Ya Empeze A Llevar Alguna Gorra De Lata Sobre Obama Y La MSM

As everyone who reads the Nuts, there have been few politicans who have scalded said Nuts to the degree that Barack Obama had. It's all in the archives. I don't want to rehash old business. I'm not backing off from my view that he's run a weak-centrist, surrendering campaign, that he's too religious and sanctimonious for my tastes, that his combination of ego and brittle personality me caen mal, his appeal to the Right, his Fundamentalist Christianity and his weakness on the issues and the "cult" all bug me. It all seemed to fly in the face of his exceptional intelligence.

And I still feel all those things. But the speech changed how I look at the man. It was the first political speech I've ever heard listening to which I thout every step of the way that if I could write a fantasy speech for Obama to deliver, I could not have done a better job. Instead of the pablum intoned, Obama spoke to the nation as a peer. He touched on race but more importantly on tribalism and social class. His elegant defense of Revered Wright showed some fucking combination of brains and balls. Truly, not a day has gone by since in which I haven't pondered some element of it. I guess everybody here's as tired of my praise of Obama as they were of my attacks on him. So, I'll get to the point.

How does a speech that causes me, formerly a hard-core Obama opponent, to view the candidate in a newly positive light and to view the speech as an American political touchstone, to shift my thinking on Obama, while his popularity with press and people sinks like a stone? I've heard a lot of possible explanations: "as long as race is an issue it hurts Obama," "he didn't go far enough in denouncing Reverend Wright," "he insulted his grand-mother in a race-based way," "the speech was too intelletual," "it was his 'Romney Moment,'" and of course "it was just words." I don't believe any of that. So, how did one of the politicans I least admired became one of the very few I do admire?

My task in the betting markets is too watch all the CNN coverage. My partner pulls a hideous double-duty; he has to listen to RUSH and FOX all the time. Yet, there's no shortage of Obama coveage on CNN.

Then, a few weird things started happening. Mainly, Obama's approval ratings went into the dumper just as my view of him went up. That was just weird. Until, I noticed that CNN kept cutting away from political issues to more and more pictures of dis-affected Black children being thrown into squad cars as the polices earched for more participants in the murders of a couple of White college girls. That was no coincidence. I'm sorry. The juxtapositioning was too precise. The unspoken message was Barack Obama=Superpredator.

You all remember "superpredators," don't you? The maximum evil predicted to terrorize all of America by Bill Bennett, John DiUlio (Bush Faith-Based Initiative Guy) and John Walters (All-Purpose Republican Anti-Drug Guy). Those "superpredators" never did come to gitch, did they? Violent crime began to sink like a stone in the early 1990s, as the USA moved out of a recession into a long boom period.

So, in the days following Obama's speech, while Fox was playing the endless tape-loop of Reverend Wright's greatest hits (still none of which sounded terribly unreasonable to me), and CNN kept interspersing Obama speech clips, with Spitzer/Paterson stuff, with heaping helpings of still shots of the White Southern Sorority Girls (tm) who were allegedly murdered by a seemingly endless parade of young black men with tattoos and all the trimmings into the backs of squad cars.

Could the fucking media and public failure of one of the finest speeches in the nation's history and its contemporaneous fall in the national polling of Barack Obama have anything to do with the subliminal and well-overt FOX and CNN "black president? No Way" strategy? No. How could I possibly think that. I'm just wearing a tin-foil hat ("Gorra De Lata") and dreaming up American conspiracy theories.

I originally wanted Kucinich, then I switched to Clinton having become increasingly impressed with her debate performances and increasingly frustrated by Obama's lack of specificity and his closeness with the religious right and support of UIGEA. After Obama showed me this new look, this tremendous historical sophistication and big brass balls, I kind of lean his way. And I certainly don't want Clinton to win this way, riding FOX and CNN racism. McCain we know is a Nazi.

So, I had been tinkering with the idea of casting my last vote as a citizen for Cynthia McKinney on the Green Party line. Now, I find out that foreign resident aliens abroad have no electors. I have been disenfranchised. Best I can do is hope that Obama continues along the path of strength, sophistication, and respect and beats McCain. And maybe that McKinney gets 5% and qualifies for public financing for the Green Party.

So, I have indeed cast my last vote as a US citizen. It was the Libertarian line candidates against Clinton for Senator and against Spitzer for Governor. For Andrew Cuomo for NYS Attorney General. For Jerrold Nadler for U.S. Congress. For all of the judges on the Democratic line. That's it. My first US votes were for Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic Primary. For Jimmy Carter for President in the general election and the rest of the Democratic line. It's been a blast. A circus for the people. But a blast nonetheless.

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