South Carolina, What Are You Doing?!

What is going on over there with the voting populous of South Carolina? Seriously. The guy that they elected to be the Democratic candidate for the Senate seems to be only vaguely aware of what is going on around him. Not to mention that he didn't mount any sort of campaign what so ever and still managed to win with sixty, yes sixty, percent of the vote! How is that possible?! South Carolina voters, how low is your bar, exactly? Well, if Alvin Greene is any indication, there might not even be a bar.

Meet Alvin Greene. He won the primary election in South Carolina on Tuesday with sixty percent of the vote to become the Democratic candidate for one of South Carolina's Senate seats. How he won is still in question. He's unemployed (though he was honorably discharged (though not voluntarily) from the military nine months ago and lives with his parents) and has no previous political experience. I'm fine with the no political experience. Sometimes, I think I would prefer that candidates don't have any political experience. But I would prefer that they appear to have the capability to form complete sentences. Oh, and to not stare blankly after being asked a really simple question by Keith Olbermann, too.

Alvin Greene claims to have had no donations. He claims that the $10,400 that he had to pony up in order to be on the ballot was his own money. Now, I'm not saying that it isn't. I am saying that I find how incredulous the media is toward the notion that it was his own money. They act like because he is unemployed, he should have no money at all. Never mind the fact that he was in the military for about 13 years. If he was living with his parents the entire time, he could have saved quite a bit of money. Even if he hadn't been living with his parents, it's not like people can't save money or anything like that. Granted, I do find it a little odd for an unemployed guy to spend ten grand just to be on a ballot, but I don't think it's as strange as the media is portraying it to be.

Speaking of things that are strange, from what everyone can tell, this guy didn't even do anything on his "campaign". I have that in quotes because I'm not so certain that if you don't actually go out and campaign (as a verb) that you have a campaign (as a noun). I'm not running for anything, but if I don't do anything and I win, does that mean that I've run a successful campaign. I don't think that it does! I really don't.

What I find more strange is that this guy seems to be of a limited intelligence quotient. He seems vaguely aware of what he is doing. He's one step away from the freaking Senate. He sure doesn't act like it. Then again, he also doesn't really act like he knows what year it is. Let's take a look at some of the dialogue between him and the abhorrent Mr. Olbermann. Keep in mind that Mr. Greene's responses to the questions are always followed by a pause of about 5 to 7 seconds. I don't know why. It could be a tape delay thing. It could be a low mental processing speed. I'm just saying. Oh, and let me just warn you. This guy is not one of our nation's most gifted speakers.

Olbermann: What was your campaign like? Did you hold a lot of meetings?

Greene: Say that again.

Olbermann: What...was...your...campaign...like? Did you have a lot of campaign meetings?

Greene: I have just a few meetings. Not many.

Olbermann: Did you have campaign rallies?

Looking awfully perplexed Greene: Nothing...formal. Just...informal rallies. (What in the world is an "informal rally"?!) Informal meetings...rather.

Olbermann: Did you go door to door to meet the voters? How did they find out who you were?

Looking like Olbermann is speaking Chinese Greene: I just conducted a...simple...old-fashioned campaign. You know. All...all across the state of South Carolina.

Olbermann: Did you have campaign advertising of any kind?

Pondering the question Greene: I had...campaign literature. Yes, I did.

Olbermann: Many...

Not quite done Greene: I had campaign literature.

Trying to finish the question Olbermann: Many first time politicians get surprised by how much fundraising they have to do...How much fund raising did you do?

Really confused Greene: Not much....I raised...I used my own funds up to this point...in the primary...and...up until right now....and.... (Then his voice just trails off and he look blankly ahead. I guess that's how we know that he's done.)

Olbermann: Um, how do you think the people who voted for you on Tuesday knew who you were or even that you were running?

Still staring ahead Greene: I think...that...you know, I think that they....saw...I think that they...no, I just think that they recognized...they heard of my name...when I was campaigning...across the state...you know to pass the word on. Just by word of mouth! (Eureka! A complete sentence!) But I just got the word around. (Judging from this interview, I find it difficult to believe that he could get the word around. He can barely get a word out of his mouth.) You know. I had sixty percent of the vote....I had sixty percent of the vote. Sixty percent of the vote is not luck. (I'll agree with him with that. It's not luck. It might not be legitimate, but it most certainly is not luck.) You know...that's a decisive wins. (Yes. He said "wins". That's a decisive wins. Good Lord...) Sixty per....(And then he just stops and starts nodding! That's twice that he's done that. I guess it's his "thing" or something.)

There's more, but I'm going to stop here. You get the point, right? The guy seems dumber than a box of hair, that is correct.

Now, some people are claiming that Mr. Greene is a "plant" by the Republican party. That theory would have more weight if it weren't for some glaring problems. Problem one is that the guy is far from the brightest bulb on the tree. (And while he could still be a "plant", houseplant would be more like it.) Problem two is that "plant" or not, he still won with sixty percent of the vote and from what I can tell, no one has ever heard of the guy because he didn't even go out and campaign. You can plant whoever you want into whatever race you want, but if it's an election, people still have to vote for him. So that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Then again, none of this does. It does seem to have the air about it of something not being just quite right. Can you ask for an investigation based solely on the impression that the guy who won couldn't find his ass with both hands if you spotted him the left one? I don't know if you can or not, but it might be a good idea. It might also be a good idea to go out there and find folks who voted for this guy and ask them what in the world they were thinking. No, wait. Show them some of the interviews of this guy and then ask them what they were thinking. I have the feeling it would be highly entertaining!

The video of Mr. Greene and Mr. Olbermann is supposed to be below. If it doesn't show, you can try watching it here. At that same link, you can watch a different interview with something called The Root. I'm not saying that you're going to learn much more by watching that interview or anything, but I am saying that you'll see that Mr. Greene's demeanor with Mr. Olbermann was not because he was having a bad day or anything. That's how the guy seems to come across with everything. Perplexed. And in a race for a seat in the United States Senate. What could possibly go wrong?

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Protests in Iran + Twitter-Aid to the Pro-Reformers

I've been loathe to comment on the unfolding events in Iran in part because I know so little about the country beyond the general contours of its 20th (Mossadegh, the Shah, his fall, the Revolution, etc.) and 21st century history, and even then, my sense of what's going inside the country today is hazy at best. What also clouds my impressions are questions about possibly ongoing US involvement, directly and indirectly, in what's unfolding in Iran. I don't think anyone should forget that we have over 150,000+ troops both to the east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq) of Iran, and for 8 years (still?) we had (have?) an administration that was determined not only to foment upheaval in Iran, in part to blunt its nuclear ambitions but also to replace its true leadership, which is to say, the mullahs who really rule the place. According to reliable reporters like the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, this only increased after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, defeating former president and important cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. This is one reason I think President Barack Obama's public stance is the right one; while criticism of the brutal crackdown and praise of the protesters' courage and desire for democracy are appropriate, Obama and the US have to studiously avoid meddling, or even appearing to be doing so, as this can be used as a means to dismiss the legitimate concerns of the reform camps, and even to punish them as foreign agents or puppets. (Not that the US's public and official caution will stop them, but the US need not give them any ammunition.)

For most of the years that Mohammad Khatami, who now stands behind the leading reform candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi [photo above, tonbak.wordpress.com], was president (1997-2005), I was under the misimpression that the country's establishment would embrace the political and social liberalization that his initial election augured. While the public rhetoric during Khatami's tenure continued to point towards liberalization and he made repeated overtures towards the West, the clerics remained firmly in control. Yet I also recall that during Khatami's second term, even Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supposedly was willing to make a deal with the US, yet after the Bush administration rejected the cleric's offer, infamously labeling Iran one member (end?) of the "Axis of Evil," the Iranian regime tightened its line, externally and internally, and has been resolutely firm--at least from what I can tell--ever since. This approach has coincided with the election, and now alleged re-election, of the extremely politically and religiously conservative Ahmadinejad and with the change from the Bush administration to Obama and his team.

The leadup to the election seemed to harken a shift in terms of Iran's politics, or at least this is how I viewed the openness and public nature of the debate between the contrasting candidates and their supporters (Mousavi and Karroubi on the reformist side; Ahmadinejad and Rezaie on the conservative side). But perhaps this was all through the lens of the Western media. I cannot say, but it appeared to be more vibrant than I remembered back in 2005. Then came the vote, and...what looks increasingly like a coup to ensure Ahmadinejad and the ruling ideology stayed in office. Up through today I've read all sorts of analyses of the election last week, and many suggest that there were serious irregularities in the vote tallies. What struck me on the evening of the vote was how quickly Khamenei declared Ahmadinejad the winner, and how dismissive Ahmadinejad's comments were towards Mousavi, Karroubi, and even Rezaie and their supporters. It was as if he knew he had the election in the bag and that his opponents, defeated, would simply accept it as given.

Instead, what the entire world has seen is an ongoing protest, throughout Iran, with massive rallies at first, mostly peaceful on the protesters' part, that have now turned into bloodbaths as the regime cracks down with ravenous brutality to impose its will and order. Yesterday, after following the advice I posted below, and while keeping an eye on the pipe repair here at the house, I was following the #iranelection thread on Twitter. I've followed a number of blogs, news reports (on HuffingtonPost.com especially), and so on, and the Twitter feeds proved an enlightening complement. Many of the posts were repetitive, some led to bad links, others felt like disinfo, but there were quite a few that were giving up to date reports on the state of things, not just in Tehran, but from what I could tell, in some other cities in Iran as well. A number of the tweets led to horrifying YouTube clips; in addition to the now iconic and tragic video of 27 year old Neda Agha Soltan's murder, there were links to attacks on a wide array of protesters, including a clip of the security forces (Basiji? I don't know) torturing one man, another of two wounded students being dragged into a university hallway, where one died, and protesters encountering live ammunition. (The tallies of those killed so far have varied considerably.) Other tweets have focused on the general strike(s), protests by Iranians and others outside Iran, ways to avoid the security apparatus's e-clampdown, links to other pro-reformist (and pro-government) sites, and so on. Just following these tweets and observing the role that Twitter, Facebook and other sites, along with the more widespread SMS technology, are playing, has been fascinating. Once these technologies enter the picture and become more diffuse, not only the Iranian government, but no government will be able to respond as it had in the past.

How will things end? I have no idea. Despite Ahmadinejad's more measured language and near apology this weekend, the clerics' line as of today is even more rigid; Ayatollah Khamenei's sermon on Friday was as firm as a guillotine, as if to assert not only that he wasn't going to back down, but that he was in total control. Countless pro-reformers from all strata of Iranian society and domestic journalists have been arrested, and some have disappeared. The regime has also restricted the work of foreign journalists, and has begun verbally attacking foreign governments. The government today announced that there would be no annulment of the election, that fallen protesters' families would be charged for their burials, and so on. Yet major figures like Khatami and Rafsanjani have cast their lot with the reformers, and millions of Iranians, women and men, are refusing to back down. (I am not sure what's really going on with Rafsanjani, how much power he truly wields, and what this will mean for Khamenei's rule, and I'm still trying to sort all these elements out.) The fly has escaped the flybottle and it cannot be returned. If the clerics and Ahmadinejad do somehow remain in power, however, I cannot but imagine that they control has been severely weakened--whether irreparably remains to be seen.

Related:

I'm not on barely on Twitter (and as far back as last spring [2008] was urging students not to use it during class), but I received this from Tisa B. and am passing it on in order to help those trying to stand up for freedom and democracy there:

If anyone is on twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. "Security" forces are hunting for people blogging about the current abuses of pro-democracy protesters using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Please cut & paste & pass it on

I did this. Please do it if you can, and take other action to support the pro-reform movement in Iran!

McLiar

There's nothing like sitting for 3 hours (or more) in an airport terminal, amid frustrated and anxious fellow passengers, inhaling recycled air and countless illnesses, while munching on a stale sandwich and drinking water that tastes like it was drawn from a sump pump, wondering if your plane is going to arrive from another city so that it can take off and get you where you'd hoped to be 3 hours ago, is there? As one of my recent students used to say all the time, echoing a phrase I would frequently hear a decade ago, good times, good times.

>>>

According to Poblano's site, 538, the person below currently matches up very well against both of the Democratic candidates, the presumptive nominee and his challenger, in the 2008 presidential race. That this is even vaguely possible gives me a headache, but as Mencken said and thousands have quoted since, as I'm doing now, never underestimate the stupidity of the American people, and I would, the ignorance, collusion and indifference of the establishment media. The person below would not know the truth if it slapped him in the face. So, my friends, here is Robert Greenwald doing the media's job, and engaging in a little enlightening, for all of us. Do pass the video on to others, at your earliest convenience.

A Super Tuesday for Hillary and Barack

I meant to blog on the Super Tuesday results, but I had too much on my mind and docket to finish the post I began (I've just posted 2-3 posts I'd partially begun, and the one on the Kara Walker show is coming), but let me congratulate both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton on their victories two days ago.

What most grabbed my attention was the far larger turnout (was it 14 million vs. 8 million?) for the Democratic primaries and caucuses versus those of the Republicans, and the disparity held not only in the Democratic or Democratic-trending strongholds like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Connecticut, but also in Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia. In Missouri alone, the Democrats drew 230,000 more voters than the GOP. I see this as an excellent sign for the fall, provided the eventual Democratic nominee (be it Clinton or Obama) can match or exceed these numbers against the likes of McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

Another fascinating outcome was that Obama won all of the "caucuses" except New Mexico, and many of the Republican-leaning states in the south and west (save Tennessee), while Clinton won most of the traditional "blue" states on the east and west coasts. The question is, can she win some of the states he did in November, or, if McCain is GOP candidate, can Obama win over enough Latinos in states like California and New Jersey if he's the nominee to sail to victory, and what about any of those southern states, like Arkansas or Georgia? I don't think either candidate has a chance in some of the longtime Republican-leaning spots like Utah (unless Huckabee is on the ticket) or Idaho, but the pair, if they formed a joint ticket, could bring in a number of states the Democrats must win in order to take back the White House. She energizes women voters, working-class voters, Latinos, he excites Black folks, highly educated liberals and moderates, some former Republicans, and lots of young people. I can't see Clinton running as his VP, for a host of reasons, but I also wonder if he'd take the VP slot, which would turn him into even more of a target down the road for the GOP.

The Obama victory and general success for both candidates in Missouri was especially pleasing to me. I'm not even 45, but I thought I'd probably have to make it to 65 to see a black candidate win a primary in my native state, which has its own particularly complicated and often nasty racial history. It entered the union in 1821 as a slave state, was one of the lesser known but bloodiest battlegrounds during the Civil War (and even had Confederate government in exile), tried its best to mimic the Southern states in post-Reconstruction hatefulness, and even gave the US a president who'd served in the Ku Klux Klan (though he also was the very person who integrated the military and turned out to be better on racial issues than many of his predecessors). The state is often more like Arkansas (though larger and richer) than other states it borders, like Illinois and Iowa, and old attitudes have tended to die slowly and hard(ly). In effect Missouri is several different states: a conservative, Catholic-and-Lutheran midwestern agricultural state (northern Missouri), a Bible-belt Southern evangelical state (southern Missouri), a small-town, moderate state with a sizable state university (central Missouri), a state with two large, wealthy and diverse urban-suburban metropolitan centers (Kansas City and St. Louis, and their surrounding counties, which extend into nearby Kansas and Illinois, respectively). Hillary Clinton won all but 7-8 counties in the non-urban parts of the state, but Obama's margins in just St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and Boone County, the home of the University of Missouri-Columbia, were large enough that he was able to win the whole shebang. Together, as I note above, they received 230,000 more votes (many from "independents") than the GOP, which has dominated Missouri politics in recent years. (Cf. the Blunt family, Kit Bond, etc.) Again, I think this is a marvelous sign, though the real test will come when one of them is nominated and must run against the Republican nominee, likely to be John McCain, who barely edged out former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He is the one I expected to gallop away with votes, so perhaps the economy, the war, and so on, are affecting Missourians, the proverbial people in the "heartland's" bellwether state, more severely than I thought.

This brings me to my last point: as much as I loathe this most incompetent, corrupt, ignorant, and lawless president in our history, I have to thank him in part because his awfulness has, I think, driven even some of the most willfully resistant people to consider electing someone utterly unlike him and many in his party. Whether his awfulness, which continues every single day he stays in office, will be enough to defeat his ideological soulmate, John McCain, I don't know. But I do know that while Clinton probably could have gotten some traction thus far no matter who the Republican in office was, his sheer horribleness has probably helped people look past the issue of race while in the voting booth, if even temporarily. I'm not saying this is the sole or even a major reason, but I would venture that Bush's record of destruction and disaster has helped, in some ways, to reset people's compasses. Has it been worth the price we've paid, nationally and internationally. I can't say yes. But if there's any good to come out of these last eight years, either Clinton or Obama in the White House, with a more liberal and progressive US Senate willing to push more liberal and progressive legislation, while also finally investigating and punishing the criminals who preceded them, would be optimal.

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Speaking of targets, Chris sent me this link to Robin Morgan's blistering piece, "Goodbye to All That (#2)," on the gross misogyny and sexism in the campaign. What do you think?

Afronetizen posts author Uzodinma Iweala's critique of the race, and its (lack of substantive) discussions of the role race (and I'd add gender) is playing, both in the campaigns and in this society. Again, what do you think?