David
Cameron, Barack Obama and the Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt,
may have been caught out being less than graceful at Nelson Mandela's memorial
service by taking selfies, but at least they got one bit of etiquette right.
They didn't arrive at the service after the deceased. At the funeral of a
friend of mine, I turned round to watch the coffin being brought into the church
only to spot my therapist scuttling in behind it. My psychological wellbeing
has been greatly improved ever since.
Top
xeno-psychologist Roy Hobbs explained today that “To argue that when certain
people do in fact act like total wankers they are at the same time being
totally cool by not parking a 40-vehicle motorcade, a fold-up eco-bike and the
Danish Embassy’s State Skoda in a football stadium when the crowd is already
singing the first verse of ‘Let’s kill some Zulus’ - though that might admittedly
actually upset some people - and then to also
assert that such crassness could also refreshingly take the sting out of global
grief was an act of intellectual flexibility, meme-plaiting, non sequiturs and
treble-standards with which only a Guardian writer would start his analysis.”
You could argue that world leaders have
a duty to be statesmanlike at memorials and that hatchet-faced solemnity is the
order of the day. You might even wonder how much any of them really cared that
Mandela had died. Most of them would probably only have met him a couple of
times at most and in the ordinary run of events you don't go to memorials of
people you've only met twice.
Political gossip
columnist Emma Bradford praised the G-13 celebs as “Extraordinarily sensitive,
given the circumstances. President Obama in particular has risen to the
occasion splendidly. Having never found time to meet the world’s most popular
black man in the scant five years of his globe-trotting Presidency, Big O’s appearance today
at a globally televised funeral says it all, really”.
But world leaders have to do what world
leaders have to do. And if it means jetting halfway across the world, both to
represent your country and to show you are important enough to be invited, then
needs must.
Henry Brubaker at
the Institute of Studies seconded that emotion by
explaining that “It was an act of diplomatic time-management genius for Queen
Gertrude, The Big Number Two and the Big Number One to visit the funeral in
person.
They could simply
have paid tribute by dispatching proxies such as a drone Lego X-Wing Fighter, by
sending an over-flight by the Royal Air Craft, or simply by allowing American Consular staff to be murdered by Soweto businessmen and going back to
bed; blaming their televised murders, rape and dismemberment on critical
reaction to a You Tube trailer for the racist film ‘Pearl Necklace.’
Getting censorious about Obama, Cameron
and Thorning-Schmidt having a laugh is to miss the point. If they had laughed
the whole way through the service, then it would have been a misjudgment. But
they didn't. They were serious when required, which is the way it should be. A
memorial is a sad time, but it's also a time to remember the fun bits of the
dead person's life. Irreverence is not the same as disrespect. I'm not sure
that Mandela would have taken a selfie at Obama's memorial if the positions had
been reversed, but I'm fairly sure he would have seen the funny side of Obama
posing at his.
“Actually,” chuckled
Tom Logan “in life Nelson Mandela was well known for his terrific sense of
humour. You only have to remember his promises upon his historic release from
Batman Prison during Antiques Roadshow of a better life for every South African
when the ANC came to power to realize what a natural genius he had for comic
timing and the delayed punch-line. I’m sure he’d get a giggle out of three
leaders of the Free World acting like students in Wetherspoons at a Freshers’
Weekend Hos ‘n Bros pub crawl sending
their shiny, happy smiles to Facebook.
Like"
A memorial should celebrate and reflect
the life of the deceased. Remember Margaret Thatcher's funeral earlier this
year? Everyone at St Paul's
Cathedral behaved with the utmost solemnity. But was there ever a more joyless,
soulless service? Thatcher left this world into a public emotional void.
Compared with that, Obama's selfie could almost be construed as an act of love.
Nikki Hollis
observed today: “If only the mourners at the Thatcher planting had loosened up
a bit and sung a couple of verses of ‘Don’t
Cry For Me, Argentina,’ let off a few party poppers like the SAS at the Iranian Embassy and passed out trays
of post-Soviet Russian vodka shots it wouldn’t have been such a snooze.
And how
right that Guardian writer is. After all, what does
the very word Obama mean to most everyone if not the world’s latest and widest-used synonym for an
act of love?”
When Leif Ericsson set off from his estates here in Copenhagen between ten centuries and a millennium ago to cross an ocean and bring oppression and slavery to the natives: Black, White, Yellow and Red, of North America, no-one could have foreseen that on this day in history an African-American President would stand here as the freely elected leader of a corrupt, cruel and warlike nation to bring peace and equality at last to the globe that has cried out for them so long to deaf ears. But I have large, wide, receptive African-American ears.
Last night I had a dream. I dreamt I left the Road to Mandalay and laid down the white man’s burden and later divorced her just like dear old Dad did. I left all the peoples of the world to govern themselves according to their own unique histories, laws and diverse customs: just as people of every nation should do. And we shall soon freely follow all of those histories, laws and diverse customs in slavish fashion back in the United States – in all 57 of which I have lived and studied and was born.
It was warm that year, and although you couldn’t prove it wasn’t due to there being too many automobiles in the world (and I’ve made sure that there will be just exactly the right number of American ones by helping the Auto Workers Union to make their production targets), you could prove it by the tree rings. Except that there weren’t enough tree rings the first time we counted them, but it’s been possible to substitute similar data to support the mediaeval existence of carbon-spewing industries across the Atlantic by following the ancient Scandinavian science of taking small slivers of timber and casting them into the air to prove that the hockey stick is real.
(Never trust a woman who says she knows what a hockey stick is for, by the way. She’ll say it’s for her children and her children’s children. As if that kind of uncontrolled breeding ever did the human race in all its diverse and equal races any good at all throughout the rise of mankind and the history of civilisation.)
No-one could have foreseen that on this day in history an African-American President, whose ancestors Leif Ericsson would never have allowed to even touch a hockey stick; let alone fabricate scientific evidence to merit the closing down of all carbon-positive industries such as all of those that manufacture goods for profit as well as most services, would stand here to tell you at this moment in history that I have a dream.
It is a dream of two worlds. One is dirty: disorganized; divided; and afflicted with hidebound institutions such as royalty, divisive politics as its leaders squabble, and many individuals have unhelpful opinions, and some of its people cling on to memories of a republican constitution, an independent senate and some old religion.
The other is a perfect world: bright and regular and clean and full of people united in a common purpose. And one day it approaches that old, tired and disorganized world and it brings its message of hope from the stars: a new hope.
And on my orders millions of voices suddenly cry out (for change, I have no doubt) and are suddenly silent.
And so I ask you; the rulers (and in one or two cases the freely elected representatives democratically chosen from identifiably different and competing political parties), to join me and come over to my side. Join me and together we shall rule the world as One. With me as the biggest Number One of all.
When I first read this article, having Googled for the text of President Obama’s Berlin Wall speech, I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t a wicked (and wickedly funny), all-time best Right wing spoof of some Left Liberal’s obsequious paean to The One. For me this was like a dream come true: except, obviously, without all the lesbians..
It turned out not to be so. Someone’s actually getting paid by the shareholders of The Boston Globe to write this reality-free garbage.
But I have promised not to fisk at least once a week, (which I’ll fulfil today), and I’m sworn to saying something positive about a Right wing point of view each week (which in this case means it’s enough to say that no-one on the Right wrote unqualified tosh like this about Ronald Reagan during the first year of his presidency or for much later as far as I know,) and… besides, some of you have been very creative and responsive lately.
So let’s not fisk it at all.
Let’s instead accentuate the positive, shall we, and show up something that isn’t a non-sequitur; or isn’t flatly gainsaid by some other part of the piece; or an outright lie or - better yet - that doesn’t match this particular gem’s combination of mendacity, hypocrisy, more mendacity or the dramatic irony of what a crock each part of it is compared with the rest of the article or to the little circle of firelight that we call reality…
“At critical points in the 2008 campaign, Obama boldly defied conventional wisdom about fund-raising, organizing, message strategy, and crisis management.”
The candidate who had “The Audacity to Win’’ - as chronicled in the new book by his campaign manager David Plouffe - is a president with the audacity to wage war with a pre-announced date for winding it down.
His predecessor, George W. Bush, never lived down the “Mission accomplished’’ banner that hung across the aircraft carrier he landed on in May 2003. At the time of Bush’s now infamous photo-op, the conventional phase of war was over in Iraq. But the insurgency that developed afterward took thousands of American lives. The banner and the president in a flight suit declaring an end to major combat operations turned into a morbid national joke.
Last week, Obama used a West Point setting to essentially declare his mission accomplished before it even begins. He is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, with a vow to start pulling them out in 2011.
Now, that’s true audacity, and totally in keeping with candidate Obama’s willingness to continually roll the dice.
Plouffe’s book chronicles many examples of dice-rolling, from minor to grandiose.
When Obama decided to run for president, he gambled that the country was somehow ready to elect “an African-American man, born to a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, just four years out of the Illinois state senator,’’ as Plouffe writes. To get to the point of convincing voters that he was the right man for the times, Obama first had to gamble that he could derail Hillary Rodham Clinton, the all-but inevitable Democratic nominee.
At critical points in the 2008 campaign, Obama boldly defied conventional wisdom about fund-raising, organizing, message strategy, and crisis management.
He tackled the race issue head-on with a ground-breaking speech. He took an overseas trip that could have backfired in any number of ways; Plouffe calls the speech that candidate Obama delivered in Berlin “truly audacious.’’
“One of the fundamental truths of the campaign’s story, one that will always stick with those of us who went through it, is that we threw long,’’ writes Plouffe. “We refused to be defined by past electoral and American history, by what we were told we couldn’t do. We tried to see things simply as they existed. We refused to accept the story that many thought would be written for us and instead wrote our own chapter of history.’’
The gambles paid off. Obama won.
Now, after what we are told was long, thoughtful, gut-checking analysis, he is embarking on another kind of gamble. He is marching more American troops into Afghanistan and betting that he can order them to start coming home in time for his reelection campaign.
If Obama has any second thoughts in the months ahead, he can turn to Karl Rove’s laudatory opinion piece, published in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “Obama can win in Afghanistan.’’
Now, Rove represents an administration that really knew how to start and end a war, doesn’t he?
Obama’s problem is that starting war, or escalating it, is relatively easy. Ending war is hard.
Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel, Vietnam War veteran, and Boston University professor of history, said on the radio show “Democracy Now’’: “He seems to assume that war is a predictable and controllable instrument that can be directed with precision by people sitting in offices back in Washington, D.C. I think the history of Vietnam and the history of war more broadly teaches us something different. And that is, when statesmen choose war, they really are simply rolling the dice.’’
There it is again, the phrase that allowed a first-term senator from Illinois to shock the political establishment and win the war.
Rolling the dice.
If he loses this gamble, Obama could lose the presidency. Then again, Bush was reelected even after the “Mission accomplished’’ debacle.
But with this gamble, there is much more at stake than reelection: the country’s trust and the lives of its precious sons and daughters.
So its good, truthful, consistent, or hopeful points about the Obama Presidency are…?
The following is an extract from my forthcoming magnum opus: ‘Liberals: Born Free but Everywhere Feeding us to the Lions,’ Chapter Three: Guardian writers-outthought by yeast.
It's nasty. It's scary. But face it, it's not new – America was built on racism
Jimmy Carter's blast against Barack Obama's opponents was just, but the left too has problems with people of colour
When it comes to respect for former president Jimmy Carter's staunch and consistent anti-racist stance and his fearlessness in speaking what he considers to be the truth without fear or favour, I take a back seat to no one.
That would be this and this and this and this and this and this. Nil points Ms. Greer. But it’s early days yet.
He has stated that much of the ire aimed at President Obama's healthcare reforms, his spending plans and other initiatives is based on racism, that there is an inherent sense in America that no African American should be president of the United States. Inherent?
Anyone over three years old knows the United States was built upon race, among other things,..
Clever Ms. Greer. She’s heard of all that near-universal adult literacy, reformed Christianity, religious toleration, scientific and engineering education, high levels of agricultural and craft skills, metalworking, (some) respect for women, plus widespread knowledge of classics and literature, and commonplace (but by no means universal) freedom of speech and movement. there’s hope yet.
… and that it remains utterly race-addicted on all sides.
Which is utterly dented by this far-Right, arch-segregationist, pillowcase-masked, jackbooted, blood-and-soil Germanic revivalist website.
BEWARE. DO NOT BROWSE TO IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WITHOUT FIRST TAKING PROTECTIVE MEASURES TO KEEP YOUR SOUL SAFE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Yes, it’s official folks.
In The Liberal to English DictionaryTM, the innocent phrase “In a Gallup poll from 2/9-11, Americans were asked the question: If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be black, would you vote for that person? 94% of Americans answered yes” actually translates as We sho’ want no niggers here, no sir.
Sooner or later, race will always step forward and take a bow. But in the matter of calling opponents to President Obama racists, Carter needs to take the advice he gave to Hillary Clinton during last year's presidential primaries and "give it up".
Good Ms. Greer: good. You can see from this is how liberals can think of themselves as being smart. From time to time they pass the Clue Thong around at Comment is Free staff parties and this was the day for the bonny Bonnie.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you would have to have had a heart of stone not to laugh as the comment pages, the cable networks' politico-comedians, the blogosphere, the twitterati and 24-hour news feeds came alive as a result of Congressman Joe Wilson's boorish and crass outburst on the floor of the House during Obama's address last week.
For the benefit of Martians and people who only get their news from the mainstream media, Congressman Wilson said ‘Tell the truth’ and 'You lie' when President Obama was reciting one part of the list of blatant lies and distortions which was his let’s socialize healthcare speech to Congress.
He said
The man shamed his office, his state, his party and his mother, but he apologised to the president, and the president accepted. But for many, this was not enough. One prominent columnist even opined that "boy!" was the unsaid coda to the outburst.
Fox News's Glenn Beck –…
He’s the one who exposed Obama’s Green Jobs Czar as a communist and a 9/11 truther when ABC, NBC, CBS, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times,Time Magazine, Air America, PBS and CNN were investigating Sarah Palin’s hairdresser’s ex-boyfriend’s half brother for a marijuana offence in 1997 and searching for the now-notorious but mysteriously missing photo of her standing over the still-warm body of the last polar bear in Alaska.
I suppose it takes a Right-wing moonbat to make a bogey out of green jobs.
…a real-life Howard Beale, that crazed broadcaster from the 70s film classic Network – must be rubbing his hands in glee. Once again, the left has stepped in the mess and can't smell it yet.
I watched in horror during the campaign last year as the media, the left and liberals alike jumped on what they thought was surely going to be some kind of post-racial love train with Obama as train driver, conductor, ticket collector and onboard entertainment. For them, nothing was going to stop their revenge – I mean, righteousness.
To call the anti-Obama healthcare protesters in the main racists is to overlook the small but potent coalition that it is.
She clearly means that it’s wrong to accuse a large movement of the sins of a minority. She’s being right. Sensible. Correct. My brain hurts. This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen
.
Now let’s look at how the rest of the Left conflates that minority (whose existence within conservatism we shall not question here), shall we?
This is a melange of classic anti-big government,
Big government being axiomatically anti-racist. You only have to think of Germany in the 1930s to realise that that’s so true.
…pro-small government people:
Because as evr’ schoolkid in the ‘hood knows, if the gummint just be enforcin’ the law an’ keeping the Russians out of Europe an’ Cincinatti, an’ building the roads an’ keepin’ the peace an’ makin’ da kids go to school, that be huge racism right there.
….garden variety fiscal conservativesv…
Low taxes and burning crosses go hand in hand like slow, stupid, defeated relay runners.
…the hardcore "end-of-days" Christian right,
Who are so concerned with the Jews returning to Israel and the Rapture that they have no time for colour coding the saved and the damned, but hey, everyone knows from films and stuff that American Christians are inbred, canoeist-raping, homosexual Mafia-deniers and therefore obviously racists, and who needs facts for that?
…pro-gun…
That lead, it’s a metal much more attracted to, and indeed mostly to, the hearts and the rhythms of Africa and their sufferings much more than those from the British Isles and the European plains…
… and anti-abortion elements,…
Because Whitey, he sure do love to see all those little picaninnies born alive, don’t he?
…staunch anti-communists….
Because disagreeing with, and wishing to prevent repeat performances of, Communist multi-million genocides is just crazy talk,
…and yes, of course, ye olde racists.
So there you have it.
The other disagreeable people above weren’t racist at all.
Greer is right and clever, and honest. Only the actual racists are racists.
Seriously.
But they've always been there. Sorry, but where's the news?
And to say, as some do, that no president has been as maligned as Barack Obama is not to have read American history very closely. I can recall, during anti-Vietnam war protests in my student days, marching behind a sign that read: "LBJ Pull Out! Like Your Daddy Should Have Done!" Andrew Jackson's wife was called a prostitute, Wilson insane.
Plus all that ‘Bush=Hitler’ and ‘Death of a President’ and ‘Reagan listened to little voices that tell him to bomb Russia.’ I expect she repudiates all that as the trash it was and still is.
In the 44th president's case, race is added to the usual anti-Washington, anti-administration mix. It's nasty. It's scary. It makes you angry. But this is what it is.
Right on. I’m amazed. I actually have no argument with Ms. Greer, here.
But we know this already. Even the official Left knows that it’s possible for a tiny, unrepresentative minority to have nothing to do with a fundamentally decent majority. For example, when someone says something like: ‘Women were created by Allah to be defective,’ the Left can take the side of the minority that holds that the Hadiths aren't canonical, or when someone that Kaffirs are to be subjugated, they can pick on anyone who says otherwise - irrespective of the numbers involved.
Only…
Here comes the money quote: the fly in the ointment (presumably myrrh) of what hitherto, despite my shadow fisking, was actually a comprehensive de-coupling of racism from anti-Obama conservatism by Greer.
I can indeed hear and recognise the code words being shouted out: "give our country back"; "the American people"; "defend the constitution". Add to these words like "tyranny" and "fascism", and anyone can see what President Carter means.
They all clearly translate as ‘Nigger, get out of the White House.’
"give our country back"; can’t exclusively mean ‘from overgrown Marxian statism’ - it just can’t. Conservatives plain aren’t allowed to believe what we say we believe. They have to mean what the stupid, non-Greer Left calls all conservatives as clearly distinguished from racists by her above.
"defend the constitution" – that inconvenient document that followed a declaration that proclaimed that all men are created equal, and in the pursuit of which generations of Americans have moved from a slave-owning rebel republic to a superpower with a half-black President.
like "tyranny" and "fascism".
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, my dear Ms. Greer.
If we think that Obama is dishonest, a demagogue, and the deliberate subverter of a constitution intended to limit the growth of over mighty government, why can’t we just mean it?
But conservatives and rightwingers are not the only racists.
I think she slipped and missed out the respectable ‘some’ between ‘but’ and ‘conservatives.’ But still.
I cringed during the campaign at the drooling of male broadcasters over the candidate's physique; the "cool black guy" envy many of them subliminally expressed in their words and their writing which risked reducing Obama to some kind of fantasy. There still are those lachrymose liberals who can't stop welling up every time they see a black face in their vicinity. And there is the syndrome, whose name is even now being invented by psychologists, for those white people who feel that they can say things to black people that they would not have done before, simply because they stepped up to the plate and voted for Obama.
That’s so complicated and obscure that I don’t even want to try to figure it out.
Racism cuts both ways.
Obama's campaign slogan was "Change". We on the left need to change. Change our tired, ideologically driven responses to events. Change our moth-eaten rhetoric. Change our demands on what people of colour, women, disabled people, gays and lesbians ought to be when they attain positions of power. Change the arrogance and class bias too often buried in the language the US left uses, such as "astroturf", "cracker nation" and "faux-News" – and change too the establishment oligarchy that shapes our opinions and forms our images.
In other words, ‘The Left needs to stop being The Left.’ Good luck with that one. Really.
Above all, we must change the unspoken belief that Barack Obama is our president. However else this presidency ends up, it will be primarily the creation of the person elected to office. Before our eyes, he is building his mission, reshaping, reconfiguring, adjusting.
We have a great man in the Oval Office. With him, we are in uncharted waters. Let's help him keep the ship of state steady – and let's shut up.
Hmm, because the last thing he needs right now is a bunch of Left-wing race-baiters around him calling his critics racists, except for the particular bunch of Left-wing race-baiters he’s had around him all his adult life; some of whose pals he’s appointed to public office.
So, apart from her one paragraph of two lines reversion to type, Ms. Greer is incisive, observant, rational and right.
And that’s the problem with liberals today. It’s not that some liberals can’t see faults in themselves (or more likely their programmes and style) that don’t merely translate as ‘Not Left-wing enough.’ Some clearly can. Nick Cohen and Melanie Phillips have taken that step backwards to the hard core of classical social-liberal belief and are trying to apply that core to a world that contains things not recognized by machine liberalism: real-world Islam being distinct from Anglicanism-with-coriander-and-garlic; moral poverty as the major cause of the economic sort in industrialised countries; the scarcity of resources.
And gravity.
But when otherwise perceptive, fair and honest Left-liberals just plain can’t accept that we other people hold to what we believe in and say what we mean, then they’re always going to assume that conservatives have a terrible and unredeemable dark heart.
In misinterpreting conservatives, even the best of them voids their own – increasingly scarce – moral honesty. Lose that and they’ve really only got the folk songs to fall back on…and it’s not looking good.
