The Bitter Truth: Can Obama Tell It and Still Win?

I'm of a mixed mind about whether Obama is electable. Why? Because the more I like him, the more I realize it is because he is giving the voters the bitter truth that they don't want to know. If he becomes the messenger of truth, as he seems to want to be, then the myopic, parochial, and ostrich-like "in denial" American public, who are largely brainwashed by the Main Stream Media-government collaboration, will turn on and attack the messenger and continue to close their eyes to the truth.

Rev. Wright.
Not wearing a flag lapel pin.
Comments about bitter people in Pennsylvania.

All good messages of bitter truth that make me like Obama, but they are messages that Obama is being attacked for and feels he must apologize for.

If apologizing works then I'm wrong again and that's fine with me. But personally, I'd prefer to have him be the unashamed bearer of truth and go down in flames rather than being the apologizer who loses anyway.

To me, Obama is only making himself appear weak by apologizing for Rev Wright's words and apologizing for his own words on bitterness. I understand he is trying to dodge the bullets, so I can't fault him for attempting this tactic, but I fear that he will lose both ways: it won't work and in the process he will have sold his soul of truth.

Rev. Wright?

He was telling the truth to America just like Micah and the prophets of the Old Testament. What's wrong with that? It was nothing different than Martin Luther King Jr. preached. But who wants to listen to that truth. It's much easier to misrepresent the message and attack the misrepresentation than deal with the truth.

Micah 3
1And I said, Hear, I pray you, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel; Is it not for you to know judgment?

2Who hate the good, and love the evil; who pluck off their skin from off them, and their flesh from off their bones;

3Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.

4Then shall they cry unto the LORD, but he will not hear them: he will even hide his face from them at that time, as they have behaved themselves ill in their doings.

5Thus saith the LORD concerning the prophets that make my people err, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.

6Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine; and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them.

7Then shall the seers be ashamed, and the diviners confounded: yea, they shall all cover their lips; for there is no answer of God.

8But truly I am full of power by the spirit of the LORD, and of judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression, and to Israel his sin.

9Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment, and pervert all equity.

10They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity.

11The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us.

12Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.

How like Rev. Wright's words! Isn't America built on blood and iniquity? From the first wars by the pilgrims against the Native Americans, to slavery, to the present day with the illegal invasion of Iraq and the horrors of torture under Guantanamo and the Presidential policy of rendition, and to the next foul thing America does, who can deny we are not built on blood, iniquity, and injustice just as Rev. Wright preached?

If you don't like Rev. Wright's words, then you don't like the Old Testament, and you don't like to hear the bitter truth, and that's fine. But if you don't like Rev. Wright's words and you call yourself a Christian, then you are just a hypocrite.

No lapel flag pin??

Great! Why shouldn't he be proud that he is not a false patriot. I don't wear a flag lapel pin either. If everyone who doesn't wear a flag lapel pin voted for Obama it would be a landslide. I wear a blood donor lapel pin. I'd like to see Obama wear one of those, but I wouldn't vote for or against him on the basis that he does or doesn't wear one.

In his CD album "Eat The Rich", Peter Tracy sings in the song "I Want a President":

"I want a president who is patriotic
Who would never sacrifice out children needlessly
I want a president who is not psychotic"

I'd like to see Obama get down with that as a response to the flag pin questions.

Here's what Obama needs to stand up and say loud and proud:

Look, anyone who says not wearing a flag pin is unpatriotic is a false patriot, a phony patriot, a fake patriot. A true patriot knows that the love of country is found in the heart and demonstrated by actions, not shown by wearing it on the lapel or the sleeve.

"Bitter" words?

As someone who lives 45 miles from San Francisco, I didn't find any problem at all with Obama's comments there about the bitterness of people in Pennsylvania and how that feeds their gun-tottin’ mania and affects their church-goin' attitudes. He accurately stated how it looks from the West Coast.

No one likes criticism, but if the people of Pennsylvania don't like to see their reflection in the eyes of West Coasters or others, then maybe they are not dealing with a reality that they should be paying attention to. I'll criticise you and you criticise me and maybe we can learn from each other. The attitude in America that people can't criticise each other for real issues is killing our morality and ethics more than any thing else. Instead of talking about bitterness, we get the distraction of the mainstream media pundits criticizing Obama for daring to raise the question of bitterness in the first place, what may be causing or exacerbating it, and what to do about it.

People may deny that their conservatism is based largely in bitterness, but it is a fact. People don't deceive themselves with the falsehoods of a faith based evangelism like George W. Bush does unless there is a deep bitterness in their soul and their world view.

The joke "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged" has a seed of truth in it, because conservatives are people who gennerally grew up being told by their parents and church that life is mugging them. The flip side that "a liberal is a conservative who has been caught doing wrong" also has a seed of truth in that none of us claims his or her civil rights more strenuously than the conservative who has gotten caught doing something illegal. (A variation on the theme is the conservative whose family member gets a disease and then overnight becomes converted to providing liberal funding for research to cure that disease.)

The only mistake that Obama made in his remarks was in tying the bitterness of gun-tottin' Bible bangers too closely to recent economic events and not to a world view that depends on holding onto personal bitterness and encouraging wide spread bitterness in how people approach the world, blaming everyone but themselves for their bitterness.

Can he win?

As I see it the political predicament that Obama has is that he wants to tell the bitter truth but he also wants to win. This is a pretty hopeless situation for a person whose campaign is based on hope.

Who's Really Burning the Flag?

As a fan of The Young Turks, I peruse their website and today producer Jayar Jackson (nicknamed "The Reverend") posted a good blog titled Voyeristic Voting Leads to Presumed Patriotism.

Jayar was responding to the right-wing nuts who are criticizing Barack Obama for holding his hands in front of himself while listening to the National Anthem instead of having his hand over his heart. He conncected this latest outrageous attack of false patriotism to the previous attacks on Obama for not wearing an American flag lapel pin.

Logic should scream that Barack Obama shouldn't have to tell you that his grandfather taught him the Pledge of Allegiance when he was 2 years old. Common sense should prevail when you wonder if his missing American flag lapel pin allowed over 3,800 U.S. soldiers to be killed in Iraq on false pretenses. Questioning if he will restore habeas corpus, privacy, and civil rights to all American citizens, including ones that have sex in their own homes differently than him is a nice place to look first. Will the healthcare puzzle that many other countries figured out be solved? How about whether or not our troops that the Republican Party claims as their own will begin to be treated with the dignity, respect, and basic treatment that they deserve when/if they return home? Do our third world-like cities such as New Orleans have the capabilities to survive another Hurricane Katrina? Will it take over two more years of filth, disease, and random violence to begin to revive our lost city? What steps will he take to stop the terrorist-recruiting and anti-American practice of torture that yields false information? Is the candidate going to threaten another sovereign country with unprovoked attacks because of what their leader likes to say about others?

If you think the answers to these questions lie in his American flag pin, whether or not he places his hands on his chest, butt, crotch, or stomach during the national anthem, or if his name comically sounds similar to that of a Muslim, then have fun in your fantasy world called the Matrix. When you see an agent, run, Neo, run!

At the end of his blog, the first comment from reader named acroso notes, "Obama supports flag burning too." with the link to a 2006 statement why Obama supports legislation to make flag burning illegal but not a Constitutional Amendment.

"And when I became a Senator, I swore an oath to protect the Constitution. Under that oath, my first allegiance is not to a political party, or to an ideology, or to a president, or even to popular opinion, but to the Constitution and to the rule of law.

"The Framers made it difficult to amend the Constitution because our founding document should not be changed just because of political concerns or temporary problems. And even the strongest supporters of this amendment are hard-pressed to find more than a few instances of flag burning each year. Those problems were left to be solved through legislation, and I support legislation introduced by Senator Durbin that makes it illegal to burn the flag without changing the Constitution. The Constitution has only been amended 27 times. These amendments include guarantees of our most basic freedoms, the freedom of religion, the right to a trial by jury, the protection against cruel punishment."

After reading the statement of Obama in the light of Jayar's comments, I posted this response.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Reverend Jayar, you can write. I hope this was written before Screen Writers Guild strike so the conservatives won't accuse you of being a scab.

If anyone, soldiers included, thinks that our soldiers are fighting a war to protect our flag, then they are greatly mistaken. The flag is a cloth symbol for our national fabric that is woven from the Constitution. It is the Constitution that needs protecting, not the flag.

Though Barack Obama says flag burning is a rare event, he is only talking of literal flags and flames. But in truth flag burning is a daily event. Today it is the conservatives and neo-cons who are "burning" the meaning of the flag every day at the very time they are holding it aloft, because they are waving the flag in order to tear out pages of the Constitution that they don't like, not to protect the Consitution and our AMerican freedoms. Every single neo-con and right-wing reactionary who wears a flag on his or her lapel is burning the flag with the flames of their false patiotism.

Here are some of my favorite quotes on the difference between true and false patriotism:


"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
- Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe Commander, Nuremberg Trials 1946
- from "Nuremberg Diary" by G M Gilbert (Signet, New York, 1947)


"There is an important difference between being patriotic and chauvinistic. The patriot places his country within the context of international conflicts; the chauvinist is a "vain country bumpkin" who believes that the world ends within his country's borders."
~ Marginal Notes on the Crime" by Celia Hart (August 25, 2004)

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else." -~Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President (1858-1919)

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it "
--George Bernard Shaw

"Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons."
--Bertrand Russell

"A politician will do anything to keep his job even become a patriot."
--William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) US newspaper publisher, Recalled on his death 14 Aug 1951

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Author: Samuel Johnson
Source: Boswell's Life of Johnson

"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last refuge of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first."
~Author: Ambrose Bierce

"This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism--how intensely I despise them!"
~Author: Albert Einstein

"One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous."
- Aldous Huxley

"Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties."
~Author: H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells)
Source: Future in America

"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else."
- Clarence Darrow

Lastly, here's one to consider for the those false patriots who support the occupation of Iraq. It was said during the time of our Revolutionary War by an Englishman responding to questions from his fellow Lords about why the American insurgents continued to attack the English Redcoats:

"If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms,--never! never! never!"
~Author: William Pitt, Earl of Chatham
Source: in a speech 1777