Will Obama work from the center?

The NY Observer has an interesting read up entitled: Obama and the New American Middle by Joe Conason. I like Joe, he has a decent pov on all things political. Conason starts off by vilifying The Shrub and his pathetic performance as President during our last big crisis, 9/11. He then goes into his pov about how Obama can avoid many of the pitfalls that Bush43 walked right into, sometimes willingly. From the article:

Now Barack Obama is trying hard not to make that same kind of mistake before he is inaugurated. So he will continue to reach out to the same people who have spent the past six months vilifying him. He will try to reassure the voters whose fears have been exploited in this campaign. He will certainly enlist the Republicans and independents who may be disposed to advise and assist him, whether they supported him or not.

In his rhetoric and his appointments, he can be expected to behave as Mr. Bush ought to have acted in a time of national crisis. That means drawing on good will wherever he can find it, drawing on talent regardless of party, and drawing on the powerful desire of most Americans to live again in one nation.

All of his bipartisan gestures, however necessary and sincere, need not mean that Mr. Obama must abandon his promises of change upon taking the oath of office. But he can safely ignore the pompous advice he is receiving from many quarters to ingratiate himself with the establishment and to prove that he is sufficiently mature to trash his ideals. For he above all must know by now, after traveling across the country for the past two years, that people are in the mood for something different. They have just told us, with unprecedented vehemence, that the last thing they want is more of the same.

Conason has wise words for our President-elect. The one that rings true, for me, is that Obama can not abandon the people and our needs. He can not give in to the cronyism that is rampant in DC and the halls of Congress.

Conason believes that extreme conservatism is dead, based on how the majority of American’s voted this past Tuesday. I think the vast majority of American’s walked away from the values of the extreme right too, but heed this warning:

Rethugs will not be going away anytime soon. The Neocons and their Theocratic counterparts will lie, steal and browbeat to get their way. They have no shame and evidently no scruples either.

This is supposed to be a country for the people, not the corporatocracy, not just for the top one percent and certianly not for the extreme religious right’s fucked up ideals. The needs of the many trump those of just a few. We are hurting emotionally and financially.We need to bury the idea that religious beliefs trump everything, because they do not. We are a nation of diversity, of different beliefs and belief systems.

I hope for all our sakes, Conason is right…that Obama will create a new center in America. One that is as far from the extreme rightwing nutjobs as possible.

Only time will tell…

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Evolution: Scapegoat of the Right

by PraetorOne

When the far right goes looking for a scapegoat it doesn’t go halfway. The same people who talk about personal responsibility are the same people who blame evolution and the teaching of evolution in our class rooms for America’s social problems. That’s right friends and neighbors. The far right claims that if you teach children they are mammals they will somehow devolve into violent brutes and thugs. Additionally, many on he far right blame evolution for the eugenics and brutality of the the Third Reich and fascist Italy but that ignores the fact that those governments had hundreds of years of experience with conservative Christianity. In a similar vein those governments never completely rejected Christianity and merely adapted their versions of Christianity to adapt to the fascist regimes. In other words these were essentially Christian regimes

So what’s wrong with the far right’s take on evolution?

Well, to be perfectly frank it actually undermines the far right’s ideas about personal responsibility. Why should children bother to control themselves when the adults in their world are handing them a custom made excuse for bad behavior? “I can’t help being a violent, over-sexed thug–Charles Darwin made me do it.” Children need guidance, not excuses, and the far right, in its eagerness to blame evolution from everything from tooth decay to social decay, has managed quite nicely to provide a convenient excuse for violence and sexual promiscuity.

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