The traditional media has declared McCain victor of the “surge” debate.  But no Western journalist has provided an honest portrait of what Iraq looks like today.  Take a look at this harrowing video from a young Iraqi journalist.  It’s important that we give a voice to those we supposedly tried to liberate, rather than only listen to  blow-hard Washington politicians, the very people that orchestrated this madness, the very people who are now trying to cover it up with cheap PR.

One problem. The wingnuts and the McCain campaign played the race card a long time ago. In fact, the comments that produced so much anger and disappointment from the McCain campaign turned out to be Obama’s irrefutable analysis of the Right’s tactics against the senator from Illinois. Obama said that McCain couldn’t win on the issues so had to resort to negative politics of fear. The Right, Obama said, would claim “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

While surely this alludes to the color of his skin, Obama’s race card only becomes an offense if what he claims is untrue. Here is a McCain campaign ad from June. Note the imagery:

Looks like the McCain camp came up with the idea of Barrack on our currency long before Obama. More significantly, McCain surrogates have been playing the “race card” right in front of the nominee’s eyes, this one from back in May:

And who can forget the Fox News fear campaign, ostensibly the royal flush of race cards:

Sadly, in the past week “journalists” have suffered another bout of amnesia and failed to call the McCain camp and its many surrogates on its BS. As long as mainstream journalists fail to present the truth, McCain benefits.

Not too important, Sen. McCain?  Must we even ask what kind of message this sends to our 150,000 troops in Iraq, the thousdands more that might soon have to serve, and the countless military families whose lives will be indelibly altered until their loved ones return?  Weeks after learning for a fact that this illegal war was conceived on deliberate exaggeration of intelligence and sold to the media via a pentagon led propaganda campaign,  in three frightening words McCain willingly breaks from the views of all rationale beings. The McCain campaign says his stamement reflects his opposition to timetables and nothing more, despite the fact U.S. and Iraqi casualties continue to rise and despite Iraq’s demand that we set a timetable - you know, so they can have their country back.     

McCain’s statement comes to us just days following his first general election TV ad, in which he declares “War is hell!”

Yes, we know Sen. McCain – that’s exactly why we don’t want to fight wars; that’s exactly why we think troops coming home is “important.”

But that’s not all today on the Not-Straight Talk Express.  It turns out McCain picked the wrong piece of legilsation to use as a bludegon against Obama. From CNN:

On Friday, McCain attacked Obama’s record on the environment during a campaign stop in the Florida Everglades.

“Sen. Obama has no record of being involved in this issue that I know of,” he said. “I will stick by my record and my commitment of many years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Remember the part where Sen. McCain said Obama has no record on this issue? One problem, folks:  Obama co-sponsored McCain’s very own climate bill last year.  Is he lying, or just having another one of those “senior moments”? 

• Obama is a closet Muslim extremist. Only if you open trashy chain e-mail. 
• Obama is far less patriotic than POW McCain.  We’ll probably hear this one from every angle, Michelle Obama not excluded.   
• But my 100% cashback guarantee: Obama will raise your taxes so high you can say goodbye to everything from vaction to kitty’s haircuts!!! 

This is almost the only thing, and I mean only thing, the wingnuts and their hapless followers seem to believe when it comes to the economy and their democratic rivals.  Fact and truth (you know, those annoying caveats that get in the way of GOP triumph) need not apply in the timeless, delusional tax chant. 

So what is the truth in 2008? Let’s take a look at Income Tax savings if McCain’s and Obama’s plans were to be fully implemented, provided here in dazzling chart form (numbers based on average ’08 return):

(Source: Tax Policy Center)

So if you are flippin rich and have an annual income over $112k, McCain is your guy.  But if you are like me and most Americans:

We can see that if you make less than $112,000 a year, then you will pay less in taxes under Obama’s policies compared to McCain’s. According to the IRS, 89% of Americans report less than $100,000 in adjusted gross income (2005). —-  dailykos and ARing2B

So when a misguided friend, colleague or random McCain supporter tries to tell you Obama will raise your taxes, this response should work for 90% of you:  “You are SO not telling the TRUTH.  Here, take a look at this chart.” (Unfold printout of above chart from back pocket, show misguided counterpart, and watch their eyes as they attempt to rebutt or revert to other false GOP talking point).       

By rolling back Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthiest, Obama has room to give America’s masses a little help.  Rest assured, the hardworking wealthy will still be wealthy, but the hardworking rest of us will have a little more cash to dump into our ailing economy.   

Don’t forget to take a look at last week’s Civil Right’s Issue Brief. 

Even if you think you’re right, arm yourself with knowledge.  You might help someone else come to the light. 

Likewise, we wish to inform you that the majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq, in accordance with a declared timetable and without leaving behind any military bases, soldiers or hired fighters.

Here’s the big test. If you actually buy Bush and McCain’s pronouncements that this war is about freedom and liberty to Iraq, take them at their word. We gave Iraq democracy. Now it’s time to go. Iraqis say so. Not the Democratic party, which merely wants to return them their due sovereignty. And while Iraq is still torn by ethnic conflict, it is not our divine right to be there. Our occupation created the disaster, the cesspool of terror and violence that has left a million Iraqis dead, should we be so pompous to claim it our right to fix it? Withdrawal is not surrender; it is reconciliation for the crime of invasion itself; it is giving Iraqis what we promised them; it is returning our troops to the loving arms of their families. I support the Iraqi parliament. Do you? Does our government? Or is the Iraq occupation what I suspected all along — another strategic staging point for broad American empire?

The contrast between Obama and McCain on the issues is immense. Ultimately, this is what voters need to pay attention to starting now. Looking at their published platform indicates not only who they are trying to reach, but which Americans they care about, as well (you think that should be everyone, right?)

But here’s a sad preview of the forthcoming months’ election coverage so you don’t have to endure the inept bloviating. The pundits will be getting off on each other’s incessant opining of who the VP running mates will or should be for the next two months. The neocon talking heads will dig up a “scandalous” bio on every scary black person that shops at Obama’s grocery store, or something of the sort. Brian Williams will drool at the sound of his voice while his lapdog Russert will show how great he is at Electoral Map addition. Wolf Blitzer will shed the silver beard hair-by-hair as he unravels the latest poll results. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart will be damn brilliant tearing down their “journalist” colleagues.

As much as the media wishes politics were like American Idol or Days of Our Lives, this election must be about issues. You won’t get much of that from the mainstream media (MSM), so get your pencils out, learn the policy proposals (sounds fun right!) and tell your friends. Because if I’m paying off the second trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war in 2059 because we elected McSame, it’ll be a darn shame — my grandkids will want nice graduation checks.

Civil Rights

Obama’s Stance

Yes, their are still grave inequalities in the good old U.S.A. What does Obama see as the problem? From his Web site:

Pay Inequity Continues: For every $1.00 earned by a man, the average woman receives only 77 cents, while African American women only get 67 cents and Latinas receive only 57 cents.

Hate Crimes on the Rise: The number of hate crimes increased nearly 8 percent to 7,700 incidents in 2006.

Efforts Continue to Suppress the Vote: A recent study discovered numerous organized efforts to intimidate, mislead and suppress minority voters.

Disparities Continue to Plague Criminal Justice System: African Americans and Hispanics are more than twice as likely as whites to be searched, arrested, or subdued with force when stopped by police. Disparities in drug sentencing laws, like the differential treatment of crack as opposed to powder cocaine, are unfair.

His plan:

Strengthen Civil Rights Enforcement

Obama will reverse the politicization that has occurred in the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice. He will put an end to the ideological litmus tests used to fill positions within the Civil Rights Division.

Combat Employment Discrimination

Obama will work to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that curtails racial minorities’ and women’s ability to challenge pay discrimination. Obama will also pass the Fair Pay Act to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes

Obama will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation, expand hate crimes protection by passing the Matthew Shepherd Act, and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Section.

End Deceptive Voting Practices

Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.

End Racial Profiling

Obama will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.

Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support

Obama will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.

Eliminate Sentencing Disparities

Obama believes the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.

Expand Use of Drug Courts

Obama will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.

How would he do all this? Obama provides a more detailed blueprint for cleaning up the Department of Justice. Basically, hundreds of thousands of civil rights injustice claims come in every year, and since the end of the Clinton administration, many of those claims are going unheard by courts. Hmm. Wonder why. Here’s his plan.

McCain’s Stance

Because the GOP is all about liberty and freedom, they’d be in an uproar whenever a civil rights injustice occurs; you can count on that . . . Hang on for a minute while I search for McCain’s stance on civil rights.

Hmmm . . . it appears the good people at johnmccain.com forgot to put up the civil rights link in his issues section. Darn. Not a mention of it in any of the sub-sections either. Let’s search the archived articles on his site. Nope. No policy proposals or positions found on civil rights issues. Except that gays shouldn’t be marrying each other. (Obama agrees, but supports civil unions and equal rights) I guess that’s a civil rights issue, right?

Well, at least I don’t have to write as much tonight. If John McCain is now the leader of the Republican Party, is this to say the GOP doesn’t care about equal pay, prosecuting job discrimination, stopping voter fraud, and equal treatment with drug sentencing?

But at least we have his record:

1. I’ll start with a tip of my hat. He has a great record supporting Native American issues. No direct mention of that on his issues page though. Only archived links to articles. Obama has tons of policy initiatives that represent our nation’s oppressed First Americans.
2. McCain voted against making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday in 1983. Last month, he conceded to the King family that his vote was wrong and apologized.
3. McCain voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes in 2002.
4. McCain voted against the widely bi-partisan Civil Rights Act of 1990. He helped Bush Sr. become the first president to successfully veto a civil rights measure. He stands by his decision to this day, using a false assertion that the act supported a quota system for job hiring.

Issue Scoreboard:

Obama: 1

McCain: 0

What do you think?

Next week:

We’ll tackle education. Leave No Issue Behind!

So join me for a few minutes to explore how racial formation and Christianity are both wicked and hopeful cousins in the dysfunctional family of U.S. history.

I first engaged in this history during a religion and civic culture course. During a heated debate about religious works and the notion of “salvation” – Christian deliverance from sin for eternal life with God – a mentor of mine asked the question: “So what is it? Would the real Christianity please stand up?” Her question indicated that throughout American history, markedly different concepts of Christianity emerged with great influence — from the antebellum period to reconstruction and Jim Crow. It is a history too few of us know.

I could not begin to explore the touchy question without discussing the life and work of a man who scoured the depths of his own spirituality to make sense of his role as an American Christian. Phillip Berrigan (1923-2002), a former Catholic priest and devout peace and civil rights activist, spent his adolescence believing what he was raised to believe: that America was righteous, that slavery had ended, and that democracy thrived. He willingly fought in WWII to defeat fascism and later realized that the human cost and the atrocities committed on both sides hardly made it the “Good War.”

The road soon led Berrigan and his brother to become ordained priests of the Josephite order, which specifically emphasized social justice. Based in New Orleans, Berrigan made it his mission to discover why his African American parishioners lived in abject poverty. From the context of his faith, he challenged segregation, specifically why hospitals weren’t treating black patients in the area. His findings led him to later remark in his autobiography that “to live in America is to be a racist, either by commission or omission . . . Racism influences where we live, whom we choose to have for friends, whom we marry, where our children go to school, where we work and worship.”[i] A weighty statement that leaves most whites defensive, but the keyword is ommission. By living complacently in a racist society, one’s inaction – omission – indirectly props up the system.

As a young priest at the outset of the civil rights movement, he observed an order of French priests who took working class jobs, protested alongside the angry poor, and vociferously spoke out against unjust government policy. The Pope threatened the “worker priests” with excommunication, but Berrigan saw their actions as a profound manifestation of Christ-like behavior and used them as motivation for his controversial sermons and work in the Deep South.[ii] Berrigan became an active participant in civil rights protests and organized several acts of famed civil disobedience in objection to Vietnam. His stands amounted to 11 years of served jail time by the end of his life. “Where should we draw the line between social activism and our more traditional religious duties?” he asked, “Was there really a line to draw?”[iii]

After 18 years of challenging his congregations and Church superiors with this question, Berrigan left the priesthood in 1973, finally declaring that the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church stood in the way of practicing his faith, his purpose as a human being. He came to a profound personal realization that the institution he gave much of his life to was at odds with what he believed to be authentic Christianity. Through his work in New Orleans, Berrigan found himself torn between traditional American (white) Christian attitudes and practices and the inspiring outlooks of African American Christianity that emphasized charity, justice and humility in the face of racism; it is for this reason that Berrigan’s story provides us access to the challenge of determining what we might consider ‘authentic’ Christian behavior.

As stated above, exploring the evolution of these two divergent spiritual worldviews, we also see that, within the context of American history, religion is implicitly connected to racial formation. At the outset of ‘New World’ colonization, Christian culture characterized the human condition in such a way that degraded the self. Humanity, in essence, was a sick, depraved state due to the biblical transgressions that tainted all souls with ‘original sin.’[iv] Only by purging these evils through faith in Christ would salvation be obtained; only when the Gospel was spread throughout the world would Christ return for judgment. According to David Stannard, this absolute, Puritan truth “meant total extermination or conversion of all non-Christians.”[v] Thus, when encountered by millions of indigenous peoples, the colonists found divine justification to eradicate this exotic culture by means of murder or conversion. For centuries, natives were perceived as not only heathen, but as sub-human beings, and therefore expendable in the colonists’ quest to conquer the new world for God and country.

Around this time, a key difference emerged between treatments of white-skinned and non-white peoples, exhibited by the case of the English’s brutal treatment of their Irish neighbors. The difference boiled down to whether the population in question possessed souls. While they were a despised obstacle, the Irish people’s ‘humanity’ was not an issue. Assimilation and conversion, as opposed to total removal, was the end goal; however, the “savages” encountered in North America were ostensibly inconvertible and thus had to be eliminated in accordance to God’s plan. Many of the Irish had merely fallen into barbarism and unlike the New World indigenous, did not possess innate inferiority. Christianity and “white” became further synonymous to each other.[vi] (During the 19th century Westward expansion, the tactic was reversed and more missions and Christian boarding schools were built to assimilate Native Americans.)

With this framework, early-America and its budding capitalist system was soon born on the back of African chattel slavery. It became increasingly relevant to Christian leaders that if slavery were to exist, so to would a justification for its existence. By this time, African slaves were widely considered fully human, which meant they were also subject to conversion.[vii] But this posed a difficult philosophical challenge considering that American Christianity, along with its espoused democratic principles, expressed freedom. Paul Harvey notes several difficult questions that surfaced at this time for American Christians:

If blackness was (by definition) unfreedom, and Christianity was (by natural law) freedom, then how could the two be commingled? . . . Would not the ultimate freedom promised by Christianity infect the minds of the not-free, such that they would begin to question their status, or to doubt the validity of Christianity?[viii]

Despite this fear, however, many white Christians persisted in their belief that African slaves could fit within a plan for divine providence. The prolific Puritan minister Cotton Mather contended that the Bible showed unmistakably God’s intention for Africans to be servants to their masters – their time on earth was merely their service to Jesus Christ. The Old Testament passage, the curse of Cannan — son of Ham, was routinely used for centuries as reasoning for enslavement, despite the fact many theologians felt it was mere reliance on folklore and stood in defiance to ‘high’ theology.[ix]

An antislavery movement before 1807 gained traction, but the organized push for equality spurred by Christian (Quaker), humanitarian and sentimental approaches subsided after the slave trade was abolished at this time. Notions of true equality and cognizance of the oppression at hand informed many white Americans, but other economic, religious and political forces quelled their dissonance. The American experiment of liberty, equality and the important notion that it is one’s environment that shapes his or her spirit and capability told many whites that enslavement was wrong and anything but Christian. However, as Winthrop Jordan illustrates in his renowned historical analysis, simultaneous challenges of maintaining a national identity, fear of miscegenation (cross-breeding) and the retention of purity continued to feed the engine of racism. A construction emerged that Negroes, although fully human, were inferior and should never be fully American even if converted to Christianity.[x] Nationalism and faith, as they do today, clash to co-exist.

But as Eddie Glaude and many other historians illustrate, shortly after being introduced to their oppressors’ religion, African Americans re-appropriated Christian myth and determined that the Christian God was ultimately a God of justice. They too drew on religious texts and history to find their meaningful position in the world as slaves. “Like the nation in general, African Americans, through biblical analogy, saw themselves as the children of God and linked the freedom of the Israelites with their own eventual liberation,” says Glaude.[xi] This simple act of self-definition, as compared to the oppressive label of inferiority given by their masters, marked a significant moment of agency within African American communities. It became the premise of Liberation Theology. The very line of Christianity that Jeremiah Wright preaches. While Christian America waffled in its own hypocrisy, African American culture stirred within a Christian framework that called into question how this great American experiment of equality could operate without acknowledging the great sin of oppression and abhorrence of difference in America’s infancy.

Antebellum resistance writers and abolitionists turned the tables on American theologians to suggest that, in fact, their Christianity was not legitimate. The ‘sanctified’ white race was now a subject of pervasive and influential African American Christian literature that subverted traditional Christian teachings. The spiritual writings spread throughout the south, serving as a rallying cry and organizing tool for the oppressed populations. Black congregations inverted the Christian notion of adherence to scripture and purity of daily life into a “religion that masked a sublimated outrage balanced with patience, cheerfulness, and a boundless confidence in the ultimate justice of God.”[xii]

Black heroes were not so kind to their white Christian counterparts. Abolitionist Frederick Douglas declared, “The existence of slavery in this country brands Republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”[xiii] David Walker, decades before the civil war, stunningly prophesized the plight continued racial oppression would bring America if reconciliation and justice were not reached. Peace would come only once the sinful white Christians, who he addresses interchangeably as Americans, were to see that God truly did create all men equal: “Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together . . . But Americans, I declare to you, while you keep us in bondage, and treat us like brutes, to make us support you and your families, we cannot be your friends.”[xiv] Christianity was at once the shackles used by the oppressors and the weapon of equality for the oppressed.

To the end of his life, Phillip Berrigan described himself as a Catholic trying to become a Christian. This profound statement denies the absolute truths of “belief” complicit in the subjugation and annihilation of millions that paved the way for America’s prosperity. Faith and salvation are work of progression, never fully wrought, never obtained by mere compliance to tenets and sacramental rites. From Berrigan’s unique story and the stories’ of the Nat Turner’s and the Martin Luther King Jr’s of African American history, we learn that — provided we agree God is compassionate and just — authentic Christianity must be more than, in the word’s of Frederick Douglas, “an empty ceremony.” The abolitionist wished faith were “a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man.”[xv] Yet, today institutional Christianity at large, although not exclusively, clings to a “pie in the sky” mentality that renders faith communities across the world mere bureaucratic, money-making businesses that preach the Gospel, but fail to connect Christ’s teachings to the sins of our past, the ignorance of our presence, and the actions we can take now and in the future to correct injustice.

Often missing from the two millennia of religious pronouncements and justifications constituting Christian history is Jesus himself. Where were and where are the Beatitudes in the politics of Christianity? Where is Christ’s simple message of loving the enemy, caring for the least of humankind, and leaving behind wealth for a life of service? The African American Christian leaders of the civil rights movement, in their drive to end segregation and Jim Crow by espousing Christ’s views, simultaneously unraveled “blackness as inferiority that had enslaved so many Americans for so many centuries.” (Harvey, 25) For Berrigan, the Catholic Church in America didn’t address these questions on a wide-scale level, eventually leading him to believe he could impact the faith more from the outside looking in:

“The church is a major, worldwide institution, and it is even more conservative, perhaps, than our government. Not conservative in the sense of “conserving” the gospel, but in maintaining useless rituals and policies that are designed to protect, and perpetuate, the institution. The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the Gospel . . . If the church wanted to come to grips with the gospel, it would have to give up its property and its exemptions from the state, and involve itself with resistance on a major scale. It would have to resist the violence against our poor, and stop pretending that one political party is more humane than the other.”[xvi]

Essentially, Berrigan’s view of authentic Christianity is undistinguishable from Christ’s life and purpose, the same Christ, who when encountering a temple made a haven to wealth-mongering merchants, took an angry, fervent stand against a corrupt institution. In that moment, more than any other example from the Gospels, Christ showed us his sincere humanity and, most importantly, that faith is more than words.