Month: June 2008

Commentator and author Eric Alterman discusses whether Barack Obama is a progressive realist or a conservative with The Real News analyst Pepe Escobar.

ALTERMAN: If you want to lose. I have so little patience for the romanticism of left-wing romanticism with defeat. I want to win. I want to do the world some good. Let the other side blame themselves for being impure. Politics is about compromise. If you don’t want to compromise, you don’t want to do what’s necessary to get power, do something else.

ESCOBAR: So what you’re saying is that Barack at the moment is holding his cards very close to his chest. Is it?

ALTERMAN: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: Yeah. That’s it.

ALTERMAN: Well, yeah. I mean, you know, if Barack Obama is saying, “I’m a person of good values and good judgment who is broadly progressive, and I can win.” That’s a pretty good deal. Look what this country’s been doing for eight years. Look at what this country’s been doing since the election of Jimmy Carter, who didn’t work out very well. He’s the most progressive—he’s certainly running the most progressive campaign since Jimmy Carter, you know, as a Democrat nominee. And I think he’ll be the most effective president, if he wins, since Franklyn [sic] Roosevelt. So if he’s got to say a few things that I wish he didn’t feel he had to say, first of all he’s smarter than I am. He knows what he has to do and what [inaudible] better than I can figure it out. But I’m just so sick of saying, you know, “We’re pure and they won.” You know?

ESCOBAR: Yeah, sure.

Let’s see. In just the past week, among the “few things” Obama’s said was that the FISA bill with telecom immunity was more or less OK by him, that he thought Gen. Wesley Clark was wrong when he said that Sen. John McCain’s war record didn’t automatically qualify him for the White House, and that he might just keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on in his own cabinet.

I was a little excited over the weekend because I’d gotten an email Thursday from a reporter at The New York Times about a little something I’d done back at the end of February.

Tired of the implication that Barack Obama’s middle name of Hussein was somehow a bad thing, I posted a short Spartacus-inspired video on YouTube in which I stated by name was Darrel Hussein Plant, then linked it here, to an iamhussein blog I set up, and at Daily Kos.

Apparently, while I was doing that, a number of other folks had come up with the same idea and after I posted mine I saw a couple of others, which I acknowledged.

And then I more or less forgot about it until Thursday, when one of the Times’ political reporters — Jodi Kantor — wrote me a note saying she was doing a piece on Obama supporters who were using Hussein as a middle name. I called her back, answered questions to the best of my recollection, and actually went back to look at what had sparked it for me (which she recounted, although I don’t know if I was the only source for it) buuuuuut she didn’t use my name.

Interestingly, however, I did find out that someone just set up iamhussein.com today (according to the whois record), and apparently they put my Daily Kos posting on the front page along with the Times article.

The late George Carlin on the first Gulf War, discusses how American foreign policy is often described in the sexual terminology of thirteen-year-olds with terms like “pulling out” and “going all the way.” He ends with the admonition:

If you want to know what happened in the Persian Gulf, just remember the names of the two “men” who were running that war: Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.