We Smear For Obama

Ever gone to gop.com? Chances are that you haven't, and you're missing out. Really. If you delve deep enough into the Bible, surely there is something about "Know thine enemy" lingering somewhere, and if you go to the website you will immediately see that the G.O.P knows this all too well. In fact, the entirety of the site isn't even directed at the issues themselves, it's all about smearing Barack Obama. Apparently that is all they can do to try to make themselves look better at this point. As the Republican party is being abandoned by the Old Money that embody the nickname "GOP" (see a few entries back), as well as the neo-Evangelicals and other conservative Christians that have come to realize that war wasn't on Jesus' mind, and now by poor people who realize that they need things like health care and jobs, the best they can do is try to run Obama through the mud and hope that anyone still cares.

The main smear today is Obama's links with Tony Rezko. As you probably know, Rezko was charged with political corruption earlier this month and had both contributed $50-$60K to Obama and bought a property adjacent to Obama's in Illinois. (Read more at the Sun Times.) Barack had previously donated all of the Rezko money to charity and explained his involvement with Rezko to the media and to the public, and continues to take the non-smear High Road. The first transcripts of the trial say blatantly:

Obama was a tangential figure at the trial, mentioned only a few times as a beneficiary of Rezko's fund-raising. But Republicans are already exploiting the Democrat's long friendship with a now-convicted felon.

Apparently his name even being mentioned has given the GOP a reason to "question his judgment." Obama has since countered with a message from his campaign saying that any inquiries into his transactions with Rezko or Rezko connections would be no problem. Rather than smear, why not inquire into the facts?

Of course, when you have a candidate as bad as McCain, just one smear isn't enough to cut it. Obama's opt-out of public campiagn financing has fueled the GOP into calling him a two-face, boasting "Obama vs Obama" as a point of their "In The News" link.

What is this Public Financing of which we speak? Literally, it is money offered by the Federal Treasury to finance the campaigns of political candidates. The United States allows both public and private monies to be used in presidential elections at this time, and this would mean that McCain would be taking both money from the public AND from the deep pockets of the Republican National Committee AND from lobbyists. That sounds like Public Usury to me, and of course none of that is mentioned on the gop website. The fact remains that McCain is desperate for cash as the numbers roll in on how far behind he is on fundraising:

CAMPAIGN TOTALS SO FAR

Barack Obama:
Raised: $265m
Spent: $219m
Cash on hand: $46m
Debt: $2m

John McCain
Raised: $97m
Spent: $73m
Cash on hand: $24m
Debts: $968,301

Could it not already be said that Obama is already raising funds from the public? The vast funds already raised by his campaign have been mostly from small contributions from supporters over the internet and there are no lobbyists to answer to, so arguably you could say that his campaign is being run by the people- everyday people who can only donate what they can and their time- and why then run on the Public Finance system as well? As he says:

"It's not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections," Mr Obama said in a video message to supporters.

"But the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system."

He said Mr McCain's campaign was being financed by Washington lobbyists and special interest groups.

No kidding. If Obama does want to win, one way to not do that is by playing the GOP Game.

One visit to barackobama.com shows that he is above the smear, as no attacks appear on his page, only news reports on the issues. In true dirty Rebublican style, the "In the News" focus on demonizing Obama is not enough, and they have even started a direct Site of Smearage, MeetBarackObama.com. In it, I assume it will entail taking, twisting, and running with every possible point of contention that they can possibly dig up. Already you can get your own ticker widget counting down how many days it's been since Obama visited Iraq and since McCain invited him to town hall meetings (two of these meetings are, by the way, listed on Barack's Agenda already).

Why try to drag down a candidate running on Hope? The answer is this: Smear worked for the GOP. Just ask Al Franken, who detailed the horrible smearing of John Kerry's record as a War Hero in his book The Truth: With Jokes. The war in Iraq is still a major issue in the minds of Americans, and now the Democratic party is putting forth a candidate who has consistently been vehemently against the war (as are most Americans). While this is a point of legitimate contention, it is unlikely that the GOP could win on this issue alone this time. Obama's positions are also uniting struggling poor and middle-class workers, who want health care and jobs and financial security. So, the focus is shifting away from the fact that what the Republicans offer is the New Bush and politics as usual to the GOP website putting up a few well-edited quotes tying Obama to Tony Rezko. All it takes is a swift gathering of the facts and presenting them to the media to clear this, and I will make the call to public inquiry to do so. John Kerry's war record wasn't cleared fast enough from the smear and that led in part to his demise, as Al Franken puts it, so let's not let the GOP get away with it this time and clear Obama immediately.

Happy Memorial Day

McCain on opposing veteran's college benefits:

McCain said he opposed Webb's measure because it would give the same benefit to everyone regardless of how many times he or she has enlisted. He said he feared that would depress reenlistments by those wanting to attend college after only a few years in uniform. Rather, McCain said the bill he favored would have increased scholarships based on length of service.

(Read the full article here.)

The multimillionaire and veteran proves that he is once again removed from the reality of the average person in the USA. Many of these enlisted individuals see the military as their only opportunity to get an education at all, and at the end of it they would be told they "didn't serve enough time" to get a scholarship?

Not to mention that the US Military has been doling out bonuses of up to $50,000 for soldiers in Iraq, and nearly no one signs on again. In addition to the inevitability of being shot at in a war zone, and the real possibility of being injured or killed, the suicide rate of soldiers in these combat zones is up to 19.9 in 100,000 according to citizen-soldier.org.

And there are tales such as these:

On the ground, the young soldier never received any psychological support. Officers did not encourage consultations. They gave a name to those who sought help: "psychos." After leaving the Army, Erik began to have panic attacks: "That happened to me whenever people began to argue." He's had nightmares, suffered from anxiety: classic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The trauma has decreased since he began to militate with other veterans. They are campaigning against the administration's plan to revise the criteria to define PTSD in order to limit reparations.

According to an Army report, one soldier out of three returning from Iraq suffers from mental problems. The proportion of personnel affected is the highest of all recent conflicts, from Bosnia to Afghanistan. "In Iraq, there's no front line," explains Colonel Charles Hoge in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Eighty to eight-five percent of personnel have been witnesses or participants in a traumatizing act: enemy combat, death of an adversary, IED attacks.

"In Vietnam, there were secure zones where people could recuperate," indicates Steve Robinson, director of an association that advocates for veterans in an interview with the Washington Post. "That doesn't happen in Iraq; every place is a war zone."

From truthout: A Disillusioned American Soldier's Return from Iraq.
The soldier in that article was my age!
Yet for all that he went through in the name of the USA, he wouldn't get the help to fulfill the dream of college??!!? For all the horrors they experienced so that we could have not-very-cheap oil, they at least deserve a chance at an education and maybe even a desk job.

On this Memorial Day 2008, I urge you to take up the issue of Veteran's benefits. Even ppl who despise and vehemently oppose the war (like I do) should not sit by while the government abandons the young ppl who fought in it.

Who Are The Evangelicals (and why should anyone care)

Evangelicals: This group has been in the media frequently, and this time it has been McCain courting their vote, as the Republican party has decided to align themselves with conservative Christianity.
At the core of the Evangelical faith is the idea of evangelism; that is, spreading that Good News that many ppl try to avoid hearing shouted at them on sidewalks. However, despite what you may have seen on Jesus Camp, not all Evangelicals are "fundamentalist" in nature. Actually, they are a breakout group of the Protestant reformation, just like the Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and basically every Christian that isn't Catholic or Orthodox.
This is the main clue that many of them, like most liberal-leaning Protestants, are not as ultra-conservative as one might be lead to believe from the media.
So who are the Evangelicals that are being courted? Apparently they are the neo-Evangelicals, a splinter group that has pockets of believers (shockingly) in the South. This group claims to be fundamentalist in nature; that is, they believe in the absolute word-for-word Truth that is in the bible. (Although there is no explanation as to why anyone should do this or if there are really any benefits to doing so. ) There is not even any proof that many of them know the Bible word-for-word beyond the certain passages they keep harping on, but that's a different post.
The fact is, this group has gained prominence politically due to GW Bush and the extreme nature of their worship (the tongues, the jumping, the tears, the writhing in the pain of sin). But according to Wikipedia, there really aren't that many of them, and most of them aren't dead set on the Republican agenda:

However, the Christian Right is not made completely (or even a majority) of Evangelical Christians. According to an article in the November 11, 2004 issue of The Economist, entitled "The Triumph of the Religious Right", "The implication of these findings is that Mr. Bush's moral majority is not, as is often thought, composed of a bunch of right-wing evangelical Christians. Rather, it consists of traditionalist and observant church-goers of every kind: Catholic and mainline Protestant, as well as evangelicals, Mormons, and Sign Followers. Meanwhile, modernist evangelicals tend to be Democratic." Although evangelicals are currently seen as being on the Christian Right in the United States, there are those in the center as well. In other countries there is no particular political stance associated with evangelicals. Many evangelicals have little practical interest in politics.

Not only that, but they seem to actually care about the traditional Christian values as well:

According to recent reports in the New York Times, some evangelicals have sought to expand their movement's social agenda to include poverty, combating AIDS in the Third World, and protecting the environment.

Clearly as Bush leaves office, the Evangelical support is also leaving the Republican party, as observed by Dr. James Dobson's nonsupport of John McCain: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53743,
Despite the atrocities that Focus on the Family has invoked on the American family, this sect now lies without a Bush-like candidate to mandate to its listeners, as their hope for a Mike Huckabee presidential bid is all but gone.
The NAE, National Association of Evangelicals, says that it doesn't even endorse candidates. (Which is the contrary of that great Jesus Camp scene worshiping the cardboard GW.) However, Lester Feder of the Huffington post is quick to point out that the President of NAE, Rich Cizik, also distances himself from McCain, noting that apparently the dislike between these groups is in fact mutual:

Cizik's favorable disposition to Huckabee's campaign is expected. Huckabee is widely regarded as the evangelicals' greatest hope in 2008. But his view of John McCain may come as something of a surprise. McCain is regarded as having dealt his 2000 campaign a deathblow a week after George W. Bush defeated him in a dirty South Carolina primary when he blasted Bush supporters on the Religious Right in a Virginia Beach speech. He condemned Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance" in the political campaign, and expressed disdain for their opposition to his signature issue, campaign finance reform. "I don't pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message. I believe in the cause of conservative reform." Though not all evangelicals agree with Falwell and Robertson, McCain's attack on the movement's high profile leaders is believed to have ended any remaining hope that he could win over the key GOP constituency.

In conclusion, after reading this the answer may indicate that the Evangelicals are in fact not really to be cared about. But I caution against this thinking. One immediate lesson to be learned is that a politician's personal faith can (and as we have seen repeatedly throughout politics, DOES) influence how they act in office. While the Evangelical influence may be at bay for now, this has also shown that this is a real marriage between Church and State. All presidential candidates, and certainly most candidates at State or local levels, are tying themselves with or pandering to Christianity in some form.

So the real question might be, who are the important Christian groups in this election cycle, and what are their issues?