Uppity Negro Network

Editors note: This is a dense post.  Grab a doughnut or some tea and buckle in for the ride.

In the past week, the country has been treated to backroom comments made by high profile politicians as quoted in a tell-all book Game Change expected to hit bookshelves January 12, 2010.  What has made the top of the list was Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) comment about the then Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama and him being “light-skinned” and having no “Negro dialect…unless he wanted to have one.”  Next on the list was a comment, or paraphrase made by former President Bill Clinton concerning Obama’s candidacy to the effect that “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

What has ensued has been a PR nightmare for Harry Reid, and has resulted in a borderline media circus surrounding specifically Reid’s comments.  But, black talk shows were taking issue not just with Reid’s comments but also what Clinton had to say.  Some black callers were excusing Reid for his comments, while holding Bill Clinton’s feet to the fire.  Many still recalled Clinton’s comments about Obama’s campaign being “the biggest fairy tale” shortly after the Iowa caucuses and also his comment about Jesse Jackson having won South Carolina–which clearly has a much larger black populace than Iowa.  I even had one brother on Twitter today invoke the memory of BET’s former sellout president Bob Johnson make the gaffe that he did in an anti-Obama fashion.

Just tonight I heard Michael Eric Dyson to Lani Guinier weigh in on the issues for the major networks.  And personally I sided with Dyson alleging that Obama and this milquetoast approach to race is not healthy for the country.  Others have said that Obama need not worry about race, he has other things to concentrate on concerning domestic and foreign affairs.  There’s even the liberal contingent that’s probably still yelling that Obama isn’t the president of Blaaaaack America, but all of America (does this include Central America and South America?)  And of course GOP Chairman Michael Steele’s uninformed self got on Fox News on Sunday and just made a complete fool of himself as if that was even more possible.  And Steele and some others both GOP’ers and some blacks are taking the point of view that this is a double standard concerning Reid’s comments.  That is to say that if someone like Reid’s opposite Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made similar comments that the liberals and Democrats alike would be calling for his head and asking for his resignation as has Steele.

And some are even comparing this statement to former and then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s (R-Miss.) comment that the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency when he campaigned on the Segregationist ticket in 1948.

I won’t even dignify that comparison with a response.  Or the fact that Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Ut), Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) or Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) about bent over backwards to defend Lott.

What I argued was that Reid’s comments versus the plethora of comments made by GOP’ers and self-professed conservatives are contextual comments.  For me, context is simply that, relative.  Saying there’s a double standard admits objectivity; that there is some universal standard by which we’re judging all comments.  Reid’s comments are fine by me because, aside from the fact that I agree with him, they were said in the context of Reid having participated in a lot policies that I feel are advantageous to my own political beliefs.  Not to mention, if Reid really didn’t want Obama to run back around the times these comments were made, he certainly wouldn’t have made these comments.  However, when someone like Trent Lott makes such comments, one looks at the context of which he said them, what audience for example, and the fact that Lott has a history of not exactly being a friend to more egalitarian causes.

And when I take a step back and look at even my analysis, I see it’s flaws.

Of course, I’m like the supercomputers in the blockbuster movies like in “I, Robot” or the all being knowledge of the alien in the form of Keanu Reeves in “The Day The Earth Stood Still” and I believe that my logic is flawless, but what kept echoing in my mind all day as I watched and listened to the media fallout was the notion of ontological blackness.

Generally what most blacks were arguing about was what constituted “being black.”  Even ousted Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.) made a comment about being “blacker than Obama” and he went on to give reasons why.  And Blagojevich was yet and still attempting to define what blacks, I think have even failed to define for themselves–what is blackness?  Often times we give various performative features of what it means to be black.  One can ask James Baldwin about blackness when it comes to language as he so artfully argued in “If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then I Tell Me What Is?” and essay he published.  Others have made the argument down through the years that blackness is defined by how one walks, how one talks, how one dresses and even how one thinks.

All of that sounded good, but as we do move into post-modernity and yes as we continue the slow and at times painful progression to a post-racial society, “blackness” as we know it will come under scrutiny.  And enter the idea of ontological blackness and it’s transmutable powers.

Ontological blackness is really just a five dollar phrasing to say what does it mean to be black.  Ontology being the study of being.  So according to Victor Anderson in his book Beyond Ontological Blackness, blacks in this country have developed a counter-discourse to racism that has morphed itself, if you will, into what can be categorized as ontological blackness.  In short, without parsing his book and his argument, when the average black person approaches the subject of race, we approach it as racial apologists.  That is to say, we make our arguments to justify our actions–or inactions in certain cases.  So to take these various comments made by various politicians, all of the discourse I’ve heard from blacks has been quite apologetic.  In the midst of giving their opinion, they’ve qualify their opinions with a counter-discourse to racism.  In fact Anderson goes on to say that blacks have assumed a reactionary identity–that is to say, our blackness is dependent upon white superiority.

Well, Anderson wrote this in 1997 and that was even something I argued about the dominant subordinate culture millieu in a post last year.  But it bears mentioning.  Blacks, in my opinion, often times react emotionally and react without a proper filter.  That is to say, we don’t always think before we speak or feel; we fail to process what has happened and think about various other points of view when we make statements.  For instance, black folks were mad as a hatter when Sen.  Hillary Clinton (D-NY) was running around acting entitled to getting the Democratic nomination.  Well, yeah, she was wrong for acting entitled, but dammit, she put in hard work and she had done what she was supposed to do and Obama did come up in the 4th turn on the last lap and snuck up on the inside and nudged her out at the last minute.

I would have been mad too.

But black folks immediately racialized the situation prematurely.  We racialized the “fairy tale” comment and we told ourselves that if Obama hadn’t been black that Bill wouldn’t have said that, and we convinced ourselves that we were right.  We had no evidence in favor of our feelings, and in fairness no evidence otherwise either, but, we were RIGHT! And our feelings mattered! And that’s all there was to it!

Professor Anthony Pinn, in a book review on Anderson’s book I found online, echoes some of the same issues I’ve raised in class that usually I can’t get no help on when I raise them.  Blacks, by in large are stuck in the civil rights mindset of approaching social, economic and various political issues.  Aside from that approach always being reactionary, this approach assumes the perpetuity of whites being the oppressor.  Especially after the whole Jeremiah Wright debacle and the mentioning of Black Liberation Theology, I started thinking again and realized that I too, as Anderson and Pinn both recognized prior to my awakening moment, had a fundamental problem with Black Liberation Theology.  Pinn put it this way:

Black[s]…speak in opposition to ontological whiteness when they are actually dependent upon whiteness to legitimize their agenda. Furthermore, in a bizarre twist, ontological blackness’s strong ties to suffering and survival result in blackness being dependent on these issues, and as a result social transformation brings into question what it means to be Black. Liberative outcomes ultimately force an identity crisis, a crisis of legitimation and utility

…By keeping ontological blackness alive, theologians maintain their raison d’etre and the vitality of their enterprise. Within the work of these theologians one ever finds the traces of the Black aesthetic which pushes for a dwarfed understanding of Black life and a sacrifice of individuality for the sake of an illusional unified Black “faith.” Implicit in all of this is a crisis of faith, a fear to address both the glory and guts of Black existence–nihilistic tendencies that unless held in tension with claims of transcendence have the potential to overwhelm, to suffocate.

And I think, in my humble opinion, that’s where we are now: we’re in severe identity crisis mode.  Even though Pinn was referring to Anderson’s shift toward the discussion in the black religious context, I think that not only is it true of black clergy, but also true of the everyday thought process of the average Negro.

Yes, racism is alive and needs to be dealt with; yes there are a myriad of civil rights issues when it comes to race that need to be addressed, but for some of us, we need to knock the racial chip off of our shoulder. We sit up in our barbershops and beautyshops and we yell at our TV’s as we watch CNN and MSNBC and we volley the same flawed thinking at media and political pundits who can’t hear us and ultimately we do nothing–our thinking is still the same.

Perhaps me and Anderson diverge ever so slightly in how we need to move past the limiting flaws of “ontological blackness” but, in my own words, blacks need to wake up and realize that it’s 2010 already and Martin Luther King is dead and aint coming back!  The problem with the argument that I make, and probably what Anderson makes as well, is that ontological blackness does not see the day when humanity does not judge one by the “colord of their skin, but by the content of their character.”  I know it’s a lazy move to pull such an overused quote from King’s speech, but is that not what we’re moving toward?  Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t just a black people thing.  White folks buy into the notion of ontological blackness as well–why else do you think Obama is “light-skinned” and has no “Negro dialect” which translates into non-threatening Negro to white Americans.

Just ask how Al Sharpton did when he ran for the presidency.  Most would simply say “he was too black” and never give a clear definition of it.  Al Sharpton just be too black.

Yup. Ontological blackness at its finest.

Once blacks decide to move from the mindset of us vs. them, much the same way that whites have as well, then maybe we’ll see a shift.  You see right now, the collective black mindset is borderline on revenge mode: the oppressed want to be the oppressors.  Once we move from revenge mode to reparation and reconciliation mode, then perhaps we’ll be able to move into a post-racial society.

But it starts somewhere.

It’s an inconvenient truth.

It sounds corny, but it’s true, one day, someone is going to have to say enough is enough and attempt the actual reconciliation.  I’m not sure which side is it going to be however.  I will say that things are looking up however.  Now blacks and whites and Latinos and Asians go to school together.  Unlike our parents and most certainly our grandparents, blacks actually have white friends and whites actually have black friends.  Small stuff like that as we move forward in this country all lend to a better day.  A day when people like Harry Reid won’t make gaffe’s like he did.  Or a day when Obama won’t have to downplay every racial incident just to maintain the country’s status quo.

I make these statements as someone who is intentionally black.  Perhaps by making that statement I’ve nullified everything in which I’ve said against the general notions of ontological blackness, but at the end of the day, sadly even, despite the facts that speak against ontological blackness, reality in this country still states that my skin color matters more than the content of my character.

We’ve got to do better.

The nightmare ends when you decide to wake up.

Thoughts, concerns, rebuttals…leave them in the comment box.  Was I on point, or was this just a waste of time and I need to go somewhere and saddown and shuddup?

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Continued from the previous post because I figure y’all wouldn’t be reading a 3,000+ word post.

2005 – Hurricane Katrina, Terry Schivo

In March 2005, we all remember the Terry Schivo case where the entire country joined a pro-life debate, not about unborn fetuses, but rather about a Florida woman who had entered a vegetative state.  Terry Schivo’s husband, Michael for the previous seven years had been trying to get his wife disconnected from the feeding tubes–essentially pull the plug.  But, Terry’s parents filed a court injunction and the big hoopla began.  From about 1998 and coming to a head in 2005, injunctions and affidavits of all kinds were filed and it boiled down essentially to parents unable to grieve.

What we had here was a simple, and yes I mean simple, case of parents unable to accept the inevitable–their daughter was dying.  And by some accounts, already dead because of the lack of neurological activity.  The U.S. Congress got involved and the President got involved in this whole she-bang.  No serious precedent was established per se, but it was a major part of the national consciousness at the time.  And going along with the apparent theme I’ve set already, this was a case of where the nation allowed their deep-seated political beliefs to bubble to the top.  Not to mention, we had something that was a deeply personal and family issue displayed on the 24/7 news media cycle.  Seriously, could you imagine having to grieve about your loved one in the public?  And you were never previously a public figure?

Later that year, and of personal note, the Gulf Coast was battered by Hurricane Katrina.  I’ve written my few blogs concerning Katrina, so I need not go into depth about it.  What I will say is that yet again we saw the culture of conservatism rear its ugly head.  One need not go into detail that it took five days before the federal government moved in troops to the Superdome, or the fact that it took five days until the Corps of Engineers mobilised enough to begin dropping sandbags at the various breached levee points.  Or the glaring fact that our president literally did a fly-over of the damage done when the levees broke rather than land his plane at Armstrong Int’l Airport and God-forbid talk to the people.  Or the fact that his mother had the unmitigated gall to surmise that the displaced residents of Louisiana who had sought refuge in Houston’s Astrodome were doing better here than they were back in New Orleans.

Perhaps because I wasn’t glued to the television for this one because I was actually apart of it, I missed just how the right responded to it, but what I do remember was that conservatives were quite mum on this issue.  For them, Katrina and essentially New Orleans was something that really never happened, barely a blip on the radar screen–there once and never seen again, I guess like a flock of geese passing through the radar field.  These alleged compassionate conservatives responded politically in much the way that the president responded–aloof and far away.  We should have seen it coming though, if the conservative human response was to remain as separated when human calamity strikes, well, let’s just say now we can put their health-care stance in perspective.

What I do remember was a freshman Senator Obama on the coattails of Senator Hillary Clinton.  Clinton was quite clear in her criticism of Bush and the federal governmental response, but Obama most certainly took much more conciliatory tone.

Just wanted to put that out that.

2006 – Coretta Scott-King passed, Wii, Pluto demoted, Saddam Hussein killed

This year, nothing ground breaking happened that affected a mass social consciousness, in my own opinion, but Coretta Scott-King’s death two years following the death of Rosa Parks, did mark the end of an era.  Yes, her daughter Bernice influenced the family to hold the funeral at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church (Pastor Eddie Long) and some protested because of Long and New Birth’s political stance against gay rights–something that Coretta had already spoken in favor of citing her late husband’s quote from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Then Pluto got demoted.

Then America was introduced to the Wii by the Christmas 2006 season, and we saw the grainy images of Saddam Hussein getting hung.

And the mission still wasn’t accomplished.

2007 – Nancy Pelosi first female speaker of the house, Virginia Tech, Fallwell’s Death

The joint years of 2006 and 2007, as I review, didn’t necessarily see major ground shifts so much as the progression of time.  I mean this, and I don’t take this back, thankfully, we saw the death of Jerry Fallwell.  I mean the irresponsible statements he made as early as the 1960’s against Martin Luther King until his recent comments alleging that America’s tolerance for homosexuality led to the September 11th attacks are simply unconscionable in the highest regard.  Not to mention that we can certainly credit Fallwell and his establishment of the Moral Majority which helped deliver Ronald Reagan into office in 1980.

This was the bridge year that we saw Nancy Pelosi elected as Speaker of the House, and finally we saw the Bush Age of Conservatism being eaten away as Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate and a fair number of governorships and state congressional bodies.  Well, this was in the face of a Bush approval rate tanking by the day, the country trying to figure out the mired direction of the Bush White House and how they were handling the war.  Bush, thanks to Cheney shooting his hunting buddy had a severe PR image that in typical lame duck fashion, they weren’t worried about.  Not to mention the Mark Foley scandal soliciting young congressional pages and the Jack Abramoff crap that had gone down by this time.  And I’m sure most Democrats and self-professed liberals and progressives were smirking to themselves as Idaho Senator Larry Craig was caught tapping his foot at an airport stall.

And yet again, this nation was gripped by fear as we heard about the Virginia Tech massacre.

And the Senator with the funny name from Illinois announced his candidacy for President of the United States.

2008 – The 2008 election, Lehman brothers

By far, 2008 was dominated by the Presidential race.  Nothing else happened but the presidential election.

Well, not really, Fidel Castro stepped down after 49 years of telling the United States to kiss his grits and being an operable socialist republic in the Western Hemisphere and the world was introduced to the famed Usain Bolt as he hit the international stage at the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008 and Lehman Brothers, who dealt with U.S. securities and general investment banking and global financial services, filed for bankruptcy, the country knew that we were in the thick of it.

But, yeah, it was the 2008 election cycle that was primary.

Barack Obama strategically won the caucuses, starting with Iowa on that frigid January night with Hillary Clinton in last place.  Poor John Edwards thought he had a shot, but between his hair and his illegitimate child while cheating on his sick wife–well, that was about it for him.  Meanwhile, John McCain had shot through the Republican field while Clinton and Obama were forced to duke it out state by state, primary by primary and caucus by caucus.  The country got fully familiar with partisan media in the form of liberal media bias of MSNBC with Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews and the conservative rantings of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly from FoxNews Network when the entire country’s focus between March and April were on Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ, the church of Barack Obama.

And still Obama pressed on through till June and Clinton dropped from the race on June 6th and Obama received a rockstar reception at the open air field in Denver as Republicans and conservative alike prayed for rain.

Then we metAlaska Governor Sarah “Plain and Tall” Palin.

I need to do a whole post about her, stay tuned.

Poor Republican Senator John McCain-Ariz. really had nothing but a hope and a prayer by November 2008.  Palin had turned into an albatross around his neck–let me just call it how I see it.  Palin may have invigorated the base, but she did a good job of alienating the middle of the country which always are the swing votes.  So, Obama ended up winning with a much wider majority of the votes than what we had seen in a while.

Then 2009 happened.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

So, now as we have entered a new decade, or at least a new 10 year period, let us look back at the top ten moments that have had an impact on our lives.  Or have they?  Honestly, we live in a 24-hour news cycle and we’re much more apt to talk about Tiger Woods recently losing sponsorship from AT&T rather than reflect on the Bush’s decision to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Why because Tiger doesn’t require much thought, we can easily fire off an answer, but in the spirit of being intellectually responsible, responding to the long term effects of this country’s belligerence requires much more neurological energy–so much so, many us don’t always want to use it.

I encourage all of us to be aware and connect the dots of our existence.  No, not encouraging conspiracy theories, but simply stated, I just highlighted–from my own memory–the last events of this past decade that do have an impact on where we are as we enter 2010.  These are just my thought, a mere commentary, so leave comments down below, you know where.

JLL

2000 – Bush-Gore Florida

Just recently, I was going through some old newspaper clippings and I had saved a whole bunch of clips regarding the 2000 Election and the fight over the then 25 electoral college votes that had been awarded to Florida.  From what I remember, Vice President Al Gore had intiially conceded then called it back and then it was on and popping.  From that first Tuesday after the first Monday of November.  With Bush’s brother as the governor and a Republican as the Secretary of State, the odds were stacked against then Governor George W. Bush of Texas.  Long story short, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and overturned the Florida State Supreme Court that had ruled in Gore’s favor for a 70,000 vote recount–essentially allowing the previous state certified vote margin of 537 in Bush’s favor.

No shocker that the justices that voted in the majority had ties to former Prez George H.W. Bush.

What I also remember as a little known fact was that technically, there is no federal law that requires the members of Congress to vote in favor of what their state’s constituents vote–for example, those 25 members of Congress from Florida were not legally required to vote for Bush.  But also, what most people don’t know let alone remember was that electoral college votes can be challenged–but they have to be joint sponsored by one Senator and one member from the House of Representatives.  At the time of the certification of the electoral college votes–of which Al Gore, as Vice-President was currently overseeing–members of the Congressional Black Caucus actually put their money where their mouth was and protested the certification, but Gore was forced to rule them “out of order” because NOT ONE U.S. Senator saw fit to challenge it.

I really wonder if there had been a member from the Congressional Black Caucus as a U.S. Senator would they have stood up and co-sponsored the challenge.

Without trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist, let us be aware that the following eight years from 2000, we need to be aware of the neo-conservative atmosphere that Bush had created.

2001 – 9/11

Despite what former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said concerning a terrorist attack happening under Bush’s watch, the events of September 11, 2001 did happen while George Bush was president of these United States.  If we want to use Perino’s line of reasoning, then it was really under Jimmy Carter’s watch that the Iran hostages were released and not Ronald Reagan.  Again, the conspiracy theories abound much that Bush knew about this and I’m not going that far, however, I will say Bush most certainly capitalized on it.  Bush’s entire presidency post-9/11 was marked by the bellicose rhetoric surrounding “terrorists.”  We still haven’t found Osama Bin Laden and in lieu of what just happened Christmas of 2009, we’re no more safer, necessarily, than we were prior to 9/11.

The Bush Administration, thanks to guard dogs such as White House Advisor Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney, allowed for this atmosphere of severe xenophobia to reign rampant.  We saw an increased visible presence of social conservatism within the media and media coverage thanks to FoxNews Network.  With the rabid dogs of old head like a Rush Limbaugh and now Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the always jovial Pat Buchanan, and to be inclusive, the bitch of the group Ann Coulter, and now even newcomer Glenn Beck, we now have an atmosphere that is ripe for lies and other misconceptions to take place in the American consciousness.  The Bush White House established a culture based on fears and seemingly drew upon McCarthyism tactics of “us vs. them” and the rhetoric of “anti-Americanism” seemed straight from McCarthy’s playbook.

What resulted by the end of the second Bush term was a heavily divided country.

2002 – No Child Left Behind, The DC Sniper and Mid-term Congressional support for Bush and Department of Homeland Security

Aside from the fact that this was the year I graduated from high school, this was also the year that Bush enacted the No Child Left Behind Act.  Yeah, it sounded great on paper, even Ted Kennedy sponsored the bill, but I’m sure he along with Bush never step foot in anyone’s public schools.  Long story short, in order for school districts and ultimately individual schools to receive funding, they had to maintain certain test scores.  So, we’re still operating school districts off the idea that essentially every single kid learns within certain parameters and those parameters can be judged by tests–and the teachers are teaching for a test.  So naturally, inner-city schools are never given the opportunity to address the plethora of social concerns that all effect a child’s learning ability.

And no this isn’t some leftist leaning beliefs, but come on now, every parent of multiple children knows that each child has some quirk about them that results in them learning differently.

And then DC was paralyzed with the DC Sniper, who was finally executed this year.  And I’m sure every black person was shocked when word got out that he was black.  The shock was further compounded when it was discovered that the sniper, John Allen Mohammed had some little boy Lee Boyd Malvo following him around.  As if the nation wasn’t already gripped by the jelly bean color coded “alert” system, the DMV residents were most certainly on red alert.  All of which helped move this country to okaying the encroaching of our own individual civil liberties.   Yes, I’ll admit it’s a hard decision to make when the decisions of a few individuals affect the larger population, but damn, this stuff is starting to suck.

Can’t help but wonder if even the DC sniper helped the country to shift from Afghanistan and “smoking ‘em out” with Osama to finding this “weapons of mass destruction” that poor Secretary of State Colin Powell got up at the United Nations with faulty information with which to go forth in February 2003.  Because that prior fall, Congress gave Bush the greenlight more or less with defense funding and enacted the Iraq War Resolution.  Not to mention, we saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

2003 – Bush, Mission Accomplished

Of course, by March, Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in the the fighter jet.  And most of us were of course, happy because we thought it was over, but still disturbed because we saw our president dressed in military garb.  Honestly, for the more critical thinkers, we of course drew up images of Fidel Castro who was synonymous with his ubiquitous military revolutionary outfit.  And we were forced reconcile our country entering a war, but yet an unjust war.  Yes, we were all mad as hell that our country had been attacked, but yes, we were fighting the ideals of terrorism but not in fact a terrorist.  So by in large we were fighting a war of consciousness.

I’ll admit that perhaps the Bush White House (Cheney et. al.) were aware of this, but they did a damned good job of personifying this war of ideals.  We now are afraid of any one who looks un-American.  Un-American became defined by anyone who didn’t have a frayed flag flying on their car or from their house.  Un-American became defined as anyone who didn’t seem to fit into the narrow ideals as dictated by the ever increasingly vocal religious right and conservative punditry.

Long story short, the mission was not accomplished and still has not been nearly seven years later.

2004 – Kerry/Bush

I did a post as to why blacks voted for Bush in 2004 and still I couldn’t have done it.  Yes, there is the political science theory that one does not change leaders in the midst of a war.  Well, okay, I guess.  The war aside, blacks voted for Bush because of the symbolic move to get the Defense of Marriage Act ultimately passed as an amendment to the Constitution, not to mention Bush’s conservative stance on abortion appealed to the black conservative religious predilections.  There is some debate as to how socially conservative blacks can be, particularly when infused with religion, but in this case, Jay-Z is right–numbers don’t lie.  As John Kerry went windsurfing, blacks voted a record 11-12% for the Republican candidate.  And my personal story was that, while my intelligent friend made the decision of voting for Bush, and I still disagree with him, he said part of his decision was that he decided to vote for the poorer candidate.  He said voting for a man who was worth in the neighborhood of $1,000,000,000.00 was just unconscionable as we are a country with a significant working poor making less than $30,000.00 annually.

The Bush White House walked away from that election with their mandate as this country voted Republicans back into the majority and finally, this conservative slant of the country had finally gained a real toehold on this country and they were here to stay.

(check the next post for the continuation….)