The Barack and Hillary Show Plays Selma

[Applezotz]

The Barack and Hillary Show Plays Selma
Wednesday, 07 March 2007
by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

The double-church drive-by in Selma, Alabama showed the utter vapidity and lack of substance of the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns. As the corporate media checked their applause meters and "Amen" counters, both corporatist candidates plied the Black congregations with false-folksy nonsense and self-congratulatory exultations - avoiding at all cost any hint of challenge to American ruling structures. If the Bloody Sunday commemoration is any indication, the Black Freedom Movement ends with, not a whimper, but hollow bombast and impotence.


<SNIP>

The Brown Chapel AME and First Baptist churches are located only blocks apart, but Sunday's near-simultaneous celebrity performances showed the two Democratic "front-runners" are even closer than that, separated only by race and gender, with not a dime's worth of political difference between them. Forty-two years after the historic civil rights crossing of nearby Edmund Pettus Bridge on the road to Montgomery, the Barack and Hillary Show reveals that the last vestiges of the Black Freedom Movement are going - nowhere. African American political luminaries from around Alabama and the nation, eager to become part of the pageant, arrayed themselves in the box seats of their favorite's church venues, validating the candidates' vacuous presentations as if they actually contained something of substance worthy of the occasion.

"Barack and Hillary Show reveals that the last vestiges of the Black Freedom Movement are going - nowhere."

<SNIP>


Getting his church groove on, Obama dubbed the elders of the civil rights movement - the heroes and heroines of Edmund Pettus Bridge and other struggles - the "Moses Generation" that led the people to the borders the Promised Land. Obama's generation was personified by Joshua, who the Old Testament says picked up the leadership reins from Moses and conquered Canaan by repeatedly marching his troops around Jericho while commanding the priests to blow their horns. The walls of the city "came tumbling down."

Getting those walls to tumble is Black folks' unfinished business, with Obama playing Joshua. But Obama has never blown a bugle or commanded troops or outlined a strategy for victory. It is true that Selma is "home" to every African American, part of the collective legacy. But Obama gained national fame declaring at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

<SNIP>


Obama not only knows money, he serves it. Among his first votes in the Senate was to limit citizens' access to state courts in suits against giant corporations. He and the bill's Republican sponsors called it Tort Reform, when in reality the measure abridges fundamental civil rights. This, from a former professor of constitutional law, who seldom corrects folks who mistakenly call him a "civil rights lawyer."


<SNIP>

The Senator didn't mention his own proposal on health care - thankfully, since it isn't right to lie in church, and to claim that Obama's plan bears any resemblance to "universal" health care would be a lie. Like the DLCers he flocks with, Obama advocates retaining the for-profit nature of American health care, and mandating that poor people pay for it, somehow. His plan is only "universal" in the sense that mandatory auto insurance is universal.
<SNIP>
Bad-mouthing Black behavior is not a public option for Hillary Clinton, in or out of church. However, as the wife of the first "Black President," Senator Clinton knows how to make the congregation feel good about being visited - while saying nothing at all. At least Clinton managed to mention the Iraq war, even if obliquely, something Obama failed to do. She reviled a Bush regime that seems oblivious to the plight of soldiers and their families "when we have our young men and women in harm's way and when they come back the government does not take care of " them properly.

Had Clinton explained her position on ending the war in Iraq, it would have become plain that she has no intention of doing so, and has until recently sometimes sounded more gung-ho on "victory" than the Bush regime. Obama is no better: a class-A imperialist who complained that the U.S. was "coddling" Iraqis

<SNIP>

Clinton posed as a crusader for voting rights. "In the last two elections we have seen the right to vote tampered with...not just in Florida... the precious right to vote is under siege."

<SNIP>

Both Obama and Clinton came to town to celebrate themselves and the circumstances that have made them frontrunners for the Democratic nomination. The Black Freedom Movement, they would have us believe, was designed to create the conditions in which white female and Black and Latino male corporate candidates could be seriously considered for the presidency. The civil rights movement gave "Obama a chance...gave Bill Richardson a chance... and gave me that chance, too," Clinton exulted.

Full thing at :http://www.blackagendareport.com/ind...=124&Itemid=34

[runs with scissors]

:rofl:

[RichM]

- It was excruciatingly embarrassing. Both of them imitated "black-style" Southern preachers, talkin' jes' like reg'lar black folks.

As Stewart noted, it was like having white people imitate black people who were imitating white people. Sort of a talent show, "How Black Can You Be?"

I dislike hate loathe both of these phonies.

[leftchick]

thank you. It is so nice to read the reality of those two empty suits rather than hear the constant whoo-haas from the 'left' over them.

[DemonFighterLives]

I hope that the blacks in the country will see through them.

[Applezotz]

What Hillary was doing is called "code switching"

Code-switching is a term in linguistics referring to alternation between two or more languages, dialects, or language registers in a single conversation, stretch of discourse, or utterance between people who have more than one language in common.

Early work on bilingualism claimed that codeswitching was not governed by systematic rules; however, linguists now agree that this early claim is incorrect. There are two principal directions in which codeswitching research has developed. One focuses on the social motivations for switching, a line of inquiry concentrating both on immediate discourse factors such as lexical need and the topic and setting of the discussion, and on more distant factors such as speaker or group identity, and relationship building. The other direction of research concerns syntactic constraints on switching. This is a line of inquiry that has postulated grammatical rules and specific syntactic boundaries for where and why a switch may occur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_switching

There are a number of possible reasons for the switching from one language to another and these will now be considered, as presented by Crystal (1987). The first of these is the notion that a speaker may not be able to express him/herself in one language so switches to the other to compensate for the deficiency. As a result, the speaker may be triggered into speaking in the other language for a while. This type of code switching tends to occur when the speaker is upset, tired or distracted in some manner. Secondly, switching commonly occurs when an individual wishes to express solidarity with a particular social group. Rapport is established between the speaker and the listener when the listener responds with a similar switch. This type of switching may also be used to exclude others from a conversation who do not speak the second language. An example of such a situation may be two people in an elevator in a language other than English. Others in the elevator who do not speak the same language would be excluded from the conversation and a degree of comfort would exist amongst the speakers in the knowledge that not all those present in the elevator are listening to their conversation.

The final reason for the switching behavior presented by Crystal (1987) is the alteration that occurs when the speaker wishes to convey his/her attitude to the listener. Where monolingual speakers can communicate these attitudes by means of variation in the level of formality in their speech, bilingual speakers can convey the same by code switching. Crystal (1987) suggests that where two bilingual speakers are accustom to conversing in a particular language, switching to the other is bound to create a special effect. These notions suggest that code switching may be used as a socio-linguistic tool by bilingual speakers.

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Skiba-CodeSwitching.html

[Applezotz]

Willy | March 6, 2007, 2:02pm | #
Dude, you've got to be kidding. Clinton's rendition of a southern accent would cause even Scarlett O'hara to put a bullet between her eyes for being an obvious Yankee conspirator.

Dan T. | March 6, 2007, 2:52pm | #
Maybe Hillary thought that if George W. Bush could put on a cowboy hat and fool Texans into thinking he was a Texan, how hard could it be?

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/118988.html#comments

[DemonFighterLives]

Little dubby tries it all the time. When he is speaking black, he makes me sick. When he is speaking texan, he makes me sick. Let's just say he makes me sick all the time. Hillary makes a funny black girl. In the hood.

:grin:

[DemonFighterLives]

Poor Hill, I hope she wasn't going to do vaudville makeup and sing Mammy.

:lmfao: