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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Is serving the Italian-American community racist? Mull it over in that mud pie you call a mind.
a lot of the pompous prattle. The Russians can have this bitter humour because of how they suffered through serfdom, how they produced a mad "holy man" in Rasputin, their experience of famine and war. I'm sick of listening to the BBC and other media outlets over here with its anti-Russian bias in reporting on the Georgian kerfuffle in the Caucasus. Condoleezza Rice has been in Georgia lecturing the Russians about "democracy" and the awfulness of invading a neighbouring country. Strangely enough, it's only that arch-conservative, Pat Buchananan, who's seen this for what it is. JFK brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the Sixties when the Russians installed missiles in Cuba but when the USA arms and trains the Georgian army, encourages it to join NATO and decides to erect a missile shield in Poland, virtually encircling Russia, oh, that's a different matter altogether.
American foreign policy is far more important to the world and to America itself than all these flimsy articles on "saddlebags", bags o' money and a thesis (which is probably boring) written many years ago. The European Union is also making "tut-tut" sounds about Russia but it's only all for show. Putin can clip all their wings because it's Russia that has the oil and gas. Life just isn't fair.
We have more in common than I originally imagined. I'm glad people still crack 'ol Gorky open. Over here he's kind of like the lambada, the forbidden dance, because Lenin listed Gorky as being among one of his favorite writers. Americans like things to be appropriately bland. Lambada? No. square dancing? Sure, it's sickeningly safe, and well - square.
Is serving the Italian-American community racist?
Depending on the situation, serving one ethnic or racial constituency "first and foremost" could be considered racist. It wouldn't be for a member of the House of Reps whose district was primarily of that race/ethnicity. It would be for a President, who presumably is responsible for all citizens of all demographics.
I remember reading that Italian-Americans believed that nobody with a surname ending in a vowel (Ferraro, Cuomo, Giuliani) would ever be elected President of the United States. They must have felt aggrieved about everyone linking them to Don Corleone but they had to get on with it, as people do. Now, if Obama is elected, the Italian-Americans will be delighted, especially Camille Paglia.
"could."
Could you point to a pointed blantly racist statement uttered by the mouth of Michelle?
Are you the little train that "could?"
you know.. "I think I can I think I can I think I can I think I can..."
Come on choo-choo...show me the money!
Every goddamn ethnic enclave in this country has some kind of a grudge. It's always been that way since Jamestown. The racism thing though, that's the tar that the true American idealists are ever hopeful of taking to the quick, and then getting it to stick. I mean, just look at all the jerkoffs who're striving like their lives depend on it to cast Obama and his wife as the leaders of a black nationalist underground who will first thing off the bat, start out with a punitive policy against "those people."
"Fight fire with baking soda." Ha! Excellent.
Just wanted to say thanks for getting medieval on the conserva-trolls who seem to be taking over the letters section of any and all Salon articles about politics these days. I don't remember them ever being so thick before. Keep the broadsides coming. Your use of logic is a refreshing antidote to their half-baked appeals to ignorance and use of rumors. The rhetoric doesn't hurt either -- I mean, "Soylent Whitey?" Pwah
They are so disingenuous, nearly as bad as the emails this article was about. What dirty tactics -- they can't even be honest about who they are. Has there been any research or reporting done regarding the use of fake Web identities and compassion trolls as a campaign strategy?
And I say this as a lukewarm Obama supporter -- I have my doubts, as I do about all politicians. I'm just sick to death of the BS and right-wing stupidity in these letters and emails. Sometimes it feels like it's bedtime for democracy, to paraprhase Dead Kennedys.
If either of your candidates be he McCain or Obama get up on stage and say whatever it is politicians say to get elected and you believe them whatever it is, or the opposite of that when they say the opposite of that tomorrow then you pretty much get the government and the governance you deserve. If you believe that smoking cures cancer or Enzyte really makes your penis bigger, then feel free.
Never go full retard. I don't care what either McCain or Obama has to say on this day or that. I went to Obama's speech in Raleigh the other day. It was fine. A chicken in every pot a car in every garage. Same with McCain: we will win all wars no matter the cost. blah blah blah words words words.
Not only is Obama Muslim, he's a space reptile and a secret member of the Illuminati and is selling crack to white kids in the suburbs. On the other hand McCain eats babies. I believe that. Don't you?
What the fuck has happened to Salon.com???
I seem to remember a time when the people who came here weren't dickheads of the highest order...the douchebags who haunt these pages disseminating hate are so fucking tiresome...just go away. You aren't convincing ANYBODY to vote differently. Not a person. Nobody.
Give it up.
Anybody else remember when this was the first place they came for news? Now I view Salon.com as a haven for trollish assholes...
I suppose there is no choice other than having to waste one's time on debunking other people's lies and misrepresentations, because one can't just ignore them, thus "giving them credence". Cue Irving's London lawsuit against Jewish US academic Deborah Lipstadt, which she won on all counts: Irving IS a deliberate falsifier of history, end of. Pity the Obamas can't sue for libel for every single instance of deliberate misrepresentation.
On one level it's a Sisyphean task because we are talking prejudice here, and prejudice always works the same way, no matter whom it is directed against - Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, black people, white people, yellow people, brown people, whomever. A prejudiced person will frantically attribute to OTHER PEOPLE what she/he most hates im THEMSELVES ("denial and projective identification" in psychoanalytical parlance). This is why there is an unending stream of smears every time the prejudiced person thinks of their hate object, and they don't mind what they say either, however off-the-wall it may be, because it relieves the prejudiced person's inner tensions for that one moment, and flummoxes the recipient with its crass absurdity and unreason. It's actually INTENDED to create that "shock and awe" moment in THE OTHER, whoever he/she may be, because "joyful cruelty" (New York psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg) is highly addictive for prejudiced people, as is the need/greed for self-congratulation/self-adoration.
Of course the prejudiced person is also the last to notice any of that in THEMSELVES. But the debunking still has to be done: Thank you.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Joseph Goebbels - prototype of unrepentant and deliberate liars and smearers - persisted in calling the deputy police chief of Berlin, a lawyer who happened to be Jewish, "Isidor". (Look up "Dr. Bernhard Weiss"). I'm afraid it worked at the time, for the same reason that crypto-racist smears work on the Obamas: There is just such an endless flood... but it still has to be resisted.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
