... just like the girl that married dear old dad.

Mother and Child, Henry Moore

David Seaton's News Links
I read the following quote in Josh Marshall's blog. If David Seaton had written the following he would have been crucified.

If I were a completely amoral Republican operative, I'd try to find some white women that Obama dated before Michelle and get them into the public's stream of consciousness anyway I could. Its a tactic so vile I don't even like speculating about it, but if you want to be ready for the worst, I think Rove just tipped his hand at where they plan to go. -- David Kurtz

Is this the "conversation" about race that Obama suggested?

Look, if you read me you may have gathered that I think Barack Obama is a fraud, but the last thing I would ever criticize him for is for dating white women. First because it is nobody's business who he ever dated before he got married and second... One of his biggest selling points is that he is bi-racial.

His mother was a white woman f'krisesake! If he found white women unattractive that would be abnormal.

A person's mother in great part determines their relations with all women thereafter. I think this reaction is as true for girls as it is for boys. Mothers form a person's taste in women.

For example, when I was a little kid my late mother was a drop dead redhead with big hooters and I have been happily married to a drop dead redhead with big hooters nigh on to thirty years. But on the other hand my momma was a lousy housekeeper and her messy house embarrassed me with my school friends and so consequently I married a German who is obsessed by domestic cleanliness.... both have/had fantastic senses of humor. My wife is that rarity, a sexy clown.

Moral: mothers are mined and cherry picked for qualities and defects. What a son chooses in women is a judgment of his mother.

Really, in Obama's case the interesting psychobabble point is why somebody who was raised by white women is not married to a white woman himself. I think it was Konrad Lorenz who had all these baby geese following him around because he was the first thing they saw when they hatched and they thought he was their mother.

So, if you are an amateur psychologist (and what American isn't) and you really wanted to delve into Barack Obama's psyche and come up with nuggets of insight into his character, you would begin to study the similarities and differences between Stanley Ann Dunham and Michelle Robinson and I am sure the differences are much more than "skin deep".

An example: both are very well educated women, but Michelle is a very together and responsible mother and very rooted in her community...

You could play this game at cocktail parties from now till the inauguration ball.

I am not at all sure it would do Obama any harm politically: quite the contrary, it has all the human interest, soap opera, telenovela quality infused with pseudo-intellectualism that Americans find irresistible... Me included. DS

Si non è vero

Scene from a capea

David Seaton's News Links
The other day I posted a version of my News Links post, "The Sword of Damocles" over at TPMCafe. "The Sword of Damocles" was a speculation about the famous/infamous, true/false, existent/inexistent, Michelle "tape/dvd".

I was gratified by the tremendous response I received. The TPM forum is a unique opportunity to take the pulse of any issue and anyone who earns his bread and cheese in political speculation has to be grateful for the opportunity.

That said, I really had to dodge the flung dung.

They called me everything but pretty.

I am pleased to share with my readers some of the choicest stuff that that was tossed my way over the "Sword" and a follow up post to it, which I'll reprise below. Enjoy.

God, Seaton, you're a fucking idiot. I NEVER call people that.

From one Obama supporter: Fuck off!

I've suspected for quite a while that you're an intellectually dishonest jackass.

This crap is just wacky with no entertainment value. Except for the freakshow.

Toss him a chicken, see what he does with it.

Seaton, I don't wish to put too fine a point on it but you, sir, are a fool.

David, you are a weasel, and either phony or demented.

Are there any DVD/Videos rumored to be out there which reveal that David Seaton is a convicted pedophile, who can not return to the USA.

So much for the "new politics".

If you are a friend, please don't be upset by any of this, I'm certainly not. "Sticks and stones," as we used to chant as tots. The Obamites haven't gotten to sticks and stones yet... but, only time will tell.

In fact, the above abuse is music to my ears. It means that my probing has connected solidly with an exposed nerve and that a fruitful path of investigation has been revealed to me.

In fact, the reaction I received to my post convinces me more than anything else that there is something to this rumor.

Or perhaps I should say that it proves that there is a tremendous fear among Obamites that there is something out there of equal caliber and destructiveness.

There is a famous Italian saying about certain rumors; "Si non e vero, e ben trovato", it means: if it isn't true, it's well made up. It sounds true because it is made up of many elements that are probable in themselves.

For example if we were going to invent scurrilous rumors about John McCain, we would probably invent things like his having incipient Alzheimer or wearing diapers. Because of his great age, some people might believe it.

However, if we spread it about that he was a shoe fetishist or a child molester or that he took drugs, or often missed his naps, very few would find that credible, again because of his great age.

I really can't imagine either McCain or his supporters mobilizing masses of people to refute any of these inventions, either the credible or the incredible.

In the case of Michelle Obama, this tape rumor is either true or it isn't.... and if it isn't, it will die a natural death, certainly long before November.

However, the hysterical reaction of the Obama campaign and the Obamites in general makes me smell a rat. It proves that as Maureen Dowd writes in the NYT.

“Michelle,” as one political observer puts it, “is a target-rich environment.”

The Obamite reaction will certainly prove to the Rovian, neo-Swiftboaters that they are close to pay dirt.

To anyone with insight, I think it is perfectly obvious that Barack Obama is Hawaii's answer to Tony Blair... a phony: a faux-progressive manipulator. I am sure that Obama's role models are Blair and Reagan... passed through Dick Daley.

The way Barack Obama needlessly sold out the Palestinians the other day at AIPAC proves to me that he'll do the same on health or anything else. He makes John Kerry's "flip flopping" look Gibraltar-like in its steadiness. Except for bare faced Blairian spin, like his race speech, I have yet to see even one moment of genuine political courage in his entire career.

Every day as the campaign intensifies more people are going to be catching on to this and as sympathetic (dog like?) as the media has been up till now in their treatment of Obama, some will be tempted to hold his feet to the fire and obviously the Obama campaign wants to intimidate them. The Spanish call this "curing yourself in health" or "applying a bandage before you are cut".

Noemi Klein writes in the Guardian:

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC: "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market." Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed the 37-year-old Jason Furman, one of Wal-Mart's most prominent defenders, to head his economic team. On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged: "I won't shop there." For Furman, however, Wal-Mart's critics are the real threat: the "efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits" are creating "collateral damage" that is "way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy ... for me to sit by idly and sing Kum Ba Ya in the interests of progressive harmony".

She was immediately brought to book by an Obamite calling him/herself, "Watching You", citing chapter and verse of "The Audacity of Hope" and warning Ms. Klein to "be careful".

I'm beginning to wish Obama does win, just for the fun I'll have taking the piss out of his starry eyed supporters as he triangulates the conservatives on every issue in true, Clinton (Bill)/Blair fashion and slows down and dilutes every transformational initiative from the left of the Democratic Congress and Senate.

I am beginning to think that I might have as much fun with Obama as I have had with Bush.

If McCain wins, I know I will disagree with him most of the time, but I don't think I'll feel the sort of contempt I feel for Bush or Blair... or Obama.

Back to the rumorology and its effect on the election.

This election is about Barack Obama. How he wins it or how he loses it.

In a certain sense McCain is an "innocent" bystander.

The center of my thesis is that while McCain can't "win", Obama can lose it and the weakest link he has is his wife Michelle. That is because she is a real person, with real opinions, who has spoken her mind without calculating the effect her words might have years later on her husband's fortunes.

She is also a person who belongs to what, in the United States at least, might be called the left.... and the USA is a solidly right wing country by world standards.

With much media complicity, Obama has been able to distance himself from embarrassing associations... up till now. Obama can throw Wright, Trinity, Johnson or the Palestinian people under the bus, but if he tries to throw Michelle Robinson under the bus, she'll cut his effing heart out.

As to the rumor itself... there is one detail that is either true, or the work of master rumor monger: that is the bit about Michelle's denouncing Bill Clinton's inaction on the Rwanda genocide. That is a story that surfaced a couple of months before her supposed speech to the Rainbow/Push conference in 2004 and which quickly dropped out of the public eye, it is a political junky's collector's item, it is certainly something too old and too obscure for a crude forger to either understand or use today. DS

The Sword of Damocles

The sword of Damocles

David Seaton's News Links
I was surprised that Maureen Dowd, of all people, led me to a encyclopedic page of virulently anti-Obama material. Was this advance damage control or just subtly presented, advance damage? Who knows.

The Internet, as I'm sure you all know by now, is buzzing with rumors of the famous Michelle Obama, "whitey" tape, of which the link of Maureen Dowd's provides this description:

For about 30 minutes, Michelle Obama launched into a rant about the evils of America, and how America is to blame for the problems of Africa. Michelle personally blamed President Clinton for the deaths of millions of Africans and said America is responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis and other ethnic groups. She then launched into an attack on "whitey", and talked about solutions to black on black crime in the realm of diverting those actions onto white America. Her rant was fueled by the crowd: they reacted strongly to what she said, so she got more passionate and enraged, and that's when she completely loses it and says things that have made the mouths drop of everyone who's seen this.

The "tape" is a DVD that Trinity United sold on its website, and possibly offered free for download up until March 2008 when Trinity's site was scrubbed and the DVDs were no longer offered for sale.

The first question is, does the "tape" actually exist?

I would imagine it does, because, strictly as a rumor, this thing would have very short legs. It certainly wouldn't affect the election if the tape never appeared.

There is a certain plausibility in Obamfile's version, if you situate yourself in July 2004, at a conference of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/Push Coalition, when according to Obamafile, all this is supposed to have happened, then some of the things she is accusing Bill Clinton of are quite reasonable and part of progressive discourse at that time.

For example, it is true that Bill Clinton never moved a finger to stop the massacres in Rwanda. The information became known in April of 2004, and quite a few well informed black people... and not so black people, rebuked him bitterly for it.

However if the rest of what the website says is true and the tape exists, when and if it is released, then that will be the end of Barack Obama's campaign. It will all be over but the shouting.

I think the United States is certainly ready to elect an African-American, Obama's success to date proves that, but probably they are not prepared to elect one who appears to be of the radical left to boot.

And if, as the website Maureen Dowd links to says,

Her rant was fueled by the crowd: they reacted strongly to what she said, so she got more passionate and enraged, and that's when she completely loses it and says things that have made the mouths drop of everyone who's seen this.

Then middle-America will have nightmare visions of Obama's Inaugural Ball... and frankly, I don't think middle-America is ready for that yet.

Middle-America has up till now been enchanted with someone who seems to them to combine the gravitas of Colin Powell and the unthreatening charm of Will Smith, with just a dash added of Doctor King's noble rhetoric and delivery. In short someone who embodies all that white America loves in black America and none of the things they fear and loathe. Catharsis. We all live happily ever after.

That the Obama camp is taking so seriously what is only at the moment a rumor, (and a rumor that will fade and die harmlessly if no tape, in fact, exists) then it would appear that the tape's release is imminent. (For what imminent release means, see below.) Otherwise they are only giving body to baseless calumny. Some of what they are planning to do is frankly a little sinister. According to Time:

Obama is enlisting his millions of supporters to help him hunt down and quash these stories, just as those supporters helped him turn his insurgent campaign into a history-making juggernaut.

How exactly are these "millions of supporters" going to "hunt down" and "quash"? Are we talking about out and out intimidation?

Time continues:

Near each rumor will be a fight-back button, offering suggestions as to where and how Obama supporters can call or e-mail to counter the rumors. The site will also have a spot where Obama supporters can alert the campaign to any new rumors they may be seeing on the Web or in their mailboxes or hearing on the telephone.

I think the "fight-back button" is a huge mistake, this is a Skinneristic wet dream for every electronic prankster in America. This would be like an electronic version of a village bullfight, called a capea in Spain, (what they call in South America, a pachanga), with all the local boys risking their lives to lure the bull.

Assuming the tape exists, who are "they" and when would "they" release the tape?

I see four possibilities:

• Hillary: If she has it, she'll find someone to release it in time for the super-delegates to change their minds with decorum. If the tape appears very soon, shedunnit.

• McCain: If he has it, he'll release it in the fall, probably the classic "October Surprise". In time for the voters to see it and digest it, but not early enough for Obama to make a Checkers Speech.
  

• Reverend Wright: If as they say, the tape was in the Trinity Church catalog, Wright will have some copies lying around for sure. He has access and motive. If he releases it, he'll will do it either right before or during the Democratic convention. So that all hell breaks loose and he can sit back and laugh and laugh as those super-delegates tie themselves into knots.

• Some fifteen year old kid will launch it from his bedroom computer to impress his friends... Any time he and they get bored. Thus is history written.
  

As I said, either the tape exists or it doesn't... If it doesn't, the rumor itself won't hurt Obama because, as they say in Spanish, "what doesn't kill you makes you fat". DS


BTW: Now even Muammar Qaddafi is getting into the act. Here is this from the BBC website:

"The statements of our Kenyan brother of American nationality Obama on Jerusalem... show that he either ignores international politics and did not study the Middle East conflict or that it is a campaign lie," he said.

"We fear that Obama will feel that, because he is black with an inferiority complex, this will make him behave worse than the whites."

"This will be a tragedy," Qaddafi said. "We tell him to be proud of himself as a black and feel that all Africa is behind him."

How is that for perverse? Qaddafi has strange taste in clothes for sure, but he is very shrewd and I am sure he knows how his remarks will play on Fox. DS