I'd Like To Try Your Wu Tang Style

Robert Ludlum is DEAD people! Get over it! No more Jason Bourne books!

I’m sure many of you have seen by now the video of President Obama killing a fly in mid-air with his hands. As if it weren’t enough of an accomplishment to be the first black President, we now discover he is also the first ninja warrior elected to the office.

How about those Iranian elections, huh? And we thought political theater was a uniquely American phenomenon.

Last Friday, Iranians went to the polls to either elect and new president, or re-elect the old one. Merely hours after the polls closed, in an election featuring record high voter turnout (around 80%), in a country without electronic voting, where all the ballots must be counted by hand and with less than 20% of the vote counted, government officials declared current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner, two votes to one. According to officials, despite the miserable performance (or lack thereof) of the Iranian economy over the past four years, Ahmadinejad won re-election by a greater margin than when he first took power in 2005, and each of his challengers - all of who performed very well in 2005, lost even their home districts by the same two-to-one margin. That would be the U.S. equivalent of John McCain losing Phoenix, or Barack Obama losing Chicago. Seriously. Even McGovern won his home state. Supporters of the current regime point to an opinion poll taken three weeks ago showing Ahmadinejad with a two-to-one lead over his opposition. But wiser people than they are quick to point out that Iranian election campaigns only run four to five weeks, and much changed during the final 10 days of the campaign. The referenced poll is the U.S. equivalent of polling the electorate on January 1st, 2008 and declaring Rudy Giuliani the winner over Hillary Clinton. Rule number one of rigging elections, at least try to make it believable. To paraphrase my lovely wife, they’re making a mockery of sham elections.

It is entirely possible - if not probable - that Ahmadinejad won re-election. No one is disputing that. It is manner in which the supposed victory was accomplished that has lit the firestorm of doubt inside Iran and around the world. Ignoring threats of violence against them, supporters of the primary challenger Mir Hossein Moussavi poured into the streets of Tehran on Monday by the tens-(possibly hundreds)-of-thousands to protest the election results in a scene described by many reporters as the largest demonstration seen in Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In response, government officials shot themselves in the foot by organizing a counter-protest of Ahmadinejad supporters on Tuesday while banning all foreign journalists from covering any protests. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei retreated from his endorsement of Ahmadinejad on Saturday to order the Guardian Council to perform a recount of a number of districts in order to affirm or dismiss claims of voting irregularities. But that isn’t good enough for Moussavi and his supporters. They want an entirely new election. Whether or not they get one remains to be seen. It’s highly unlikely given the nature of the Iranian political system. But we’ve seen a lot of highly unlikely things in Iran over the past five days.

As a side note, smart move by the President to largely keep out of what is at this point an internal Iranian affair. He seems to understand something his critics just can’t seem to fathom, a perspective he no-doubt gained through his international background. The primary complaint of foreign nations against the United States is not our wealth, our cultural excess or our trade policy. It is the nasty habit we have of constantly sticking our noses in other country’s business. An unequivocal presidential statement of support for Iranian reformers, as called for by GOP Senator John McCain and Congressman Mike Pence have demanded Obama make, instantly delegitimize the reformers in the eyes of Iranian citizens as pawns of Western governments, and any progress they might have made is null and void. What the President needs to do is let Iranians decide who will represent them on the world stage, and deal with whomever that turns out to be.

Last week Thursday an 88-year-old white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and shot and killed the guard that opened the door for him, then continued shooting until he was disabled and taken into custody by security. For the second time in eleven days, a right wing extremist committed an act of domestic terrorism by assassinating an American citizen with whom his ideology took issue. The use of those words is not accidental. Terrorism is the use of violence to advance a political agenda, and assassination is murder for the purpose of gaining political advantage. George Tiller and Stephen Johns were not murdered by some 18-year-old kids with delusions of grandeur. They were assassinated by men with political goals, one the criminalization of abortion, the other a “racially pure” society. There is far more to be said about these incidents than can be given just due in this post. But there is one thought that needs to be explored.

The suggestion has been made that perhaps the right-wing radio talking heads are somehow responsible for the actions of two very disturbed individuals. Let’s put one thing to bed right away. There is absolutely no bright line to be drawn between words on the radio - regardless of how offensive they may be - and gunning a man down in church, or at his place of employment. But there is a tangential connection that the voices in the ether don’t want to acknowledge. Consider the following.

Bill O’Reilly is on a crusade against “gangsta rap.” As far as I can tell, he’s been on this crusade at least as long as he’s been on television. He misses no opportunity to expound upon how thoroughly the songs are laced with profanity, how vile and degrading many of the lyrics are - to women in particular, and how the lifestyle glorifies drug use, violence, apathy and anti-social behavior. Accompanying his rant is always the assertion that while for many/most well-rounded, mature adults, “gangsta rap” is nothing more than harmless entertainment, the genre can be tremendously damaging to impressionable young kids and other unstable individuals. I don’t say this often, but he might be correct. I admit, I own several albums falling into the “gangsta rap” genre. I find several “gangsta rap” artists entertaining. I can even recite the lyrics to a few “gangsta rap” songs. But I am a well-rounded, mature adult. And before I was a well-rounded, mature adult, I was a well-rounded, mature adolescent. I had parents who taught me the value of life, and an honest day’s work. Parents who taught me the value of education, respect for women and how to resolve a conflict without shooting up the neighborhood. I am fully capable of separating fantasy from reality. Unfortunately, there are far too many people who cannot. And because they constantly inundate themselves with violent, degrading, materialistic imagery, they create for themselves an environment in which it is perfectly acceptable to emulate that behavior.

If O’Reilly is bright enough to make the connection between the influences unstable people surround themselves with and the results of those actions when dealing with rap music, why is he too dense to apply the same principles to his own line of work? As difficult as it may be to believe, one could plausibly make the argument that rational, well-adjusted adults could spend 18 hours a day with the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Savage and Beck and derive nothing more than entertainment and the odd kernel of information. Two incidents do not a pattern make, but there seems to be a growing maladjusted segment of the population from whom reality is defined by something other than what is real. And when such unstable individuals are constantly bombarded in the language of war by the asinine notions that their country is “being stolen from them,” that their neighborhoods are being “invaded by foreigners,” that doctors are “committing genocide against babies in the womb”, that the government is coming to “confiscate their guns,” and that the democratically elected government is a “clear and present danger” and a “threat the safety and security of their nation”, why is it unreasonable to assume they will react in any other manner than to take up arms and protect themselves and their loved ones from the enemy? The constant drumbeat of suspicion, hysteria and hyperbole from the right-wing fringe at the very least contributes to a climate of fear and paranoia that affords the unhinged just enough social comfort to believe their radical actions fall somewhere within the realm of acceptable behavior. Gangsta rap never held a gun to anyone’s head and pulled the trigger, just as talk radio never shot up a holocaust museum or blew up an abortion clinic. But if a genre of music can be held responsible for the purported degeneration of the culture, shouldn’t a microcosm of a political ideology that has declared war on sober, rational thought be held under the same microscope?

Late last week President Obama signed new anti-smoking legislation into law giving the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco. I can’t help but be a little annoyed by this bill - as I find myself annoyed with most legislation of this ilk. Over the past two or three decades we have collected mountains of evidence showing the relationship between cigarette smoke and various types of cancer. If General Motors produced a vehicle the contributed to the death of 440,000 people every single year, those cars would be crushed on car dealer’s lots and the company would be sued out of business in a week. Yet instead of simply banning cigarettes, we continue to allow and encourage they be produced for the perversely ironic purpose of funding projects like cancer research and healthcare for children. We tie more and more programs at higher and higher costs to tobacco-related revenue while actively campaigning to reduce the number of smokers generating that revenue. Enough with the mixed signals! If it’s terrible for us, which it is, let’s get rid of it altogether. If it’s not, leave it alone.

Some of you more astute readers out there may have noticed there is some sort of debate taking place in Washington regarding healthcare reform. Apparently this debate has been dragging on for about 50 years now, but according to experts, this time is supposed to be different. Strangely, while the cost of healthcare has exploded over the past half-century, the fear-mongering from the opposition to reform doesn’t seem to have changed at all. But we can explore that next week. It’s not like the issue is going away any time soon.

In a related story, an 18-year-old girl diagnosed herself with Crohn’s disease upon examining her own tissue sample in a high-school biology class. Doctors had been trying in vain to determine the source of her crippling abdominal pain for the past eight years. Might that say something about the current state of healthcare in this country?

Speaking for his party last week, House minority whip Eric Cantor claimed in a television interview with Fox News that there is neither legal framework nor precedent for trying terrorists in U.S. criminal courts. Proof once again that he GOP lives in a world of the GOP’s own creation. Cantor is apparently unaware of the trials, convictions and imprisonment (on U.S. soil) of Omar Abdel-Rahman, Zacarias Moussaoui, Richard Reid, Theodore Kaczynski and Terry Nichols to name just a few. But seriously, facts only get in the way when you’re trying to scare the begeezus out of the masses.

For seven years, Republicans told us that the only way to “support the troops” was to continue to fund the war effort. Anyone who voted against funding the wars - whatever the reason - was unacceptable, un-American, perhaps even providing aid and confront to the enemy. Any Democrat who dared not support the Bush war effort was tarred and feathered as weak on defense and eager to hand over the keys to the country Osama Bin Laden. Yet, this past Tuesday, when the final supplemental war funding bill came before the House for passage, every single House Republican save five voted against it. Not because they had seen the light, or been awakened to some higher purpose, or even decided that the best way to “support the troops” is to bring them home and out of harm's way. House Republicans voted against “the troops” because $5 billion of the $106 billion measure was allocated for assistance to the International Monetary Fund. Apparently, the Republican Party believes that American soldiers aren’t worth 4.7% of a hundred billion dollar spending bill. I want to see that in every single Democratic campaign commercial between now and 2012.

Finally, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, has been fired. The new face of opposition to same-sex marriage apparently failed to perform the duties required of Miss California and was released last week by pageant owner and walking hair club advertisement, Donald Trump. Only a few weeks ago, the Donald came to the defense of Miss Prejean, claiming that she was just too beautiful to be fired. Apparently that was only true so long as she was too beautiful at the times and places stipulated in her contract. Once she started skipping out on her appointments to do her own thing - whatever that thing is or was - and costing Trump money, that pathetic justification was out the window. Congratulations to Tami Farrell, the replacement Miss California. She can’t possibly do any worse than her predecessor. The bar has been set pretty low.