That's what courage looks like

China warns of 'life and death struggle' over Tibet

You realize what they're saying, right?

"If we have to kill some motherfuckers, including the Dalai Lama, to make sure Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong remain under out thumb, then so be it, biatches. We got force on our side, baby. Haven't you heard? That's what makes for legitimate governance these days."

It's so nice to know that you are the Chinese government and you have the approval of Harvard University, the Democratic and Republican parties, the U.S. Government, the U.N. Security Council, and most of the Washington press corps for your philosophy of governance, isn't it?

Oh, they don't like Communism. But they sure do like force as a governing philosophy. And what the fuck else do you think Communism is, dumbass?

China's got friends in high places, they reason. So if the Dalai Lama's gotta take it for the team, then so fuckin' be it. What you gonna do? You gonna force us to stop, Dalai Lama? Good luck, Ghandi.

Most of the world, right now, is rationalizing this line of reasoning.

Me. I can hardly believe that there is someone with the courage like the Dalai Lama still around, these days. I thought courage went out of fashion with Martin Luther King. You certainly don't see much on American soil, except among those men and women willing to sacrafice their lives for the security of the Iraqi people. But apparently, there's still some of that scarce resource in these parts.

I'm sure Hillary Clinton is trying to calculate, right now, whether letting the Dalai Lama die improves or worsens her Presidential prospects.

You gotta love the Democratic party's version of courage, don't ya?

Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama

The Testing of Obama

It's so funny and ironic.

I am a long-time liberal who has finally grown weary of the meaningless divisiveness of liberal democratic politcs, who is concerned about the security of Iraqis and American soldiers, and who is voting for John McCain, at this point, to better guarantee that security.

Andrew Sullivan is a very like-minded life-long conservative, who very much shares much of my outlook on the world, who is more skeptical of the efforts of Americans to secure Iraq, would like to see a speedier withdrawal, and who seems, at this point, to be voting for Barack Obama.

It's a crazy, crazy world.

And Andrew has an excellent argument about Barack's affiliation with Jeremiah Wright, today, that I think sums up many of my own thoughts on the matter, as a bridge builder from so many different perspectives, though not with Andrew's background as a gay man, obviously (I am straight as fuckin' arrow, ladies. If you doubt that, I will be happy to demonstrate it for you. I also happen to care very much about gay rights and my gay and lesbian friends and have for a very long time).

In it's entirety:

"Today will be a crucial day. It will be a day when we will discover if America's racial environment - and the emotions and feelings and anger and fears that it entails - can allow for a black man - with all that entails - to become president. Can a man like Obama both relate and belong to a congregation like Trinity UCC and be inspired by a man like Jeremiah Wright and still reach beyond race to white and Latino and Jewish and Muslim and other Americans who may find the specific racial context as impossible to understand as it is absurd to excuse? This is the argument that will come flying back at him:

If John McCain had spent twenty years hanging with Pat Robertson, describing him as his mentor, attending Robertson's church, having his kids baptized by Robertson, having Robertson officiate at his wedding, giving him the inspiration for the title of his career-making autobiography, collaborating with him in political organizing, and then tried to dismiss criticism by calling Robertson his lovable uncle who sometimes goes too far, there is no way on God's green earth Yglesias or his crowd would call this "trumped up."

Much of Wright's worldview I find repugnant. But some of it I also find inspiring. And in trying to understand it in its totality, I do try to think about the racial context and history of America. And so there is a difference, pace Jonah, between a white charlatan like Robertson who chooses to demonize minorities in the name of Jesus and a pastor like Wright who vents rage against a majority that has, in the not-so-distant past, given African-Americans every reason to be angry. And there is a difference between a white politician (like Bush) who seeks to enjoy the support of a Robertson without ever challenging his ugly dimensions and a black politician who, while remaining in a congregation like Wright's, nonetheless has written and spoken as movingly as anyone in my lifetime about the need for racial reconciliation and understanding.

Maybe this is a bridge too far. But in thinking about Obama for this past year, and reading the subtle critique of, say, Shelby Steele, as well as the palpable racial discomfort of some white conservatives, I have to say that it is precisely the wide span of Obama's bridge that makes me admire him. He has refused to disown Wright, while also refusing to endorse all of his message. You can call that opportunistic or expedient or cynical. You can also call it intelligent and brave and principled. Obama could have chosen the Shelby Steele route or even the Alan Keyes or Condi Rice path. He could equally have chosen the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton path. But what is unique about Obama is that he tried and is trying to do much more than any of them have - to express all of these racial strategies and to transcend them. While being human. He isn't a saint or a savior. But he is trying.

I think this is part of his appeal to the next generation. And maybe it's appropriate for me at this point to express how he has inspired me as a gay man to keep trying to maintain the bridge over the gulfs of my own various identities rather than to burn it. It is possible in American public life to be defined as a gay person and to embrace every aspect of gay culture - the good, the bad and the ugly. It is also possible to be closeted or semi-closeted so that these questions do not easily arise. And it is possible to be a gay man completely divorced from gay culture, and to buy access to power and influence by simply adopting a relationship to the gay world that is indistinguishable from many straight people. I don't think there's any perfect solution to this terrible dilemma of identity - of belonging and transcending, of empathizing and maintaining a proper distance. I don't blame any gay man or woman for failing to make all this work. We live in many worlds and not all of them fit. And there have been times in my life when the roughest edges of a gay subculture I do not want to disown and have been a full part of reach out and target me again. Whether it be an embarrassing online personal ad or sexual mishaps or a long night at the Black Party, I know that part of the straight world stands poised to attack and condemn, pigeon-hole and dismiss. So be it. I have no desire to disown much of gay culture that the straight world finds abhorrent. At the same time, I also know that not all of this subculture is healthy or good and I have an obligation to address and engage and reform those parts of it. That I have also tried to do - with uneven success. And I know, as I watch Obama, that these strains are not easy and those who have never had to walk this path do not fully know how hard it can be.

The ease of pure victimology is as phony as the release of complete assimilation. For an intelligent and principled person, the struggle lies in the interstices. What I have come to despise about much of the Republican party is its refusal even to empathize with this difficulty - or, worse, to choose to exploit these struggles for easy, cheap and callow political gain. And as I have grown older and felt the tug of all these identities more strongly, and understood more deeply the immense difficulty of resolving all of them, I can see few role models older than I am - and more, mercifully more, younger than I am.

But I see Obama as a pioneer on this path - a brave and principled pioneer. I would think much, much less of him if he disowned a spiritual guide because of that man's explicable if inexcusable resort to paranoia and racial separatism and anger. And I would think much, much less of Obama if he had never opened himself to this subculture and its fears, hopes and resentments. That he has done all this - while still attempting to reform and explain it - is a remarkable achievement. Did he overlook too much? Did his white guilt prevent him from protesting black extremism? It's hard for me to know, because this kind of judgment is very personal. I don't think I would have been as passive as Obama confronted with some of this stuff. But he did not merely sit back; he also dedicated his career to racial integration and understanding. It was a wide bridge, perhaps too wide for the weight it is bearing. And maybe America is not ready for this bridge, for these contradictions, for this complexity. But the promise of Obama is that his campaign appears poised to show that America is ready for this - and the immense healing it would bring.

And so we are suspended between the old politics and the new, between a Clinton who believes in her heart that America is not ready and may never be ready for this leap and should therefore adopt a politics that assumes the ineradicability of this gulf and the need to disguise it and play cynical defense - and an Obama who offers all of us a chance to see that sometimes authentic identity requires an element of contradiction, a bridging of the resentful, angry past and a more complex, integrated future.

He may fail; and the Clintons may be proven right. But he may also succeed - and what a mighty success that would be. These things are never easy; and we were lulled perhaps into an illusion that they could be. So now the real struggle starts. And it will not end with an Obama presidency; it ends with a shift from below that makes an Obama presidency possible.

Or to put it in a phrase that is as true as it is wilfully misunderstood: We are the change we have been waiting for. And the waiting is now over."

People of decent hearts and everyone else

Conservatives are feeding on red meat, today, as they pretend like their ugly narrow interpretations of this episode with Jeremiah Wright are really at all the same thing as the more open-hearted and genuine reflections that Barack Obama offered today.

Shelby Steele has a really ugly, bullshit "interpretation" of the Obama phenomena in the Wall Street Journal which reflects more about Shelby Steele than it does about Barack Obama.

The Obama Bargain

"The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence."

How to keep up with the bullshit? Let me count the ways.

First of all, Obama is more genuinely talented and transcendent of racial divisions than is Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, both of whom Steele obtusely compares him to. Obama just accepts, better, the fact that lots of people carry ugliness about race with them, white and black. And that's what drives people like Shelby Steele crazy.

Steele conjures up this idea of "bargaining" because he just can't imagine that perhaps Barack Obama or anyone might have a genuine concern to transcend the ugliness of racism and all of the bitterness and hatefulness that surrounds race issues by people all over the political map. Steele assumes that Barack must be lying or manipulating or disingenuous because Shelby Steele seems convinced that anyone who is black and successful but doesn't carry with them a sense of outrage and obsession about racial issues - and issue that Shelby Steele writes almost exclusively about, remember - and who doesn't agree with him on other issues - Shelby is a conservative working at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Obama is a liberal running for the Democratic Presidential candidacy - must be up to something. They couldn't possibly be genuinely wanting us to get past our legacy of bitterness and division about race. That would just be too naive for us all to believe. It takes a man of incredible and unchallengeable insight like Shelby Steele to see through the deceit. Thank goodness we have scholars to sort all such questions and not a broader marketplace of ideas, huh? Because we would all just miss all the bargaining going on all over the place and where would we all be then, huh?

The fact is that he just wrote this hit job on Barak Obama - A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win - that he's now on record with. That's his story, now, as the saying goes, and he's got to stick to it. Makes me almost want to vote for Barack just to humble this asshole.

But the fact is that I am voting for John McCain, at this point, until I hear some assurances from Democrats that they are not going to pull out or pressure to pull out from Iraq before the Iraqi government is ready to handle security on its own (we did start the goddamn thing, after all; our consciences just conveniently forget this when we're feeling a bit more self-interested).

So I don't defend Barack Obama because he's my man. He's not, at this point. I defend Barack Obama on this because it's pretty fuckin' clear to me listening to Obama and reading Steele's work that Obama is the more honest of the two. And Shelby Steele is desperately trying to rationalize why he is such a cynical, mean-spirited prick. And Shelby Steele can fuck off, as far as I am concerned.

Obama makes arguments about race that make sense to me and Steele does not. Obama's more open hearted recognition that race is complicated in America as much by the ugliness in the hearts of white and black people as much, if not more, than our bigoted past. Obama understands that ugliness better because he is not blinded by it like his counterparts.

I very much identify with the efforts of more decent-hearted people to deal with the cynical interpretations of their motives by cynical assholes. It is very much my life, much of the time, these days. Because what cynics lack that more open-hearted people like Obama have is the courage to face and forgive such failings, openly, rather than to search out all sorts of ways to avoid demonstrating that kind of forgiveness and open-heartedness. It's a conspiracy of lessers against their betters. I don't agree with Obama on everything. But on this question and the question of forgiveness, generally, Obama is a better man than his critics, like Shelby Steele, and it drives them crazy that such a better man would be getting so much support from America, these days.

Victor Davis Hanson has a similarly hateful column today in the National Review.

An Elegant Farce

And James Taranto shovels out this hateful screed on the Wall Street Journal today.

Obama and his "white grandmother"

Here's the bottom line on this thing that neither Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, and James Taranto can get their hateful little heads around:

Barack Obama is being loyal to his friend. He has made clear he does not agree with him and thinks he's been hateful and outrageous in his comments. But he's not foreswearing him, as Victor Davis Hanson suggests, because he takes seriously a virtue that Steele, Hanson, and Taranto are unfamiliar with: he is loyal.

Jeremiah Wright is not a terrorist. He is not a not a murderer. He is not someone that needs to be turned into the authorities. He is a guy with some views and an experience that Barack appreciates, some that he abhors, but who is, more fundamental than all that, his friend, who he is not selling out because conservatives see an opportunity to pounce.

As someone who is not voting for Barack Obama, at this point, it is a quality about Obama that is admirable, not a reason for concern for me. It is, however, a reason for me to be skeptical of his detractors on this issue, at this point. If you don't understand loyalty, do not feign to give me any fucking lectures on what virtue means in political life. Because you have no fucking clue, you opportunistic shithead. So fuck off.

I'm still voting for John McCain. It's not personal. I actually like Barack Obama a lot. I also like the Iraqis and the American soldiers sworn to defend them. Barack has chosen a policy course that it is perfectly clear to me is mistaken, at this point, and which puts them all in danger. And I am voting, at this point, for the guy who puts them in the least amount of danger and who guarantees their security better. If Barack Obama could offer that, then he might compete for my vote. Until them, he is a guy who I admire for his loyalty and so many decent thoughts about issues like race and poverty and insights into people, generally, and whose outlook on foreign policy is actually his strongest card, politically, I think, but who does not have the better policy commitment on the most serious question the country faces.

In the meantime, the more decent guy doesn't have anything to answer to from assholes who wouldn't know a decent heart if it swooped down and switched out their narrow little minds and shriveled little hearts.

This is why politics is a mess. Because when people like Barack Obama and Mark McGwire demonstrate clear loyalty, assholes like these can't see anything but wickedness abounding.

And, for whatever stupid reasons, we let assholes like this guide our national conversation.