Topics: Evolutionary Politics
|| Math Science || McCain’s Brain
|| Third Reich Lubbock || Sex, Love, & Family || Denver Shootout
|| Obama Sellout || Polygamy
|| Imperial America
Conversion in West Virginia
© July 4, 2008, by Ruth Calabria, all rights
reserved.
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. |
||
|
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