Stanley Crouch: Why Obama isn't black like me - sacbee.com

Stanley Crouch: Why Obama isn't black like me - sacbee.com:

Stanley Crouch: Why Obama isn't black like me

By Stanley Crouch -
Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, November 4, 2006

If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, a feat he says he might attempt, a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us for the very first time.

Back in 2004, Alan Keyes made this point quite often. Keyes was the black Republican carpetbagger chosen by the elephants to run against Obama in Illinois for a U.S. Senate seat. The choice of Keyes was either a Republican version of affirmative action or an example of just how dumb the party believes black voters to be, since it was very obvious that Keyes came from the Southeast, not the Midwest.

Keyes lost to Obama by a wide margin. Perhaps one of the reasons was that Keyes might get so hopped up and hysterical about religious issues that he could appall even a conservative audience with his self-righteousness until he was savagely booed away from the microphone.

Keyes was not able to make a distinction between himself as a black American and Obama as an African American. After all, Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock, and his father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.

Of course, black Americans were obviously involved in bringing slavery to an end, but the peculiar institution initially came under fire from white Christians -- the first of whom to officially stand tall and separate themselves from slavery were Quakers. The majority of the Union troops were white, and so were those who have brought about the most important civil-rights legislation.

So why, with slavery having ended for good in 1865 with the loss of the redneck South to the Union Army, do we still have such a simple-minded conception of black and white? It seems to me that the naive ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism are at the root of the confusion.

Quite clearly -- and understandably -- when Pan-African ideas began to form in the 19th century, they were based in serious complaint. All black people suffered and shared a common body of injustices, regardless of where they lived in the world. Europe had colonized much of the black world in order to get control of its natural resources, and the United States had enslaved people of African descent for nearly 250 years. After American slavery ended, there was the time of long-suffering under segregation and bigotry, appearing in either hard or soft form.

So when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama makes it much clearer than he did when running against Keyes that he has experienced some light versions of the many negative assumptions based on his color, but he cannot claim those problems as his own, nor has he lived the life of a black American. That should not actually matter.

I doubt Obama will crash and burn as Colin Powell did when he seemed ready to knock Bill Clinton out of the Oval Office. But if Obama throws his hat in the ring, he will be running as the son of a white woman who married an African immigrant. So, if we end up with him as our first black president, he will have come into the White House through a side door, which might be the only one available at this point.

Daily Debate - Stanley Crouch: Why Obama isn't black like me - sacbee.com

Daily Debate - Stanley Crouch: Why Obama isn't black like me - sacbee.com

Stanley Crouch: Why Obama isn't black like me

By Stanley Crouch -

Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, November 4, 2006
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7

If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, a feat he says he might attempt, a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us for the very first time.

Back in 2004, Alan Keyes made this point quite often. Keyes was the black Republican carpetbagger chosen by the elephants to run against Obama in Illinois for a U.S. Senate seat. The choice of Keyes was either a Republican version of affirmative action or an example of just how dumb the party believes black voters to be, since it was very obvious that Keyes came from the Southeast, not the Midwest.

Keyes lost to Obama by a wide margin. Perhaps one of the reasons was that Keyes might get so hopped up and hysterical about religious issues that he could appall even a conservative audience with his self-righteousness until he was savagely booed away from the microphone.

Keyes was not able to make a distinction between himself as a black American and Obama as an African American. After all, Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock, and his father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.

Of course, black Americans were obviously involved in bringing slavery to an end, but the peculiar institution initially came under fire from white Christians -- the first of whom to officially stand tall and separate themselves from slavery were Quakers. The majority of the Union troops were white, and so were those who have brought about the most important civil-rights legislation.

So why, with slavery having ended for good in 1865 with the loss of the redneck South to the Union Army, do we still have such a simple-minded conception of black and white? It seems to me that the naive ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism are at the root of the confusion.

Quite clearly -- and understandably -- when Pan-African ideas began to form in the 19th century, they were based in serious complaint. All black people suffered and shared a common body of injustices, regardless of where they lived in the world. Europe had colonized much of the black world in order to get control of its natural resources, and the United States had enslaved people of African descent for nearly 250 years. After American slavery ended, there was the time of long-suffering under segregation and bigotry, appearing in either hard or soft form.

So when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama makes it much clearer than he did when running against Keyes that he has experienced some light versions of the many negative assumptions based on his color, but he cannot claim those problems as his own, nor has he lived the life of a black American. That should not actually matter.

I doubt Obama will crash and burn as Colin Powell did when he seemed ready to knock Bill Clinton out of the Oval Office. But if Obama throws his hat in the ring, he will be running as the son of a white woman who married an African immigrant. So, if we end up with him as our first black president, he will have come into the White House through a side door, which might be the only one available at this point.

About the writer:

• Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His column routinely appears on Saturday in The Bee and occasionally on other days. Reach him at scrouch@edit.nydailynews.com. Distributed by King Features Syndicate Inc.

Stabroek News

Stabroek News:

Crouch argues in relation to Obama that Americans have a simple-minded conception of black and white

Monday, November 6th 2006

Dear Editor, The only thing that I found more interesting than G.H.K. Lall's letter on Wednesday November 1 about Barack Obama possibly being the candidate the Democrats need was the article in the New York Daily News the very next day by conservative columnist Stanley Crouch. Almost as if in direct response to Lall's letter, Crouch's article was entitled "What Obama isn't: black like me". Crouch's main point in the article was that Obama is not so much a black American as he is an African-American. As he put it, "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan." He goes on to say, "Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves". While he acknowledges that "the idea that one would be a better or a worse representative of black Americans depending upon his or her culture or ethnic group is clearly absurd", he recognizes that Americans still have "a simple-minded conception of black and white" and he questions how it colors the way we see Obama. He points out that the "confusion" stems from "the naïve ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism" which he describes as the set of ideas that began to take shape in the 19th century when "all black people, regardless of where in the world they lived, suffered and shared a common body of injustice". This as a result of the widespread colonization Europe had imposed on "much of the black world" resulting in the 250 years of slavery in the U.S. Overall, Crouch questions black Americans referring to Obama as "one of us". When he hears this, "I do not know what they are talking about" he writes. He cites Obama himself in Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope" where Obama makes clear that although he has experienced "some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American". Noting that "Obama is being greeted with the same kind of affection that Colin Powell had when he seemed ready to knock Bill Clinton out of the Oval Office" but for many reasons (most of them personal) did not become the first serious black American presidential contender, he thinks that if Obama does run he will have to do so "as the son of a white woman and an African immigrant", and if he does become the first black American president he will have entered the White House "through a side door". Yours faithfully, Stafford Wills

NPR : Roundtable: Saddam Verdict, Crouch on Obama

NPR : Roundtable: Saddam Verdict, Crouch on Obama: "Analysis
Roundtable: Saddam Verdict, Crouch on Obama

Listen to this story...

News & Notes, November 6, 2006 · Guests: Callie Crossley, social/cultural commentator on the Boston television show Beat the Press, Marcelo Su�rez-Orozco, professor of globalization and education at New York University; and Robert George, editorial writer for The New York Post.' Topics: Saddam Hussein is found guilty and sentence to death: Will voters care? Also, a discussion of why columnist Stanley Crouch can't relate to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).
"

Jenice Armstrong | Playing racial games

Jenice Armstrong | Playing racial games:

Posted on Wed, Nov. 08, 2006
Jenice Armstrong | Playing racial games THE "BLACKER-THAN- THOU" game. Sometimes it's all about skin color: Who's darker and therefore supposedly closer to his African ancestral roots. Other times it comes down to a round of the dozens in terms of how "down" someone is. In other words, has he lived an authentically black experience? As a kid growing up, were your relatives more like those on "Good Times" or "The Cosby Show"? If your answer is "Good Times," give yourself 10 points. When you're playing the blacker-than-thou game, being from the projects gives you extra street cred. Admit to living in the suburbs or being Republican and, depending on the circle you run in, you can be accused of being elitist, or simply not black enough. I got it just the other day from a male reader who accused me of being "uppity" after I wrote a column saying Flavor Flav's car wreck of a reality show, "Flavor of Love," is racially stereotypical. Racial one-upmanship goes on all the time. Ask any black suburban middle-schooler. At any rate, I'm recalling this disturbing practice in light of a piece I recently read by New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch. Now, I'm a fan of Crouch's work. He's progressive, level-headed and has a way with words. But in a recent column he brought up a topic that I really wish he hadn't. It was about Sen. Barack Obama's racially mixed heritage. Obama's mother is white and his late father is African. Crouch wrote, "So when black Americans refer to Barack Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about." Crouch went on to discuss the senator's book "The Audacity of Hope." Crouch wrote that Obama "experienced some light versions of the many negative assumptions based on his color, but he cannot claim those problems as his own, nor has he lived the life of a black American." Crouch's observation is that by virtue of Obama's racial makeup, his experiences haven't been that of the average African-American whose ancestors were slaves. Maybe so, but so what? Who really cares if Obama's experiences more closely resemble that of some West Indian, Africans, Latin Americans or others? When it comes to governing, what difference would that make in terms of what Obama's Middle Eastern policies might be if he managed to make it to the White House? How would his racial makeup address the way that he selects members of his Cabinet? When people go into a voting booth as they did yesterday, they want to know, "who's going to help my situation? Who's going to represent my interests, maybe lower my taxes and improve my chances of getting healthcare?" And as we've seen with the way blacks lined up behind Gov. Rendell instead of the GOP's Lynn Swann, voters can't be counted on to vote for those whose skin color most closely resembles their own. A national Associated Press/AOL Black Voices poll released last week bore this out. In a phone poll of 900 black adults, more than 80 percent said a candidate's race doesn't matter. Nor should it matter how they fare in the blacker-than-thou game. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Have you peeped a hot trend that hasn't been reported? E-mail heyjen@phillynews.com and let me know what you know.

THOU' game. Sometimes

it's all about skin color: Who's darker and therefore supposedly closer to his African ancestral roots.

Other times it comes down to a round of the dozens in terms of how 'down' someone is. In other words, has he lived an authentically black experience? As a kid growing up, were your relatives more like those on 'Good Times' or 'The Cosby Show'? If your answer is 'Good Times,' give yourself 10 points.

When you're playing the blacker-than-thou game, being from the projects gives you extra street cred. Admit to living in the suburbs or being Republican and, depending on the circle you run in, you can be accused of being elitist, or simply not black enough.

I got it just the other day from a male reader who accused me of being 'uppity' after I wrote a column saying Flavor Flav's car wreck of a reality show, 'Flavor of Love,' is racially stereotypical.

Racial one-upmanship goes on all the time. Ask any black suburban middle-schooler. At any rate, I'm recalling this disturbing practice in light of a piece I recently read by New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch.

Now, I'm a fan of"

China: Scapegoat or Sputnik - New York Times

China: Scapegoat or Sputnik - New York Times: "November 10,

November 10, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

China: Scapegoat or Sputnik

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Shanghai

As I was saying, Mr. Rove, Americans aren’t as stupid as you think.

Now that we’ve settled that, and now that we’ve had an election that clarified which country is most important in shaping U.S. politics in 2006 — Iraq — I’ve come to visit the country that’s most likely to shape U.S. politics in 2008: China.

The civil war in the Republican Party, which you are about to see, will be all about Iraq — whom to blame and how to withdraw before the issue wipes out more Republican candidates in 2008. But the coming civil war among the Democrats will be all about China.

I still believe that when the history of this era is written, the trend that historians will cite as the most significant will not be 9/11 and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It will be the rise of China and India. How the world accommodates itself to these rising powers, and how America manages the economic opportunities and challenges they pose, is still the most important global trend to watch.

It really hits you when you see the supersize buildings sprouting in Shanghai, or when you look at the world through non-American eyes. Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, told me the other day that Asia right now “is the most optimistic place in the world.” More people have come out of poverty faster there — particularly in India and China — than at any time in the history of the world, and as a result, he notes, more people in Asia than anywhere else in the world today “wake up every morning sure that tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday.”

But one person’s optimism can be another person’s flat wages. And that is why the Democrats and China are almost certain to butt heads. The Bush team’s focus on Iraq and terrorism, coupled with the Democrats’ lack of control over either house of Congress, has kept China-U.S. relations largely out of the headlines and on a relatively even keel during the Bush II years.

But two things will change that. One is the Democrats’ return to control of both the House and Senate — powered by politicians like Nancy Pelosi, who has long taken a hard line vis-à-vis China on both economics and human rights, and Sherrod Brown, the newly elected senator from Ohio, who comes to D.C. with strong protectionist leanings from a state that has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs to Asia.

The other is the mood reflected in a Nov. 2 analysis in The Financial Times, headlined: “Anxious Middle: Why Ordinary Americans Have Missed Out on the Benefits of Growth.”

Technology and globalization are flattening the global economic playing field today, enabling many more developing nations to compete for white-collar and blue-collar jobs once reserved for the developed world. This is one reason why growth in wages for the average U.S. worker has not been keeping pace with our growth in productivity and G.D.P.

“Economists call this phenomenon median wage stagnation,” noted The Financial Times. “Median measures give the best picture of what is happening to the middle class because, unlike mean or average wages, median wages are not pulled upwards by rapid gains at the top. As the joke goes: Bill Gates walks into a bar and, on average, everyone there becomes a millionaire. But the median does not change.”

Many Americans lately have started to get that joke, and it is one reason that with this new Democrat-led Congress we are likely to see a surge in protectionist legislation, more Wal-Mart bashing, a slowdown in free-trade expansion and increased calls for punitive actions if China doesn’t reduce its trade surplus — which surged to a record in October.

China, in other words, is inevitably going to move back to the center of U.S. politics, because it crystallizes the economic challenges faced by U.S. workers in the 21st century. The big question for me is, how will President Bush and the Democratic Congress use China: as a scapegoat or a Sputnik?

Will they use it as an excuse to avoid doing the hard things, because it’s all just China’s fault, or as an excuse to rally the country — as we did after the Soviets leapt ahead of us in the space race and launched Sputnik — to make the kind of comprehensive changes in health care, portability of pensions, entitlements and lifelong learning to give America’s middle class the best tools possible to thrive? A lot of history is going to turn on that answer, because if people don’t feel they have the tools or skills to thrive in a world without walls, the pressure to put up walls, especially against China, will steadily mount.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Rumsfeld exit shakes Bush administration

BBC NEWS | Americas | Rumsfeld exit shakes Bush administration

Rumsfeld exit shakes Bush administration

By Paul Reynolds World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website

President and defence secretary: parting company Rumsfeld's career

The resignation of the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shows how much the Bush administration is in disarray about Iraq.

The president made it quite clear at a news conference after the election that he had decided beforehand that a "fresh perspective" was needed at the Pentagon.

This means that, win or lose the election, Mr Bush had decided that things were going badly enough to remove one of the architects of the war.

In fact, when Mr Bush told reporters last week that Mr Rumsfeld would be staying on, he had already spoken to Mr Rumsfeld about leaving.

On Wednesday, Mr Bush told reporters he had decided ahead of the elections that "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee".

Whether Robert Gates, a former CIA director, is the kind of man to provide much of a fresh perspective remains to be seen. Until now he has always been an establishment figure. But he seems to be about to become one of the pegs on which new hopes will be hung.

Significant moment

The departure of Donald Rumsfeld is a major moment in the history of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld felt himself to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time

His resignation is a sign and an admission that the policy in Iraq has not worked, so far.

Apart from Vice-President Dick Cheney and President Bush himself, there was nobody who more clearly symbolised the administration's determination to wage the war on terror and to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

"We know they have weapons of mass destruction," he announced of the Iraqis at one stage. "We don't need any debate about it." His confidence and brusque dismissal of dissent was typical. For some, it amounted to arrogance.

Ambitions

Rumsfeld brought to the Pentagon years of ambition to stir up a department he had run as a much younger man under President Ford.

The recent book about the administration at war by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, State of Denial, tells of the blizzard of handwritten memos known as "snowflakes" with which he bombarded his officials.

He was determined to break what he saw as the old guard and to get control of policy himself, which he felt was too much in the hands of the generals and admirals.

He wanted a slimmer, more mobile military, one more capable of waging war on international terrorists and governments that supported them and less concentrated on the massive weapons systems that were being developed as if the Cold War had not ended.

Donald Rumsfeld felt himself to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time.

His direct, irascible, sometimes even folksy style appealed to many when things were going well. His famous dictum about there being "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", made pre-Iraq, was seen as quirky and "Rummy" at his most idiosyncratic.

In a resignation appearance with President Bush and his own successor in the Oval Office, Mr Rumsfeld referred, almost as if he had not been appreciated, to "this little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century... It is not well known, it was not well understood, it is complex for people to comprehend."

Downfall

However, the very confidence that allowed him to make his mark on the Pentagon also led to his downfall - it became overconfidence.

He ignored warnings that his reliance on hard-hitting, relatively small units would win the ground war in Iraq but would not win a guerrilla war.

Like most US policymakers, he simply did not believe that Iraqis would not welcome the invaders and take care of events for themselves from then on.

He was not a man of patience and did not in the end have the necessary patience for a long, drawn out counter insurgency war. Nor did he show the flexibility of tactics needed to demonstrate to his commander-in-chief that he was going to deliver the victory the president believes is so necessary.

He had to go, whatever the results of the elections.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6130514.stm

Published: 2006/11/08 21:05:17 GMT

Tolerable or Awful: The Roads Left in Iraq - New York Times

Tolerable or Awful: The Roads Left in Iraq - New York Times:

November 8, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Tolerable or Awful: The Roads Left in Iraq

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I had to submit this column before knowing the results of yesterday’s election, but here is one thing I know already: this needs to be our last election about Iraq.

The Iraq war has turned into a sucking chest wound for our country — infecting its unity at home and its standing abroad. No one can predict what Iraq will look like 10 years from now. I wish it well. But in the near term, it is clear, nothing that we’ll feel particularly proud of, nothing that we’ll feel justifies the vast expenditure of lives and treasure, is going to come out of Iraq.

Our only two options left today in Iraq are “tolerable” and “awful.” “Good” is no longer on the menu. When you read stories from Iraq saying that all we need to do is get rid of all the police there, get one-third of the soldiers in the Iraqi Army to actually report to duty regularly, and replace all the ministers who are corrupt, you know why “good” is not on the menu anymore.

It’s time to make a final push for the tolerable, and if that fails, quit Iraq and insulate ourselves and our allies from the awful. This can’t go on.

That’s sad. Iraq was always a struggle of hope against history. After 9/11, and the Arab Human Development Report detailing the increasingly dysfunctional Arab-Muslim world — which produces way too many terrorists — we had a real interest in collaborating with Iraqis to try to build one decent, progressive, democratizing society in the heart of the Arab East.

But to succeed we needed to establish a secure order in Iraq and prevent the murderous Sunni/Baathist attacks on Shiites. The Bush team, arriving in Iraq with too few troops and no plans, failed to do either. And therefore the natural tribalism of Iraqis surfaced and the minimal trust between citizens needed to forge a real democracy never emerged. Now we have a tit-for-tat civil war.

The “tolerable” outcome that might be self-sustaining and stable would require reshaping Iraq as a loose federation of predominantly Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni zones. To make even that work, though, would probably require cutting a new deal with Iran and its Iraqi Shiite clients, and Syria and its Sunni Baathist allies, and the Kurds. Iraq would retain a central government in Baghdad, but power and oil income would be more radically decentralized among the different sects. Democracy would be subordinated to stability.

A small U.S. or U.N. force could remain in Iraq to police the boundaries between the three communities and make sure the ongoing violence is contained. To produce even this, though, the U.S. will probably need to set a date and threaten to leave. Otherwise, the parties won’t negotiate seriously.

“Awful” would be carrying out that threat to leave Iraq by a fixed date because Iraqis prove too angry and atomized to reach any deal. The fires of madness now raging in Iraq — people beheading each other, blowing up each other’s mosques — would all intensify.

A U.S. withdrawal under such conditions would be messy and shameful. But when people are that intent on killing each other there’s not much we can do. As bad as we’ve performed in Iraq, what Iraqis have done to each other, and the little that other Muslims have done to stop them, is an even bigger travesty.

Still, we’d need to give visas to Iraqis who wanted to flee the madness; we’d need to give a security umbrella to the Kurds, so that Syria, Turkey or Iran did not invade them if we left; and we’d need to protect Jordan from the spillover.

But there would be some strategic benefits. Syria would have to support the Sunnis in Iraq, and Iran would have to back the Shiites, so these two “allies” would be on opposite sides of the civil war. Iran would also have to manage the chaos in southern Iraq, particularly the Shiite militias, and this would be a permanent migraine for Tehran. U.S. troops would no longer be in range of Iranian retaliation, and therefore would be much freer to confront Iran’s nuclear challenge. The U.S. would also be able to extract itself from the Abu Ghraib/occupation syndrome and could start combating Islamist radicalism by being the best America rather than the worst.

Finally, Iraqi instability would push oil to $80 a barrel. That would mean more people buying hybrid cars and investing in alternative energy, so that we end our dependence on this region sooner.

These are our real choices in Iraq now: tolerable and awful. It’s time we choose. No more expending lives and treasure for nothing good. The only way we can pursue good in the world again is by either shrinking our presence in Iraq, if Iraqis will step up, or leaving entirely, if they won’t.

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence - New York Times

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence - New York Times:

November 3, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories — from “Cobra II” to “Fiasco” to “State of Denial” — all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we’ve been making it up — and paying the price — ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we’re addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing — demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation — to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see.