Finally, some recognition of a global disaster. (Yet once again the focus is on the threat of political volatility and not the more basic humanitarian problem of millions facing starvation.)

“Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. … The Palestinians are not as nice as the Tibetans in the eyes of the world. But the Palestinian people deserve exactly the same rights as the occupied Tibetan people … there is no difference between a Tibetan and a Palestinian — they both deserve the exact same freedom. … There is also no point in asking which occupation is crueler, the Chinese or the Israeli. The competition is harsh and bitter. The Chinese killed and imprisoned more Tibetans, in Lhasa there is less freedom of expression than in Nablus, but in general, the extent of Israeli repression in the territories is much greater today than Chinese repression in Tibet. Nowhere in the world today is there a region more besieged and confined than Gaza. And what is the result? The world calls to boycott the occupier in the case of China, while absurdly, with regard to the Palestinians, the world is boycotting the occupied entity, or at least its elected leadership, and not the occupier. This, it seems, has no parallel in history. … Is there any other way to describe this, except a double standard?”

— Gideon Levy (in Ha’aretz, 13 April 2008)

Why is the worldwide crisis in food prices considered a nonevent by every major US news outlet? According to the Google news aggregator, only the BBC, Voice of America, AP and the Sydney Morning Herald gave it any coverage. Checking the CNN homepage; it’s another horse race story about Clinton and Obama, this time on their “faith.”

Maybe this is premature; I’m going to check the New York Times. The top story in their world news page reads that the National Security adviser of the United States “said foreign leaders would be more effective influencing China with… ‘quiet diplomacy’”—let Beijing immolate a few dozen more Tibetans, we don’t want to spoil the celebration. Okay, here’s a bulletin closer to the mark; it addresses the riots in Haiti over “rising food prices”. But no big picture. Maybe when millions of Americans are in danger of starvation our media will take note that there is a problem.

NOTE: So apparently I missed this but the main page still has Hillary-Barack at the faith forum as their top story.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut (from “Requiem,” in his final book A Man Without a Country, p. 137 [2005 hardcover edition, Seven Stories Press]):

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

And this wonderful bit of prose earlier on that only grows more haunting and, well, painfully honest and eloquent (from chapter 9, pp. 98-101):

“It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the U.S. Constitution.

“But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.

“I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: ‘C-Students from Yale.’

“George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

“To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, and published in 1941. Read it!

“Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

“PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

“And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.

“So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

“They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!”

An American patriot left us one year ago today. You will always be remembered; God help us if we don’t.

p.s. Last month, an ABC reporter asked about two-thirds of the population opposing the war and whether that should matter; the Vice President of the United States answered, “So?” The reporter, Martha Raddatz, followed: “So, you don’t care what the American people think?” Arrived this contemptuous remark in reply: “No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls” (editorial in the Battleboro Reformer of Vermont, “They don’t care”)

This is funny to me because sometime last year I tried to compile a list of the towns the area codes encompass but then I just found that someone -- a feminist no less -- actually took the trouble to map it. (Just for fun.)

Today marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. These are extended passages from his April 4, 1967, speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (see the entire address here)

…In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.… Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

…[W]e increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese — the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs….

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

…What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

…Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

…The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy—and laymen—concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

…I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

…War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

…This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept — so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force — has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

…If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

[Rest in peace.]

So I saw a very interesting bumper sticker today, which is the fifth anniversary of the ground invasion of Iraq, that speaks volumes about the silence in the mainstream discussion about the impeachment option (it may not be too late). But it attacked the burning issue of our constitutional order from a different angle, reading: “Support the Troops – Impeach Bush Now.” And, if you think about it, don’t our fighting men and women deserve a more competent and able commander-in-chief? Everyone talks about the “antiwar” case for removing Bush from office, but what about the “pro-war” case? Where’s Anthony Cordesman, our respected military affairs think-tanker, talking about the insult to our soldiers that they be victim to a chief policy-maker (and commander, needless to say) of such ineptitude? Why should our troops continue to sacrifice their lives for a man who was never fit for the job, and for a strategy that will ensure they die in vain? Does anyone really care about them?

SIDEBAR NOTE: Five years, half a decade of war. 4,000 Americans dead. (Nearly one million Iraqis dead.) $3 trillion down the hole. Iraqi society devastated, basic services still unavailable to many. Internal displacement and refugees in the millions. Terrorism a bigger threat to the United States than ever. Al Qaeda and Taliban resurgent, the Hydra that endures our fire, enriched by the conflagration we initiated by invading Iraq. It’s time to leave Mesopotamia like the British have before us so long ago. The question now is how to exit without ensuring imminent genocide and a deepening of the ethnic cleansing and humanitarian crisis that already exists. It’s also time to put out to pasture the war criminals in our capital seat who have killed thousands of our sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, and maimed, scarred and crippled many thousands more.

I believe it was John Kenneth Galbraith, the respected economist, who once said that “the only respectable form of socialism in America is socialism for the rich.” And it is obvious that that’s happening right before our eyes, shattering whatever illusion left about the “free market” in the United States. We do not have one. Instead, we have, as E.J. Dionne was good to note in today’s Washington Post, a system of corporate welfare that—instead of enduring the rigors and sacrifices of real risk and self-discipline that the “market” instills in everyday people, like the people who have really suffered but, really, to hell with them because they’re not rugged individuals like us right?—expects a government hand-out when they start to feel the pain.

Condemning the Hamas rocketing against Sderot and Ashkelon is a no-brainer, let’s make that clear. But the Israeli retaliatory responses are, in my judgment, excessively heavy-handed and counter-productive. Taking my cue from news reports from several sources, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead on this front is about 100 to one (over the past several months of fighting since the Hamas victory in January 2006). It is now almost beyond dispute that Israeli policy is, in effect, a collective punishment of the Gazan population, and that’s despicable as a general principle.

Although I have no military background, I think it’s fair to observe that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) strategy seems to be that by exercising intermittent displays of force instead of a full-out invasion, terrible enough in terms of the human impact but more cost-effective, Hamas will be incrementally weakened but not destroyed. In other words, destroying Hamas — and to be real, I’d like to see the organization eradicated — would probably totally destroy Gaza and its 1.5 million people. Not a pretty public relations picture. So now we also have this lovely statement by Matan Vilnai, the Deputy Minister of Defense:

“Palestinians will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”*

Anyone who honestly cares about the future of Israeli society and its wonderful people would surely see at once the obscenity of those words, and join me in calling for his immediate shit-canning and dismissal. (Hamas “spokesmen” predictably dubbed their foe “new Nazis,” according to a report in Yediot Aharonot.) So what to do, when uncontested sovereign territory undergoes near-constant attack? I wish I had an easy answer because I do not; but I hope it’s not naïve or unreasonable of me to declare that threatening annihilation is not the best choice — nor is it anything other than an insult to the Jewish people and a defamation of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Period.

*Min. Vilnai used the word ‘shoah,’ connotative of disaster or calamity — but unmistakably a direct reference to, and unconscionable exploitation of, the Nazi Holocaust.

Creatures from the Gaza Zoo spotted escaping their pen (above), venturing out for a totally unnecessary shopping spree. Get back to your cages, wild beasts!

Dept. of Homeland Security: Preggers are to be shot on sight.

Full report here.

In December, the State of New Jersey put a heralded moratorium on the death penalty. Just yesterday, Nebraska ended the use of the electric chair, giving this reason (courtesy Andrew Sullivan, a sharp conservative writer, who cited the decision):

We recognize the temptation to make the prisoner suffer, just as the prisoner made an innocent victim suffer. But it is the hallmark of a civilized society that we punish cruelty without practicing it. Condemend [sic] prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes. And the evidence clearly proves that unconsciousness and death are not instantaneous for many condemned prisoners. These prisoners will, when electrocuted, consciously suffer the torture that high voltage electric current inflicts on the human body. The evidence shows that electrocution inflicts intense pain and agonizing suffering. Therefore, electrocution as a method of execution is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Nebraska Constitution.”

There’s a lot to remain proud of in these United States. We are a humane people, and nearly a decade of arch-reactionary, authoritarian (mis)rule cannot, could not, and will not change that. I would also add that it is a hallmark of a civilized society that we punish terrorism without practicing terror.

Call for the abolition of the “superdelegate” system, which is hideously antidemocratic; in the next several months, also call for the abolition of the electoral college. As it stands now, the popular voice may become subverted by entrenched systems of power and privilege that many of us do not entirely understand—all of which are woefully underreported if not ignored by our media. That said, my earnest wish is that Obama can pull through and defeat Clinton, the California returns notwithstanding.

“It was painful. It’s painful now. … There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. That devastated me.”

— Colin Powell, 8 September 2005

And so it was: a used, duped man helped sell a war that is now facing its sixth year.

Democracy in America Revisited

We face the radicalization of the obvious. The zeitgeist demands that we deny what is right before us and give reality all manner of euphemistic descriptions and evasions. And so we want simple answers for everything. But, on the other hand, the social reality is not so complicated that we cannot speak of it. We stand on the self-destroyed scaffolds of the New Right and the ashes of the New Left, generations removed from the promises of social democracy and looking toward an uncertain, chaotic future, mindful of the need to rise above the tired categories of “left” and “right” and demonizations of the Other. My generation has enslaved itself to trendy, escapist and cynical patterns of thought, as we, to borrow the language of Port Huron, look uncomfortably to the world we inherit from our vantage in college dormitories.

We have so many opportunities ahead of us and are so privileged. Social change on an institutional, systemic level is a moral imperative that rests on our shoulders. This should not be of academic interest, or the province of “change agent” elites, but the work of ordinary citizens. We are a republic only if we can keep it, to borrow Benjamin Franklin’s words. I have no doubt that my words will be given some or other ideological sign or tag. We can ask what were the tags appended to the proponents of the American Enlightenment and revolutionaries who resisted colonialism? It is surely recognizable.

So we must proceed from elementary facts. One of these is that we have betrayed the Founders in word and spirit, for which we ought to be deeply ashamed and embarrassed. The second is that even acknowledging that fact is illegitimately tarred radical. Orwell, at one point in his life an anarcho-syndicalist fighting fascism in Spain, wrote that to “see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” What faces us is a bald-faced betrayal, a usurpation of American liberty and the Constitutional order that has thrown us, atomized, confused and self-deluded, into a denial of the reality before us. To speak honestly, the litany of high crimes perpetrated by our government need not be reviewed here. Have we been awake?

It should suffice to say that we cannot afford to approach the world as liberals or conservatives, terms now more worthless than international peacekeeping missions. “Liberal,” for example, when not a pejorative term of abuse and derision, means in an operative sense accommodating of neocolonial foreign policy and “centrist” management of the domestic polity in an arch-regressive, statist direction for the sake of political expediency (Clinton). It can at times take on a charismatic form (Obama) or fashion itself as populist (Edwards), but all are a far cry from traditional Enlightenment notions of freedom and equality. “Conservative” has been deformed beyond recognition.

Tocqueville wrote admiringly of the impressive “equality of conditions” that gave meaning to freedom in the United States. No big government enforced such conditions of life; the society was structured along the contours of small townships and direct participatory democracy was realizable. Much has obviously changed, like industrialization—not altogether a bad thing—but some things, thank God, do not. The preamble to our Constitution still speaks of a strange concept called the “general welfare.” What of it now? Does it even remain coherent or sensible to talk of American society, when the dominant culture encourages us all to think only of ourselves so we can “get ahead” by climbing over everyone else’s backs as we all ascend the same pyramid?

I believe in the power of individuals, and think of myself as an individual with the rights of an individual and, hopefully, a free mind. So, for example, my attraction to democratic socialist theory, a school of thought obvious enough at several points (i.e., the insane idea that people, as human beings, ought to own themselves and not submit to state or corporate power), is tempered by several caveats. Yet politics has discredited itself. But we avoid any and all things “political” at our own expense, and at the peril of generations unborn, in these times.

Charlie Wilson’s War?

Your application was intriguing … What you didn’t have was the strong news reporting background of many of the other candidates. [I actually submitted a dozen or so pieces from my college paper] … You clearly have many of the instincts that a very good journalist should have. In particular, we applaud your curiosity and your commitment to search out your own truths, rather than to swallow a party line.”

Excerpted from my rejection letter from the Washington, D.C. bureau of The New York Times for this summer’s Rosenbaum editorial internship. If it’s a good thing to not be a partisan...?

Here’s my problem with much of the post-N.H. commentary with regard to the Clinton “victory.” Particularly, with third-wave “feminists” like Gloria Steinem, who wrote in the New York Times the day before the primary a gushing, grotesque article about HRC that made me briefly consider the wisdom of throwing up. (I did not.) Lemme pull it out of the trash bin, just a sec… here we go. January 8: “Women Are Never Front-Runners.”

Right out of the gate Steinem is playing the ‘gender card’ at full tempo, without any shame at all. The biggest illogic of the whole thing is the insinuation that opposing Hillary Clinton means I am opposing the advancement of women in politics. And that’s flat-out absurd. Yes, there is no question that women have it tougher, that they have a higher hurdle in the political arena, and that there are popular stereotypes they have to overcome. But that’s not the point: HRC is not as polarizing, unpopular and shrill and power-mad and self-congratulatory as she is because she’s a woman, but because she’s Hillary Clinton. It is actually, in a way, sexist of Steinem to suggest, ever so implicitly, that Clinton represents all women. No, not all women, but a subset of career-oriented women who are not really that interested in equality but more intent on shaming men into thinking they are automatically “sexist” or “misogynistic” because they oppose individuals like Hillary Clinton. In other words, it is sexist to argue that opposing her candidacy is perforce sexist.

Here’s Steinem: “I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate [not if you count Obama’s service as a state senator], an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training…” Wait, stop, stop right there. On-the-job training? Are you kidding me? She is not getting hired; this is an election, not a job selection process. Steinem concludes that “[w]e”—i.e. women—“have to be able to say: ‘I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.’” (her emphasis) The first part is dubious at best, and the second is completely patronizing. It’s like saying that I support Joe Lieberman—and I certainly do not, for several reasons—because he’s Jewish. Just ridiculous.

NOTE: It is interesting to take a look at the letters published in Thursday’s Times. The best came from two men and two women writers (because, unlike the Steinem-type feminists I am interested in equality; there was a feminazi forum at my college some time ago, whose breakdown was three women speakers and the token guy).

Daniel Grossman of Clifton, NJ writes, “It is unfortunate that the Clintons continue to resort to this type of manipulation [Hillary had gotten a tad choked up the day before NH]. … Victimhood is not a sufficient criterion for being president.”

Karin Kimbrough adds: “As a black woman and a feminist, I find it depressing to see Gloria Steinem set up this tired, false debate as to whether a black man or a white woman is more disadvantaged in national politics. … My parents (who are Ms. Steinem’s age) vividly recall racism in the Deep South, including barriers to voting as well as the barriers to many other supposedly granted rights like eating in restaurants, staying in hotels and using public facilities. These were all rights white women actively enjoyed.” I’m reminded of the Carlin rant about how feminists like Steinem “don’t give a shit about black women’s problems, they don’t give a shit about Latino women, all they care about is their own reproductive freedom and their pocketbooks.” Then he goes on to agree about their characterization of men as moral monsters and how it’s terrible that women “put on a man-tailored suit with shoulder pads” and “imitate the worst habits of men”—like, tada! Hillary Clinton!

But I digress. Phillip Ruland from Laguna Beach (CA) chips in with the fair-minded sentiment that “such a self-regarding emotional display”—I believe a good paraphrase can be something like “oh, look I’m about to cry, can’t you see how you should agree that I’m entitled to be your leader?”—“is hardly the type of character trait one desires to see in a presidential candidate—man or woman.” And Marilyn Kiss of Staten Island writes that she has been “firmly in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp” until she cast a vote in favor of authorization of use of force against Iraq in 2002. “For me,” Ms. Kiss—couldn’t help it, sorry—“international peace trumps national feminism, since it also takes into consideration the lives of women and girls in Baghdad and beyond.” Need I repeat what Carlin said?

Alas, we cannot expect everyone to be levelheaded, male or female. This is Carolyn Kirkland of Fort Worth, Texas, who makes this asinine statement: “Gloria Steinem ... may have ... helped turn an election. I am amazed at how many of my women friends e-mailed her Op-Ed article to their friends because she put into words what so many of us feel in our bones.” Oh, how long, oh Lord, how long?

[Addendum, Jan. 11: in her 1983 book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions Gloria Steinem made the ominous foreshadowing, “One day, an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the earth” (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 218), er, the Democratic nomination.]

(Photo credit Zombie/AP)

...and CNN calls it for Hillary. Damn.