Desperation

The desperation of a long time campaigner. Hillary Clinton must be getting desperate indeed to try to pin Obama with plagiarism. Because a phrase or two of Obama’s were identical to those of one of his close political friends (who he consults with all the time) they want to accuse him of plagiarism. Unfortunately this will be seen by virtually everyone as an act of political desperation. It will be much ado about nothing. But the fact that they would even attempt it shows just how shaky the Clinton campaign really is. Similarly, they are trying to label him as a flip-flopper on campaign financing by distorting what he has said in the past about it. This, too, is too transparent to work. You can see in this, however, that they have their minions working overtime trying to find something, anything, that will slow down the Obama momentum. Now the polls show Obama ahead in Wisconsin and Texas a dead heat. If this turns out this way Clinton might as well pack up and go back to New York. She may want to stay and fight to win by enlisting the superdelegates but it appears to me that some senior members of the Democratic party have already decided that is not going to happen.

Bush the Dumb has now announced that the “war” in Iraq, costing billions a month, has nothing to do with the U.S. economy. I guess you might find somewhere in history a claim more ridiculous than that but I don’t know where it would be. This is a claim even more absurd than Giuliani’s famous claim that there is no relationship, none at all, between American foreign policy and what is transpiring in the Middle East. Where does the Brafia even find these people, let alone tolerate and support them?

It appears that the powerful Israeli lobby probably made a mistake by jumping on the Clinton bandwagon too soon. They did not regard Obama as being sufficiently friendly to Israel, misjudged how the campaign would play out, and now are finding it a bit too late to switch their allegiance. Remember, Obama was raised at least in part in a Muslim environment, and he has also said in the past that the Palestinians are among the most downtrodden people on earth (or words to that effect). Does that mean we might have some hope that finally, at long last, we may have a President who does not cave in to every Israeli desire, and might in fact actually do something to help the Palestinian cause? Someone who might curb Israeli’s ongoing racist colonialism? I sincerely hope so, but of course it remains to be seen. Look for more false claims that he is a Muslim and worse. Obviously we cannot know for certain what Obama will do if he attains the Presidency. But in my case the will to believe in him is so strong I don’t care what they try to paint him as, he’s by far our best hope for meaningful change.

As a brief respite today from the gloom and doom of the current world situation I watched an ant. In the bathroom. It was fascinating, especially as my mind began to run away in a whirlwind of fantasy. This time of year, when it is cold and dry and icy, ants sometimes try to come into our house. We spray them and they give up for a time, but then they try again. I guess they want both water and food. Anyway, this ant was a loner. It was in the middle of our bathroom floor. It is a good sized room with an all tile floor. This lone ant must have been, in ant miles, a good hundred miles, maybe much more, from any other ant and certainly from any ant colony. To the ant the floor must have resembled a gigantic almost endless desert. There is nothing but tile, one after another, separated by caulking. The ant wandered here and there, in and out of the valleys of caulk, seemingly lost, or at least not doing anything purposeful that I could see. But that is what was so fascinating. Why was it there? How did it get there? Did it have a purpose? Was it merely lost? Perhaps it was a spy, sent out to find another ant colony that his compatriots could attack? Maybe it was a messenger, looking desperately for a general, like in “A Message for Garcia?” I thought maybe it was a scout, sent out to locate some food and water. Perhaps it was an outcast, having violated some ant law and been banished to wander forever on bathroom floors, something like the Flying Dutchman? Then it could have been a romantic ant looking for love, or even for a lost love. It trudged on doggedly over seemingly endless terrain. Finally it began climbing the waste basket, a task for it roughly one hundred times more difficult than Tensing conquering Everest. Poor little ant tyke. I wished it well as it disappeared into a miasma of used tissues and assorted bric-a-brac. I am an incurable romantic.

LKBIQ:
“Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.”
George Bernard Shaw