Eric L. Wattree

Paul's entire premise is flawed. Total personal freedom was clearly not the intent of the founding fathers.

it’s time for America to wake up - and particularly poor and middle class Republicans. Because entrusting this nation and our economy to the GOP would be like entrusting our children to convicted child molesters:

The working conditions created by the inept and irresponsible managers within the postal service is not only un-American, but creates a serious danger to the unsuspecting public at large.

The nation is currently going through is a manufactured crisis. The GOP purposely dragged the country under the bus in order to justify attacking the programs put in place under the New Deal and later legislation.

Most Black people have very little use for Black conservatives. It's not that we disagree with everything they say, but because we’re suspect of the reasons they're saying it.

So Ralph Nader and Cornel West have teamed up yet again to sabotage the Democratic Party. They’re currently canvassing the country for Democratic opponents to challenge Obama in the primaries.

At the very outset I’d like to make an unequivocal assertion - entrusting our economy and the well being of the poor and middle class to the GOP is like entrusting the well being of a child to a convicted child molester.

A classic example of the technique at work can be found in how the Republican Party manipulated the American people during the sixties.

This is a reprise of and article that I did back in December of 2005. At the time, I pretty much predicted what we’re going through today.

History is clear. There is no example in the history of mankind where justice has simply been bestowed upon a people.

Keeping the people divided is the coin of the corporatist realm, and I seriously suspect that Tavis is working in concert with the corporations that he continues to shill for - Wal-Mart, Exxon, Nationwide, Wells Fargo, etc.

Many of my fellow Obama supporters contend that the president can only do so much, which is absolutely true. But what he can do is use the bully pulpit of the presidency to educate the people, which he’s failing miserably at. The entire GOP agenda is based on flat-out lies, the blatant corruption of facts, and a deviation from reality that’s so severe that even a child could see it if someone would just take the time to explain it. So why isn’t Obama doing that?

And God must have loved this magnificent church the minister headed--the choir alone in this ornate house of God was larger by a factor of three than the entire membership of the little church I'd grown accustomed to, and the choir pit was twice as large as the room where we held Sunday school.

I thought I was done discussing the illustrious Dr. Cornel West, but he just won’t seem to go away. But that’s ok, because he’s serving a useful purpose. The Cornel West saga has served to open the eyes of many in the Black community to the petty, self-serving agenda of many of the so-called Black intellectuals, and none too soon.

I recently posted an article entitled “President Obama: What’s the Difference Between Zionism and Racism?” In response I received several comments from a gentlemen who posts under the name of Tim 2. His comments were so reflective of the typical Zionist reaction to this debate that I thought it would be enlightening to present it as an article under its own name.

The common trait shared by all those who tend to be inhumane and corrupt is neither race, creed, nor color. What they all have in common is power, opportunity, and greed. And let there be no doubt, that's the source of all of the turmoil in the Middle-East - the power, opportunity, and greed of Israel and the American military/industrial complex.

I'm not against Jews, I'm against the injustice of Zionism - a philosophy which dictates that one group of people are entitled to the land of another by virtue of their religious beliefs alone.

Since Black people are the product of the very same racist environment as White people, we tend to be just as racist toward other Blacks as any Hillbilly. That explains why we never see a drive-by committed by a person wearing a sheet. The Klan has learned, just like the powers that be, that we’re much more efficient at destroying one another than they could ever be.

We should walk away from this moment with the clear understanding that Just because a person has letters behind their name, teach at a prestigious university, favor a garbled multi syllabic tongue, or host a television show, that doesn't mean that they have any more intelligence, or any more character than we do.

The fact is, anyone who considers West's remarks toward President Obama merely an objective and scholarly critique of the political environment needs to go back and take a refresher course in both freshman English and forensics. The comments directed at President Obama by Cornel West was nothing short of a racist and petty personal tirade by a woefully presumptuous and undisciplined mind. His comments were not only less than constructive and nonspecific, but they were also saturated with unsubstantiated personal attacks against the president. They were, indeed, Palinesque in both nature and intent.

The fact is, anyone who considers Dr. Cornel West’s remarks toward President Obama merely an objective and scholarly critique of the political environment needs to go back and take a refresher course in both freshman English and forensics. The comments directed at President Obama by Cornel West was nothing short of a racist and petty personal tirade by a woefully presumptuous and undisciplined mind.

The interest in this case has been with good cause, because Ms. Snow’s ordeal is the perfect metaphor for the blatant corporate, and now, governmental assault on the American middle class as a whole. But when I promised to keep you abreast of the twists and turns in this particular case, I thought it was simply going to be the story of a middle-class worker’s struggle to finally obtain justice. But instead, it has not only become the story of governmental extortion, threats, and collusion, but the clear demonstration that justice has become nothing more than an illusion for the American middle class.

The degree that I managed to obtain through my “formal” education was theoretical at best. I simply received a receipt attesting to the fact that I was warming a chair in an environment where psychology was discussed.

There was only one thing more predictable than the Sun was going to rise in the East, and that was the fact that a group of idiots was going to pop up and claim that the Bin Laden killing was a hoax. And sure enough, even though the man was buried at sea, he’s not even wet yet and I've already started getting email from "Bin Laden Hoaxers." So I decided to write a standard response, and here it is:

First, Mr. President, allow me to congratulate you on bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice. That one act alone separates you from the disingenuous chest-beaters who have been manipulating American misery to gain political traction. No longer can they wrap themselves in the flag and strut around in their ineffectual, faux patriotism while they accuse the President of the United States of “palling around with terrorists.” The quiet and effective way in which you’ve gone about carrying out America’s business clearly distinguishes who’s the adult in the room, and who's the true American.

Both the methods and propaganda of the GOP are not only un-American, but right out of the Nazi playbook. The GOP leadership has calculated that the more miserable they can keep the American people, the better chance they have of regaining power. That, in turn, would allow them to get on with the business of totally enslaving the American people. So they routinely employ tactics from right out of Joseph Gobbels’ handbook on the effective use of propaganda to keep us so angry and divided that we’re blind to their concerted effort to keep America ignorant, distracted, and miserable.

While Cornel West often speaks to this issue, we must remember that he has an agenda. His close association with Tavis Smiley gives him the credibility of a man ranting about fascism after just having lunch with Mussolini.

I’m an Obama supporter, but I’m not an Obama cheerleader. While I agree that President Obama has done more for this country in the short time he’s been in office than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, presidents are not only assessed based on what they do, but also what they fail to do. So in spite of the fact that he’s saved America from a second Great Depression, his success in that area pales in comparison to what he’s failing to do - aggressively confronting America’s most insidious domestic enemy and the most serious threat to our democracy since the civil War, the current GOP.

I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster every since Barack Obama appeared on the American scene. I’ve gone from being hopeful when he threw his hat into the ring, to ecstatic when it became clear that he was a viable candidate. I then went from disappointed when he backslid on FISA, to solemn when America elected him.

The most recent example of the GOP engaging in subtle racism is when Mike Huckabee claimed that President Obama viewed the world from the perspective of the Mau Mau. Then when it became clear that he'd crossed the line, he claimed that he misspoke and didn't understand what all the uproar was about. The true attitude that the GOP harbors toward African-Americans is reflected in this exchange that I recently had over the internet:

[Only] 14% of blacks marry. [Seventy-four percent]74% don't know who their fathers are. Their contribution to the arts is gangsta rap, nasty, foul chattering, that passes as music. [Ninety-six percent] 96% voted for Barack Obama, who is the worst fraud and fake ever to set foot in the US. Per capita, blacks represent 80% of prison population violent crimes segment. Billions have been spent on blacks in the US to mainstream them to no avail.

I wonder if the president has considered the fact that Cheney just might be trying to get him to make the same kind of mistake in Afghanistan that the Bush Administration made in Iraq in order to take the Iraq issue off the table for the 2012 election? If during the 2012 campaign America is bogged down in Afghanistan with the useless death of thousands of U.S. troops, all of a sudden, Bush, Cheney, and the GOP won't look all that bad. The president should think about that possibility, since the mechinations of Dick Cheney makes Machiavelli look like a trainee.

Actually, what’s both curious, and insulting, is why conservatives can’t understand the reason that most Black people see the GOP in exactly the same light as the GOP sees Al Qaeda. After all, the people who lynched Black people in the South may have called themselves Dixiecrats, but the bottom line is, they were radical conservatives, and they eventually migrated to the Republican party. So why should Black people hate radical conservatives any less than the GOP hates Al Qaeda - they killed many more Blacks, and for a much longer period of time? The only logical reason that conservatives can’t seem to grasp this very simple concept is that they obviously believe that the lives they took were not of equal value to the lives taken on 9/11.

So what I'd like to know is this - if a shade tree journalist sitting up in his den in the heart of a Los Angeles ghetto could see what was going on, why couldn't the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, CNN and all of the other media networks; why couldn't Harvard, Yale, and all of the various and sundry Ph.D.s from America's great institutions of learning; and why couldn't the nation's so called "think tanks," all of the nation's political scientists, and the United States Congress figure it out?

In spite of the GOP claim that they believe in limited government, The Michigan Messenger has reported that newly elected Republican governor, Rick Snyder is poised to sign an emergency management bill that will hand total control of local governments over to "emergency managers" appointed by the government. "According to the law, which has already been approved in the House, the governor will be able to declare "financial emergency" in towns or school districts and appoint someone to fire local elected officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services."

Unfortunately, politics is much like religion - no matter how much evidence is brought to bear that a person’s preacher is a hypocrite, a crook, and a pedophile, many of the people in the church will refuse to believe their lying eyes, because it’s not what they want to see.

Friends validate their own existence, lending independence to the soul; They slay their dragons from a warm cocoon, with a kindred spirit to console.

Receding hairline, failing vision, hair now turning grey, an aging boomer in final protest, Father Time his foe this day. . Donning his headband, tie-dyed jeans, and scorched draft card of protests past, he set out for one last battle, as in his youth that had quietly passed.

I bear witness to a once vibrant people greedily gulping down society’s hemlock. Even as they claim to be “keeping it real“, they continue to kill, maim, and despise their own in hot pursuit of the prime directive with the passion of a sheetless klan.

Is the modern Republican Party really “the party of Lincoln,” and responsible for freeing the slaves? I don’t think so. But the GOP regularly, routinely, and with a straight face makes that claim. One Republican recently confronted me and stated the following: "It was Republicans who beat Democrats in the Civil War, thus freeing the slaves. It was Democrats who started the KKK as its military wing to intimidate the (largely black) Republican party who were running the south after the war. Can a leopard change its spots?? Are the Democrats now the party FOR the black people after being against them for so long? So many of you are duped by the Devil's trickery. a few table scraps from massa's table and you run right back to his side. The Democrat is the racist."