Conversion in West Virginia

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Conversion in West Virginia

Contact: ruthcalabria@matrix-evolutions.com

Our family urges everybody to support Hillary Clinton for president by emailing the superdelegates to cast their nominating vote for Hillary in Denver.

We didn’t always feel that way, though. I am the Obama supporter Bill Clinton got angry at in Fayetteville, West Virginia, as seen on the YouTube video, Bill Clinton Argues With Voter (CBS News). Long turned off to politics by the charades of politicians during the Monika soap opera and Bush’s eight year rendition of 1984, my family, like many others, was energized by Barack Obama’s youthful offering of hope and change. In exile in Mexico from the unhappy society Bush and company created in America over the last eight years, our family worked round the clock sending out 30,000 emails to tell Pennsylvania primary voters that Obama was the only hope for stopping the War in Iraq. We felt that way strongly because of Hillary’s initial vote in favor of the war. And certainly McCain, a military brat and POW in Vietnam for 5 years with a personal grudge against combat enemies, is not going to stop this war. Like seeing a new romantic love as perfect, we saw Obama as the anti-war candidate in shining armor. And to make the case for Obama and against Hillary as forcefully as possible in our campaign emails, we tarred the Clintons as the cause of everything that ails mankind down to making some very out of bounds comments about Chelsea Clinton.

Our rosy view of Obama was first shaken by the so-called debate on ABC TV before the Pennsylvania primary. It was an obvious hatchet job on Obama and we felt for him as the victim of an unfair attack. But after an hour of seeing the ABC moderators dump enough tar and chicken feathers on Obama to sculpt his face into that of your ordinary dumb asshole, we began to have our doubts about Obama, for that debate made it clear that Obama had no impulse to anger when ridiculed, not the mark of a hero. And we were also startled a bit to hear Obama’s wife, Michelle, say a number of times that she was “proud of him.” Proud is what you are of your children. It made us think less of Obama’s toughness. These observations, however subtle, gave a hint that Obama might be just another smart-boy populist politician, not the brave lion of change his oratorical skills might make you think.

And it didn’t increase our respect for Obama when we saw him pandering to right leaning voters by wearing the flag lapel pin he correctly first identified as a false symbol of patriotism. But our sense of Obama as a typical hypocrite politician was minimal when we decided to help him in an active way by the five of us making the long journey from Acapulco up to Denver, the place where we felt the nomination would ultimately be decided by the superdelegates.

We were not a good fit with the Obama campaign staffers we spoke to in Denver. Our politics include a strong sense that the War in Iraq and America’s strong support of Israel’s cruel Semitism towards Muslims will escalate into a world war fought with nuclear weapons. After two weeks of polite conversation that showed Obama’s two female staffers’ sense of America’s problems to be as deep as a Tuesday afternoon grocery list, we got on a bus for West Virginia to directly help Senator Obama’s chances of securing the nomination.

Our spending thousands of dollars of our less than robust savings to help get Obama nominated was also driven by our alarm at the conservatives’ steady march towards totalitarianism in America. For what is happening with the establishment of an almost military order and a Homeland Security police mentality in America since 9/11 is the equivalent of Julius Caesar’s entry into Rome with his army from Gaul, Rome’s Iraq of two thousand years ago. This was the critical event in the history of Rome, the beginning of rule by emperors, a sudden and permanent departure from the previous few hundred years of Rome being a relatively free and fair republic. The same thing is about to happen in America with a complete takeover by the conservatives unless a Democrat is elected in November. The Republican continuation of war in the Middle East and the destruction of any real freedom in America make this the most important election in America since the Civil War.

These are the real issues, the war and our loss of freedom. The propaganda that Issue #1 is the economy rather than the War in Iraq is just that. What should be an inarguable Guns or Butter analysis of our financial debacle in America from Economics 101 makes it clear that currency devaluation, inflation and recession are standard characteristics of any nation locked in a costly protracted war. The issue of overriding importance in America is the war, however the corporate conservative controlled media propaganda machine may hide the fact. Our initial leaning to Obama was based on our hope in his promise to end the war. And as our feelings about the war are very intense, so also were our feelings that Obama had to be the person nominated and elected as we five headed for West Virginia in a Greyhound bus.

The war and excessive control at home go hand in hand in clear Orwellian fashion. We have to keep a strong leash on you, spy on you, pat you down, lock you up for the sake of national security is the never-ending mantra. That repression at a severe level, however airbrushed, does exist in America today cannot be denied from any objective criteria. The 2008 Pew Report tells us that one American in a hundred is in prison today, many of them black and Latino. To put that hard data into perspective, note that we have 7 million people in jail or otherwise under the control of our penal system. This is a number sixteen times greater, per capita, than in the Peoples Republic of China where, everybody agrees, there is no freedom or human rights. We are the most incarcerated nation in human history, a milestone better appreciated, perhaps, by comparison to two other countries that were number one in locking people up in their time, Stalinist Russia and apartheid South Africa.

This is not to say that America is a police state, for if it was you’d have surely heard about it on TV, our home grown Pravda under the Bush regime. Pravda is a Russian word meaning truth, also the name of a blatantly propagandistic newspaper during the Stalin-Brezhnev years of totalitarian control. What better guise for telling lies than labeling them as truth! On par with Pravda as the title are the slogans of Fox News as Fair and Balanced and of CNN as The Most Trusted Name in News.

The story of America as a nascent police state is also told by the 50 police bullets that murdered Sean Bell and the acquittal of the murdering cops by a conservative judge, by the videotaped beatings of the three young men in Philadelphia by fifteen viciously violent cops, by other once a week police beatings caught on tape and by the actions of Child Protective Services, America’s family police, in tearing away Mormon children from their parents unnecessarily. Even Dr. Phil, no friend of ours, decried this, saying on Larry King that three out of every four kids in foster care wind up on the street homeless or in prison. And even the evolution denying dopey faced conservative columnist, Ben Stein, talked of the CPS action as Gestapo tactics. The post 9/11 police state mentality sanctifies the bullying tactics of governmental institutions that constantly set aside human considerations and violate all due process rights of the little people.

We have been peace activist journalists for over 30 years, going back to the days of America’s cold war with the Soviet Union. Our concerns for ending the war go beyond its destroying the economy and rationalizing police state attitudes and even beyond the moral demand to halt the senseless deaths and crippling of over 30,000 American soldiers and a million Iraqis, 60% of them women and children. For this war will continue to escalate and spread across borders to other nations, as it is doing even now, to eventually ratchet up to a world war that would likely be fought with nuclear weapons. Our fear for the realization of this doomsday scenario derives from a scientific mathematical analysis we have made that derives from an evolutionary analysis of aggressive behavior. That was our primary motive in going to West Virginia, to support Obama as the only true anti-war candidate.

Our planned strategy there was to follow Hillary and Bill around West Virginia and help Obama by challenging the Clinton’s exaggerated election year promises. Upon arrival in Charleston, my husband, Pete, and I went right over to the Obama campaign office to tell them what we intended to do. Shocked we were, though, to be derided for our passionate political feelings and our plan to help the campaign by challenging Bill and Hillary. Well, these are just kids who don’t know any better, we told ourselves, and what really matters is the good that will come from our efforts, whatever the arrogant attitudes of these juvenile Obama staffers. This is us below.

My husband, Pete, a PhD in Biophysics, photo taken in Mexico.

This is me, Ruth, my grandson Angel T, our evolutionary flag designer, and our adopted daughter, June, our webmaster.

Ben And Sara

Sara, a Mexican college student and dentist, who gave us the energy we needed to get our mathematical analysis down correctly, and ace mathematician son, Benito.

My granddaughter, Lisa, an Honor Roll mathematician at Albany High, who did not make the trip, in a school play.

The first Clinton event we attended in West Virginia was at Shepherd’s University up in the panhandle near Maryland. Being novices in the art of passing out Obama political flyers at a Hillary event, we quickly discovered that Hillary supporters are very loyal and very aggressive. One slim younger one was playfully flirting with Pete until she saw my arms full of Obama material, at which point she started screaming at both of us: “Get out of here! Just get out of here!” This shouting attracted another 20 Hillary supporters, all of whom glared at us in a near physically threatening way. At this point, Pete got protective and took us away from the Hillary crowd and far across the street where we began to talk to the locals, many of whom were Obama supporters and distinctly more friendly.

We barely heard Hillary’s talk from this distance, but did get some useful information from a resident of this town and a professor at this liberal university. He went out of his way to tell us that this liberal area was frequented by conservative homosexuals, a la Senator Larry Craig, the Rev. Ted Haggard and that creepy representative from Florida, Mark Foley, the one who looks like George Bush. The professor told us that many Republican gay politician types do their perversities on the QT in this broadly permissive hamlet that was but a short commute from Washington, DC. This hardly surprised me as I was married to a Lutheran fundamentalist missionary in my 20s in Japan, divorcing him after I grew up enough to understand that he was using me for bait to get at the young male Japanese converts in our church, like out of the Tennessee Williams play, Suddenly Last Summer. And my brother, Don Graf of Lubbock, a conservative high up trustee in the Lutheran church, was also divorced by my sister-in-law, Ruby, so we came to understand, for the same reason.

We drove the six hours back from Shepherdstown enlightened, but a bit weary and disappointed with our efforts to convert Hillary supporters to Obama. So weary that Pete stayed at the motel the next morning when Ben and June and I went off to the State Capitol building to try harder at the next Hillary event. Again we were fiercely glared at by Hillary supporters as we passed out our pro-Obama flyers. But one Hillary staffer, who was willing to talk politics, told us he had worked for Obama for two months, but switched to Hillary because he felt strongly that Obama could not possibly win against McCain. And a local TV anchor asked me why we were the only Obama supporters there. June, who was paying more attention to what Hillary was saying than I was, said later that she thought Hillary was a gutsy woman and emotionally honest.

We got back to our motel room at noon that day to have Pete tell us to hurry up and grab lunch because we were all going to Fayetteville where Bill Clinton would be speaking. The locals who lined up outside the high school auditorium were friendly as we passed out our Obama flyers. Rural West Virginians are family people and saw and treated us as like a family. However much they are apprehensive of blacks like Obama, a point that was subtly made clear, they accepted our fliers politely even if to crumble them on the ground after we had walked away.

Things did get a little sensitive at times as when we were told by an older fellow wearing his VFW cap and a crinkly smile that West Virginia had its own Homeland Security named Smith and Wesson. His 82 year old wife had a hospitable sense of humor, though, and cooled the whole thing off. She would have talked to us for two hours. Other people we talked to seemed like real nice people, too. We’d lived in many states over the years and thought West Virginia would rank as, maybe, our fourth most favorite state to live in, but only if we were smart enough to keep our thoughts to ourselves, something we have never been able to do.

After a long wait, Bill Clinton strode onto the auditorium stage, a bright rooster for somebody his age. Pete thought that Clinton had a very strong mind, whatever the merit of his sales pitch. Not too long after Clinton began to speak, Pete walked over to the side benches to rest his feet after two hours of standing up waiting for Bill to speak. We had made up our minds on the bus ride to Charleston not to heckle, but at some point I got tired of Bill promising that Hillary would develop a car that got 100 miles to the gallon and a cure for Alzheimer’s, so I interrupted him with my objection to their bathing in the glow of health care promises that were never delivered during their time in the White House.

My getting Bill’s goat with the cameras rolling was certainly a success for Obama, for the CBS video of it got a half-million views on YouTube and 3000 comments, most of them favorable to my anti-Hillary, pro-Obama, views. Hooray! We had done something useful! But when we went back to the Obama campaign office in Charleston, excited and eager to tell them that the CBS video had been played on all the TV networks, the head Obama staffer from the national campaign office lectured us that he had more important things to do than to watch television! We thought this an odd failure on his part in not understanding the obvious value of this fairly wide positive media exposure for Obama. The asshole, pompous in his position as a paid Obama staffer, took this ridiculous attitude even though what we did received write-ups in the New York Times, Washington Post and all the major newspapers and blogs, including five minutes on Rush Limbaugh.

We made Bill Clinton look bad in getting angry at a fair question, so it was generally reported. All of these idiot staffers who did not respect its reach and generally positive impact had to still be in the crib wearing diapers. When one staffer named David Zhou actually grabbed my husband, who is 65 years old, to push him out of the office, Pete was enraged enough to tell him, “If you don’t get your hands off me, asshole, I’ll knock your fucking teeth in.” Something has to be wrong here, we both said simultaneously in utter disbelief as we left the office.

What was wrong was not that hard to understand if you’ve lived a long enough life. These were children, young people whose self-confidence still came mostly from mother love. That relatively kind interpretation of the Obama kids held a clue for what Barack Obama was all about, for the attitude of a campaign staff had to be, we felt, a reflection of their candidate. We were beginning to have our doubts about Barack.

The ultimate joke, not an insult to us anymore, was our being turned down by this crew of pompous underage dreamers for tickets to hear Obama speak in Charleston the day before the West Virginia primary voting, what our three generation family of five had come 1000 miles to see. Instead, we had to watch what we could of Obama’s speech on TV. He was dramatically unimpressive that day, mumbling his way through a litany of stump speech rhetoric with his flag pin on, looking like he had to make a mad dash out of the place to take a piss.

Having no desire to knock and be refused once more, even though we had spent hours in telephone campaigning there, we avoided the Obama campaign office the night of the primary returns. Instead we got to watch the vote returns at a bash thrown by West Virginia Governor, Joe Manchin, who had invited Obama supporters to join him at the Marriot in Charleston. This turned out to be greatly informing because we got to sit down next to some very knowledgeable local Democratic Party biggies who spelled out the details of Hillary’s efforts to get universal health care in the face of the Republican resistance to it led by Bob Dole on behalf of the insurance companies. All Republicans are out to make money the easiest way they can, the mortgage scam and health insurance industry scamming being obvious examples, rather than concerning themselves about the needs of the average American family, all of whom they view as just so many work animals on their capitalist animal farm.

The next morning, as we were about to leave West Virginia, Pete and I looked at each other as we packed our bags and simultaneously said: something is wrong here. That something wrong was that we were backing THE WRONG CANDIDATE. After a few minutes of talking, we did a 180 turn. Hillary, she’s the one!

Certainly not John McCain. Pete told me the story about when he drove a taxi in New York City after he dropped out of graduate school. It was about the time that the North Vietnamese had released their prisoners of war back in 1972 after the anti-war protestors forced the end of that war and freed them. A soldier who just got off the plane from the Hanoi Hilton with a few years growth of beard went out of his way to jump into Pete’s taxi because Pete had the same crop of anti-war hair on his face. “How was it over there?” Pete asked sympathetically. “They were no worse than the LAPD,” came the laughing reply of the soldier. That’s a true story, not election year propaganda. So whatever the pain in his suffering as a POW in that utterly stupid war that murdered 57,000 American servicemen and two million North Vietnamese for no good reason other than the promise of offshore oil and the propping up of an utterly corrupt regime in South Vietnam, let us be careful in electing John McCain, single minded army brat and husband of an upper class millionaire, because he was a hero in a war that could have no heroes. If elected, his POW traumatized mind will fight the Vietnam War all over again, in Iraq. No, Padre John is just another one of them, another one of the loony self-interested ever-deceptive Republicans who have no real feeling for any of the many who suffer other than in the pretty speech of a politician at election time.

Hillary is all we have. The Clintons are the better by far than the alternatives. Or have we all forgotten the years of peace and financial stability during their eight years in the White House because of the wired Monika setup by the conservatives. Obama is inarguably still a special young man who we still think has the capacity for greatness, some day, once he wipes the snot from his blind-to-reality, in love with himself, young nose.

Both Obama and Clinton are populist politicians, of which there are but two kinds. Successful populists are puppets on the string of the ruling class, their financiers and ultimate handlers. The populists watch out for the working class within the constraints and wishes of the ruling class. They get better grass for us cows to eat, something that is short term meaningful to the cows, whatever their ultimate fate at the slaughterhouse. The Clintons were such populists, themselves, during their rise to power and tenure in the White House, their building of more prisons and putting more police on the street and destroying welfare protection and doubling the homeless population, bills that Clinton could have vetoed, being a part of the broad conservative agenda that has controlled the direction of America since Reagan and George Bush Senior first took office in 1980.

The other kind of populist politician is rare and very hard to come by. They are the few populists who come to better understand their true role in the game of politics by dint of having had the tyrannosaural power of their ruling class supporters thrust up their ass. This was the case with the Clintons on whom the logic of the saving of a DNA stained dress and the revealing of Monika’s oval office sex life to a mother like Linda Tripp wired to a tape recorder connected to Newt Gingrich has not been lost. Raped as a couple from their public humiliation, they are yet vigorous enough, bless them, to want to fight the conservatives who set their family up with impeachment for a minor failing in judgment that cost the public not one penny and not one life, in contrast to the endless murders and thefts of God fearing Republicans from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street over the last eight years.

In short, the Clintons failed once, something that both Mikhail Gorbachev and the Matrix movie say is necessary to ultimately win at the bigger game. Forgive them. They learned the big lesson and are enlightened warriors at this point in their lives, nobody’s fools. If elected, Hillary Clinton will do the right thing as regards the war and as regards the people of this country. She is sensible and emotionally stable, something George Bush is decidedly not and Obama not tested enough to begin to be. Hillary has the good fight in her. So does her husband, Bill. How do I know? I saw his spontaneous anger when I incorrectly called his wife down about health care. He stuck up for her in an immediate and instinctive way.

Obama, on the other hand, lacks this instinctive fire, whatever projections of strength may be signaled with his practiced Pavarotti level oratorical skills. This is not to say that Obama has no testicles at all when he allows himself and his wife to be as insulted on TV. But he does not have big enough testicles. He is not yet a full grown man. And that is what it will take to win the general election. That is what it will take to guide this nation though this most critical time in its history, a grown and tested warrior. Obama is not the Abraham Lincoln that we need today. As to Hillary and Bill, they could be. They are the best that we can get for this dangerous situation the country finds itself in. Whatever their shortcomings. We should be happy these two people exist, for fate has made them our only hope in this most difficult time. Even Lincoln was a savvy politician. The Clintons being politically savvy is no crime. For that is what it will take to beat the Republican machine, of which John McCain is but a figurehead.

The most important thing in what we hope is not an excessive put down of Barack Obama is that there is little chance that he can properly to the Swift Boat battering the conservatives are pulling on him, which may run all the way to Rezko’s selling Obama out for less federal prison time. There is no way that Barack Obama can be elected in November. Those superdelegates who think otherwise are as foolish as the overzealous unrealistic Obama staffers we ran into in Denver and West Virginia, all very enthusiastic and all very blind to reality. Those superdelegates and their party will pay dearly, as will we all, when Obama loses the general election and we get a continuation and expansion of the war and the Republican police state.

Fate further reinforced our decision to abandon Obama for Hillary when, by chance, we ran into a black Hillary supporter from Philadelphia in the St. Louis Greyhound bus station. No description of this ardent Hillary volunteer, oddly raised in Utah and with mostly Mormon children, could do justice to her impassioned feelings for Hillary and against Barack Obama. The Clintons were there for us time and time again in ways that matter to ordinary black people, she barked out to us and to whoever would listen. What are all these stupid black people voting for Barack for? Just because his skin is black? He’s a white boy raised by a white mother who just happened to be inseminated by an African. He went to elite white schools and has little personal experience with the plight of ordinary black people, other than from high up on his Harvard law School, she continued. And what does “that Michelle Obama”, whom she called arrogant, “know about the nigger?” Her word not mine. And this grandmother of four went on with devoted praise and appreciation, which went a bit beyond our hard logical reasoning, that Hillary was twice as smart as Barack Obama, three times as tough, six times more experienced and ten times more electable.

People want change, a change from the last eight years of Bush deceit and manipulation. Hillary Clinton would certainly be a genuine change from that. The candidate who would best make a change from Bush is not necessarily the one whose campaign team thought up the “change” catch phrase first. And, most importantly, only Hillary can win in November. Whatever dirty laundry they have on her has been run through the wash and hung on the line for years now. Obama’s dirt and shortcomings they will bury him in, and us, too.

Our conversion to Hillary should not be taken as a condemnation of Barack Obama, the man. His youthful spirit and gifted oratory inspired many people to get back into the democratic process back before the Republicans punched a hole in it. For that contribution to the American political process alone, a miracle in itself, Barack deserves to be nominated for vice-president.

But Hillary must be the presidential nominee for us to win. And for that to take place, she must hang in there until the August convention, with whatever guile, for superdelegates can change their mind up to the last minute when their votes are formal. The superdelegates must dismiss all the pseudo-moral arguments for selecting Obama, for the important thing is that we must have an electable Democratic, for another Republican in the White House is the end of us all.

Now we want to talk about a major problem that a Hillary Clinton nomination will cause for the city of Denver. Barack Obama’s youthful and minority supporters, both of which constituencies are very emotional in their support for him and many of which will make the sacred trek to Denver this August, will not accept anything but his nomination for president as fair. As fervent hopes dashed in manner seen unfair have a powerful propensity to arouse great anger, two precautions must be taken to prevent Denver from being burned down.

The first is that Barack Obama be given the vice-presidential slot. Obama would make an excellent vice-president and is young enough to have plenty of time to gain the experience and toughness needed to optimally execute the duties of the highest office in the land some day.

And there is a second precaution that must be taken because no matter an Obama vice-presidential nomination, it will yet cause bad feeling and severe rioting in the st