Letters to the Editor
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@ljwaker53
Hey guess what.. I'm sure some HRC supporters are okay with labial mutilation, just as some Obama supporters wish that the niggers were still picking our cotton.
Conflating a candidate with their supporters is walking a thin wire, almost as bad as characterizing their values based on who they know (Goldwater, Wright).
That's the fun, difficult and vexing problem with democracy: some, many or even most voters may be assholes, idiots or just plain insane (eg: Kansas).
If through some miracle of, well, a back-room deal Clinton gets the nomination it will piss off a lot of those unwashed, voting idiots. A large number of these plebian vote-tards have never participated in the process before: too young or too black, too jaded or perhaps too legitimately afraid of voting because they view the system as not only stacked up against them, but actively oppressive.
My father is an attorney in Cuyahoga County, Ohio which contains Cleveland and has volunteered his time and services as an election monitoring official. He is unable to publicly confirm any of the claims that have been made regarding voter disenfranchisement in North East Ohio due to ongoing litigation, however I feel like I can, in general, confirm that what he witnessed was extremely troubling.
What is more troubling to me, however, is that word of dirty tactics employed by largely the Republican party (but in some cases both parties) filters down into the urban African American community -- the same community where claims that the CIA has a hand in the AIDS epidemic can gain traction.
Where urban blacks have been discouraged from participating in (national) politics, rural and urban ethnic whites, the so-called red-state blue-collar voters, have been encouraged to vote in spite of their best interests for nearly 50 years.
If you read the letters on salon.com you come away with the impression that this primary is "girls versus blacks." Much ado is made about the unfairness of our male-dominated society and its inherent sexism, and the atrocities committed on a daily basis against women.
Atrocities are committed against women on a daily basis, around the world, and in this country. Yet we have an overtly racist justice system that disproportionately imprisons African-American males, subverts urban voters and manipulates low-income whites into voting for candidates whose platforms are in every way antithetical to Americans of any race or gender struggling to make a living.
So to say that Hillary deserves the nomination because women get a raw deal in America is sexist on its face, and short changes these new voters coming in and participating in the system for the first time ever -- woman, man, black, white, gay, atheist or frakking cylon alike.
I think the people have spoken, overwhelmingly, and they have rallied behind Obama. I know this must be hard for Hillary Clinton to accept, but I am perplexed by her continuing actions which bely an ego-driven campaign and a kind of narrow, tunnel-vision guided purpose which throws reason out the window.
I will vote for whichever Democratic nominee runs against McCain, but I do not believe that we have any chance of winning if Clinton in 2008 pulls a Bush 2000.