Blogito, Ergo Sum - 30 November 2008

The news is all about India, but what can I say about that? I'd just shock you if I said that, taken as part of the whole, it was generally a good thing. That's waaaay subject to misinterpretation, I know, but I mean it in the same sense that Pearl Harbor and even 9/11 were good things. Because in every case it woke some people up to the magnitude of the threat they were facing.

By the time Pearl Harbor happened, England was almost to the point of being lost. If we had waited another six months we would never have arrived there in time. I think it was Admiral Yamamoto who argued against the attack, saying it would only "waken a sleeping giant", and he was right. Had they waited until England had fallen to Hitler then we would never have reclaimed Europe.

Korea was a good thing in that it shocked a lot of people to find out how badly our military had declined since the end of WWII, and even in 1953, when I joined the Marine Corps, we were fighting to catch up in men and materiel.

The attacks on 9/11 showed that Clinton's ineffective responses to Osama over eight years gave him the wrong impression, and 9/11 was our wake-up call...and many still are not awake, even so.

Now Mumbai shocked a whole bunch of other people overseas, and some are starting to come to grips with the degree to which THEY are also involved with terrorists, it's not just about the United States being involved in the Middle East

As Mark Steyn (I believe it was) pointed out yesterday, it's really simple: the Muslims want to live under Islamic law, and for the most part the Western World is preventing this. On top of that, the original and continuing goal of Islam was to spread, by force if necessary, until it encompassed the entire world.

The militants, the jihadists, consider even the Muslims who have adopted more moderate ways as being apostates, infidels worse than those who were unbelievers out of ignorance.

And the huge and growing population of young Muslims, unemployed and feeling oppressed, are a growing source of jihadists rather than likely to swell the ranks of the moderates.

It's just like the case of the disaffected youth in America's inner cities: they aren't likely to grow up to become civic leaders.

Does this leave you feeling the same way it does me? Why wasn't he willing to do this the first time he was asked?

General McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington’s power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the “left hook” assault on Iraqi forces.

But it was 9/11 that thrust General McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.

He's essentially a lobbyist. He's been involved in some military procurement plans which have been close to being unethical. And I'd swear that I remember his "color" commentary during the invasion phase of Baghdad where he assured viewers that there would be perhaps 10,000 casualties just in taking Baghdad, alone. I have no way to prove my faulty memory now, however.

Here’s a story you don’t see very often. Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That’s not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can’t imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel — and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press. ...

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Iraq to have relations with Israel anytime soon, but the fact that it may be developing an independent judiciary is good news. It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries. And it’s a reminder that a decent outcome may still be possible in Iraq, especially now that the Parliament has endorsed the U.S.-Iraqi plan for a 2011 withdrawal of American troops.

I wonder if Tom remembers the words George Bush spoke that day on the flight deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, despite the misleading banner reading "mission accomplished"?

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We are pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. ... We are helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave — and we will leave behind a free Iraq. ...

Our mission continues. Al-Qaida is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people. The proliferation of deadly weapons remains a serious danger. The enemies of freedom are not idle, and neither are we. Our government has taken unprecedented measures to defend the homeland — and we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike.

The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide. No act of the terrorists will change our purpose, or weaken our resolve, or alter their fate. Their cause is lost. Free nations will press on to victory.

Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home.

Excerpts from speech made by President George Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003

(My emphasis added.)

It's been right there under your nose all this time, Tom. The recent agreement with the democratic Iraqi government to leave by 2011 is the successful fruition of all that Bush spoke of that morning. We're leaving behind a free Iraq, even as our mission against terrorism continues.

If Iraq can keep improving — still uncertain — and become a place where Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites can write their own social contract and live together with a modicum of stability, it could one day become a strategic asset for the United States in the post-9/11 effort to promote different politics in the Arab-Muslim world.

How so? Iraq is a geopolitical space that for the last three decades of the 20th century was dominated by a Baathist dictatorship, which, though it provided a bulwark against Iranian expansion, did so at the cost of a regime that murdered tens of thousands of its own people and attacked three of its neighbors.

In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem — a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

Big discoveries for Tom about Iraq being the geopolitical center of the Muslim Middle East, even though he can't quite bring himself to say that much. He fobs off the hard job that Iraq turned out to be as all due to Bush's poor planning...funny how that happens, when the other side manages to win as a result of their own efforts. As for the corrupt Iraqi government, we can certainly be proud of ours, can't we?

And we have already begun drawing down our troops, Tom. One of Bush's biggest failures has been his unwillingness to blow his own horn. I would have seen to it that every returning combat brigade--all of the surge troops are home now, but who knew?--would have been meet with a victory parade, maybe even several.

Yes, Tom, tilting the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction was always the goal, from the beginning.

Obama is poised to take the credit for good future results. I have mixed emotions about the man, so I'm watching for one thing from him after he takes office. I want to see if he has the moral courage to recognize what Bush intended to accomplish from the very beginning, as well as remember the old maxim that no battle plans survive longer than the first engagement with the enemy. If he can do that then he'll go a very long way toward getting my full support.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national security credentials than that.

I have to shake my head in dismay at Liberal thinking. Uh, Tom...that's already the situation today, even before Bush leaves. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly glad that my own father gave me an open-ended commitment, that I always knew that I could count on him to be around as long as it proved to be necessary, even though the eventual goal was for me to stand alone. My Dad never said "21 and you're out, that's the deadline". Bush didn't say he'd wait forever, but he also wasn't as unrealistic as some were about how long it might take to establish a democratic government in a land which had never seen one in 6000 years of history. Bush probably read American history and got an idea of how long ours took to create. Even though the process still continues, and always will, you might reasonably argue that it wasn't until 1964 before the American democracy had finished it's initial creation phase.

Regardless, the deed is done and Bush did it. The war is over and the agreement signed before Obama takes office. Obama's major role from here on is to avoid screwing things up by acting precipitously...remember, he's the man who would have had all of our troops out in early 2007, leaving Iraq in chaos. Friedman will certainly agree about that, since he repeatedly mentions how fragile things still are even now.

The court system which Friedman began this column with in such admiring fashion? Already in place. The free press he finds so remarkable in the Arab world? Already in place. The democratic Iraqi government trying to match the U.S. Congress in venality? Already in place.

It's all being handed to Obama on a silver platter, I just want to see now if he is man enough to be properly appreciative of that fact. Friedman is not.

Last weekend, 18 days after Barack Obama decisively defeated their candidate for president, a mostly Republican crowd of self-described conservatives received their first introduction to someone many prominent members of the GOP think could be the party's own version of Obama.

Like the president-elect, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is young (37), accomplished (a Rhodes scholar) and, as the son of Indian immigrants, someone familiar with breaking racial and cultural barriers. He came to Iowa to deliver a pair of speeches, and his mere presence ignited talk that the 2012 presidential campaign has begun here, if coyly. ...

...Jindal is boyish-looking and six years younger than John F. Kennedy was when he became the nation's youngest elected president.

I actually thought that McCain would choose Jindal just for that reason. It is interesting speculating why he did not, but I can't help but wonder if Jindal did not express reluctance and preferred to wait...even if Obama gets 8 years, Jindal will be only 45, two years older than JFK was. Let Palin run in 2012 and get bloodied, Jindal will only look better in 2016 after a second full term as Louisiana's governor.

I think this is the time for Republicans to fall back and regroup, and Jindal can spend the time profitably building a base.

Jindal is, above all else, a political meteor, sharing Obama's precocious skills for reaching the firmament in a hurry. It was just four years ago, after losing a gubernatorial election, that he won election to Congress, and only this year that he became Louisiana's governor, the first nonwhite to hold the office since Reconstruction. And now, 10 months into his first term, the talk of a presidential bid is getting louder among his boosters.

And what does "non-white" mean, since Indians are Caucasians? Only skin color alone? What would an albino African-American be, in that case?

And a har-de-har-har from me, too. I was in New Orleans the late winter/early spring of 1973, still working for Standard Oil, when they came by our desks one afternoon and told us we could leave early if we wanted to because a cold storm was headed our way. I'd never before been told by any Standard Oil supervisor that leaving early was permissible, so my buddy and I, both new to New Orleans, jumped in my car and headed for our apartment posthaste. We were one of the last cars to get over the big bridge across the Mississippi, before it froze solid and became impassable. I don't know how many cars were trapped on the bridge and people spent a miserable night huddled in them. The next morning I awoke to at least 6" of snow in the yard!

Back to color and race, where the WaPo has this column titled "He's Not Black!"

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

Not really. What has happened is that political correctness has replaced vocabulary. The dictionary is quite clear about Mr Obama's status: he is a mulatto, "the first-generation offspring of a black person and a white person".

That no longer sounds like a 'nice' word, so it has been dropped, but the vocabulary is still there, just the same.

I'm a big fan of James Lee Burke, who writes stories centered about Dave Robicheaux, a former New Orleans cop and later a nearby parish deputy sheriff, and he deals with various mixtures of black, white and Indian blood, plus the early French settlers, all of which have created a variety of social and racial types. Very interesting, from an outsiders point of view.

Our multiracial identity was brought home to me a few months ago when I got my results from a DNA ancestry lab. I thought I was a simple hemispheric split -- half South American, half North. But as it turns out, I am a descendant of all the world's major races: Indo-European, black African, East Asian, Native American. The news came as something of a surprise. But it shouldn't have.

Mutts are seldom divisible by two.

Like Obama, I am the child of a white Kansan mother and a foreign father who, like Obama's, came to Cambridge, Mass., as a graduate student. My parents met during World War II, fell in love and married. Then they moved back to my father's country, Peru, where I was born.

I always knew I was biracial -- part indigenous American, part white. My mother's ancestry was easy to trace and largely Anglo-American. But on my Peruvian side, I suspected from old family albums that some forebears might actually have been African or Asian: A great-great aunt had distinctly Negroid features. Another looked markedly Chinese. Of course, no one acknowledged it.

My first wife was a 'lapsed' (or, as she considered it, 'escaped') Mormon. This was back in 1956, when the negative religious aspect the church held towards Negroes, as we called black people back then, was still very much in force. It was religious in origin, not actually racial, however. Anyhow, Mormons are also fanatics about their genealogy, and my wife told me that her family had been traced all the way back to arrival from overseas, England most likely. Interestingly enough, though, there was one entry during the Civil War which was shown only as "Soldier Craft", with no other information, and her family always wondered if this was a name or an occupation, whether it was the result of a rape, and whether or not it the virtual blank represented an erasure because the man might have been a Negro.

In my present wife's case, she was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where the big premium there was not to have any Native American (we used to call them Indians) blood in your family line. Things happen, of course, and Carol is now proud to have some Native American blood in her veins, something which now is admissible if not precisely okay with all and sundry.

And for my own heritage, what do I know? I have only my Dad's word for who his father actually was, the records do not show this information, and he said his father's name was Richard Hamilton, a good Anglo-Saxon name. Other names in my family record are Reed and Gibson. The only other different heritage I know is Dutch, but I haven't tried to trace things very far back, either, so the truth is that I really have no idea what else there might be. I always figured this would be one of the things I did after I was retired and had, ah, plenty of time on my hands. So far things haven't worked out like that, though.

I'm fair skinned and fair-headed (now extremely 'fair', alas) and I don't tan much, even after nearly 9 years living in the Tropics. I wear shorts virtually every day of the year, and short-sleeved tee-shirts, yet there's barely a demarcation line to be seen when I take off my clothes, and I still sunburn if I'm not careful. My people obviously come from northern latitudes where sunburn is not a major worry.

I was transferred to Bakersfield in August of 1971. Don Fissel and I had a technical assistant who was Hispanic, and I was quite surprised one day when we were chatting at coffee break and I learned that he did not consider himself to be "white". I was surprised because I'd always thought of him that way and I didn't really know yet that Hispanics were beginning to feel differently. But the distinction was entirely on his part, not mine, since I didn't really care. My current 5-year-old is probably Nicaraguan on both sides, otherwise half with Costa Rican. The major difference between Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans if often where the two countries have chosen to draw their borders.

Amusingly, the northern border is not the center of the river, as you might imagine, or even one of its banks, but a very short distance into the Costa Rican side. Thus you can live immediately south of the river and be Nicaraguan, yet a few feet further south and you are Costa Rican. Similarly, Guanacaste has alternately belonged to one or the other in recent times. Currently it is Costa Rican.

A good point...except that Obama wrote in his book Dreams from My Father, "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant."

He was the one trying to raise himself to be a black man in America, many of the rest of us were not trying to put him there. I wonder how many people in the civil rights movements are unwilling to come to grips with the fact that a lot of us don't really care one way or the other? When Don and I heard our technical assistant tell us he didn't consider himself to be white we found that interesting, and also surprising because of our ignorance, but it wasn't something that really mattered to us. It did to him, though.

I wonder how many of us are really tired of hearing about it? Or if we do have to hear about it, prefer to talk about historical truths rather than fictions. For instance, the only heritage Obama has which connects him with black slavery, on both sides of his family, is an American white ancestor who was a slave-owner and an Arab ancestor who was a slave-trader. If anything, then, he's the product of the oppressors, not the oppressed.

Doesn't this fact alone make it obvious that judging all of us today based upon the fancied crimes of our ancestors, especially based on skin color alone, should be consigned to the dust-bin of history?

I'd like to see Obama do some healing by pointing out to the nation that if it had not been for the hundreds of thousands of white Americans willing to fight to the death to eliminate black slavery that it would still endure on the southern plantations. Hillary got in trouble just for pointing out that Lyndon Johnson was more essential in passing the Civil Rights Act into law than was Martin Luther King, Jr, because without the presidential signature it would not have become law, and he was a white southerner.

Why not take into consideration that 'racial healing' might also consider making me feel like I'm not considered whitey, the blue-eyed devil, and give me the confidence to walk late at night and alone in a 'black neighborhood'?

I've not only never owned slaves, I've served in the Marine Corps with black Marines and under black officers. I had a black kid for another technical assistant and he used to spend the night at my house occasionally. After a party one night, I once drove a black Realtor home because he was too drunk to drive himself safely...and if that doesn't astonish some of my friends who know how I used to party, I'd be surprised. They probably can't even imagine a situation where I'd be considered the safer driver after a party.

In short, I have no antipathy at all towards black people...but I sure don't believe that they have the same feelings towards me. If Obama can change just that attitude alone he will have been a transformational president when it comes to race.

From another Washington Post column on race, this one written by a young black female rookie political correspondent:

During the long Democratic primary campaign, some voters I talked to worried that racism would curb Obama's hopes. In South Carolina in October 2007, I met hairdresser Margaret Bell, a 63-year-old African American and ardent Hillary Clinton supporter. She was sure that Obama would lose because of his race.

I went back to see Bell after Obama won in Iowa, and she was perplexed. The lifelong Democrat still did not believe that a black man could become president. Bell's shop is in a mostly black Charleston neighborhood that had undergone white flight a decade ago and been left to deteriorate. Her clients are all black women, most of them in their 60s. She can spend an entire day between home and work interacting with only black people. She had no idea -- and no way to know -- whether white voters would support a black candidate. And everything in her immediate experience seemed to indicate that they wouldn't.

Isn't that conflicting? How can she draw from 'immediate experience' when she can go days without interacting with a single white person?

And what does it mean to observe that the neighborhood deteriorated after the white people moved out?

Absent some last-minute fireworks, President Bush will leave office with a kind of double failure on Iran: Administration hard-liners haven't checked Tehran's drive to acquire nuclear-weapons technology, and moderates haven't engaged Iran in negotiation and dialogue.

The strategic balance between the two countries is the opposite of what Bush had hoped to accomplish: Iran is stronger than it was eight years ago, and the United States, fighting costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is weaker. Iran spurns America's carrots and dismisses its sticks.

Now, David, please tell me at which time since they took our embassy away by force right out from under President Carter, when has that last statement not been the case? Iran has grown stronger every year since then, save when engaged in ruinous wars with Saddam, and Iran has always, under several presidents, spurned America's carrots and dismissed its sticks. What carrots and sticks did Clinton proffer that worked? Well, then, how about GHW Bush?

I think you are making a big mistake, common in non-military types, in thinking our military is weaker because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iran. From what I have read, we went into Iraq ill-prepared in terms of arms and equipment, lacking vests and armored Humvees, etc, but none of that is the case today. We've fought two major wars for seven years at a total cost of less than 5000 lives, an incredible statistic! My memory banks keep hearing the old expert, General McCaffrey (ret) saying we were going to lose twice that number just getting to Baghdad, and if he warned us there would be five years of brutal insurgency afterwards then I must have missed that expert call.

I read in the blogs the other day where a Marine platoon was attacked by an ambush of over 200 enemy and the Marines killed about 1/3 of them while losing not a single man to death or even serious injury. One sniper of ours alone got 20 kills...with 20 shots. Yeah, we're definitely weaker.

We're so weak we've already brought the five surge combat divisions back home again because they did their job so well.

Engaging Iran in negotiation and dialogue is merely foolish liberal wishful thinking, because they aren't interested in negotiation and dialogue. America has nothing to offer them that they want, or cannot get elsewhere. Germany, our ally, one of those people without whom Bush should never take independent action, is supplying Iran with everything they need. Oh, yes, we mustn't act without the approval of our allies, especially the Europeans. They're so sophisticated, don’tcha know?

The president-elect’s popularity stands in stark contrast to that of the man he is replacing. President Bush’s approval rating is stalled in the low 20s — and deservedly so. But Bush did at least one thing right in an eight-year tenure characterized by incompetence and hyper-partisanship: He appointed black Americans to the post of secretary of state, the highest position of authority blacks had held before Obama’s election.

Many pundits have already noted that Bush’s failures helped to create a climate in which Obama could win. So did Bush’s singular achievement — the elevation of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. It ought to be noted that it was a Republican, not a Democrat, who broke the barrier that had limited black appointees to the usual Cabinet positions dealing with housing and health.

Many thought Bush's singular achievement was his, ah, hyper-partisan effort with Ted Kennedy called "No Child Left Behind". Yes, that Ted Kennedy. Some, perhaps mostly older folks, thought it was his expansion of medicare. Others thought it was the way he rallied and steadied the country after 9/11, leading to stratospheric approval ratings. A few even thought it might have been the bipartisan creation of Homeland Security, which has helped prevent another successful attack on the United States for seven years now.

But, no...it was appointing not only a black man but a black woman, as well, to represent the face of America to the world. How about Rod Paige as secretary of education, in charge of children both black and white? Bush's Asian and Hispanic appointments apparently counted for less, not even a mention here.

And who is it who has argued precisely the points she makes here? That people who succeed as a result of affirmative action or other artificial means are thereafter forever suspect about their abilities? Not that Ms Tucker is partisan or anything, but being a Republican represents a political failure in her mind. She illustrates this point again a bit later on.

A cynic might suggest a different interpretation. Whereas Ms Tucker sees credibility, the cynic will see gullibility. After all, doesn't the argument go that Bush lied and duped everyone about the war, and hasn't Bush been consistently referred to as a moron, sometimes even an idiot? Wouldn't that make the pool of people he was able to dupe rather limited? But, earlier, Powell had been the general in charge of the first war in Iraq, he'd fought Saddam once already and certainly must have had a better idea than most of Saddam's weapons capabilities. Is it really that easy to dupe a commanding general...by anyone? Powell believed the WMD were there, just like Bush did, and just like all of the world's other intelligence agencies agreed, even those of France and the U.N.

Three years ago, I wrote of my astonishment at seeing the enthusiastic greeting Rice received at the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium when she walked onto the field during a football game’s halftime. I’m an Alabama native, as Rice is, and I remember its oppressive and violent Jim Crow era, as she does.

“She was not the first black person to step onto the University of Alabama’s football field to so enthusiastic a greeting, but she is the first who has never worn a helmet and shoulder pads,” I wrote. “Had I not witnessed the moment myself — in all its magic and wonder — I could not have imagined it.”

Impressed as I was at that moment, though, there were other things I still could not imagine.

“I am not naïve enough to believe that racism is dead, the nation is colorblind or that Rice could be elected president, as some have claimed,” I wrote.

Well, that's the Democrat speaking, because even as shabby a white Republican as I am could easily have pictured either Powell or Rice winning at least the Republican nomination, and I felt pretty sure that Powell would have won the presidency had he chosen to run. That would probably really have conflicted Ms Tucker...a block man running as a Republican, what a political failure that would have been in her mind. Condi Rice also had no interest in running, and although I think she would have gotten the Republican nomination I am less sure about the election because of her inexperience...I expected Obama to lose for that reason alone.

And here's her admirable display of honesty, for which I applaud her, all the more considering what a dreadful opinion she holds of Bush as well as Republicans in general.

But thinking that Bush's singular achievement in eight years was promoting Powell and then Rice to the position of secretary of state, singular only because they are black, is racism pure and simple. Clearly it isn't intentional on Ms Tucker's part, it's simply part and parcel of the way she learned to see the world, growing up in Alabama, and while Condi Rice was her neighbor, Condi managed to escape that way of thinking.

For my part, I'm sorry that Powell and Rice did not choose to run when their time came but I can certainly sympathize with their thinking. I would have felt my own small glow if the first black and maybe the first black female presidents had been Republicans, no doubt about that, and I was happy to see Bush being colorblind when it came to talent. I didn't vote for Obama because I considered him to be less experienced than Palin, if anything, and I don't think Wise Old Joe Biden standing in the shadows behind him, guiding his hand, is an adequate substitute. Now that Obama is elected, however, I feel a great sense of relief and no small measure of hope, it's my fondest wish that he not be a failure for a whole host of reasons, at least one of them racial.

The best Marine I knew in boot camp was one of my fellow squad leaders; I had the 1st squad and he had the 3rd, a black kid from the deep south named Turner...one of the few names I remember from boot camp, now 55 years ago. Turner was a great guy and I paired with him to help confront his tormentors, the 2nd and 4th squad leaders, who were twin brothers from Texas named Smith and who ragged Turner unmercifully, quite upset at the fact that he was their equal.

The rifle range produced the widest simultaneous emotional swing that I can remember having. I got my first rifle when I was 12 years old and I'd been hunting ever since that time, first rabbits and then deer. I had no trouble qualifying as an expert rifleman. Turner had never fired any gun, was scared to death of the noise and the recoil, and couldn't overcome his reflexive reaction. He failed to qualify even minimally. I was in the clouds for myself because I can't really remember any other boot in our platoon who qualified as an expert, but in the depths for poor Turner. He not only felt terrible, himself, but the Marine Corps also places a very high premium on being a qualified rifleman, and failing to qualify meant that Turner had a rough row ahead that he didn't deserve. Perhaps even worse than that, this gave the Smith twins a legitimate reason to grind Turner even harder than before, and all we could do is suffer in silence this time.

I don't want to see that happen to Obama from the Smith twins who still exist in the deep south. Fortunately, I don't think that it will. Despite my reservations, I'm favorably impressed with what I've seen of his actions thus far, so maybe he can succeed despite his inexperience. We all can hope so.