Over the years Amy Goodman and Democracy Now have been an important voice for liberal-progressive views, reporting on stories often not covered by mainstream media, opening up the can of worms left collecting dust on the information highway’s shelves. But there’s a difference between putting the spotlight on an issue from a liberal perspective and trying to put words in an interviewee’s mouth. During this current presidential campaign, Goodman has been doing that with recurring consistency. 

She did everything short of waterboarding to get Kevin Alexander Gray to paint Hillary and Bill Clinton as evil personified. Mr. Gray, introduced as “a civil rights activist and community organizer in Columbia, South Carolina” and editor of “the book Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence and … author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics” wasn’t having any part of painting Hillary and Bill Clinton in Amy’s own personal view. Unlike Donald Trump he really does “… know words … have the best words” and can articulate them without Amy’s over the top prompting.

At Goodman’s soliciting: “According to ThinkProgress, ‘More than 33,000 people in South Carolina are behind bars, and 62 percent of the prison population is black. Most of those people are not eligible to vote. In 2012, the [South Carolina Legislature] took voting rights away from state residents on parole and today, more than 48,000 South Carolina residents in prison, on parole, and on probation are disenfranchised by felony or misdemeanor convictions. African Americans [make] up 64 percent of South Carolina’s disfranchised population, even though they comprise only 27 percent of the state’s voting age population. One out of"—

At this point Alexander Gray interrupted with: “Let me say this, Amy. Let me say this, Amy. First of all, that’s a problem in and of itself, that the discussion on black politics starts talking about criminal justice issues and prisons. Black voters want the same thing that white voters want. They want to be able to pay their house payments, to pay their mortgages, to pay their rent, to pay their utility bills, to pay their taxes, to educate their kids. And when you think that the whole foundation of black politics is just about talking about criminal justice and crime, well, that’s playing a stereotype in and of itself. And while there are a lot of black people in jail in South Carolina disproportionately and we understand the effects of structural racism, we still have a million, close to a million, eligible black voters in South Carolina and probably close to 600,000 to 700,000 registered voters. And when you look at the results from 2008 to 2012 and the number of people that didn’t vote, that are registered to vote, that says something about the Democratic Party. That says something about someone telling them that they are waging a revolution, and it’s not a revolution.”

“If you want to talk about building and building a progressive movement, build a progressive movement, but do not come into South Carolina or anywhere, where basically you’ve got the same kind of campaign that Hillary Clinton got. You’ve got white men on the top running it, and you come into the state, and all your surrogates are men. You have a program in Greenville, South Carolina, with Danny Glover, and everybody on the program is a man. And those kinds of things matter. But to start out just talking about crime, just talking about police and using Black Lives Matter talking points, well, the black community, I believe, is more sophisticated than that. And if you’re running a progressive campaign, you ought to have sense enough to know that you have to talk to people and tease out the issues a whole lot better than you did.” 

<http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/29/did_bernie_sanders_run_a_white >

TELL IT!

The myopic “best words” I’ve witnessed by the current wave of Bernie supporters—being smarter (by their typical arrogant condescension to assumed short-sighted denizens of the hood in need of schooling—all follow the same scripted rhetoric: the 1996 Crime Bill, the Clinton’s money, and Hill’s interventionist appetite as illustrated by her support of the Libya-Arab Spring intervention. Reasons apparently justifying words like vile and evil to characterize Clinton’s moral depravity. Buzz words to stir and steer the supposed under-intelligent to the Bern-ing Bush for the way home.

How do we go from a piece of legislature (Crime Bill) to an alluded to premeditative genocide of African American men? How psychic is that to retroactively time travel and slip quietly into Hillary’s mind and view her diabolical plan to exterminate Africa American males, connecting mind-read intent with the term “predator” an such. 

I grew up in D.C. After Nam’s killing fields, I lived in the hood and got stopped on numerous occasions by black and white cops, ‘cause it was night, someone got robbed and there I was on my way home. I don’t think Hill personally wished that kind of presumed bias on my ilk when the Crime Bill was being debated. I’ve witnessed and participated in conversations with family and friends on the need for more policing and sharper penalties for criminals. To many of us, back in the day, “three strikes” would have sounded good, even as we “hood rats” simultaneously complained vociferously about the “man cramping our style” and being profiled. The Crime Bill’s unfair implementation was not known or psychically grokked. Hindsight is everything, huh?

The Clinton’s have always been centrists. If you believe that is criminal, no point in my pointing out the merits of that view. I get it. But stop shrinking down your reasons for feeling the Bern on such disjunctive cause and effect conclusions. Using “those of the same stripe” arguments: rich/poor, pacifist/hawk without context (supposition of motive, being the psychic fly on the wall) is myopic. Psychic myopia should not equate with a vote for either candidate.

One thing I can say with definite conviction is that electing the first woman president of the United States will be historic. If it is Hillary, regardless of how her polity will be viewed in the eyes of the beholder, it will be beneficial to women and society at large, and a sea change occurrence toward ending the long dominion of the patriarchy. The imbalance of which is responsible for the ills suffered by humankind and played out daily in this country and around the world.

The time is now, not later.

Carl Hitchens