ok, time to rag on some white people

first, arnold schwarzenegger.

this hypocritical gasbag global-warming visionary was on leno last night going on and on and on about his tireless efforts to lead not only california but the nation into a new age of conservation awareness--seriously, he spent virtually his entire segment on this topic. what he failed to mention (nor, of course, did leno bring up) was the fact that, while he's urging all of us to buy fuel-efficient cars and to carpool, he chooses to make his daily commute all by himself.

on his jet.

yes, folks, since no one in their right minds could possibly expect maria and the kids to give up life in brentwood, our governor commutes from los angeles to sacramento and back every single working day via private jet--but don't worry, he buys "carbon offsets," so that makes it all ok, right?

yeah, right. i swear to god, these global-warming hypocrites just make me wanna claw my brain outta my skull everytime i see one of 'em blathering on about "sacrifice" and "saving the planet." i mean, i can only dream of ever having as lavish a carbon footprint as fucking al gore with his mansion with its $1,500-per-month utility bills (yeah, yeah, he installed some solar panels when news of his excess hit the wires--big fuckin deal).

my point is, if even the most pseudo-passionate of global-warming proponents aren't willing to walk their talk, how can they ever expect joe everyman to do it? seriously--from now on, unless you're ed begley who pedals a stationery bike for half an hour each morning in order to generate sufficient electricity to make his breakfast toast, then get outta my face already about doing my part to combat global fucking warming. because i can almost guarantee you that anybody on tv wagging their finger at me to conserve is using at least 10x our fragile planet's resources that i am.


and now, on to george w. bush

so the other day i see this headline: "white house admits fault on 'mission accomplished banner''

and i think, "well, it's about time--it's not a big one, but at least these assholes are gonna finally own up to something."

but no, we're talking about the bush administration.

what they're "admitting" is that, yeah, they did pay for the banner--but they're still insisting that

". . . the 'Mission Accomplished' phrase referred to the carrier's crew completing its 10-month mission, not the military completing its mission in Iraq.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

remember--it took 'em five years to come up with this lame-ass bullshit. up to now, of course, they had denied any involvement in the banner, and now they're telling us they whipped it up and posed bush strategically in front of it after having him symbolically land on the carrier while posing as an actual fighting man in order to congratulate the carrier crew on the completion of its mission? i mean, good god, how stupid do they really think people are?

never mind--that was a stupid question.

rev. wright to blacks: shut up and keep shufflin'

he's been a busy boy lately, our reverend wright--so much so that i, focused as i was on his national press club appearance, completely missed sunday night's naacp performance. thankfully, reader judi was more observant than i, and she and her commenters had some interesting things to say about it--so interesting, in fact, that it's taken me all goddam day to muster a proper response.

a complete transcript of reverend wright's words can be found here, but the highlight of the evening (for judi and me, anyway) was when the good reverend attempted to use the research of a certain dr. janice hale to explain away the scholastic-achievement gap between black and white students here in america. for brevity's sake, allow me to paraphrase (and again, if you're incredulous and don't trust my interpretation, please feel free to click on the link provided above and read for yourself, draw your own conclusions): euro-american (white) and afro-american (black) children have two completely different learning modes--i.e., white kids learn in a left-brain, cognitive (logical/analytical) style, while black kids learn in a completely-incompatible right-brain (creative/intuitive) style.

or, as reverend wright puts it, "[we] learn from a subject, not an object. tell me a story."

[and of course his audience was cheering him on, because god knows black folk love it when other black folk tell 'em how special and apart they they are--when that suits their purposes, anyway (reserving the right, of course, to be "just like everybody else" when that suits their purposes).]

and then he goes on to say, "different does not mean deficient."

yeah, right--as long as you're hunting antelope on the veldt and not crunching numbers on wall street.

i look at this shit and i laugh and cry at the same time--the good reverend wright is doing the work of white-racist america for them, because you know damn well that by next wednesday every half-wit white-supremacist in america will be quoting him verbatim as complete, justifiable verification for their hate.

seriously--imagine if this theory had been posited by, say, david duke: white people learn best by reading books written by other white people, while black people learn best by squatting around a campfire and telling each other stories, thus neatly explaining why most white people live in houses with electricity and running water, while most black people live in mud huts in africa.

can you even in your wildest dreams imagine some white educator coming out and saying, "black children require special education here in america because their ability to perform at a caucasian level is limited due to the constraints imposed by their racial origins."

hell, let's take it to the logical next step: "since blacks' ideal mode of learning is so completely different from that of whites, perhaps, in order to provide them with the optimal education, we should give them their own specialized, separate (but equal) schools." is that what you want, reverend white--to go back to pre-1954?

i mean, i've heard some lame-ass explanations for the performance gap between white and black students in this country, but this one takes the cake. i dunno about you, but i can't imagine anything as inherently limiting and ultimately destructive to young black minds as to feed them this crap--telling 'em, "don't even bother; you can't hope to compete in a white man's world because your brain isn't wired the right way."

yeah, you black folk just go on entertaining us white folk with your (creative/left-brain) singing, dancing and athletic feats, and we'll continue to do the (analytical/right-brain) heavy intellectual lifting.

as a white boy who spent the better part of his youth having the dogma of "we're all the same under the skin" pounded into his lily-white brain, may i reserve the right to hereby and respectfully say

"what the fuck?"

i'm beginning to think that hillary's smarter than all of us

there's been all kinds of speculation these last few months as to why hillary refuses to wake up, smell the coffee and get out. some see it as selfish arrogance, others as denial, and still others think she's playing a machiavellian game to so weaken obama as to ensure his loss to mccain, thus setting her up for another run in 2012.

me? i'm starting to think that she's hung in there because she knew damn well what's happening to the obama campaign as we speak was bound to happen.

because, lemme tell you, barack's in a world of shit right now.

first, his new and more strenuous repudiation of rev. wright isn't holding water with anybody. i mean, seriously, he can say shit like "the person i saw yesterday was not the person i had come to know over 20 years,'' but all that really tells us is either (a) he's a credulous, unobservant, easily-deluded fool; or, more likely, (b) he's a liar--i.e., he has eyes and ears just like the rest of us, and what he's really upset about is that wright couldn't keep his mouth shut until after he was safely ensconsed in the white house.

either way, he's fucked with white middle-america.

oh, and he's starting to catch heat from black america too--or he will be soon, if al sharpton has anything to say about it. see, al's upset with barack's outrageous call for a nonviolent response from blacks in the wake of the sean bell verdict, characterizing his craven, chickenshit position as "grandstanding for white people."

so, lemme see: he's too scary for white people, and too white for black people--talk about a rock and a hard place; barack just can't win these days.

or, for that matter, in november.

and hillary knew it all along; she's just hoping the rest of her party will see it as well before it's too late.

jeremiah wright: the gift that keeps on giving

from dana milbank's column in the washington post:

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

and then he went on to imply that, his public protestations to the contrary, obama secretly agrees with him.

and there's lots of other good stuff, too--i encourage you to read the piece.

but there's more--lots more.

not content to sing the praises of farrakhan, reverend wright then goes on to rhapsodize about his good friend james cole, a guy who makes farrakhan look like martin luther king by comparison.

haven't heard of mr. cole? well, lemme just tell you that he's a leading proponent of a school of thought known as "black liberation theology." these folks believe that blacks are the "chosen people," white people are "the devil," and that all white people are collectively responsible for all white oppression that's ever happened. cone has written, “what we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”

want more? cone “refuses to accept a god who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. if god is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him."

to reverend wright: thank you, you racist self-aggrandizing loon, for not knowing when to shut up. and please, keep talking--america needs to hear what you and your friends have to say.