I'm sorry, but Sen. Biden's remarks are only dynamite to the small percentage of hard-core liberals who think that acting politically via "identity politics" is a good idea.

It isn't.

The only label I fit easily under is liberal, or perhaps progressive. I haven't been happy about this for around 15 years now, but whatever. As a white R&B/jazz musician for nearly 20 years, an easy 75% of my collegues are black. This in spite of the fact that I have always managed to live in WAY-white populations--except for my college years in Boston (okay--on second thought, including them). The kind of bullshit that is being thrown at Biden for using the word "clean" in reference to Obama is absurd, full-on left-wing, PC, bullshit. Nobody I know, of any race, thought this was an issue; and everyone I know, of any race, thinks this is media/pundit crap. I have little doubt that what Biden meant was that Barak is not a tatooed, pierced, gang-banger wanna-be. But, as any reasonable person--or at least one who has ever stumbled across a cable channel or UPN/WB/CW--can attest, one need not be black to fit into the gansta wanna-be catagory. Obviously, not everyone who is tatooed and pierced and sports gangsta fashion is--hold on here--actually a gangster. Nonetheless, we have a media content on portraying blacks in this fashion more than not. NEWSFLASH, the vast majority of us are grown-up enough to know that this is a stereotype, and to discount it.

I happen to think that Biden did alright on the Daily Show. Not perfect, but in this media climate there is nothing he could have done to erase the assumed gaffe. So be it. He laughed at himself, and that's the best one can do over the air-waves. I wouldn't have voted for him before and I won't vote for him now.

The more important matter is: This is only an issue to the far-left activists who hold the strings to the democratic nomination. And here's a tip:

If y'all don't knock it off pronto, you'll end up with another nominee who doesn't offend anyone except the right wing-nuts, and you'll lose the fuckin' election AGAIN! Let's--immediately--get behind whomever we choose to get behind and argue for them based on their freakin' merits!!!! You know, how they show up in the world: their voting record, the words they put into the public record that preceded their voting record, etc. If we do this--I think Barak takes it running away. Legislative experience is SO not a pre-requisite for executive branch success. Look at our freakin' history, people.

It took less than a month for the party FINALLY again in control of congress to devolve into the same old Democrats--bickering, fractured, self-interested mess at the party-pundit level.

Seriously, have we learned nothing?

Birkenhead, via his logically ungrounded arguments, could serve as the poster-child under the heading "pearls before swine". Read some freakin' Wilber or Spiral Dynamics. Mr. Birkenhead is a flaming secular, orange/green flatlander. Thank you, but we've had about 75 years of your worldview screwing things up. Perhaps hope and intentional visioning aren't the embodiment of Satan that you seem to believe. All the better for those of us who've moved beyond it. With any luck, we'll constitute a majority before it's too late.

Because, again--seriously, your worldview has all the political and cultural cred as that of the Christian Right, only spewing from the Left. Sweet...how proud you must be (and how fucked the rest of us must be that the pendulum will likely swing back your way before a third-stream populism takes hold!!!).

You keep right on dismissing everyone who doesn't agree with your opinion and see how quickly the world comes to resemble something of YOUR choosing: shitty as it is to admit it, democracy still functions within the paramaters of the secret (it's called the collective conscious--and all you have to do is look around the ENTIRE U.S. to see that we got what we deserved in 2000).

Toodles...

I read Ms. Dickerson's article with reluctance having found her previous column on Barack Obama petty and self-consciously racist. I was quite pleasantly surprised by the longing, the confusion and the open-heartedness expressed here.

Her musings regarding her own children seem to run head-on into, and right on over her musings of Obama's racial cred. If she can extrapolate out from her own family to the broader world I should think that a retraction of her comments on Sen. Obama should be forthcoming.

I look forward to that.

Election Day 2000: I vividly remember sitting on my couch at 2:30am PST, watching a terribly loopy Jim Lehrer and thinking, "well, at least this should be the farthest swing of the right-ward pedulum. Look out, Middle--here we come! That's good for the country, and--it's all I've got, so in that light, Godspeed George W. I mean, how bad could it be?" And, I went to bed disappointed, but heartened.

Cut to, Now: In my worst nightmares I couldn't have imagined the horror, the disgrace, the catastrophe that the Bush presidency has turned out to be.

While it's nice to see that my thoughts on the rightward turn were perhaps prescient, it will take--perhaps--decades to repair the damage these 'evil-doers' have done to our nation in Its name.