Politics
Kevin Hilke
We have a president, and irony of ironies a black one, who has been convinced that manning up on the defining civil rights issue of our age will get him evicted from the White House. Whether or not this prediction is a good one is irrelevant. Manning up is what Barack Obama was elected for. This is the job, however shabbily done by others, so he can shit or get off the pot. The longer he sits there perched without moving his bowels, the stronger the miasmic stench of his equivocating rhetoric, and the stronger his signal to Americans that with respect to gay rights, nothing has changed.
Politics
Kevin Hilke
Shortly after Caroline Kennedy withdrew her name from consideration for the vacancy in the U.S. Senate created by Sen. Hillary Clinton’s resignation, Nate Silver published a brief and provocative piece entitled “Did Caroline Ever Really Want It?” in which he analyzes Kennedy’s withdrawal in a simple and radical way: as though she were a person.
Politics
Megan Stacy
The thoroughly discredited “birther” movement maintains, contrary to all available material evidence, not only that President Barack Obama is not a native-born U.S. citizen, but that we’ve all been duped into believing that he is by an international conspiracy.
So why does Google see the birthers as a new market?
Politics
Kevin Hilke
U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech “to the Muslim world” from Cairo University earlier this week has provoked a variety of predictable reactions from the right, most of which impugn Obama for admitting points of view other than that of U.S. interest when thinking through global affairs. By this rationale, Obama’s admission that the Islamic societies of the past were crucial to generating and preserving the ideas that underpin what we call “the west” becomes nothing more than a sheepish “apology” to “terrorists.” Criticism from the left has been almost as uniformly boring and predictable. An intriguing and problematic exception comes from Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Administration official whose readings of events are often simultaneously refreshing and myopic.
Politics
Kevin Hilke
“The challenge for all of us,” as Obama said yesterday, “is to identify good ideas.” And so Vandiver’s demand, the demand to roundly understand, must become our own. Having something shown to you in the Missourian sense is a process not of credulous reception but of active and incessant evaluation. For the product of the pragmatic Missourian’s deep skepticism, his demand to know not only the what but also the why of the what, is precisely the elimination of unworkable ideas in favor of workable ones. His search for proof is a continual querying and reconfirming of both the proof itself and the integrity of the criteria from which the proof derives meaning and legitimacy. We must help Obama find or create his whys and whats, and to articulate useful, socially productive, and popularly understandable relationships among them. Being shown is not a passive process. Proof, telling or irrelevant, genuine or counterfeit, is not found but made, and our new president has only two hands.
