  Dr. Kelly Miller, a contemporary of Dubois and a Dean at Howard University, described Washington’s success in similar if more poetic terms.

Comparing the “Great Accommodator” to his immediate predecessor Fredrik Douglass, Miller remarked “Douglass lived in an age of moral giants; Washington lives in an age of merchant princes.  Douglass lived in an age that honored the Golden Rule; Washington lives in the age that honors the rule of gold.”  Herman Cain embodies a major reactionary cultural trend; that’s why he gets big love from racist whites on the right who want to turn back the clock to some mythic time when white was always right and America ruled the world.

They are wild about Herman because he is willing to play Uncle Rhemus and tell dumb damaged white folk’s fables that confirm their view of themselves as exceptional, and their mythical view of an American society dominated by economic royalists and bible totin fanatics as the last best hope for mankind in a troubled world.  White Americans may once have abused black people they argue, but have long since put such attitudes and practices behind them.

I have come to believe that this passionate support for Uncle Herm by right wing whites is something of a collective public temper tantrum: ”By God if we’ve gotta have a darkie in the White House let’s have a real Jigaboo, one cast in our image that we can trust…a real southern Nigra, not some uppity Mulatto from Chicago!”  However it’s beginning to look like Brer Cain – who in his secret life is actually Brer Rabbit, the trickster – done played these silly white folks like a fiddle!  But after today, His world may come tumbling down!

Cain’s Accuser! Sharon Bailek

No Sugarcain For Her!

My man Herm is proving to be a worm; he now stands publicly accused of being a slimy sexual predator.  Alas, his accuser is a well-spoken voluptuous blond…. and it was a round unvarnished tale she told.  It sure wasn’t pretty, and I began to suspect that this coon might be cooked!  The majority of whites in Mississippi have recently gone on record stating that they believe interracial relationships should be illegal, and I suspect they mirror the feelings of many other Southern Tea Party types.  Of course, I don’t give a shit what they think…anybody should be free to hook up with whomever they want.  If they are consenting adults its nobody’s business!  But that’s the problem with the mess Uncle Herm is in.

One thing is for sure, this development will certainly tell us whether we are living in a post racial society.  For Uncle Herm has now been accused of violating the ultimate American taboo, the sexual violation of a white woman!  When he was a boy riding on the back of the bus in Georgia the white folks would be forming a possee to drag him out of his house and string him up on the nearest tree! Now he just sass the white folks on television and done call that white woman a lie!

If the white southerners whom Mississippi Governor, Haley Barbour, assures us would go overboard for Cain – “he would sweep the south said  the self-described  ”fat redneck’ – continue to support Cain they we can safely assume that this nation has moved on from the bad old days of racial conflict….we’ll see.   But right now the question Uncle Herman must be asking his redneck Tea Party supporters is: “Will yhall still love me tomorrow?”

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Playthell Benjamin

Harlem, New York

November 8, 2011

Raising Cain!

 

The Great Pretender

 

Is Ignorance of the Electorate a Danger to National Security?

      Of the myriad dangers that imperil the national interests none is more frightening than the ignorance of the American electorate.  Looking at the state of American politics today, the thoughtful observer with a sense of history cannot help but marvel at the prophetic wisdom of Thomas Jefferson’s warning that a participatory democracy can’t work with an ignorant electorate because they will elect the worse people to power.   Nowhere is this more poignantly demonstrated than the astonishing rise of Herman Cain. A former pizza mogul and corporate lobbyist, Cain is the most conspicuous corporate shill to ever run for the Oval Office.

Cain’s ideas about economics are rooted in laizze faire free market dogma that would undo most of the social safety net created by the New Deal and Great Society legislation of the last century, devastating the working class and especially non-white minorities.  In Cain’s view if you are not rich or can’t find a job, it’s not due to the failures of those who own and manage the economy, “you should blame yourself!”  Not surprisingly, he is supported by the most reactionary factions of the plutocracy, such the Koch brothers.  During his career as a head of the National Restaurant Association he opposed public safety measures such as laws to curb cigarette advertising.

While his backward ideas on domestic policy are scary enough, Cain’s abysmal ignorance of foreign relations is horrifying!  Every time he opens his mouth he reveals a shocking ignorance about the world.  In a recent interview on PBS he was asked about  his plan for competing with China economically he said “we will outgrow them!”

When asked if he thought China was a military threat to the US, he replied yes because they “are beginning to build aircraft carriers like us.”  He also said he has also been told that the Chinese are trying to develop a nuclear capability.  Everybody who knows anything about China,  America’s main rival, knows they have had atomic weapons for half a century!   Yet Cain’s rival John Huntsman is not only a successful politician and businessman, but an expert on China who speaks fluent  Mandarin.  And he is virtually ignored by Republican voters!

 China Today! 

                              

A Booming Economy with a  new Infrastructure

The Chinese Indeed  Are Building Aircraft Carriers  

Among The Best in the World! 

In other interviews Herm confessed that he hadn’t a clue what a neo-con is, and had never heard of “the right of return” question in Israel.  Considering that it was the neo-con cabal in the Bush Administration who were the architects of the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq, and the unresolved Palestinian/Israeli conflict will be a critical issue for any American President by virtue of the social forces unleashed in the “Arab Spring” upheaval that is transforming political reality in the region, this kind of ignorance is extremely dangerous.

Such shortcomings are more than enough to disqualify anybody from serious consideration for the presidency.  But then we catch Herm the Worm shamelessly lying on video tape about sexual harassment complaints against him.  Surely this was the last straw and this guy is gone.

Not so! Instead the right wing wolf pack is attacking the press, accusing the media of racism and a “hi tech lynching,” recycling the lame rhetoric of Uncle Justice Thomas.  Through it all Herm the worm’s approval ratings continue to soar over all other Republican Presidential contenders, and contributions to his campaign are skyrocketing.

Clearly any party that would vote this scurrilous ignoramus into the Oval Office is a danger to the stability of the United States. Yet the chances of preventing a Republican victory in 2012 are increasingly imperiled by the naiveté of the burgeoning movement for economic justice, whose activists  declare themselves above politics!!!   Thus they risk falling into irrelevance: all sound and fury achieving nothing!

Furthermore, a misguided leftist intelligentsia led by megalomaniacal political incompetents like Cornell West, is contemplating running an independent or third party candidate.  This will almost certainly result in repeating the fiasco of 2000, when support for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore resulted in eight disastrous years of George Bush. And the usual suspects are involved!

Those who refuse to learn from history are certainly bound to repeat its mistakes George Santayana warned.  That’s why I am convinced that the greatest danger to the prospects for peace and prosperity in America is Boobus Americanus, as old Mencken aptly labeled them, the legions of ignoramuses armed with a ballot that comprise the American electorate!

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Playthell Benjamin

Harlem, New York

November 2, 2011

Mitt is Not Only A Bore…He’s a Fraud!

Destroying Jobs at Bain Capital

 

Is Mitt Romney the Answer?

There will be much speculation about what brought on the Texas bumbler Slick Rick’s demise, but I think putting his dumb verbose wife out front with her annoying Texas cracker drawl, explaining how Ricky was not properly prepared for the previous debates but he was really boning up for the next one, and solemnly promised he would do better, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

From all appearances Ricky has waited too late to seek the aid of tutors, for he has been exposed to the world as an empty vessel; as one observer put it: “Rickey is a Texas cowboy who is all hat and no cattle!”  And like Humpty Dumpty after his great fall: all the Texas cattlemen and all the Texas Oil Men can’t put Ricky’s campaign back together again!

As Rick Perry’s star dramatically falls, threatening to crash and burn, Mitt Romney is on the rise. And when we look at the steady decline of the other contenders, Mitt emerges as the frontrunner by default. Although this does not insure that he will win the race to become the Republican candidate for the Oval Office, as I write he is the leader of the pack.  So the question facing the American electorate is whether Mitt has the answer to the protracted unemployment crisis that is gripping the country like an incurable disease?

Since he is building his campaign on the claim that his executive experience running companies in the private sector taught him how to devise  policies in government that will lead to a boom in job creation, this is a reasonable question to ask.  Mitt has even taken to scornfully dismissing his adversaries in the race as economic know nothings who have never managed a corner store.  The trouble with Mitt’s argument is that, unlike Herman Cain for instance, he has never run a corner store – or any store – either.

According to Eric A. Kriss, who was Mitt’s partner in Bain Capital where the Mittster made his enormous fortune, “Mitt ran a private equity firm, not a cement company.  He was not a business man in the sense of running a company.  He was a great presenter, a great spokesman and a great salesman.”  In fact Mitt was a corporate raider and job destroyer as Bain Capital bought and sold companies as if they were pig skins.  And as governor of Massachusetts his state was 47^th of 50 states in Job creation!   Hence, contrary to his campaign claims: The Mittster is a flop as a job creator: He is all blow and no go on the economic front!!!

Furthermore this stiff, plastic, poseur is in the strange position of having to run away from his major achievement in establishing a health care system in Massachusetts when he was governor of the state.  The present Governor, Duval Patrick, says almost all citizens of the state are covered under this plan; it is the best in the nation. Yet here we see the ludicrous spectacle of Mitt running against Texas Governor Rick Perry for the Republican Presidential nomination, but is afraid to claim his achievement against a guy who presides over the state with the worst health  care coverage in the nation!

Mitt is also running away from his record as governor of the Bay State when he collected millions in taxes from his former corporate buddies by closing loopholes they previously enjoyed in order to eradicate budget deficits!   Both of these policies are examples of good government that any politician should be proud of, but because President Obama is pursing similar policies the Mittster is running away from his past achievements like foxes from a forest fire!

That’s why he is widely regarded as a fraud by many in the Republican Party – Dr. Rachel Maddow presented abundant evidence that Mitt is despised by people at all levels of the GOP – and is the object of open derision by the Tea Party types who make up a majority of the Republican base.  These yahoos regard Mitt the Stiff as a 24 karat phony and will tell anybody who asks!

The base is a major determinant in who wins the Republican nomination, and when the widespread perception that the Mittster is a fraud is coupled with the fact that many Evangelical Christians will not vote for a Mormon – their largest denomination, the southern Baptist, have called Mormonism “a cult” and their ministers are openly campaigning against him on religious grounds – there is a good chance that he could be knocked off by one of his two closest rivals.

However the Texas Governor exposes himself as a big numbskull every time he opens his mouth, which increases the possibility that Herman Cain could steal the nomination! Yet it is fairly easy to predict that Cain will be smoked  in the general election against President Obama! That’s why thePlutocrats, Mitt’s cronies, are desperately seeking an alternative.

They know that like a broken clock that’s right twice every day, the untutored mob that comprises the Republican base is right about Mitt.  Not only does he provide no solutions to the crippling problems that have the American working and middle classes in a death grip: he is being increasingly exposed as an unmitigated fraud!!

The Mittster: A Plastic Prick!

A 24 Karat Phony with no solutions!

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Playthell Benjamin

Harlem New York

October 10, 2011