Dogged Blog

Do you ever just sit there completely unable to think of any kind of title for a post?

So, I'm getting ready for the 19th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in San Francisco, which I'll be covering this evening for AfterElton.com/AfterEllen.com. KT is coming along to take pictures even though neither Lucy Lawless nor Renee O'Connor will be there (which, by the way, is COMPLETELY WRONG).

But as I was blow drying my hair (wasn't that a brilliant segue?), I realized I'd been ranting to myself about something.

I've tried hard not to give in to the Hillary-hate, for a few reasons.  One, a couple (literally) of people I care about support her candidacy. I don't know why they do; we've made the decision not to discuss it, although when we did, I don't think any of us knew how long this thing would drag on. Two, I happen to believe with Yoda that hating hurts me more than the target of my hate, and I'm against hurting myself. Three, I'm sick to death of negative politics so I prefer not to engage in them.

The thing I was ranting about was prompted by a very nice, civil expression of opinion on the part of a black man that since Hillary Clinton is not, in his view,  very feminist, certainly policy-wise no more supportive of women's rights than Obama or Edwards, white feminists must be supporting her because she's a woman.

And it was also prompted by the statements I've read (even though I try to avoid places where such things are said) that black people are only voting for Obama because he's black.

Well, newsflash for everyone: Both things are a load of crap. If all it took was being black to get the black vote, Alan Keyes would have gotten the black vote. And if all it took for women to support a candidate is that she be female, Elizabeth Dole would have gotten the women's vote.

Actually, if both those things were in fact true, Shirley Chisolm would have been our President a long time ago, which would have been fine with me. But I digress.

I'm white, so I won't speak to why black people support Obama. And although I'm a 49 year old white lesbian and a feminist, I can't speak to why older white feminists might support Clinton, because I don't understand it and thus, can't explain it. My issues with her were, from the beginning, that she represents the type of corporate "Republican-lite" version of liberalism that I feel has choked the life out of the progressive movement in this country for decades now -- which is exactly why I never voted for Bill Clinton, either.

Edwards and Obama, like Howard Dean, on the other hand, despite having that Y chromosome, represented a more populist political approach that more accurately reflects my lifelong values.  And it is that approach that I feel will actually address the racial, gender, and class imbalances that are killing America, rather than just try to nudge the pendulum leftward for a little while.

Of course, the middle and working classes always do better under Democratic presidents, and the rich can take care of themselves, so I would of course rather see a Democrat, even a DLC Democrat, in the White House than a Republican. But when I do that math, it has nothing to do with gender or race. The first woman, the first black person -- those are SYMBOLS. They are meaningful and important, but in and of themselves, they aren't enough to earn my vote, nor, I believe, the vote of any thoughtful person.

So I suspect, although I don't know, that the number of white older feminists who are voting for Clinton just because she's a woman is as small as the number of black people who are voting for Obama just because he's black. Not zero, certainly, but absolutely not the driving force behind that choice.

Okay, must go pick out my shoes for tonight.

Hey, Democratic Presidential Candidates: Read this

Mildred Loving has passed away.

You might be going, Mildred Who? Huh?

Back in 1967, there was a very famous case that made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, known as Loving v. the State of Virginia. It was brought by a married couple, Mildred Loving, who was black, and her husband Richard, who was white.

They were married in Washington DC in 1958, because their home state of Virginia didn't allow black and white people to marry each other. After marrying, they returned to Virginia, where they were arrested in their bed in their own home, their marriage certificate hanging on the wall above them, convicted, and sentenced to prison. In his ruling, the judge said:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

They were given the chance instead to leave the state, and they took it. But that's all they took. The Lovings, with the support of the ACLU, sued all the way up to the highest court in the land. And when they finally won that case, every law in the country prohibiting inter-racial marriage was overturned.

So often,  people offer up  arguments about religion and God and nature and the "true meaning" of marriage to justify depriving me and other lesbians and gay men of our civil rights and freedom to marry the person we love. Those same people become incensed, infuriated, outraged when we compare our struggle to the fight for inter-racial marriage waged by the Lovings. But Mildred Loving saw it differently.

Via Daily Kos, from Positive Liberty, Mildred Loving's statement from 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the landmark decision:

(O)n June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” a “basic civil right.”

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Obviously she wasn't a political person, because apparently no politician in this country-- not John Edwards, not Hillary Clinton, and not Barack Obama -- believes she or he can say what Mildred Loving said and still get elected President. I've been waiting for the day that's no longer true all my life.

Thank you, Mildred Loving, for letting me be part of your vision of  justice. Rest in peace.

Veteran suicides

From Bloomberg News today:

"The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government's top psychiatric researcher said.  Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven't provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in Washington."

Rest in peace, Eight Belles. Farewell, Kentucky Derby.

Although I have read a hundred books about racing and its most legendary horses, I don't follow horse racing at all, although Gina (my editor and friend at Pet Connection) does. But I always watch the Kentucky Derby, and I imagine there are a lot of viewers like me, for whom the Derby is everything we know of horse racing.

And I am not the only one I've seen today who's written these words: I'm done with the Kentucky Derby.

Watching Eight Belles, the first filly to start the Derby since 1999, who came in second to winner and favorite Big Brown, go down with two broken ankles and be euthanized where she fell, is more than I can stand. So I'm done.

Guamentum!

I took the Daily Kos link off my browser tool bar or whatever the heck you call that little space at the top. Just for the weekend, in the hope of getting something vaguely like balance back in my life.

I actually find the cable news idiots more annoying, but since I don't watch TV, they're easily avoided. What I find either amusing or annoying, depending on my mood, is the see-sawing of the concern trolls pretending to be all worried about poor widdle Obama who clearly needs all of us to [fill in the blanks] and stop his catastrophic collapse in support, or the sky is falling little bloggers who believe that Obama once had good ideas but now needs to [fill in the blanks] because clearly those idiots in his campaign have no clue what they're doing.

All of them, of course, missing the truly important issue, which is that Obama has taken the Guam primary and as well all know, as Guam goes, so goes the nation, yo.

Oh blogosphere how I love thee.

Anyway, I have a little bit of work to do today, and a few personal issues that I've let slide for too long, so I decided to test my internal fortitude and try to avoid the political interwebs until Monday. None of us is doing anything except driving ourselves stark raving insane, anyway.

I have a post up at Pet Connection about my dog Kyrie's battle with a multi-drug resistant staph infection -- it's here, and contains the latest news for those who have been following the story.

Two hours of work, then I have to watch a video for an article I'm writing for AfterElton.com. (Yes, I get paid to watch television.) Oh, and assuming our media credentials come through, KT and I will be covering the GLAAD Media Awards next weekend for AfterEllen.com/AfterElton.com.  Do you see how exciting life can be when you delete DKos from your bookmarks?

Rut-roh

No comment.

Huh. How'd he do that?

I was down at my mom's, and Obama's press conference came on. It was clear from the first sentence that he was going to disavow Rev. Wright.

I almost cried. "Oh no," I said to my mom. "Tell me he isn't going to do this. No, no, no."

And then he did, and then he kept speaking, and about five minutes in, I was nodding.

I'm not going to say it worked on the media or America. I have no idea. I don't know if he fixed a problem that wasn't a problem to me in the first place because hello I DON'T CARE ABOUT WRIGHT AND DON'T MIND WHAT HE SAID even though I don't agree with some of it.

But I understood Obama's problem. I felt he was genuinely hurt and angered. He reminded me what his campaign is about. He addressed the issues and not the man, and he did it in a principled way.

And I started out thinking he shouldn't do it at all.

Go figure.

In other news: Obama can fly. Who knew?

Feeling a little bitter, are we?

I still don't understand why the media people are angry or upset at what Rev. Wright said in any sermon or speech he ever gave. Do I agree with every single word he uttered? No, but I've been known to argue with myself about stuff; is there anyone alive I agree with on everything? Absolutely not.

It's been suggested (that's what journalists say when we heard it somewhere but can't remember where) that white people Americans feel hurt and attacked by some of his comments on race. Well, welcome to my world.

For my entire fucking adult life I've been listening to religious leaders condemning me to the fiery pits of hell for being a lesbian. I've heard nationally prominent pastors with TV shows and the ear of presidents bluntly state AIDS is "God's punishment on homosexuals" (note to right wing Christians: most people with AIDS are and were heterosexual. Your "god" has bad aim).

John McCain has courted, received, and bragged about the endorsement of virulent homophobe John Hagee, who said Hurricane Katrina was god's punishment on the City of New Orleans for planning a gay pride parade (see note above about aim, kthnx). He also doesn't like Catholics, Muslims, or the nation of Iran. And not so fond of women, either; in his book "What Every Man Wants in a Woman," he said, "Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick. Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist."

So, I'm sitting around listening to this guy, this pastor of a Texas mega-church who has endorsed a grateful John McCain, this powerful and influential man, say:

"It [Gay marriage] will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah."

And this:

"It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality. There is no justification or acceptance of homosexuality.... Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce."

And this:

"The military will have difficultly recruiting healthy and strong heterosexuals for combat purposes. Why? Fighting in combat with a man in your fox hole that has AIDS or is HIV positive is double jeopardy."

Then there's another McCain endorser and a man he has called a "spiritual advisor," Rev. Rod Parsley. His enlightened view of the gays:

"Gay sexuality inevitably involves brutal physical abusiveness and the unnatural imposition of alien substances into internal organs, orally and anally, that inevitably suppress the immune system and heighten susceptibility to disease."

So, now the media everyone is all upset that Rev. Wright was mean to the poor widdle white people?

Boo fucking hoo.

Oh well if you're going to put it like THAT...

"The media has become like a six-year-old boy who, when you're sitting discussing something serious with other people, keeps interrupting to say 'Look! Poop!'" -- SensibleShoes

Apparently I have more to say about the sky falling

I was driving my mom home from a doctor's appointment, and she asked how things were going on Daily Kos while she was having her procedure done.  (Yes, my 72-year-old mother was having DKos withdrawal symptoms.)

So I started telling her how the sky was falling because  Obama had gone over to the Dark Side of the Force on Fox News, and first I said more or less what I said in the post immediately before this one, and then I said something like this:

If you're talking about the pundits on Fox, the "hosts," and Fox News as a corporate entity, then there's no argument to be made. Obama did legitimate them by going on the show, and he did get shit on his shoes. There's no question.

But this isn't about Fox News the corporation or the braying jackass hosts on Fox. It's about the people who watch Fox News.

Let me tell you how brilliant it would be for Obama to have "gone after" Fox and called them on being a right wing propaganda/smear machine. It would have been Bittergate times ten thousand. Because he'd have basically been saying that all you people are too stooopid to realize what Fox is. Too stooopid to know when you're being played. Too stooopid to know that your favorite trusted network is lying to you.

Oh yeah, that would have been great.

/rant

Obama on Fox: Sky falls, news at 11

Do I live in a different universe than the rest of the progressive blogosphere, or am I just old?

Let me begin by saying I hate Fox News and I don't watch it. I didn't watch the interview they did with Obama the other day. I consider them illegitimate as a news source, and I pity -- yes, there goes any chance I'll ever be elected to public office -- the people who get their news from Fox, and resent living in a nation and world where those people have the right to vote (although I would never take that right away -- if I had a political magic wand, I'd use it to show them what "fair and balanced news" really is).

The reason I'm feeling like an alien in Blogistan is that I'm really shocked at the number of its citizens who have completely and utterly lost their shit at Obama going on Fox News. They say things like this, or  like this:

Obama showed weakness by caving to right-wing bullying taunts (thrilling our political foes), disrespected his base, gave Fox a propaganda victory, exposed his campaign as a bunch of liars who promised something their candidate was clearly incapable of delivering, and defended the Democratic spinelessness that gave us the most ridiculous Supreme Court in generations.

I won't pretend to guess whether this helps him in Indiana or not. It may or it may not. And since I've never put Obama on a pedestal, this doesn't knock him down. What this does demonstrate, and quite clearly so, is that Obama is quite willing to score cheap political points at the expense of his base, regardless how much it might embolden the very same people that are working to demonize him to the American people.

Now, maybe Kos is just acting all outraged so the right thinks Obama really is willing to stand up to the progressive blogs even if we get pissed off; honestly, I have no idea. I don't know him, but it smells to me like he really believes this analysis.

I don't, though. I mean, hello, Obama said he was willing to talk to Ahmadinejad; you think he wouldn't talk to Fox News?

But more to the point, I don't care. I don't care because I'm sick and tired of this bullshit paradigm where all people exist on a linear continuum from left to right, and anyone who tries to make common cause with a person with whom they traditionally don't see eye to eye is viewed as a traitor, and all attempts to create unity on the basis of our shared goals are seen as  cynical moves toward the center.

Did progressives really believe that "What's the Matter with Kansas" was that it wasn't left enough? No, what's the matter with Kansas is that people were voting against their own self-interest because they had been beaten down and propagandized. Giving them a different frame for understanding how the Republican Party has been treating them isn't going to turn conservatives into liberals,  folks -- I can't believe you thought it would. It's just going to let them make decisions more consistent with their self-interest, primarily their economic self-interest.

My goal isn't to force people to think like me, it's to elevate the discourse in this country so it's less full of lies and bullshit. It's to obliterate the left-to-right continuum, not by "watering down" progressive values or disenfranchising cultural conservatives but by replacing it with a different paradigm.

That's why I supported Obama in the first place, because since 2004, that's what he's been saying he wanted to do.

I'm not stupid. I do agree that Fox News has done as much, if not more, to damage honest political discourse as anyone else in the media. They are not a legitimate news source, they're a right wing propaganda machine. Like I said, I can't even turn them on. (Although to be fair, I can't watch CNN or MSNBC, either.)

But to act like millions of Americans who do not know that Fox is not legitimate aren't watching Fox is idiotic. This isn't the right wing equivalent of  Socialist Worker, folks. This is one of the major sources of news for millions of citizens of the United States, and Obama is running to be their president, not just yours and mine.

Can a Democrat appear on Fox with impunity? No, they can't. It does legitimate them. It does make them think yay, we won! We bullied Barack Obama into coming on our show! We win! He loses!

But it doesn't matter what they think. What matters is what impact it really has. And I completely disagree that the impact of this interview is that the movement towards a new politics in America was harmed.

I don't know who originally said this, and Google was no help to me, but I learned it from watching Xena: Warrior Princess:

The highest form of martial arts is turning an enemy into a friend.

Maybe going on Fox isn't morally or ethically benign. It's certainly risky.  But, sticking with the popular culture metaphors,  I think Obama just told the right wing spin machine, "These are not the 'droids you're looking for," and they believed it.

I kind of like that.

Quote of the Day

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence." -- Bertrand Russell