If you turn off your mind, relax and float downstream ... and just read for a while ... the Wall Street Journal can explain how the Democratic primary in South Carolina just might change the face of racial politics in the South forever, since Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are trying such different strategies.Clinton is using an old-style political machine, trying to scoop as many endorsements as possible from political leaders and media types and preachers; Obama is using a grass-roots campaign to mobilize an entirely different group of people, or so the WSJ wants me to believe.
They may be right. But they lost me when they started talking about poor blacks looking to their preachers for "both spiritual and political guidance". White people don't do that, of course. Not since 2004, anyway.
Meanwhile, in an effort destined to earn even more ... um ... credibility ... said Journal carries a piece from Norman Podhoretz called "Stopping Iran", in which he argues -- quite falsely -- that hardly anybody disputed the 2005 NIE which said Iran was racing to build nuclear weapons.
Podhoretz also asserts that Iran has no need for nuclear power since it has all that oil.
Let's see, now: If I had all that oil, and it was selling for $100 a barrel, with no sign of a price decrease ever ... Would I rather sell it ... or burn it? Hmm, that's a tough one. Podhoretz would burn it, obviously. Apparently he doesn't understand the value of money. So he argues that Iran must be stopped from obtaining nuclear technology.
And it seems to me I've heard that one before. Have you? It's funny how Podhoretz doesn't seem too concerned about the entirely credible allegations made by Sibel Edmonds, who says US government insiders were selling nuclear secrets to the highest bidder on the black market, and much more.
Actually, no one in the US media seems much concerned about that; they're more interested in a hypothetical threat than evidence of any actual crimes, especially with crimes as serious as these -- crimes committed by powerful people who could ruin your reputation!
Naturally, the Democratically controlled Congress can't find time to look into it either, since their feckless leader, Henry Waxman, is so busy chasing down a chump who last played in the big leagues five years ago so he can find out what the chump knows about some illegal injections of steroids.
Illegal injections of cash are far less interesting to our bought-and-sold friends in the political/media circus, who don't give a damn about a million dead Iraqis but can't stop writing about one dead Marine.
So this is post-democratic America in its embryonic form: stupid; distracted; cut adrift from reality; corrupt to the bone; fighting a one-sided war of choice and bragging about it; and torturing people until they get mad at us.
And then, if they get mad enough to want to hurt us, we're morally obliged to torture them again, aren't we?