Author: Nancy LeTourneau

As if I wasn’t already shaking in my shoes at the possibilities that we’re going to escalate the killing in Iraq and that plans are in place to “nuke” Iran, then I have to deal with getting sick to my stomach by hearing that the New York Times is celebrating the The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat.

The article is written by Ryan Lizza and here’s a taste:

Nancy Pelosi’s carefully crafted introduction to the American people last week seemed to reinforce some stereotypes of the so-called mommy party. On the day she made history as the first woman to be elected speaker, she appeared on the House floor, surrounded by children and bedecked in pearls.

But even as this nurturing image dominated the news, the swearing-in ceremony on Thursday was notable for another milestone in gender politics: the return of the Alpha Male Democrat.

The members of this new faction, which helped the Democrats expand into majority status, stand out not for their ideology or racial background but for their carefully cultivated masculinity.

“As much as the policy positions is the background and character of these Democrats,” says John Lapp, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who helped recruit this new breed of candidate. “So we went to C.I.A. agents, F.B.I. agents, N.F.L. quarterbacks, sheriffs, Iraq war vets. These are red-blooded Americans who are tough.”

Mr. Lapp even coined a term to describe these manly — and they are all men — pols: “the Macho Dems.”

I don’t bring this up because I have any problems with the candidates they are talking about. The Testers and Webbs of the world might actually hold some promise for helping us get out of the hole we’re currently in. But it will NOT be their “Alpha Maleness” that saves the planet from its current course of destruction.  

As Lizzy points out, this “masculization” of the Dem party started three years ago:

The roots of the Macho Dem strategy can be found in the party’s 2004 losses when Democrats decided that their post-9/11 candidates needed to exude strength above all else.

“Presidential politics, but also the rest of national political leadership, has a lot to do with the understandable desire of voters for leadership, strength, clarity and sureness,” says Jim Jordan, John Kerry’s first presidential campaign manager. “Frankly, in the post-Vietnam era, Democrats have come up short by those measures too frequently.”

snip

And in the past, when Democrats believed their candidate was a true hero — well, just remember how the Republican Party was able to portray John Kerry. It could be a warning sign for Democrats: live by the Macho Dem creed, die by it.

Yeah, the militarization of John Kerry worked out real well for us, didn’t it? Does anyone else think that maybe the US public has had enough already with “machoness?” I know that I have. Hasn’t that been exactly the emphasis that has gotten us into the mess we’re in now? How about the possibility of defining the alternative? What would that alternative look like? And how would a dose of that make sense to you?

I’ll start with a portion of a poem by Marge Piercy titled “For Strong Women”

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make each other.

OK, I’m hopping mad and need to say so. I’ve never written a “rant diary” but feel the need to tonight.

What’s gotten my blood boiling? This article in the Washington Post. Its by Lois Romano and here’s the whole title: “Effect of Obama’s Candor Remains to Be Seen: Senator Admitted Trying Cocaine in a Memoir Written 11 Years Ago.

And here’s the opening paragraphs:

Long before the national media spotlight began to shine on every twist and turn of his life’s journey, Barack Obama had this to say about himself: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. . . . I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

The Democratic senator from Illinois and likely presidential candidate offered the confession in a memoir written 11 years ago, not long after he graduated from law school and well before he contemplated life on the national stage.

Then the article goes on to discuss whether this admission will be a political liability for Obama if he runs for president. What a load of crap!!

I read this book in 2004 after Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention and marvelled at his openess and honesty. His drug use happened in high school and college when he was struggling to put together an identity. It is a powerful and moving story. Here’s an example of what he wrote that’s quoted in the article:

“We were always playing on the white man’s court . . . by the white man’s rules,” he writes. “If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher . . . wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn’t. . . . The only thing you could choose was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage.

“And the final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors . . . they would have a name for that too. Paranoid. Militant.”

Now that’s putting the straight talk out there for everyone to see. Obama lives this kind of life, uses drugs temporarily during this time of confusion. But the story doesn’t end like it has for too many young black men in this counrty. He overcomes and goes on to contribute powerfully to his community and country. We should all be holding him up as a model and thanking him for his courage.

Instead, take a look at what the IDIOTS at Faux and Friends have to say. What a bunch of loosers.

Because of the kind of work I do, I know there are thousands of young black men in this country who need to hear Obama’s story. They need to hear the hope that he demonstrates to them. And the courage. These smearmongers better keep their hands off this one!!

ENOUGH ALREADY.

There are some interesting conversations around the nets about the Edwards campaign. I’d love to hear what folks here at the pond think about some of this, so let me summarize the line of thinking that has me most intrigued.

First of all, here’s something from Mickeleh’s Take:

Here’s the brilliant innovation of the Edwards campaign: he’s conducting an open, public, empirical test of his own leadership abilities. He’s giving us a demo. That’s a high wire act. No net.

The operational definition of a leader is someone with followers. So here’s Edwards saying, hey let’s get busy and start getting things done now instead of waiting until the election. If people get busy, Edwards is a leader. Kennedy famously challenged the country to, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” But that was in the inaugural address, not the campaign.

Edwards isn’t asking for the order on election day. He’s asking for it today. And the ask isn’t just, “send me money.” It’s take action on issues. If people respond, Edwards will have delivered an irrefutable demonstration of his leadership.

Then Nancy Scola at MyDD started an interesting discussion with her diary titled Nominee, Movement Leader or Both.

As we know, Edwards’ announced his candidacy from the site of a building project in the yard of Orelia Tyler’s house in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, the city still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Really, the last two years for Edwards have been an extended effort to show rather than tell what sort of leader he can be.

Edwards seems to want to set himself as the choice of the results-oriented, competence-driven voter. Perhaps once, an Ivy League-degree was the sort of thing that reassured voters that a candidate was on the ball. Then came George Bush, Yale ’68 and Harvard ’75. In making his announcement, Edwards focused on getting things done.

In the comment thread on that diary, Paul Rosenberg weighs in with this:

But Edwards, OTOH, simply strikes me as someone who realizes what it will take to govern effectively, which is an energized base to help counter the other pressures he will face.  There will be no time to organize such a base once he’s in office.  Clinton thought he didn’t need it, since he was going to cut deals that would be win-win for everyone.  He didn’t figure on folks who’d rather see everyone else lose.  And he came up with bupkis.

It just seems to me that Edwards knows better. Which shouldn’t really be that hard to figure out.

Just compare: Reagan was a B-movie actor with a movement behind him who sold arms for hostages to turn around and finance terrorists, and he had to publicly apologize for about a milisecond. Clinton was a flat-out genius with an endlessly network, but no movement at all, and he got impeached for a blowjob.

I think we should be turning this around: what’s any Democrat doing running for President who isn’t also trying to build a movement?  Because they’re damn sure going to need one once they get elected.

And Joe Trippi, again at MyDD, has an interesting take: Transformational Politics

All modern campaigns and transactional campaigns are built around a candidate who proclaims to the nation “Look at me — aren’t I amazing?”.  

The Dean campaign (and any transformational campaign successful or not) was built around a candidate who proclaimed “Look at you — aren’t you amazing?”

This strikes me as essential.  More than ideology, or any other factor — true transformational leadership can only come from a candidate who fundamentaly gets that it isn’t about him/her — its about us.

I agree that all of this is incredibly important for us right now. But I actually think its more simple than all of these folks are making it. I think what Edwards is doing is helping us learn all over again what DEMOCRACY is all about. Unless we engage and get involved, there is no such thing.

I’ll end with my favorite quote from the Edwards campaign:

We have to ask the American people to be patriotic about something other than war.  

A few weeks ago I had to take a day-long road trip alone. I’ve learned that time goes by faster if I listen to a book on cd, so I bought Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at a Time. It is the story of Greg Mortenson and his work in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I keep thinking about this story as we see Iraq deteriorate and none of the “talking class” propose anything that sounds remotely constructive. Call me simple-minded and naive, but I long for a conversation in this country about how we can begin to build-up rather than destruct as a way to reach our goals. I think Greg Mortenson has the right idea, so I’ll tell you a little about his story below the fold.
Greg was a nurse by profession and a mountain-climber by passion. He attempted to climb K2, but was unsuccessful. After several mishaps, he found himself alone on his descent and almost died. He was taken in by the people of Korphe, a small village in the Pakistani mountains, and nursed to health. Greg promised to repay the people of Korphe by coming back to build them a school. When he returned to the US, he sold all of his possessions and dedicated himself to raising the small amount of money he needed to build the school. Within a couple of years it was done.

The process eventually led Greg to start the Central Asia Institute, which has gone on to build over 55 schools and several women’s vocational centers and water projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan. His passion now is all about spreading education, especially for girls, as a way to build up the people of the region and combat terrorism. In the course of this work, he has been kidnapped by mullahs, held and questioned by the CIA, and had fatwas issued against him. But the goodwill of the people he has worked with has always been there to protect him.

One of the things Mortenson laments is that less that 1/3 of the money the US promised to Afghanistan for re-building has been spent there. I just can’t imagine the mind that fails to grasp why our efforts in that country have been such a complete failure.

Here’s a little excerpt from an article about Mortenson and his work from the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

The title of the book, “Three Cups of Tea,” refers to the way business is done in the tribal areas where the Taliban has sought refuge. The first cup of tea is to get acquainted, the second to make friends, and the third is to do business — over months or years.

It’s a contrast to the fast-paced American style of business through teleconferencing, e-mails and instant messaging.

As America struggles against terrorism, he said, it fails to understand the “Three Cups of Tea” style of negotiating, and the power of tribalism.

He scoffs at efforts to generate democracy overnight.

“We’re trying to plug in democracy,” Mortenson said. “You can’t do that. You can’t just tell people to vote. You have to put in education, and land ownership.”

“It takes two generations,” Mortenson said — and a whole lot of tea.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to propose a “Department of Tea Drinking” that will be devoted to talking, listening, building up and problem-solving. I know the reaction this would get from the DC crowd – “girly man” accusations would abound. But I continue to hope for the day we’ll be ready to try something that promotes life rather than death. And it might be that the “girly-types” have the answers we’ve all been waiting for!!

Has anyone taken a look at what the cabal of neocons are saying in Vanity Fair? They are taking on the Bush administration BIG time. Lets take a look at a few clips:

Richard Perle: “In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: ‘The president makes the decision.’ [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family.”

Nothing much new here to those of us that have been watching. But a pretty big dig at Bush about the “machinery of government” running “the decider.” And what’s this about Condi? Well, it gets worse.

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: “Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

Sounds about right, when the going gets bad – blame the women. But what’s this about them being the most powerful people in the White House? No one told the repugs that when they elected Bush, the women would run the place – what an outrage!! But of course, its only because they are “in love with the president.”

But what do they think about those “powerless” men in the administration?

Kenneth Adelman: “The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job…. Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don’t think that’s true at all. We’re losing in Iraq…. I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

Oops, Rumsfled fooled the neocons.

David Rose with Vanity Fair says there’s more to come in the January edition. But its interesting that these clips come out in the public sphere now. So, what do you all think is going on here? Looks pretty clear like its “jump ship” time.

I think we can all sense the tug that is tightening as we draw closer to the election next week. We want to hope again, but we’ve been dashed too often in the recent past, so the doubts and fears creep in. The question becomes, do we cling to our hope that we can win, or do we prepare ourselves to fight the battle of a stolen victory? It becomes agonizing after awhile.

My thoughts today are that our vision is way too small if we put all our hopes in the outcome of an election. I will vote next Tuesday and do everything I can to ensure that as many Democrats get elected as possible. But I’m working real hard to make sure that my hopes are not just pinned on winning. Because even if the Democrats sweep it all, the right wing noise machine will only gear up louder until things are horribly ugly. We’ll fight that battle when it happens, but too much is wrong with our country these days to think that an election will solve it all.

So, where’s the hope? This is a question that has been rolling around in my head alot this last week. I’ve been thinking about a speech I heard a few years ago by Cornell West. He pointed out that any sense of real hope gets crowded out of our culture by cynicism on one hand and superficiality on the other. I think that is the trap we find ourselves in. Because we are committed to questioning – especially authority – we on the left are often focused on how our leaders lead us astray and the cynicism grows. And those on the right depend on some kind of transcendent hope that they think comes from God, miracles or, in the worst case, the rapture. They wave their flags, sing their patriotic songs, ignore reality and hope that God/Bush will keep them safe. This is often what passes for hope in our culture.
I’ll give you a taste of a different approach to hope that came to me this week. I am the Executive Director of a non-profit organization working with kids in trouble. A few weeks ago, we asked some of these young people to draw a picture about their hopes. We chose one picture to have printed on t-shirts. I wish I could copy the image, but don’t have the technical skills to do so, so I’ll just have to describe it and let you draw the mental picture. It is a heart with one eye in it. Around the picture are these words:

See about love
See about peace
See about each other

As they say, out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom about the real meaning of hope.

So today I think about a hope that is grounded in what our eyes can see and our hearts can feel. It is grounded in the very essence of me; what I believe about myself, and therefore what I can see in others. Rather than the superficial hope of the right, my hope embraces the rage, the struggle, the beauty and the love that is part of life. Its the same hope that Madman pointed us to in his diary Dia De Los Muertos. It is about the hope of those in the past that continued to believe even when everything pointed to despair.

I know very little about Buddhism, but recently I’ve been struck by the idea that, just as courage cannot exist without fear, hope cannot exist without despair. When we are surrounded by that despair, our hope is made real.

I think that one of the things we can do for each other, both here on the blogs and in our real life, is to demonstrate our hope and bring it to life. You see, I think hope is contagous. Lets spread some around.  

With little notice last January, our Congress passed a budget reconciliation bill that included more tax cuts for the rich and deep cuts to things like health care, education and child support enforcement.

You may be wondering why I’m writing about all that now. With even less notice, part of those cuts were in a special medicaid program, but interesting enough, the federal departments that implement medicaid have not yet communicated what those cuts mean to state and local communities.

I don’t know much about how these funds are used in other states, but here locally we use a portion of medicaid funds called Child Welfare: Targeted Case Management to fund Child Protection services and other things that assist urban children who are so often “left behind” in their struggles.
Our local governments have been trying to get answers to their questions of what these cuts mean and how they will be implemented for months now – to no avail. The reason this is so important is that it will have a devastating impact here. Our Twin Cities area stands to loose about $30 million that is used to protect children.

On a more personal note, I work for an agency that uses these funds to provide long term intervention for children who, prior to age 10, have already developed serious deliquency histories. These kids come from families where 90% of parents have a criminal history, 80% have histories with child protection, domestic assault and mental health/chemical dependency. All of them are living below poverty levels and have done so for generations. We have been working with about 70 families in this situation now for about 6 years. And yesterday we got the most recent report from the researchers looking at the effectiveness of our effots. To summarize, using a statistical analysis called Cox regression, they were able to show that 31% of the children in the program are likely to have been charged with one or more criminal offenses between the ages of 10 and 13. The comparison is that 83% of the control group is likely to have been charged with one or more offenses during that same age span. These are amazing results that will not only affect this group of 70 kids, but the whole community. This is because we are talking about working with the 7% of young people who research has been shown commit 80% of juvenile crime and cost our communities more than $2 million each in incarcerations costs over their lifetime.

What I learned this week about all of this just made me sick, but has the ring of truth. Local officials who are working hard on all of this say that the federal departments are not likely to announce what the cuts mean and their plan for implementation until after the election. Do people who vote really care what happens to abused children these days? Maybe yes and maybe no. But we’ll have to wait until the end of November to find out what’s happening just in case. The outcome of the election will not affect all of this, the deed has been done. But I wanted to go on record about this. Unless this is stopped, years from now we’ll be hearing more about kids hurt and killed because child protection didn’t intervene. And our rates of juvenile crime will go up. The end of November will be the day all of this started. Don’t forget it!!

Another book is on the way. This one by Karen DeYoung from the Washington Post to be released October 10th titled “Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell.”

The Washington Post has a long excerpt today. It describes in detail the lead-up to Powell’s speech to the UN prior to the invasion of Iraq. But I find the first few paragraphs to be the most revealing.

ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2004, eight days after the president he served was elected to a second term, Secretary of State Colin Powell received a telephone call from the White House at his State Department office. The caller was not President Bush but Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and he got right to the point.

“The president would like to make a change,” Card said, using a time-honored formulation that avoided the words “resign” or “fire.” He noted briskly that there had been some discussion of having Powell remain until after Iraqi elections scheduled for the end of January, but that the president had decided to take care of all Cabinet changes sooner rather than later. Bush wanted Powell’s resignation letter dated two days hence, on Friday, November 12, Card said, although the White House expected him to stay at the State Department until his successor was confirmed by the Senate….

The president himself made no contact with Powell after Card’s call. For two days, the only person at the State Department Powell told about it was his deputy and friend of decades, Richard Armitage. Powell dropped off his resignation letter, as instructed, after typing it himself on his home computer. (The White House later pointed out a typo and sent it back to be redone.) Loath to reveal either surprise or insult, he used the letter to claim the decision to leave as his own.

So we add to the news coming from Woodward’s book about the Bush Team’s denial and incompetence that they fired the one person who might have had an ounce of integrity left (I know he had squandered most of his integrity at the UN that day – but compared to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, he’s a paragon of virtue).

Folks are talking – that seems obvious. Wonder what’s prompting all of this? My guess would be a real fear that the nutjobs need to be stopped from the colossal mistake that an attack on Iran would be.

What I have to say is certainly NOT breaking news, as a matter of fact its not news at all. I could understand if its not viewed as important for anyone but me.

But as we have all been struggling with the state of our society and world for so long now, I begin to wonder what I’m doing, if its enough and if we’ll ever be successful in turning things around.
I go back and forth with where to best put my efforts. But nothing I can imagine doing, especially alone, seems to have even a small chance of making a difference.

That’s why last week, when several people in my small world reached out to me to talk about their lives and struggles, and I listened, I felt more powerful and hopeful than I have in a long time. As they say, its often the little things.

Then there was the fact that I saw the following poem twice in two days during the same week. Seems the universe had a lesson for me, and I had some things to learn.

To laugh often and much,
To win the respect of intelligent people
And the affection of children,
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
And endure the betrayal of false friends,
To appreciate beauty,
To find the best in others,
To leave the world a bit better,
Whether by a healthy child,
A garden patch
Or a redeemed social situation,
To know even one life has breathed easier
Because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m going to take some time to not only count my blessings, but my “successes” as well. And then I’ll carry on.

I thought some of you might be interested in knowing that Scribe (seated), Anomalous (not pictured), and I (standing right) met today with Kelly McCullough and his lovely wife Laura (standing left and center) for brunch and the first Twin Cities book-signing for Kelly’s recent publication of WebMage.
We had a lovely time getting to know each other a bit. We also got to hear the hilarious story about Scribe’s rebuff of a gentleman who tried to “evangelize” her as she was waiting for a ride this morning. I hope this man survived the “power of the scribe,” but I do know that he’ll think twice about his approach next time!!

After brunch, we all headed over to the bookstore where Kelly joined his fellow writers Tate Hallaway and Naomi Kritzer to sign and sell books (hope you sold a TON Kelly).

I know that for me, these connections are worth their weight in gold as we continue to develop the strands in the web that sustains us during these difficult times.

So, do yourself a favor, click on the Powells.com link here at BooTrib and buy a copy of WebMage. What you’ll get for the price of a fast food meal:

1. A fun read
2. Send Kelly some mojo
3. Support Booman Tribune

I don’t think we need a poll for that one. Just do it!!