I’m enjoying Black History Month, but…

Now that we have a black President…couldn’t we move it to a longer month?

Let’s hope Monday continues to be remembered as Martin Luther King Junior Day.  I don’t have a dream today, I have a nightmare…that in future years, it will instead be commemorated as Pardon Dick Cheney Day.

Why else did Cheney frankly admit to torture?  For that matter, given his own unusually candid recent statements, is Bush also going to pardon himself?

Some constitutional “experts” don’t believe you can pardon yourself (the Constitution doesn’t say a damn thing one way or the other, which is why I’m skeptical about expertise here).  Personally, bearing in mind the way the Framers thought about most things, I doubt the term is supposed to include pardoning someone for something they haven’t yet been charged with, at all.  In other words, I don’t think ANY blanket or preemptive pardons, for all crimes that someone may or may not have committed, are constitutionally valid.  (Yes, in case you’re wondering–that includes Ford’s destructive and utterly unethical pardon of Nixon, which was OBVIOUSLY, to any reasonably astute person lacking the blinders of American national pride in “our leaders,” a quid pro quo, whether explicit or implicit.  And I am not impressed by polls showing a slight majority of people, many of whom weren’t even born then and most of the rest of whom don’t remember the circumstances very well, approve of the dirty deed.  Much more significantly, most people AT THE TIME, when they knew what was at stake and didn’t have the incentive of letting bygones be bygones, thought it was wrong.)

But I digress.  Regardless of whether it really is constitutional to issue preemptive pardons, blanket pardons, even self-pardons–it’s obvious that in this political climate they’d get away with it all the way.  Many would criticize, but who would have the guts to do anything about it?  And besides, there’s a rogue Republican-operative majority on the Supreme Court.  Yes, there’d be political fallout and everything, but that’s sort of like sticking a booger into a nuclear waste dump.  Bush has already incurred so much political damage, the P.R. side almost doesn’t matter any more, as long as HE can take sole responsibility–which is one of the great things about pardons.

It seems to me Bush and Cheney are setting up a situation where all of their subordinates can give the defense that wasn’t accepted when the Nazis used it, namely, “I was just following orders.”  That defense isn’t adequate under American law, either, but it might work anyway; after all, who holds our “leaders” to correct legal standards these days?  And besides, they can say their superiors actually confessed their own guilt.  Then, these “superiors,” the ones who actually gave the orders, Bush and Cheney and perhaps a few other people who can’t pass the buck, are immune from any prosecution because they were pardoned.  This lets everybody off the hook.  It’s sort of like a Ponzi scheme–or should I say Madoff scheme?–except with criminal liability instead of money.  But because justice is a lot less rigorously enforced than economics, this pyramid scheme wouldn’t inevitably collapse.

File this article within the “I hope I’m proved wrong within 37 hours” department.

UPDATE on January 19: I never thought it would be possible to say, even occasionally, “Good news from the White House,” until after the inaugural.  But unless the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or is lying about the right hand for no apparent reason in a manner that will be exposed for the world to see within a matter of hours, I WAS wrong.  Well, hey–there’s a first time for everything.     :)

To be less cryptic, Bush’s mutants, ahem, aides are saying he ain’t doin’ no mo’ pardons.  I’ll dance a jig to that when it’s certain.

FURTHER UPDATES on January 30 — all happy ones:

1.  There were no further pardons.

2.  We now have President Obama instead of Unelected Usurper Bush.

3.  Having crashed inaugural morning, my computer is now working again.

18th century tax protester:  “Taxation without representation is tyranny!”

21st century tax protester:   “Taxation is tyranny!”

It’s not often that a single cartoon sums up, not only the whole current situation, but even its whole history.  This, from South African newspaper Mail & Guardian Online’s cartoonist Zapiro:

Let me tell you something.  The real barbarians are those who live under a barbaric order and accept it.  Barbarians are quite okay with the fact that the existing regime treats some of its “own” people barbarically.

The barbarians are INSIDE the gate.

Enter your keypad number.

By HOLBROOK MOHR
Associated Press Writer

LAUREL, Miss. –

The largest single-workplace immigration raid in U.S. history has caused panic among Hispanic families in this small southern Mississippi town, where federal agents rounded up nearly 600 plant workers suspected of being in the country illegally.

One worker caught in Monday’s sweep at the Howard Industries transformer plant said fellow workers applauded as immigrants were taken into custody. Federal officials said a tip from a union member prompted them to start investigating several years ago.

Applauding as your fellow workers are arrested — their only crime to sneak into this country hoping to provide for their families?

One person snitching is one thing.  Other people complacent, I could understand.  But standing there like someone who has no clue what his or her own real place is in the world — with no clue that the bosses only distinguish between workers to the extent that they can get away with screwing some of them more than others — with no intuition born of long, hot days, let alone historical knowledge, that workers have always been helpless when disunited — and banging your hands together like a buffoon, as if they were doing all this for you?  As if your birthright were being reclaimed, when your status as a wage slave is simply being confirmed?

In Mississippi, things used to be all black and white — literally.  If you were white, you could speak out; if you were black, you kept your head down to stay alive.  Mind you, if you were white and you didn’t agree with any of this, you were well advised to keep your mouth tightly shut.

Immigration, on any sizable scale, is a pretty new thing in Mississippi.  Like most of the South, it historically received far fewer immigrants than the rest of the country.  But historically, and still today, it has the highest percentage of African-Americans in the country.

Despite that, it’s one of the most Republican states, because the whites vote so overwhelmingly for the party of Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.

It wasn’t always like this.  Back in the days of the one-party Democratic South, Mississippi was the second-most Democratic state in the country (after South Carolina).  This started changing in 1948, when Truman came out for civil rights, but as late as 1960, no Republican presidential candidate had secured even 40% of the vote in Mississippi since 1872 — back during Reconstruction, when Black people could actually vote.

Then came 1964.  Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection after shepherding the historic Civil Rights Act through Congress, banning most forms of racial segregation and discrimination.  The Republicans nominated Senator Barry Goldwater, who had led the opposition to the bill.

Johnson won 61.1% of the national popular vote — the highest percentage since they started tabulating a national popular vote in 1824.  Goldwater got only 38.5%.

In Mississippi, however, Goldwater got 87% of the vote.

Now, bear in mind that in those days, black people pretty much couldn’t vote in the state.  Because of literacy tests and other laws designed to disenfranchise them, administered by racist registrars, plus the ever-present threat of violence, the black registration rate in Mississippi was only 5%.

Johnson, after winning his landslide reelection, got the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.  Black voter registration stunningly went up to 70% in time for the 1968 election.  Democrat Hubert Humphrey got 23% of the Mississippi vote — almost all of it from blacks — while segregationist George Wallace romped to a landslide victory with 63.5%.  Richard Nixon, en route to the White House, came in third with a mere 13.5% of the Mississippi ballot.

The Republicans have been winning the state ever since, presidentially, and, more recently, on the Congressional and state levels as well.  They can’t get 87% of the vote any more — the Voting Right Act saw to that.  In the delta region along the Mississippi river, where African-Americans have been the majority population since slavery days, most local offices have passed from ultra-racist whites to blacks since the civil rights movement.  But statewide, racist, Confederate-sympathizing whites can still outvote anyone of a different hue or persuasion.

As in the rest of the Deep South, wages are low and laws privilege corporations over workers with a Victorian savagery, with few of the nuances of job safety, state minimum wage laws, and organizing rights seen elsewhere in the country, however inconsistently.  Unions are profoundly unpopular among whites, because of memories of strikes carried out by overwhelmingly black unions — and because unions can only function when ALL working people, black, white, brown, or otherwise, band together.

Mississippi:  the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling strikes down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision goes further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

The wackadoos are in full command. Not only do they have two of the three branches of the government in their pockets, but the Congress is theirs for the asking too (see the right-wing extremist FISA bill they’re about to pass). Now their judicial arm has created a new Constitutional “right,” just for the wackadoos. Brass knuckles are illegal, but guns are too safe for the government to ban. God bless America.

Incidentally, the above-quoted AP lede is dead wrong–it was by no means “the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.” The Supreme Court had ruled AGAINST the Second Amendment having any relevance to gun control laws over and over again in rulings going back to the 19th century.

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Until the reign of general idiocy that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and is only just beginning to end, no one but gun wackos bothered quoting that irrelevant Amendment–or rather, quoting the second half of it, since the “well regulated militia” part never did their cause much good.

“Keep and bear arms”?  Nobody does that any more.  Members of the National Guard–which is today’s Congressionally-designated militia–do not keep their guns at all; they’re in an armory, and they’re the same issue the Army gets.  They DO bear arms when in uniform–unlike those who carry around a gun for self-defence or hunting, who are merely carrying arms.  In the eighteenth century, when the Second Amendment was drafted, to “bear arms” had a specifically military meaning (see the Oxford English Dictionary).

This explains the otherwise mysterious connection between a militia designed to protect the state and a right of the people.  Simply put, the feds can’t keep people from serving in their state militias–nor from keeping the weapons they’d need to do it, if any states still let militia members keep their own weapons (which they don’t).  It’s a right of the people to serve in their state’s military service–obviously subject to the provision that the state has to want them there (or the militia would hardly be “well regulated”).

Through the alchemy of our ever-obscurantist Supreme Kangaroo Court, this has transmogrified into a right to own a handgun for self-protection in the District of Columbia, which doesn’t have a militia.  Just about as logical as saying you have to stop counting votes because continuing to count them might at least temporarily swing the outcome, giving the impression that the person who’s going to be implanted into office anyway wasn’t really elected.  It’s the same five Justices–well, not quite, two having been replaced by the pseudo-president thereby implanted (and subsequently reimplanted through massive fraud).

What really worries me is the folks in D.C.  A lot of them are going to die because of this.  All in order to “reinforce the illusion, irrelevant to capitalist production but essential to its propaganda, that the individual stands self-sufficient above all symbolic restraint”–legal restraint in this case (quotation from page 21 of my big essay).

The March 28 cartoon by the brilliant Khalil Bendib.

Commenting on Barack Obama’s remarkable speech on race, Charles Kaiser says,

If Obama is elected president, it will be because he has been the first candidate in many years to try to appeal to what is best in America: “What is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Unlike the approach of every Republican candidate for president, that is a perfect example of the way religion should be used in American politics.

In Obama’s words today, you could hear the mystic chords of memory—an echo of the words of another man from Illinois with humble origins who understood the proper role of religion in politics. The spirit Obama embodied today was the same one Abraham Lincoln evoked in the peroration of his greatest speech in 1865:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Well put, Mr. Kaiser. However, in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, just before he got to the “with malice toward none” bit quoted above, he had something else to say. As the Civil War approached its close, here are the words–almost inconceivable today in their eloquent bluntness–with which the American president dared to combine religion and race:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

“God damn America,” indeed. It strikes me that old Abe was in some ways closer to Reverend Wright than to Obama–praiseworthy, thought-provoking, and indeed groundbreaking though Barack’s speech was.

To be fair, Lincoln made clear that he hoped God wouldn’t damn America, and the out-of-context snippets from Wright’s speeches we’re being bombarded with don’t make that clear (not that that proves anything one way or the other about Wright). Nonetheless, Lincoln said explicitly that if God did damn, or more precisely curse, America, in the cruelest possible way, that it would be just. More–that perhaps he was already doing so, in the form of the war that cost more American lives than any other. And that the North’s own centuries-long complicity in slavery and benefit from the wealth it extracted meant that the North, too, was liable to God’s justice. Had the North not had slavery, and then, after slowly abolishing it, kept the Southern slave system alive through its political acquiescence? Had Northern mills not woven Southern cotton? Does our economy not today rest in no small part on the backs of our own black and brown grunt laborers and on the cheap products of overseas sweatshops? Does it not further depend on the colossally murderous gunboat diplomacy to which Wright made such maligned mention, whereby countries around the world are kept open to American trade and business at the point of a knife?

I wonder what outcry must have greeted Lincoln, or would have had he confronted an American populace like the one of today. “He’s taking political correctness to a new extreme! Slavery isn’t my fault–I’m a Northerner and can’t even own slaves. Why should I be punished for it?”

He gives to both North and South this terrible war.

If God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…

the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

These words are carved into the Lincoln Monument. They should be seared into the nation’s soul as a protection against the stupendous denial of collective responsibility into which we have fallen–and the vicious anger that greets any attempt to break through it.