Cross-posted from Black Thought Blog

The problem with attacking Palin is that all of her faults are muddied.  The problem is that those issues are all muddied.  She tried to sell her government plane on ebay, but she ultimately didn't.  Maybe she fired somebody for improper reasons, but it's kind of a he said she said, ad the trooper was a bad trooper.  Maybe she had an affair, maybe she didn't.  She was for the bridge to nowhere, but then she was against it.  She was a maverick taking on her party, but she was also cozy with its old boys network.  She's against wasteful spending, but she's for earmarks when they go to Alaska.

These fights and discussions come out muddled.

The Obama campaign should focus on Palin's current policy positions.

The flip flopper attacks work on people who also have an inauthentic persona i.e. Kerry and Romney.  I don't think it's going to work on Palin (although it does work somewhat on McCain.

Cross-posted from Black Thought Blog

Our fearless leader President Bush has said and invoked the word "freedom" more than anybody has ever been able to keep track. This word is used with amazing frequency in regards to the occupation of Iraq. We needed to "free" the Iraqis, we needed to fight for "freedom" for the Iraqis, we're still in Iraq now because we want Iraqis to be "free," and indeed we are a nation that fights and stands for "freedom."

I would consider some horrific deal with the devil, if only it would result in President Bush being forced to publicly define what the word freedom actually means to him. Despite the fact that Iraqis did not have all of their freedoms under Saddam, it's clear that Iraqis are not much more (if at all) free in the currently war torn militia run country now before us.

Then again, it's not as if Americans can consider themselves completely free either. Many Americans face various forms of racial discrimination, class discrimination, and country of origin discrimination everyday. That's certainly not complete freedom. Even more specifically, we increasingly face the rollback of our civil rights and civil liberties. Add to all this othe ftentimes insurmountable financial hurdles faced by many families trying to live a decent life, it's a hard case to make that we are completely "free."

Indeed, freedom seems at its base, to be a relative concept. The question really is free in comparison to what? Your previous state? A universal standard somehow applied to hundreds of different countries and hundreds more cultures within them?

Is freedom the simple absence of state interference and the ability to be left to our own random devices, or does true freedom oftentimes require more?

Can we truly be free in a prejudiced society?

I'm not sure about any of this, but I'd like to propose a starting point from which we can begin an evaluation of, if not freedom, whether we are pursuing the correct means to achieve an increase in "freedom."

While there are a variety of forms of slavery, the American version is most familiar to us all. I think it's fair that while true "freedom" is hard to define, almost all human beings can agree that the opposite of freedom is definitely slavery. If that is true, than the further away we are from slavery, the closer we arrive towards absolute "freedom.

So let's look at what was done to the African slaves  in order to enslave them. By identifying the tools used to enslave a people, we may be able to reverse engineer these tools to find the way to best undue slavery, or perhaps reach closer towards a state of absolute freedom. Three of the "slave-making" practices stand out for me.

1) Their language was taken from them. They were prohibited from speaking their native languages because they would otherwise have been able to communicate with out the slave owners understanding them.

2) They were prohibited from reading and writing. In other words they were kept from becoming literate.

3) Slave owners controlled their sexual relations/sexuality and reproduction.

Arguably, to the extent that we can move away from these conditions, and arrive at their opposites we may be making the most steady path towards absolute freedom.

The opposite conditions would be:

1) The ability to freely speak and maintain one's own "native" language. Taken further, the active encouragement of the state in the maintenance  and teaching of "native" or perhaps simply non-majority languages.

2) Literacy. Taken further, an excellent quality education and higher education.

3) Sexual choice and birth control.

Something to think about.

Cross-posted from Black Thought Blog

Something that has been pretty disappointing has been the inability of Democrats to frame the cost of the war in Iraq and its effect on the quality of our domestic lives. Sure, some have cited the absolute numbers, and some have made allusions to the alternative uses the money could have been used for, but nobody has really driven this point home.

Not using the cost of the war as a frame for domestic policy discussion is a rather shocking and glaring missed opportunity.

Let alone that the over-extension of our National Guard helped slow the response to Hurricane Katrina, the financial resources used in the Iraq war could have drastically changed the face of the nation domestically.

Cross-posted from Black Thought Blog

How should we chose out next President? I think that one incredibly important aspect of our decision should be based on their ability to deal with the increasingly tumultuous conflicts in the world.

The Middle East is only going to get worse before it gets better, and we need a leader who can intelligently lead the world, and can lead the world in solving international problems as previous Presidents have done (to varying but higher degrees of success).

Perhaps most importantly, there is a high likelihood that there will be multiple international incidents that may change the nature of the entire planet.

How do we decide which Presidential candidate is up to the task, or better yet, who is our best representative to the global community?

For me we should apply the Cuban Missile Crisis Test to the each of the candidates.

The real question is of the current Presidential candidates, who would you have wanted to be in the White House during the Cuban Missile.

As that crisis demonstrated, sometimes being strong meant being smart, and having that diplomatic touch to avoid a global disaster. George Bush has basically demonstrated how to do things in exactly the opposite way that Kennedy did. In fact, had been in office during the Cuban Missile, we would all be dead, or living below the ground in bunkers to take shelter from an ongoing nuclear winter.

So who of the current Presidential candidates could have dealt well with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Let's just eliminate the Republican candidates. They're from the party that got us where we are in Iraq, and their war mongering approach to international relations is just about the last thing that we need.

So who of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Richardson could have dealt best with this conflict?

That... is the million dollar question.

Cross-posted from Black Thought

Most people, including many African-Americans, see Malcolm X as a simplistic hate-monger. The story of Malcolm X is a very complicated one. Indeed, Malcolm himself is a very complicated man. Before he toured Mecca, hate-mongering could be used to characterize an aspect of what he did, although arguably not the majority of his focus.

That's a longer discussion for a different day.

However, one thing that is certain, is that after his trip to Mecca and his break from the black muslim movement, the way in which he saw the world, and the way in which he tried to speak to Americans and the larger international community, was truly a model that progressives should understand, study, and adopt.

The brilliance of the mind of Malcolm X was his ability drastically re-frame issues and narratives.

Progressives are often smart, have great proposals, are even simply right, but we are bad, at least in America, at drastically re-framing the underlying assumptions of the debate.

We engage with conservatives and others about our proposals and vision for America, but we do so without the necessary re-framing of the issue towards a frame that most supports our point of view. The frame (framing) in which a picture or painting sits (the issue) will drastically affect how that picture (the issue) is seen by those who look at it. Especially by those who are looking at the picture (issue) for the first time.

Malcolm X was simply a master at this type of drastic re-framing. Here's a telling example:

"If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it's wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us and teach us how to be violent in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us and teach us to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country." - Malcolm X

This point is from a debate about non-violence in the context of the civil rights movement. However, it illustrates how effective drastically re-framing a debate can be. It eviscerates not one, but a few underlying assumptions most Americas would come to the table with.The onus gets put back on those advocating for war to explain the internal inconsistencies in their own justifications for war, and it also puts the onus on them to explain their criticism of those who did not support non-violence in the civil rights movement in the U.S..

And it all happens in two sentences.

George Lakoff has been a leading proponent of the importance of framing, but I think Malcolm X's ability to frame leaves Lakoff in the dust.

Progressives bring interesting ideas and approaches to government, but they don't create a foundation of of underlying assumptions or ideology on which to place these policy structures.

I think often progressives have their agenda, but try to message it so that it doesn't sound like what it actually is. Instead, we try to make it come off as un-threatening and centrist as possible hoping that nobody will notice what it really is. We do this "hiding" because we believe that America isn't ready for unabashed progressives, and we need to make it seem centrist to stand a chance of being understood.

So put aside Lakoff for a time, and pick up some of Malcolm's speeches, particularly in the last year of his life.

You may not agree with everything that he says, but you will undeniably see a true master of re-framing at work.

One that all progressives can stand to learn from.