Random Thoughts
From the Georgia Bureau
by Dwayne Hood

Don’t you just love right wing conservatives?

They never miss a chance to wrap themselves in an American flag, stand on a tall pedestal, puff out their chests proudly and belt out Lee Greenwood’s patriotic anthem “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free…….”.

These are the “real Americans” who insist that Christianity and democracy are under attack. They are the self professed culture warriors who tout their holiness, patriotism and family values while stoking populist rage against anyone who disagrees. Their “us versus them,” “my way or the highway” mentality has alienated Republicans from a majority of our electorate.

In response, hard core conservatives, led by Fox News, are posturing in self righteous fervor, cementing the GOP’s new identity as The Party of No.

This demagoguery was on display last week as “tea parties” of protests were held nationwide on April 15, tax day. People have every right and reason to be upset by the implosion of our economy and staggering bailouts to the financial and automotive industries. But the protests were nothing but Barack Obama hate-fests fueled by flat-earth moralists and screaming Fox News correspondents.

The tea tantrums illustrate how marginalized Republicans have become. They are the party of angry, white, middle class, rural evangelicals primarily from the South. They love guns, hate gays and moral outrage seems to be their only emotion.

In the past 100 days, Obama has spearheaded a $783 billion stimulus package that addresses energy, education and health-care while rebuilding our national infrastructure. These are issues that both political parties have ignored for the past 50 years. Obama has also renewed and welcomed diplomatic relations with a host of nations alienated by the past administration. But in lockstep rejection, Republicans have opposed every action the president has taken while offering no alternative plans.

But the tired old Republican mantra of low taxes and less government now falls on discouraged voters. People are realizing that complex derivatives and credit default swaps that spurred our economic collapse were allowed by deregulation of the Bush administration. History will prove that this economic collapse was preventable and it happened on “the Decider’s” watch.

There is a purpose and role for effective government. Yes, Obama’s $3.2 trillion budget contains too much spending. But he is trying to keep our economy from descending into a depression. Meanwhile, Republicans act like arsonists who set a house ablaze and then throw rocks at people who try to put out the fire.

Our credit markets are locked up, homes foreclosed, bankruptcies declared, retirement plans ravaged, millions unemployed, banks closed, a drug war on our borders, 15 percent of our population without health-care and a third of our teenagers drop out of high school, half in the cities. But conservatives say what’s really important is that Obama bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. He bowed! And he shook hands with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela! Obama’s a fascist! He’s a socialist!

Conservatives and their well paid puppeteers at Fox News are masters at majoring in minor affairs. They offer nothing but hatred, intolerance and self righteous indignation. People are now scared, angry and confused as they look for a strong government.

Obama responded to the tea tantrums last week by releasing memos confirming years of reports of torture by US interrogators against Al Quaeda suspects. We used stress positions on prisoners tried by the Gestapo in World War II and we executed Japanese officers who ordered waterboarding, or simulated drowning, on our prisoners. And we are the Big Brother nation, the world’s policeman that lectures other countries on human rights.

We torture people and 108 prisoners have reportedly died in our custody since the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan. Where is the Christian outrage? The tea partiers don’t care because they buy former Vice President Dick Cheney’s argument that the only way to keep our nation safe is to torture. The evangelicals and conservatives ignore the inconvenient truth that torture is morally wrong and results in wild, inaccurate information. They also forget that we won the Second World War without torturing prisoners. We also tried and condemned war criminals in trials open to the world.

How many terrorism suspects have we prosecuted or convicted? If they really are the “worst of the worst” at Guantanamo, why can’t any of them be tried for their crimes? At one time Camp Gitmo had more than 500 prisoners. Now there are only 250. What happened to the rest of the detainees? They were quietly repatriated to their home countries because they were not terrorists. In fact, many of them were never captured by our military. They were purchased from Afghan and Iraqi warlords for $5,000 each.

Our nation now stands at a psychological crossroads. And we have a new president who challenges us to follow human decency embraced by the civilized world. From torture to tea tantrums, Americans must look past the Fox News screamers to give Obama a chance to restore our national conscience and clear away political and moral wreckage of the past eight years.

Georgia Dome
by Dwayne Hood

ATLANTA, Ga. — The fat lady has sung.

The confetti has been swept from the floor, inauguration plans are made, and America is closing a chapter on one of the worst presidencies in our history.

Political honeymoons are nice but inevitably short lived. In the coming year, Americans will awake to the sad fact that Barack Obama is just another man, like all of the other men that we’ve elected to our nation’s highest office. He is not a messiah who can walk on water, feed the masses, or resurrect our economy from eight years of deregulated greed.

But Obama is refreshingly intelligent and has surrounded himself with brilliant, experienced people with differing views. He has assembled an impressive cabinet in a short period of time. And sadly enough, they will be called into service before January 20th because our present government is dysfunctional.

The remnants of the Bush administration are quietly stepping aside as the nation and the world waits to see how this new president and the Democrat-controlled Congress will confront two wars and the worst economic crisis since our Great Depression.

Here are a few predictions of what will and will not happen during the next four years.

The Democrats will not rub the Republicans’ noses in their loss as the GOP did to Democrats in 1995. The Obama administration will govern to the center and work for compromise with Republicans. And some Republicans will reach back across the aisle because they don’t want to be found on the wrong side of history. An age of continual gridlock will slowly thaw into reason and moderation.

The economic crisis will get worse in the coming years and the Obama administration’s mission will be damage control in preventing a deep, painful recession from imploding into a full-blown depression. There will be further job cuts, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and tax payer-funded bailouts. But we will eventually bottom out and slowly rebuild ourselves into a smaller but stronger economy able to weather 21st-century global challenges.

Obama will call upon Americans to sacrifice. That is a concept unknown to a majority of people. Our president’s response to a national crisis will no longer be a call to go shopping. It will be to work more, spend less, and do without.

The legacy of the Obama administration will probably be a Marshall-type plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and become energy independent. They will also address the dangers of global warming. There will be a bridge loan to the Big Three automakers with many strings and conditions attached. But it still may not be able to save all three. The Big Three may become the Big Two, but a segment of our manufacturing base will survive. And our remaining automakers and suppliers may eventually be merged into international auto conglomerates led from abroad.

The heyday of the American union is also over. The power of organized labor will surrender to the realities of globalization. There will still be unions but their power to control entire industries has ended.

And sadly, Joe “the gaffe machine” Biden is probably right. Obama will face an international challenge within his first year in office. We may even suffer another terrorist attack on our shores. But this new president will meet the challenge without landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier.

The war in Iraq will dramatically downsize into a troubled occupation. Most of our troops will be withdrawn in the coming four years. This will happen for several reasons. We do not have the billions of dollars necessary to keep 150,000 troops there for another four years. Al-Qaeda is also reconstituting itself into a force threatening enough to redeploy more forces into Afghanistan. And the Iraqi government is calling for our withdrawal.

As our troops withdraw, there will be widespread violence but it will be no worse than what we have seen in the past five years. The Iraqis will survive but their government will not be a democracy. The ultimate winners of our unnecessary invasion will be Iran which will coerce and control an Iraqi government amenable to their demands.

The United States will regain the moral standing among nations that was squandered during the past eight years. We will stop torturing prisoners and will shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Other constitutional violations such as illegal wiretaps, secret prisons, and politicization of the Justice Department will end. But many abuses of the past administration will go largely unpunished because of presidential pardons.

Some campaign promises will also fade to the harsh realities of an economic collapse. The health care and education issues in America will worsen because money and political willpower will be focused elsewhere. We can only put out so many forest fires at the same time. Priorities will be made and health care and education will languish.

Attention on illegal immigration and gay marriage will also decline. The collapse of our markets is already creating a silent, undocumented society of unemployed workers. The influx of new aliens will lessen as job markets dry up. And gay unions will continue as society debates the semantics on what to call it. Political fervor will die only to be kick-started by the GOP as a tired campaign issue in four years. But ultimately, gay marriage will recede from public view much like gays in the military, gays on television, and gays in the workplace, etc.

One of the overreaching victories of an Obama administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress will be future appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. The judicial pendulum will thankfully swing back to the center with at least two new appointments. That will rescue our court and our civil liberties from a possible Joe McCarthy-type conservatism.

The Republican Party will also reinvent itself into a kinder, gentler, and much smarter alternative to the Democratic Party. The GOP now stands at a serious crossroads. The Sarah Palin social fundamentalists want to pull the party farther to the right into a modern day puritanism. Nothing could make the party more irrelevant.

But new leaders such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford will lead the party back to the center. They will succeed because evangelicals will stop trying to vote their way into heaven and will trade their rigid ideology for moderates who can govern. The future GOP will have to open itself to different demographics in order to survive.

The Civil Rights Movement will also evolve away from grievance politics and white guilt to focus on paralyzing conditions African Americans inflict upon themselves. New spokespeople will promote jobs, education, marriage, health care, child care, and community activism. While discrimination will still exist and be decried, new leaders will call for less protest and more personal accountability.

The social and governmental torch is being passed to a new generation of Americans in both political parties. The culture wars of the past 40 years are being set aside to confront the most serious challenges of our lifetime. American history teaches us that great leaders are not born or simply elected into greatness. They are created by the trials and times in which they serve.

We now stand at the threshold of those times and trials. The next four years will determine who answers the call to our national destiny.

Dwayne Hood is a former newspaper reporter from Alabama who now spends most of his time in more academic pursuits, although he writes this weekly column exclusively for The Locust Fork News-Journal.