Dog Day Afternoon

This is the part of summer I hate. It's gotten sweaty-balls hot here in NYC the past week or so. Too hot to make you feel like doing anything. So hot, in fact, that I'd rather be in my office working than walking the streets surrounded by scantily clad women. (Can I write that now? Will she get pissed? Guess I'll find out.) And writing about BEING hot is so lame, but I just walked home from the subway, and it's all I can think about. Woe unto me.

If you've never been to New York, I can't describe for you how disgusting it feels to drag yourself into the bowels of the Brooklyn Bridge subway stop in the middle of 80% humidity and then be blasted in the face by a wave of impossibly hotter air originating from God knows where. (Mercury, maybe?) For some reason that stop has no air conditioning, or even a fucking fan, and I have to encounter it every day on my way to work. "Bloody hell," as they say in the Olde Country.

So where were we? Ah yes, The Dog Days. In the dog days of summer, a black Harvard Professor of African Studies gets mistaken for a burglar in his very own home. Then, when the cops show up and ask him offensive questions like "Do you live here?" and "Is there anyone else in the house?" and "Could you please step outside?" said black Professor of African Studies at Harvard gets arrested when he gets angry and starts acting all disorderly and shit. Problem: said professor is a personal friend of one Barack H. Obama, who happens to be El Presidente of Los Estados Unidos, and who, reportedly, is also African-American. Oh sights and wonders, what fun ensues!

Without knowing all the facts, El Jefe Barack says at a press conference that the police acted "stupidly," and promptly immerses the country in another racial crisis. How many crises is that now? Let's see. We've got the Health Care Crisis. We've got the Economic Crisis. We've got the Iraq War Crisis. We've got the Afghan War Crisis. We've got the Illegal Immigration Crisis. We've got the War on Terrorism Crisis. We've got the Social Security Crisis. We've got the Bailout Crisis (though that's linked to the Economic Crisis, so it probably shouldn't be treated as a separate crisis.) If you're a conservative, you need to add the Socialism Crisis, the Government Gun Theft Crisis, and the Liberal Supreme Court Crisis. That's a lot of crises we're dealing with here in America. And now, throw on top of it all this silliness with Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department and Professor Henry Louis Gates of Haaaahvid University.

If you're looking for my opinion on this -- and why else would you be here? -- my view is that Crowley was doing his job, but that Gates had a right to be pissed about being questioned as to what he was doing in his own house. But before I can fully judge these two gentlemen, it's necessary to keep a couple of things in mind. First, I'm not a cop and I'm not a black man, and I think the life experiences of both men in these respects were critical to what happened. Objectively, I think Gates let his anger get the best of him and was unnecessarily hostile to a guy who, from all that I've heard and read, was just doing his job, responding to someone who called about a possible burglary. Crowley didn't know who else was in the house and he followed protocol. The caller referred to two people. I don't think Crowley said anything to Gates that warranted the reaction he got.

So where did Gates' reaction come from, then? From his own experience as an African-American man in the 20th and now 21st Century, first of all. Who knows what he's been through in his life? Who knows what many law-abiding black men go through when the first thing people assume about them in a given situation is that they have bad intent? That must get old after awhile. And for someone to question his right to be in his own house, well, put that together with maybe one or two or three or ten shitty experiences with white people or cops in his sixty-plus-year old life, and maybe then one can begin to comprehend his overreaction. I'm not saying that what Crowley did was wrong, but that his questioning and intrusion may have been PERCEIVED by Gates as racist. And if you've read Blink!, you know that this situation presented a classic case of instantaneous perception run amok. It wasn't about objectivity; both men were going on their instincts -- instincts that have racial edges to them -- and this is where it led them. Gates' reaction was OBJECTIVELY unreasonable, but SUBJECTIVELY, I can understand it, though I don't condone it. If any white person had acted that way with Officer Crowley, said those things about his mama, you have to think that they would run as high a risk as Professor Gates of being cuffed and stuffed. But maybe not. Maybe Crowley would have been more patient with a white person, not because he's a racist, but because of the primal, instinctive biases we all carry around, the ones that Blink! talks about. And maybe Gates would have been more patient if he was confronted by a black cop, instead of a lily white Irish guy like Crowley.

I also think that Gates' potential arrogance came into play here. He's a Harvard Professor who has a personal relationship with the President of the United States. You don't think that gave him some intestinal fortitude in this situation? That it contributed to Gates' thinking that he could shoot his mouth off in a situation where most people would have shut up as soon as it was clear that he belonged there? I think Gates' arrogance and self-perception had as much to do with this incident as his race.

As for Crowley, I think he was too touchy himself and could have Gates' tirade go, even with all the bile and disrespect coming out of Gates' mouth. If he was that pissed off at the end of it, he could have warned Gates once more and written him a nice fat ticket. Hit him in the wallet. To arrest someone in their own house when they were minding their own business before the cops showed up, seems excessive to me, and unnecessarily escalated an already hot situation. But maybe someone else got in his face recently. Maybe he was annoyed to be there at all. Maybe he heard one too many insults from a civilian that day. Or that week.

And how about the neighbor? The concerned citizen who reported the incident in the first place? I originally thought she was a racist busybody, but the facts don't bear that out. I listened to the call she made to 911, and she actually came off pretty sane. She didn't live there and called on behalf of someone else, an old lady in the house who thought she saw two people breaking into Gates' home. On the call, she expressly said that it could be nothing, that it could be people who live there who are having trouble getting inside. On the other hand, before you go and call the damn police, don't you observe awhile and try to get some more information? Or maybe you go out there and see what's going on. It was broad daylight for goodness sakes.

And doesn't it beg the question: Does anyone in this country know their fucking neighbors anymore? We've become a nation of shut-ins who play video games, write blogs, watch t.v. and who only associate with our close friends and family. What happened to community? Where have the neighborhoods gone? No one knows anyone anymore. I can understand that somewhat in New York where everyone's crammed together like sardines and anonymity is a means of escape (and safety), but in the suburbs? In Cambridge? Even my parents in New Hampshire, who live in a super rural town, don't associate with their neighbors much. Only the ones across the street, that's about it. I'm not sure what this means, but you have to believe that if people interacted more and recognized each other's face, maybe we'd not only have safer neighborhoods, we'd avoid stupid misunderstandings like the one between Officer Crowley and Professor Gates.

After removing his foot from his mouth, Obama, to his credit, tried to turn this into a "teachable moment," by having the feuding fogles over to his house for a beer. Forced to pick an American brand, Obama went with Bud Light. Pathetic. Gates chose Red Stripe, which is brewed in Jamaica. Shocking. [UPDATE: turns out it was actually Sam Adams - a last minute change.] And Crowley went with Blue Moon, a favorite of mine, which he sipped with a slice of orange in his glass. And Joe Biden joined them, because he had nothing better to do. We'll never know what was said. From the pictures I've seen, it doesn't look like there were too many smiles around that table.

We know that no one apologized. God forbid. It seems everyone expects an apology these days. Contrition. I wonder why that is? Why do the words "I'm sorry" carry so much weight? They're just words. If you go punch someone in the face and then a month later say you're sorry, does it change the fact that someone got punched in the face and got hurt? How many "I'm sorrys" could Bernie Madoff dish out right about now? And yet, everyone WANTS an apology. They want to hear one. Obama should apologize to Crowley and the Cambridge Police Department. Crowley should apologize to Gates. Gates should apologize to Crowley. I'll tell you what's behind it. The people calling for an apology usually have no personal involvement in a situation, and they do it because they perceive the act of giving an apology as a form of weakness. A concession. A chipping away at the veneer of pride that carries us all through life. I've never viewed apologies that way. I actually see them as evidence of strength and power, not the opposite. If you're so fragile that you can't survive an apology and learn from the circumstances that led to it, then to me, that's evidence of weakness, not power. Try telling that to Bush, who never apologized for anything. And now Obama, who won't apologize for anything in this situation. He's so verbally proficient, though, that he can throw enough words at something to make it SOUND like an apology. He's just that good.

So what have we learned from all this? Fuck if I know. It's so damn hot in here that I'm totally rambling. I have no idea what I just wrote.

Things I Think

It's Friday, and I have a lot on my mind. Let's get started with the ugly:



Everyone's worried about foreign terrorists. Gotta keep Al Cater out of the country or he's gonna kill a lot of people. Gotta keep those Iranians in check. While everyone's busy hunting for bad guys "over there," we've got homegrown terrorists -- Americans -- shooting abortion doctors, blowing up federal buildings, and now, killing a guard at the Holocaust Museum, a stone's throw from the White House. And let's not forget how, a few years ago, a former Army sharpshooter took a young kid on a shooting spree in Maryland and Virginia. They murdered countless people in parking lots and gas stations and scared the shit out of everyone in the mid-Atlantic States. Oh and remember how, right after 9/11, some kook mailed anthrax to Tom Brokaw and other media personalities? The moral of this story is, that there's no shortage of American nutjobs with axes to grind, people full of venom and hate. And in a developed country like ours, you can buy all the shit you need to kill a lot of people at the local Walmart or Home Depot. Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City with a truck full of fertilizer. The next American mass murder may decide to build a dirty bomb out of all that extra radioactive waste lying around your local hospitals. Actually, another school shooting is more likely than that. For now. These people are terrorists too, right? I mean, you don't need a long beard and catchy "Down with America" chant to be considered a terrorist, do you? They say the hate groups in this country are all riled up because of Obama's election. No shit. They're on the wrong side of history; they should be riled up. I just hope someone's paying attention. If 88 year-old racists with nothing left to lose are pissed off, we're in bigger trouble than I thought.

Now the purdy:



That Miss California -- ex-Miss California -- what's her name, Carrie Prejean? She sure has some stupid views about gay marriage. Real dumb. Redneck dumb. But honestly, the first thing I think every time they show her sauntering around with those fake boobies of hers, is "Damn, that girl is f'n hot!" For what it's worth, I'm not proud of it.


David Carradine, WTF? That is one weird way to go out. And we're never going to know how he really died. It sure as hell wasn't suicide, like they originally reported. His hands were bound. That's impossible to do if you're going to hang yourself. Option two is auto-erotic asphyxiation, a form of masturbation where you cut off the oxygen to your brain to induce a more intense orgasm. Michael Hutchence of INXS supposedly died that way. I'm not sure I buy that theory either, even for an edgy dude like Carradine. Who needs an ex-tree intense orgasm at age 72? I mean, if I'm still that horny at 72 -- and mind you, I PLAN to be -- I'll be happy just to be able to pop one off at that age. I won't need all the extra fixins. I just don't think Carradine would be practicing that kind of thing at that point in his life. And if he was horny, baby, he was in friggin' Thailand. He had money. He could have gotten himself a very affordable playmate. It just makes no sense. I'm thinking he pissed someone off and got his ass killed.

Last night we had another thunder storm. I feel like I've been living in a thunderstorm for a month. The other night, the thunder crackled so loud at 3:30 a.m., I nearly wet the bed. I don't even remember what the sun looks like. It's almost summer, right?

Could someone please explain to me ESPN's inexplicable obsession with Brett Favre? Last year they wouldn't shut up about him coming out of retirement to play for the Jets. This year it's the Vikings he's courting. I say WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK!!! Is that asshole paying ESPN royalties to mention his name every thirty seconds? Does anyone outside of Minnesota care if he retires or not? I CAN'T TAKE ANYMORE FAVRE STORIES! I JUST WANT THE F'N RED SOX HIGHLIGHTS! PLEASE MAKE THEM STOP!


In other news, my Boston Red Sox have played the New York Yankee$ eight times this season, and they have won all eight games. Sweet, sweet ambrosia.


I have been following the Iranian election with considerable bemusement. You might be surprised to hear (a) that Iran is actually a democracy (more of one than say, China or Iraq); and (b) political elections there are as bareknuckle as they are here. There's a reformist candidate -- Moussavi -- running against Ahmadinejad, and I really hope he wins. He's a painter, an architect, a real renaissance man. Mahmoud is a cock gone flaccid. All arrogant flash and self-delusion but nothing real to er... stand him up when he needs it most. Just like our ex-President. Bush is gone and now it's Mahmoud's turn to leave. I'm really hoping things go that way. Funny how the leaders of Iran and the U.S. create all kinds of conflict inside and outside their countries, but the Iranian and American people seem to want peace and good relations with one another. Fingers crossed.


I loved Obama's speech in Cairo. It's about time an American President said those things to that audience. And it's about time that an American President didn't kowtow to Israel's every desire.

The GM bankruptcy shows that the companies everyone says were "too big to fail" were not too big to fail. I hate to say it, but the Republicans were right about this one. Though they're being totally hypocritical about it because most of them supported Bush when he was pushing these bailout plans nine months ago. Everyone screamed that we needed to save GM or the world would end. Billions of dollars later, it didn't work and GM is still going bankrupt. What a colossal waste of money. Not Iraq War wasteful, but wasteful nonetheless. Obamer got this one wrong. There, I said it.

The twenty-year anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square just passed. Did anyone notice? People seemed to give a shit '89. Guess we can't make too much of a big deal about it now since China owns our ass. Literally.

Palin's pissed about a tasteless Letterman joke about her daughter. Here, Dave explains what happened:



Good, now someone please grab a cane and drag dear Sarah off the stage. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill and misleading people in the process. Shit, if she didn't have any kids, she'd have no publicity at all. She should be thanking Dave for the airtime, not getting all up in his 62 year-old grille.

Here's a final thought to ponder over the weekend: what if every single thing our five senses tell us is actually an illusion? Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." That may be true. But what if none of what we think is real, the things we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is the real reality? What if it's all a dream that the collective mind is having? A bad dream where Big Mind believes that it has divided into billions of individual bodies containing tiny, smaller minds? Where Big Mind has forgotten that it's actually one mind and is now divided and subdivided and at war with itself. Where it watches millions of tiny minds -- broken pieces of itself encased in symbolic bodies -- fight each other in every way possible, from household arguments between spouses to drunken fisticuffs, to criminal assaults, rapes, and serial murders, to world wars. What would it mean if nothing in this world really mattered, that it's all an illusion to serve some unknown purpose? What if nothing we see is real and we are living in Matrixland?

If you think this is a bizarre idea, tell me, did you have a dream last night or the night before? Have you ever had a dream where you thought you were flying? Or you were shagging that boy or girl you've had your eye on for awhile? Then you woke up and you realized it was just a dream, that you can't really fly, and Bobby/Georgina never looks in your direction. (And you were pissed!) Your mind, my mind, they have the power to create worlds that defy the laws of reality, or what we think is reality. We do fantastical things in our dreams. We do bad things to good people and bad people do them to us. If there is a powerful, collective unconscious mind out there, one that encompasses the electromagnetic strength of every living thing, isn't it possible that it too could be having an incredibly intense dream (or nightmare, depending on how you look at it) where it created a world -- this world --that's not the real reality? And time, birth, life, death, winning, losing, sex, killing, wars are all an illusion occuring in the dream? Me, I not only think it's possible, I think it's happening.

A Brand New Day

Well there's a lot to say and I haven't had much time to say it cuz I've been a busy beaver lately. It's a brand new day alright. New President, new administration, new policies, new priorities. It's weird being on this side of things, to actually be rooting for the person who's in power, rather than against him. It goes against my contrarian nature, so I shouldn't be too surprised that I already feel my critical tendencies kicking in.

On the plus side, the Inauguration was nice. Certainly historical, and, at times, hysterical, i.e., the way Roberts butchered the oath. I mean what was it, thirty-five words? He couldn't get that out? Just goes to show that you can have one of the best legal minds in the country, you can have a Yale law degree, you can be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and even with all that pedigree, you can still fuck something up. And they actually did it over again last night, lest some asshat from Fox News claim that Obama really wasn't President because the oath didn't go exactly right. Believe it or not, I saw a clip of Chris Wallace doing exactly that.

The speech wasn't Obama's best, but when you're as good as he is, the bar is set pretty high. I think the speech he gave on race relations last June was the best one he's given. His Convention speech was good too. This one sounded a bit dour, a bit negativo for my taste. I know that he was trying to lower expectations, which couldn't be any higher than if you loaded them onto an Apollo rocket and shot them at the sun. Have so many people ever expected so much from one person? It's absurd. So he needed to do a little Scared Straight, but I think he could have balanced it out with some more Happy Days. Still, I liked what he had to say about putting down childish things and reaching out with an open hand if others are willing to unclench their fist. That was some good imagery.

So he's President, now what? Two days in and he's erasing a bunch of bad shit that Bush did. I read today that he signed an Executive Order saying that no one is entitled to rely on any legal memo concerning interrogation of enemy combatants that was drafted between 1999 and January 20, 2009. That's pretty comprehensive, and just so happens to cover the Bush years. Not bad. To Bush's credit, he didn't pardon Scooter Libby OR Roger Clemens. I would have been more pissed about the second one. And he also didn't leave the White House in the crappy shape that Clinton's people did. Let the record show that Bush left the White House with more class than he demonstrated with the policies he adopted when he occupied it.

We're closing Guantanamo, which is good. People are wondering where we're going to put those bad guys now, as if America didn't have thousands of jails already built all over the country. Not in my backyard! you say. I don't want any o' dem TAY-RO-RISTS in MY backyard! Yeah, why the fuck not? If you already have a jail standing in your backyard, why can't some of them go there? Do you mean to tell me that a hardened terrorist from Guantanamo is more dangerous, more crafty, more creepy than a serial killer? Or a gang member? Or some a sociopathic rapist or pedophile who's rotting in an American jail as I write this? Of course they're not! So be not afraid NIMBYITES, for evildoers already occupy your backyard! Besides, prisoners of war should be treated as mandated by the Geneva Convention. Otherwise, give them due process and let's be done with it already. This isn't the Middle Ages. Captured soldiers need to be treated humanely and given some kind of trial. Shit, even the Nazis had Nuremberg. Are they saying Al Qaeda is worse than the Nazis? Seriously? Let me predict this: Guantanamo is going to go down in American history as a modern day version of the Japanese internment camps we had here during World War II. Nothing short of an historical embarrassment.

All that said, I hope Obama's not getting too light in the loafers too quickly here. The world's a dangerous place. We're not going to torture, okay that's fine. That's what I wanted. It doesn't work anyway. But is he really going to criminalize CIA tactics that push the envelope a bit? Not torture, but what about the threat of torture, or the threat of physical harm? That's going to be outlawed too? I'm not sure how I feel about that. I don't think it's in our national interest to make it a crime to THREATEN that you're going to make a captured terrorist's life miserable if he doesn't cooperate. Unless they can show that kindness works better than threats, I think that has to stay on the table. We'll see where this goes. My point is, Obama better remember we're living in the real world, and there are some real sadistic assholes around. Principles are nice, but let's keep our eye on the ball at the same time and try and get a decent balance between our morals and values and common sense ways of handling proven killers.

I think the biggest positive change though is going to be in the State Department. I really like what he's done with the place already. George Mitchell and Richard (I actually wrote "Hal" first) Holbrooke are talented and respected people with great track records. Hillary, love her or hate her, is incredibly smart and stubborn as a mule, so she's perfect for dealing with foreign leaders. And Biden will probably have a thing or two to say about a thing or two. Much better than the mousey State that Condi was running before she left. Diplomacy can't get any worse than it's been the last eight years.

As for the economy, well.... have you ever watched a swirling toilet drain? I guess the first bank stimulus didn't work too well and now they're considering nationalizing American banks. Do you know how insane that is? No one better blame Obama for this country becoming socialist because that started well before he arrived. Nationalized American banks. That's something you see in Brazil and Chile, not the United States. We're going to have to start calling ourselves Los Estados Unidos, just so we'll fit in with all the other Third World economies. My quasicommunist college poli sci professor must be laughing her ass off, wherever she is.

I'll end this by saying something nice. For the first time in my life, I honestly feel that there's an average guy in the White House. A normal guy. A guy with a wife, kids, and even a mother in law living in there. He's not poor, but he sure as hell isn't rich either. He hasn't forgotten his roots. And he genuinely seems to care about doing the right thing and not his own future political ambitions. There was a moment at the Inauguration, before Obama was being introduced to the crowd, when he was walking down a hallway and about to step outside, when I looked at his face and it said "Holy fuck, what the hell did I get myself into?" Right then, everything seemed to hit home for him. "This is real. I'm responsible for all of these people, for the safety of the entire country. I'm the one who's supposed to get us through all of these rocky passes. How the FUCK am I supposed to do all that?" That's what his face said to me. And it was right then that I thought: this guy is a real person, an everyday guy, not some exalted, multimillionaire, insincere politician, who's practiced every action and reaction 1000 times, but a normal, funny, extremely intelligent guy who fist bumps his wife and who just got elected to be the most powerful person in the world.

Um, yeah... but didn't they say some of that about Bush too?

FF - Cutting Edge Comedy Brought To You By John & Barack

One of my favorite things in the world is the Al Smith Dinner, a charity event put on by the Catholic Archdiocese in New York City. It's typically attended by some of the biggest newscasters and politicians, and the best part is when politicians put down their boxing gloves, dust off their jokes, and do a little stand-up comedy. Last night, it was John and Barack's turn and they put on a couple of comedy routines that were pretty damn funny. Makes you wonder how great the world could be if we all learned to laugh at ourselves a little more and stopped attacking each other. Enjoy!

American Dream

When it comes to politicians, I'm as cynical as they come. They're all rich. They're all corrupted by power. All they care about is themselves. And most of the time, even when they're actually trying to do the right thing, they manage, either through misguided policies, or personal failings, to muck it up. Sure, once in awhile, one of them stands out, talks a different talk, walks a different walk, and gets my hopes up. I get excited and I start believing. I start drinking the Kool-Aid. But sooner or later, no matter how high the best leaders may fly, he or she will succumb to one of the seven deadly sins -- usually greed, pride, or lust -- and fall back to earth. Case in point: Gary Hart. Gary Hart was a Democratic Senator from Colorado who ran for President in 1984 and 1988. He was a breed apart, an idealist who was solid on national security issues and ran on a platform of "new ideas," which included a bold economic and social agenda. Back in the 80s, Gary Hart was the man. I bought into him hook, line, and sinker.

Then The National Enquirer published pictures of him on a yacht, cavorting with a 29 year-old model named Donna Rice. They showed her sitting on his lap, her long, shapely legs dangling over his. Both of them were smiling. They looked really happy. Problem was, Gary was married. So, uh, after a laughable attempt to continue with his campaign, he was forced to resign before the New Hampshire primary. The irony was, he'd long been accused of womanizing and he actually dared reporters to follow him around and try and catch him at something. He said they'd be wasting their time. The joke was on him because The Enquirer has lots of time on its hands and loves nothing better than a challenge like this. So follow him they did, and they caught him in the act. And get this: the yacht's name was "Monkey Business." You can't make this shit up. So instead of Gary Hart running against George Bush, Sr. in 1988, we got Michael Dukakis riding in a tank. The rest is history.

So yes, I've been hurt before. I've been burned and now I'm wary. I'm afraid to love again. I can't count how many Gary Harts have passed by since and I've given them nary a glance. Bubba was the most promising one and look what happened to him. The pee pee wants what the pee pee wants. It always seems to get in the way. Whatareyougonnado? Now things have hit rock bottom. People hate politicians with a passion. No one believes a word they say anymore. People hear what they want to hear. Washington has been in gridlock for years. Nothing's getting done. The country's infrastructure is falling apart while we get bought up by Europe and China and hemorrhage money in two wars as oil prices go through the roof. And Congress is about as popular as George Bush, who's despised.

But this is what makes Barack Obama so special. In an age of political cynicism and apathy, he's making people believe. He came out of nowhere, rode the wave of an inspiring DNC speech four years ago to an unlikely political campaign for President, and now, he's achieved an historic nomination. The sheer improbability of his candidacy continues to amaze me. First off, he's black. The last black Presidential candidate to show any semblance of national political success was Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson. I think Jesse may have won one or two primaries. Nothing remotely close to this. Seven years removed from 9/11, and we have a Presidential candidate whose last name sounds like "Osama." A man who spent part of his early life as Muslim. A man whose middle name is "Hussein." A man who's been in the Senate less than four years. A man who ran against and defeated a well-organized, well-financed Clinton MACHINE. Improbable doesn't even cover this guy.

How did he do it? How is he doing it? Many people have opined on this far more eloquently than I'm going to. Obviously, he gives a great speech. He knows how to use words. I listened to him tonight, like I have many times before, and this time I paid attention to how he conveyed his words. He doesn't just speak. He tells a story. Actually, in any one speech, he tells many stories. Stories about himself, about Americans he's met, about American history, and about America itself. Stories imbued with powerful rhetoric and supported by a strong voice that is both powerful and inspirational. It's not just the words that he chooses, it's the way he conveys them; it's the logic and passion behind them. Obama makes sense. He has vision. He knows what's wrong with this country and where he wants to take us. He has bold ideas: getting us off of foreign oil, making the environment, energy, and education priorities, reducing lobbyist power, revamping the tax code, fixing our embarrassingly bad health care system, and ending the Iraq War honorably and safely. He doesn't care if people don't think these things can be achieved. He's going to try. What else are Presidents for?

Obama reminds me a lot of Ronald Reagan in both the way he comes across and the way he inspires people. I couldn't stand Reagan, but the aura he carried was undeniably powerful. Obama is similar. It's the combination of his voice, his words, and his delivery. It's a mind-meld. He says what we're thinking and he says it better than we could. He embodies what we want our politicians to be and how we want to see ourselves. It's funny to see Republicans complain of Obama's "cult of personality" and donning mock togas comparing him to Caesar. Talk about sour grapes. They'd kill to have an Obama in their party. What the hell do they think happened with Reagan? The guy was a mediocre President at best -- all ideological flash and very little substance -- and still he's as revered in some circles as President Lincoln. In contrast to Reagan, Obama has ideas that rise above ideology. Whether he'll achieve some or all of them if he wins remains to be seen. Personally, it's going to take more than one man to make these things happen. What matters is he has the drive to try and change this country, and after eight years of detachment, unilateralism, stubbornness, negativity, secrecy, incompetence, and cronyism, we have nowhere to go but up.

Obama's appeal goes deeper than that though. After eight years of Bush and his fucked up policies, most of us feel like the country needs a shower. Obama is so different, in so many ways, that no one saw him coming. If Bush had been anywhere near a decent President, Obama wouldn't have the heightened appeal that he has. What makes him so powerful is that he's proposing something that is the polar opposite of the one-sided, political Machiavellianism of the Bush Administration, which won two elections (one, actually) by a nosehair, yet governed as if it had won two landslides. Obama is talking about working together, crossing party lines to get things done for the good of the country. He's a change agent who has come along at exactly the right time. Just like Kennedy. Just like Reagan. Any other time, if he followed a competent President who hadn't made so many mistakes, he probably doesn't get this far. But we are where we are, and that's how history is made. Clinton begat Bush and Bush will beget Obama.

Forty-five years to the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, the most unlikely candidate with the most unlikely of names and the most unlikely of backgrounds is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. If MLK were alive, I wonder if he'd be surprised that it took this long, or if he'd just be happy that it happened in his lifetime. Maybe both.

Hope

It's not every night that you can say you witnessed American history being made. Tonight was such a night. Barack Obama is the first African-American to win a presidential nomination. It's pretty special. The remarkable thing is, after taking the stage in Minnesota to U2's "Beautiful Day," after waving to the 17,000 people who were there to cheer him on (and the 15,000 people who were watching outside the arena), after fist-bumping his wife Michelle as he prepared to speak, he didn't mention his historical achievement once. Not even once. What he did do was show extreme graciousness toward Hillary Clinton and even John McCain. A graciousness that most certainly was not reciprocated in the two speeches I saw tonight from his competitors.

Obama is not the most experienced U.S. Senator running for President. He's also not the most experienced politician. But "experience" is not solely defined by how many years you work in Washington and enjoy Senatorial perks. Obama has life experience, experience being raised by a single mother in a mixed-race family, living in foreign countries, adapting to new cultures, becoming the first African-American to serve as President of the Harvard Law Review, working for grass-roots change on the streets of Chicago, working for eight years in the Illinois State Senate, and two years in the United States Senate. To me, that is plenty enough experience to be President. Besides, who wants 20 years' Senate experience when you're looking for something new? Maybe that's one reason why he's so inspiring, so different, so new. Because he hasn't been tainted by 20 years of I.O.U.'s, backscratching, and lobbyist paybacks. Maybe that's how real change comes. When someone doesn't have so much fundraising money wedged up his ass that he's afraid to take on the establishment. See, I think the longer you're in Washington, the WORSE President you'll make. Look at Gore. He didn't grow a pair of balls until he left Washington. Washington breeds complacency. Obama doesn't have it (yet).

For her part, while no one expected Ms. Hillary to concede tonight, one did expect a bit more of an effort to unify the party. I actually like and respect her, baggage and all, but what keeps coming back to bite her in the ass is her self-promotion at all costs. In a campaign that realistically, she lost weeks ago, she kept on, kept fighting, kept contesting the nomination, not for the good of the country, as she says, but to promote herself. To gain political leverage, either for a Vice President slot, or to compete in the next presidential election in the event Obama loses to McCain. You can admire her ambition and willingness to fight, but in my view, it's grossly superseded by her win-at-all-costs approach. That's why, after the bullshit she pulled in South Carolina, I voted for Obama in the New York Primary.

Obviously I'm biased, but watching McCain's speech tonight, I was struck by how weak he appears in front of the camera. He depends on teleprompters and notes more than most politicians, and he's not a good speaker. He looks insecure and halting, like he doesn't have it together. Now of course, this is superficial stuff. What really matters is where the candidates stand on the issues, right? I mean, Bush can barely put a sentence together, and he won two elections against two pretty intelligent, articulate guys. Americans like "C" students in their presidents, not "A" students, right? Call me crazy, but I have feeling that intelligence and competence are going to matter more this time. That maybe, just maybe, after a senseless war, hundreds of thousands of people dead, billions of dollars wasted, a gazillion dollar deficit, a Social Security system that's headed for bankruptcy, a recession looming, record gas prices at $4.50 a gallon, and a health care system that leaves millions of Americans uninsured each year, maybe Americans are finally ready to elect someone with a brain in his head. Maybe Bubba Brubaker in Kentucky will overlook the fact that Obama sounds like Osama and that Obama is (gasp) black. Maybe Bubba will LISTEN and UNDERSTAND that Obama is a CHRISTIAN, not a Muslim (not that there's anything wrong with that). Maybe he'll vote for Obama because his economic and health care policies augur a better future for Bubba and his little bubbas than those of the Republicans he's voted for since Reagan. Then again, maybe not.

We all know what's coming. The Swift Boat, the Fear Factor, the Chewbacca Defense, the Silly Monkey, the Reverend Wrighting, et al. Expect it. It'll be here soon. Whether it'll work this time depends on how stupid the American people decide they want to be. I'd say it won't work again, but honestly, we elected Bush twice, so we're pretty damn stupid, ergo, I'm hedging my bets. If it works again this time, then we seriously deserve whatever we get, and I don't want to hear people complain about the Iraq War or how they can't afford health care. If you vote the same way election after election, you deserve what you get.

But I don't think it's going to be that close, I really don't. In this election, there is a clear-cut choice for the future. McCain and Obama have major differences on all the big issues: Iraq, health care, the economy, energy policy, and dealing with allies and adversaries around the world. Obama is hope, promise, change for the future. The next generation. McCain is yesterday. What once was. The Last of the Baby Boomers. There was a time when he was a maverick -- in 2000, when he should have beaten Bush for the Republican nomination (until he got swift boated himself by a Karl Rove-inspired "black baby" story) -- but now he's the Emperor's Apprentice. He's moved to the Dark Side so he could attract those evangelicals and pro-lifers. Last year, he voted with Bush 95% of the time. That's a stat that I found surprising, given McCain's previous go-it-alone approach. He stubbornly supports Bush's war, looking at it through unrealistic, rose-colored glasses. To his credit, he stayed the course on the war last August, when his fellow Republican candidates were bailing out, and he was short of money. But getting lucky on how the war has proceeded doesn't make the policy right. I think he's grown myopic on the war, and now he's a hostage to it, for better or worse. The chaotic world we live in requires fresh ideas. McCain doesn't have any.

Ironically, there hasn't been this clear a choice since the Reagan-Carter election in 1980. And we all know who won that election: Ronald Reagan, the Change Candidate. The Candidate of Hope. It's going to happen again this time. I think when you line these two up, night after night, during the last five months of this campaign, Obama is going to shine, and McCain is going to look as dowdy and dusty as he did tonight. Maybe it's wishful thinking, maybe it's blind optimism, but I really believe that the torch has been passed. I think we're going to make history in November. I think we're going to turn this country around. Finally.

Fired UP, Ready To GO!

It's Super Tuesday. If you live in New York, California, and any of the other Super Tuesday States, today is your day. It's your day to make a difference. It's your day to make a change in the clusterfuck that's been running this country for the past 8 years. It's your day to decide who will be the next most powerful person in the world. So get off your ass, get out of your office chair, put down that breakfast burrito, and get out there and vote!

If you're still not convinced, here's some motivation:



Are you fired UP? Are you ready to GO?