All Things Reconsidered
August 1, 2003
by Alexander Washburn

What I did on My Summer Vacation

Did you miss me? Judging from the most recent 2Walls.com internet stats perhaps 44 of you did. Like Aesop Rock says: “I haven’t exactly been embraced by the populist.” However, if this space keeps consistently ahead of my fellow ‘Blog’ crowd, as well as the national media and the Democratic Party, with calls for intelligence reform and dispensing the wisdom of Dr. Howard Dean, can a short-lived MSNBC talk show be far off? Plus, with the Daily Feed gone the way of the Digital Posse, who else is going to set the urban progressive agenda?

The New York Times still sucks

The New York Times begrudgingly had to acknowledge how captivating and real the candidacy of Howard Dean has become. However, in typical centrist Times fashion the day before their below-the-fold Dean article: “Defying Labels Left or Right, Dean’s ’04 Run Making Gains,’ the Times ran an above-the-fold blowjob for the Democratic Leadership Council, that keeps branding forward thinking Democrats as out-of-touch liberals. In Adam Nagourney’s piece ‘Centrist Democrats Warn Party Not to Present Itself As Far Left’ he writes that the DLC’s warning comes in “response to the popularity enjoyed in early Presidential primary states by Howard Dean.” It may come to a surprise to Nagourney, Frank Rich, Gail Collins (how she survived the Times post-Jason Blair fallout is beyond comprehension) and others on the Times Op-Ed page, but people will forget labels like ‘left’ and ‘centrist’ in favor of a straight shooter with a record of accomplishment.

What the Times and others also fail to realize about Dean is that he is not as liberal as the label implies. First off, being opposed to an unjust war and scrutinizing rash decisions like the U.S.A. Patriot Act, does not make you a liberal. It makes you a person of conviction and intelligence. Let the John Kerry’s and Joe Lieberman’s of the world vote to use force in Iraq and try to save face by asking where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are. Where were they when you voted for the Iraq resolution? They weren’t there then and they’re not there now. Just because it is politically safer to speak up against the war these days does not mean Democratic voters will forget your cheerleading and rush to war posture of December and January.

As this space has said before, Dean left Vermont in better shape than when he found it. The same can’t be said for Bush as Governor of Texas. Dean restrained spending growth and turned deficits into surpluses, the exact opposite of what Bush has done on the Federal level. (In case you missed it, our national deficit is at an all-time high, wildly higher than what the White House projected.) In Vermont, almost all children have full medical insurance and more than a third of Vermont residents on Medicare get state help in paying for prescription drugs. And for all those who scream about how liberal Dean is, look at the facts: he ushered in stringent welfare-to-work laws, pissed off enviros to attract much-needed business investment, and he received top ratings from the National Rifle Association. So much for being a bleeding heart liberal.

Shot Heard Around the Blue States

Another innocent black man was slain in New York last month. Councilman James E. Davis was shot and killed by a lone deranged gunman in the very City Council chamber that the people of Brooklyn elected him to represent their views. Living in New York, it was impossible to miss this story – whether it was the moving visuals of the hundreds who came to pay their final respects as Davis lay in state in the City Hall rotunda or the insulting and regrettable headline run by the Fox-owned New York Post that suggested that the shooters HIV status “fueled his rage.” Fair and balanced indeed. Davis stood for a lot of things, ironically stopping the violence were key among them. As City Hall finds someway to make a symbolic gesture toward the issue Davis cared for most, Mayor Mike Bloomberg and key Congressional and City Hall Democrats should take this important opportunity to call for more stringent gun control laws.

The right is afraid of the gun issue or any other right-leaning issue for that matter, to rear its ugly head on the ‘04 campaign trail. The death of a public official cannot pass without substantial changes to the laws that allow people to obtain guns in other states using phony, non-existent addresses. However, that is exactly what the gunman did, bought a gun in North Carolina using an address that if anyone cared to check led to an abandoned house. The fact that this happen in New York is also a golden moment. Odds are that Bush will accept his party’s nomination in Madison Square Garden, a place famous for choking, so Mr. Bush should fit right in. Let Bush come to New York and defend his NRA gun stance to the faces of the constituents Davis represented.

The right is already trying to head-off this argument. John R. Lott of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and author of ‘The Bias Against Guns’ advocated in the New York Post that banning citizens with guns from public areas is the wrong path for cities to take in face of a crisis like the Davis assassination. Lott writes: “Good intentions do not necessarily make good laws. What counts is whether the laws ultimately save lives. The new rules that prohibit lawful gun-owners from carrying concealed guns at City Hall might actually wind up costing more lives, rather than saving them.” It is this kind of misguided logic that Democrats need Bush to defend on the trail in 2004. Lott goes on to cite a Department of Justice study that showed when confronted by a criminal, people are safest when they have a gun. Please. Attorney General John Ashcroft is such a gun nut that he wouldn’t even allow the FBI to check the gun records of any of the men responsible for the 9/11 highjackings, making any gun stats out of his Justice Department dubious at best. Sure, people might feel safe but it doesn’t take away that fact that with more guns in people’s hands there are bound to be more innocent victims killed. Another glaring omission by Lott is that he failed to mention and make note that Davis, who was former NYPD was carrying a concealed weapon at the time of his death. It must be comforting to Lott, Ashcroft and President Bush, who signed a concealed weapons law in Texas, which permitted brining guns to church, that Davis felt safe as he was being brutally murdered.

Did I Mention that Slavery was Bad?

Like nipples on “The Claire” ATR has been on hiatus meaning this space missed covering Bush’s meaningless trip to Africa, where he toured sacred grounds, spoke to people in Dashikis and worked his legacy by calling slavery bad. Of course, Bush said nothing about the racism being felt by mixed race people in South Africa, the same people who continue to receive the same crumbs from the black-led government that they received from the white-led government. Bush also continued to pay lip service to AIDS initiative to combat. Let’s be honest here, Mr. President, this country doesn’t have dime one – not to combat AIDS, to fully fund Head Start or to assist the states that have had to cut social services left and right. And Bush doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to forgo another tax cut for his rich campaign contributors to help Africa.

Need more proof that Bush’s words fell on deaf ears the White House still doesn’t know how much the war in Iraq is going to cost. Iraq mastermind Paul Wolfowitz was on Capitol Hill recently dodging more key questions from both Democrats and Republicans, and couldn’t give a straight answer to how much the war in Iraq will ultimately costs. Of course they don’t know how much it’s going to cost, for the White House has no idea what it’s doing in Iraq or how it is going to get out and save face at the same time. Look, when creating a futures market on terrorism is the best that John Poindexter and the Pentagon can come up with, it is time to get a little worried.

If Bush thinks going to Africa and calling slavery bad is going to win over the hearts and minds of African-American voters here in this country, than Karl Rove, like some reports, is losing his Midas touch. The jobless rate among black workers in June was 11.8%, compared with 6.4% of all workers and 5.5% for white workers. Unemployment, mixed with tax cuts for the rich and only the rich, cuts in every social service known to person-kind, and playing innocent while you change the funding formulas to Head State which will no doubt, leave more kids without early childhood education. Has the White House forgotten that it took the Supreme Court to stop Bush from destroying affirmative action? So, while Bush was touring Africa, he was also nominating more right-wing judges hell bent on overturning the social advances of the 25 years. Bush nominated Janice Brown to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Brown, if you don’t know, wrote California’s Proposition 209 decision, which bars racial preference, that to put in mildly, angered Golden State minorities. Brown’s decision was so flawed that the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court called it a “serious distortion of history” and that it was “likely to be viewed as less than evenhanded.” Bush can go to Africa and talk the talk. He can go in front of the Urban League and do the same. But outside of turning back the social clock, the self-described “inclusive” Bush has yet to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus.

But, he called slavery bad and he speaks broken Spanish, that’s got to be good for something.

(Alexander Washburn is a volunteer staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine.)