Religion and politics

Religion and politics don't mix -- well that's what the pietistic evangelicals of the religious right used to tell us back in the days of apartheid. Therefore, they concluded, Christians should not criticise political leaders and their policy of apartheid and the ethnic cleansing that resulted from it. "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's".

Now the boot is on the other foot, and it is the secular humanists and the "new atheists" who are saying that religion and politics don't mix, and one gets the impression that if they had their way there would be two voters rolls, an A roll for atheists, to elect 350 members of parliament, and a B roll for agnostics, who would be allowed to elect 50 members of parliament, and the rest would have no vote at all, and everyone knows that all war, hatred and oppression in the world has been caused by religion, and until the superstitious have come to their senses they should not be allowed to vote.

But what about the politicians themselves?

Over the last week there have been several news items about prominant politicians and their religious views, practices or utterances, to wit Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama and Jacob Zuma. These have been interesting, but even more interesting have been the responses.

Let's start with Jake the Fake. So far no one has put it better than Tinyiko Sam Maluleke's Blog - Thinking Allowed!: Welcome to Jacob Zuma's Heaven:

“When you vote for the ANC, you are also choosing to go to heaven. When you don’t vote for the ANC you should know that you are choosing that man who carries a fork … who cooks people.” Thus spake the son of God to loud cheers and unstoppable giggles. And not for the first time, mind you. He spoke before, he is speaking now and he will speak again. How many times before, has he underlined the intimate relationship between the ANC and the Lord? With uncharacteristic calm and collection, our Jacob has pointed out that until the Lord returns, the ANC will rule. To the ANC has ruling authority been granted during this interim period of uncertainly — the in-between period — the period between the ascension of Jesus and the return of Jesus. Only those who hide in the ark called ANC will survive the trials and tribulations of the current age! You have heard it said before that Jesus will return to fetch the righteous and the holy, but in Mthatha last Friday, Jacob the son of God said to you, Jesus will return to fetch those clad in the black, green and gold.

'Nuff said. If you want to read more, go and read the rest of it on Tinyiko's blog.

Then there was this: Putin on Mount Athos pilgrimage:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has visited the monastic community of Mount Athos in Greece, one of Orthodox Christianity's holiest sites.

He was the first Russian leader to visit the male-only community, on a narrow, rocky peninsula east of Thessaloniki, Russian TV reported.

The trip was part of Mr Putin's two-day visit to Greece.

He has openly embraced the Orthodox faith, despite having served the atheist Soviet regime as a KGB officer.

Well, I suppose that makes him an apostate atheist, but at least he has gone to the source, unlike the days when the leader of the Russian Communist Party, anxious to acquire some of the magic pixie dust that fell from the church, which public opinion polls showed was more trusted by the people than politicians, decided to visit a church one day for a photo-op, and lit a candle with his cigarette lighter.

And then there is Barack Obama.

If Putin was a convert from atheism, Barack Obama, was a convert from agnosticism and, rather touchingly, seems as much concerned about his own family as about religion in the great affairs of state or the fortunes of his party. Barack Obama affirms his Christianity | The Guardian:

The US president told the national prayer breakfast in Washington that he prays for peace in the Middle East – and that he also asks for God's assistance with his 12-year-old daughter, Malia.

'Lord, give me patience as I watch Malia go to her first dance, where there will be boys. Lord, let her skirt get longer as she travels to that place,' Obama recounted.

Obama's speech today was laced with Biblical references in his most public affirmation of his faith. With many Americans under the illusion that he might be a covert Muslim, Obama explained: 'I came to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace him as my Lord and Saviour.'

Obama described his upbringing as 'not religious', his father as a non-believer and his mother 'grew up with a certain scepticism … she only took me to church at Easter and Christmas – sometimes'.

The response of one American (but typical of other responses) to this news was to say "The Koran permits lying if doing so benefits Islam."

We are urged to pray for rulers and civil authorities, so let us pray for all these leaders. But especially Barack Obama, because he is evidently president of a nation of lunatics.

Bad advisors, bad advice

US President Barack Obama based his election campaign on change, and one of the things he promised to change was the detention without trial system introduced by his predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama managed to create the impression that he would get rid of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within a year.

But not only is the Guantanamo Bay camp still there, but now Obama's advisors are urging him to make detention without trial a permanent feature of the US polity.

Hat-tip to Obama's liberty problem: A conservative blog for peace

Bill Quigley and Vince Warren: Obama's Liberty Problem:

Advisors in the Obama administration have floated the idea of creating a special new legal system to indefinitely detain people by Executive Order.

Why? To do something with the people wrongfully imprisoned in Guantanamo. Why not follow the law and try them? The government knows it will not be able to win prosecutions against them because they were tortured by the US.

Guantanamo is coming up on its ninth anniversary – a horrifying stain on the character of the US commitment to justice. President Obama knows well that Guantanamo is the most powerful recruitment tool for those challenging the US. Unfortunately, this proposal for indefinite detention will prolong the corrosive effects of the illegal and immoral detentions at Guantanamo rightly condemned world-wide.

Needless to say, this is thoroughly bad advice, and one can only hope that he will not take it, and also that he will sack these advisors and appoint others who have a better understanding of all those good things like freedom and democracy.

US President Barack Obama related to all US presidents but one

7th-Grader: Obama, Most US Presidents Related - Central Coast News Story - KSBW The Central Coast:

SALINAS, Calif. -- A seventh-grader and her 80-year-old grandfather are allegedly the first people to discover that President Barack Obama is related to all other U.S. presidents except one.

BridgeAnne d'Avignon, who attends Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, traced that Obama, and all other U.S. presidents except Martin Van Buren, are related to John 'Lackland' Plantagenet, a king of England and signer of the Magna Carta.

Hat-tip to Father Milovan.

Inauguration of US President Barack Obama

We watched the inauguration of US President Barack Obama on TV, and recorded it to watch again in 8 years time if I'm still around.

He made a good speech.

The orchestral music was significant in view of the theme of "change" - Simple gifts. The words were not sung, but for those who know them, they are perhaps significant:

'Tis the gift to be simple
'Tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
and when we find ourselves in the place just right
'Twill be in the valley of joy and delight.

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and bend we shan't be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Which perhaps signals the end of American hubris. I hope so!

And there seemed to be an atmosphere of hope, similar to the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela here in 1994. It just felt like a similar atmosphere.

Of course hopes can be disappointed, and people perhaps have impossible expectations, which can never be fulfilled. But it's a bit like a wedding, of which Fr Alexander Schmemann said the grace and hope can be lost, perhaps in a single night, but the potential is still there.

Bye Bye George -- we won't miss you

I suppose half the bloggers in the world will be writing about the departure of George Bush and the inauguration of Barack Obama as US president today, so why should I add my words to theirs when there have probably been far too many words already?

Yet if I'm still around in 8 years time, and if the world is still around in 8 years time, I'd like to look back on this day and see whether what I hoped and feared has come to pass.

I think probably most of the world will breathe a sigh of relief at the departure of George Bush.

There are plenty of other trigger-happy lunatic politicans in the world, willing to commit murder and mayhem for evil, trivial or even completely inexplicable reasons that one can only guess at. But none of them has the miliary weaponry and economic resources that George Bush had at his disposal. The USSR took on Afghanistan, and the result was that the Bolsheviks took a beating. George Bush invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, and the chickens are only now coming home to roost.

Bob Mugabe in Zimbabwe took a beating in the Congo, and is now taking it out on his own people. He doesn't have the resources to spread anything more than cholera to other countries, thank God. Ehud Olmert bombed Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza this month. Osama bin Laden seems to be reduced to sending enigmatic videos to TV stations every few months.

But we can breathe a sigh of relief. At least George Bush never got round to bombing Iran or Venezuela, as some feared that he might.

Barack Obama is still an unknown quantity.

He has sung the praises of the pudding, but let's see what the first spoonful tastes like. Let's see if he can turn his rhetoric into reality. His rhetoric is good. As some journalists have noted, at least he speaks in complete sentences with comprehensible syntax, though some journalists say they will miss George Bush for his more incomprehensible utterances. As Rehana Rossouw said in The Weekender (17-18 Jan 2009)

I'm going to miss him mostly because he's been a great source of comfort. For 10 years I've been able to take comfort when our political leaders stuff up by telling myself that there is someone in office worse than them.

And I must say I agree. When people knocked Thabo Mbeki and said he was such a bad president, I'd look at the leaders of other countries and realise how lucky we were. George Bush, Tony Blair, Ehud Olmert, Bob Mugabe, Vladimir Putin. Compared with them Thabo Mbeki looked positively angelic, and though he was no more able to restrain Robert Mugabe than George Bush was able to restrain Ehud Olmert he didn't conduct bloody wars against countries on the other side of the globe.

But though I took comfort from the th0ught that people like George Bush were so much worse than Thabo Mbeki, I also can't escape the thought that Barack Obama will be so much better. Even if he doesn't manage to make things better in the short term, unlike Bush, I don't think he will deliberately act to make them worse, by invading Iran, for example.

Whether the promised change we can believe in will materialise I don't know. But for the moment I'm willing to settle for no change for the worse. And much of the threat of that is leaving with George Bush.

But then Jacob Zuma is waiting in the wings.

Will the real socialists please stand up

During the recent US elections, there were all kinds of stories flying around the internet from Americans to the effect that Barack Obama was a "socialist", which made it clear that a lot of people simply don't have a clue about what "socialism" actually means.

Hat-tip to the Western Confucian for this piece from a real socialist explaining what it's all about.

Where Are All The Socialists? Here, There and Everywhere | CommonDreams.org:

Socialism shares one thing in common with religion; there are many denominations and sects and they all claim to hold some higher truth. I don't claim to hold a higher truth. I do have a perspective on socialism, and that is, of course, open to disagreement.

Not all socialists are Marxists or atheists. Norman Thomas, the leader of the party in the 1930s and '40s, was an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Socialists do not believe nationalization of an industry, government buying stocks in banks or the subsides to auto makers makes the country socialist.

Incredible change

More evidence that Barack Obama's "Change you can believe in" slogan rings hollow.

OpEdNews -- Conned Again:

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America's wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama's choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama's selection of Rahm Israel Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama's election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.

Rahm Israel Emanuel is a supporter of Bush's invasion of Iraq. Emanuel rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Israel Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, 'during the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.'

The hollowness of the slogan became apparent as soon as he had secured enough votes to win the Democratic Party nomination (see Notes from underground: Oh well, so much for peace and Notes from underground: Why Clinton Lost and why Obama won). Change didn't end with his election, it ended with his nomination.

Many people last week said Barack Obama's election gave them hope, but it's proving to be a very false hope indeed.

Support Obama's agenda

No doubt Barack Obama has a pretty long agenda for the next few months. Avaaz invites people to send him congratulations on being elected, and reminding him on the things that need to be at the top of that long agenda -- the things that can't wait.

Avaaz says:

After 8 long years of Bush - a fresh start. Let's seize this historic moment to send a flood of global messages to Obama.

Our message and the number of signers, as well as all our personal messages, will be displayed on a giant wall in the heart of Washington DC.

Over the next 48 hours, the wall could become a focal point for US media reporting on global reactions to the Obama win. A massive global response will help make this a major moment of unity and reconciliation between the US and the world. Let's get to a million!

So send your congratulations, and a message, along with thousands of others, by clicking and signing here.

Ain't that the truth!

Hat-tip to Notes from a commonplace book for this response from Pravda to Barack Obama's election as US president.

A change for the better - Pravda.Ru:

Only Satan would have been worse than the Bush regime. Therefore it could be argued that the new administration in the USA could never be worse than the one which divorced the hearts and minds of Americans from their brothers in the international community, which appalled the rest of the world with shock and awe tactics that included concentration camps, torture, mass murder and utter disrespect for international law. Yet in choosing Obama, the people of America have opted to come back into the international fold. Welcome back, friends!

Barack Obama is one man who has a mission and a dream. He will not change the world, as he claims and he might not even change the USA, in the near future at least. Powerful lobbies control the strings which control the puppets in Washington – indeed, it is not Washington that needs to be changed, but the invisible barons dictating its policies.

Politics and pessimism

So it looks as though Barack Obama is going to win the US Presidential election, and that the Democratic Party in the US will have a majority in the legislature as well.

No doubt his supporters will be elated.

For myself, I'm relieved, rather than happy.

I'm relieved that the nightmare of an unpredictable warmongering president of the US threatening to start World War III that has dominated the last eight years may be over.

I think there are many others who feel the same way.

There is widespread relief around the world that the Bush years are almost over.

But why not elation?

I suppose for me the reason is that history has shown that the Democratic Party in the US is no less inclined to war-mongering than the Republican Party. It's just slightly less lunatic and unpredictable about it.

Bush (father and son) may have bombed Baghdad, but I cannot forget that it was Clinton, a Democrat, who bombed Belgrade.

And it was his colleague Madeleine Albright who forced war on Yugoslavia with just as much manic determination as George Bush II forced it on Iraq, and it was she, who, when asked if the lives of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying for American hegemony in the Middle East, said "We think the price is worth it."

But in another respect, one can hope for better things. Under Bill Clinton's Demcratic Party the US at least had balanced budgets, while the Republican administration of George Bush spent like there was no tomorrow, and have left the mess for Barack Obama to pick up. Will eight years be enough to sort out the mess that George Bush left?

So I hope Barack Obama lives up to the hopes that have been placed in him. I think back to the time when Tony Blair was elected as Prime Minister of the UK, and the hopes he aroused. Like Obama, he was young and dynamic and was a new broom promising change. But in the end he was a disappointment, and turned out to be as much a warmonger as Bill Clinton and George Bush combined.

Of course young dynamic leaders are attractive, but age is not necessarily a barrier. In South Africa Nelson Mandela was the best President or Prime Minister the coutnry has ever had since the union was formed in 1910, and he was also, at the time he was elected, probably the oldest.

His successors seem determined to destroy his legacy by squabbling over the spoils of office in bitter personal rivalries and factions. It is sad to see the ANC destroying itself like that.

There's much talk about Mbhazima Shilowa and Terror Lekota forming a new party, which has been dubbed "Shikota" by journalists. But they somehow don't bring as much hope as Barack Obama. I wonder how much they are driven by principle, and how much by sour grapes. Shilowa at least had the vision of an integrated transport system for Gauteng, and the progress in building the new commuter train line between Johannesburg and Pretoria is a tribute to his vision and energy. So perhaps there is some hope there.

Well, I hope Barack Obama will live up to the hopes of his supporters. I hope he will not start any new wars, and that he will succeed in bringing an end to the ones started by his predecessors. But somehow I don't think history is on his side. Undoing the damage done by George Bush in the US and in the world may take a lot more than eight years, more likely eight generations.

See also Abstractions: Remember, remember, the 5th of November..., with some interesting links.

What will Caliban do next?

Zero Plus Zero Equals Zero - by Philip Giraldi:

If the next president is John McCain, one might well expect a continuation of the Bush Doctrine, with its disregard of world opinion and its emphasis on preemption and the use of the military to solve complex international problems. If it is Barack Obama, he will hopefully have a predilection to negotiate before bombing and a greater willingness to listen to the views of America's foreign allies. But on key issues such as the Middle East, where Obama is advised by neocon-lite Dennis Ross and other Clinton administration holdovers like Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, one can expect little change. There might even be a regrettable tendency to demonstrate an Obama administration's seriousness by picking a 'small crappy little country and throwing it against the wall' just to make a point, something that leading neocon Michael Ledeen has recommended (hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace.

The first decade of the 21st century has been marked by the Caliban versus Taliban wars. At least that is what it seems like, in the light of Robert Browning's poem, Caliban upon Setebos:

Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.

Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggle that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
and two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do; so He.

And Caliban seems to be an appropriate metaphor for the USA -- much strength, little intelligence, arbitrarily throwing some crappy little country against a wall like a crab, just to make a point, or even to make no point at all, as in the case of Iraq.

US election campaign rhetoric

As I've said elsewhere, the US presidential election campaign has reached the boring stage, in which mud-slinging has replaced rational debate on policies. But some people seem to find it more worrying than boring, especially when it comes to things like this

OPINION Blog | The Dallas Morning News:

It's increasingly worrying that John McCain and Sarah Palin are embracing the acceptability of campaign tactics that play to the most racist and intolerant tendencies among their supporters. John McCain knows that Barack Obama has no links whatsoever to terrorism, and yet he's doing everything he can to create that linkage. And he's unleashing Sarah Palin to do his dirty work while McCain claims to be above this condemnable form of negative campaigning.

Hat-tip to Scyldings in the Mead-Hall who says: "I’m sorry, but intentionally or not, it sounds far too much like the tactics of a certain rabble rousing housepainter from Munich." And tactics familiar to those of us in South Africa who lived through the National Party regime of Verwoerd, Vorster et al.

I haven't been following it all that closely. Much of the rhetoric flying around now does not come from the candidates but from their "campaigns", and their supporters engaging in juvenile tactics of misspelling names in laboured political puns.

If I've seen it once, I've seen it dozens of times, people claiming that Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a Muslim. That's about as convincing as saying that Sarah Palin is a Muslim because she's the governor of Al Aska.

I read newsgroup headings about the RePUGs and the GOP'ukes and the DemocRATs, and I think of all the benefits that the Internet had brought mankind -- that infantile insults like these can be transmitted around the world instead of being confined to late-night seedy bars.

So I take this kind of rhetoric with a pinch of salt.

I remember that at one time the Anglican Dean of Johannesburg, Gonville Aubie ffrench-Beytagh, was charged with terrorism and that one of the items on the charge sheet was that he had said that Brigadier "Rooi Rus" Swanepoel of the Security Police (a nototious torturer) should be shot. It was a casual throwaway remark that anyone could make, and to treat it seriously as evidence of a conspiracy to kill him seemed ridiculous.

The courts thought so too, and ffrench-Beytagh was acquitted.

And so I'm inclined to think that this kind of rhetoric by the US presidential "campaigns" is just silly season hype.

But then I remember that Robert Kennedy was murdered while campaigning. And Martin Luther King, though not a candidate, was murdered a few months before.

So perhaps it's more chilling than I thought.

McCain not "natural born" citizen after all

It seems that people have been querying the citizenship of both leading candidates for the US presidency -- Barack Obama's father was Kenyan, but he was born in the USA. John McCain, however, was not.

clipped from www.nytimes.com In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.” The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen. “It’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy,” Professor Chin said. “But this is the constitutional text that we have.”

Decimating moral values

Christian Conservatives Uniting Behind McCain - Swampland - TIME:

At a meeting Tuesday in Denver, about 100 conservative Christian leaders from around the country agreed to unite behind the candidacy of John McCain, a politician they have long distrusted, marking the latest in a string of movements that bode well for McCain's general election prospects among the Republican base.

'Collectively we feel that he will support and advance those moral values that we hold much greater than Obama, who in our view will decimate moral values,' said Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, a legal advocacy group, who previously supported Mike Huckabee's candidacy.

Hat-tip to Richard Catto for this one. Richard comments:

Hahahahahaha!!! Obama is going to DECIMATE moral values, is he? He’s going to kill every tenth one, or one in every ten, is he?

Really? Wow! Secretly, I am hoping it’s the 6th one (do not commit adultery).

And of course the same charge could be levelled against John McCain, and could already have been levelled against George Bush, who has already decimated moral values: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's oil.

I wonder if Mat Staver could be more specific about which one he thinks Barack Obama is intending to knock off, and what evidence that he has that John McCain will not do the same.

I Just Love Irony

Notes from a Common-place Book: I Just Love Irony:

Today I read where Dr. James Dobson took issue with Barack Obama, here. I particularly noted one quote:

'I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,' Dobson said, adding that Obama is 'dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.'

Maybe the word 'traditional' has a different meaning to Dr. Dobson. But of course, he should be an expert when it comes to 'confused theology.'

Like I say, I just love irony.

What more can one say?

Why Clinton Lost and why Obama won

The media have been going to town on Barack Obama's clinching of the US Democratic Party's nomination as presidential candidate.

The South African media, in their usual racist fashion, have concentrated on the superficialities -- the colour of Obama's skin. That says more about South African society than it does about the US presidential election -- it shows that nearly 15 years after the end of apartheid, we are still obsessed with race, to the exclusion of other considerations.

Very few have have mentioned what could be Obama's downfall -- his attitude satirised in the song:

The working class can kiss my arse
I've got the foreman's job at last

in his sudden back-tracking on peace by announcing that he wouldn't talk to Hamas, showing that the "change you can believe in" hype was just that - hype, and that underneath, once he had secured the nomination, he was reverting to the same old image of the warmongering USA, bully boy of the world.

But these pieces give a different view, which the mainstram media seem to have missed:

ZNet - Why Clinton Lost:

Yesterday, brought another effort: Newsweek's Jonathan Alter offers 'Five Reasons Obama Won. Five Reasons Clinton Lost.' Those latter five, which in places echo the Journal, boil down to 'No Respect for the Voters,' 'Poor Strategy,' 'Weak Management,' 'Arrogance,' and 'Entitlement.'

Both of these pieces offer smart insights about why Clinton lost, and it's hard to dispute the salience of any of these factors. But neither the Journal nor Alter give significant consideration to an additional factor that may have been more important than any other: Clinton's vote to go to war in Iraq.

Even before this latest batch of stories, the media's efforts to explain Clinton's struggles have consistently downplayed Iraq, as bloggers like The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias and Atrios have pointed out.

It's hard to remember now, but last year, when he was a dark-horse challenger, Obama's consistent opposition to the war, along with Clinton's vote for it, provided much of the rationale for his long-shot candidacy. Without that black-and-white contrast, it's doubtful whether his insurgent campaign could have gotten off the ground.

And Stephen Zunes, professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco says ZNet - Why Obama Won:

Barack Obama has won the race for the Democratic nomination for president against Hillary Clinton on the issues. Sort of.

This is not what the pundits will tell you, who would rather focus upon the most superficial and trivial aspects of the two final candidates' style, personality, associates, personal history, and campaign organization and strategy, not to mention race and gender.

This is not what many on the left will say either, in recognition of how little differences there were between the two candidates' stated positions on most policies.

Another difference between the two, which has nothing to do with sex or skin, is that Barack seems to be populist, while Hillary seems to be elitist. This point has been noted by several bloggers, like Tauratinzwe in Observations from the Sidelines: Yes, WE Can!:

The essential difference between Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton is found in their use of the first person pronoun.

Listen to Hillary and you hear the first person singular used over and over. 'I will . . . ' 'I have . . . ' I - I - I.

Listen to Obama and you hear the first person plural pronoun. 'We can . . . ' 'We are able . . . ' 'Yes we can!' 'Si, se puede!'

The second person plural pronoun is also used differently. Clinton says she will do things for you. Obama says he will enable you to do things.

Now I'm not a fundi on US politics, and as I've noted in my blogs, I sometimes find it difficult to understand American culture, but until Obama capitulated to the Israel lobby last week, I thought he might be the better of the two. I do have a stake in American politics -- after all, as a result of George Bush's warmongering and other policies we are paying a lot more for fuel and food. So it would be nice to be able to believe in change, and that makes Obama's backpedalling even more disappointing.

Oh well, so much for peace

If anyone thought the next US President might offer change you can believe in, they were obviously sucked in by a lot of empty rhetoric.

Hat-tip to Sam PF for this one.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Barack Obama has pledged unwavering support for Israel in his first foreign policy speech since declaring himself the Democratic nominee for president. He told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a prominent lobbying group, that Israel's security was "sacrosanct" and "non-negotiable". Mr Obama told Aipac real security came from lasting peace in the Middle East - and he would work from the start of his administration to achieve a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, but with Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel - a comment rejected by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Obama and Hillary Spin a 'Big Lie' About Iraq

Obama and Hillary Spin a 'Big Lie' About Iraq | War on Iraq | AlterNet: "On the campaign trail, the two candidates often speak of bringing the troops home and ending the war, and Democratic primary voters, 80 percent of whom want U.S. troops out of Iraq within 12 months, reward them with boisterous applause.

It's a Big Lie, and everyone who follows the debates over U.S. policy towards Iraq knows it, but refuses to call the candidates on it. Both Clinton and Obama (PDF) have been very clear -- in the fine print -- about the fact that they will leave a significant number of 'residual forces' in Iraq, albeit with a more limited mission than the Bush administration has pursued. They would protect U.S. infrastructure and personnel -- Obama says 'the U.S. embassy' -- train Iraqi forces and retain a rapid-response force to conduct 'limited counter-terrorism' missions."

Three cheers for Mike Huckabee

With all the hoo-ha about Barack Obama's former pastor's sermon (dredged up from five years ago, for crying in a bucket), one of the most sensible comments comes from rival US presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee on Wright: “I probably would, too.” � Monte Asbury’s Blog:

As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, “That’s a terrible statement,” I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I’m going to be probably the only conservative in America who’s going to say something like this, but I’m just telling you: We’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, “You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus.” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had … more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Breaking Down Obama's And Clinton's Support By Religion - Poll Tracker

Breaking Down Obama's And Clinton's Support By Religion - Poll Tracker:

Jewish Democratic voters tilt slightly to Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, leads him by a big margin over Catholic Democrats while Democrats who say they are Protestant divide about evenly, according to a Gallup poll conducted March 1-22. Among Jewish Democrats, Clinton leads Obama 48 percent to 43 percent with 8 percent expressing no opinion. The margin of error is 6 percent. (The New York Times recently did a piece on Obama's efforts to court the Jewish vote). Catholic Democrats favored Clinton 56 percent to 37 percent, with a 2 point margin of error, while Protestants favor Obama 47 percent to 44 percent, with a 2 point margin of error. Democrats with no religious preference favor Obama 54 percent to 40 percent.

They don't, however, say anything about the Orthodox, the Neopagans or the Muslims.

Hat-tip to Mainstream Baptist.