Ok haterz, my latest thoughts on the US presidential election are these: most likely scenario is that John McCain is going to win and Iran will get bombed. Second most likely scenario is that Hillary Clinton will win, after some sort of about turn among Democratic party superdelegates, and Iran will get bombed. The third most likely scenario is that John McCain is going to win and Iran will not get bombed. It is hard to see any circumstances under which Obama might win, since his campaign will be overshadowed by intense media focus on his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
The best possible outcome, for people who don’t want to see another catastrophic war, would be the third scenario outlined*. I have no doubt that Clinton would bomb Iran without blinking, and would be just as aggressive as an unrestrained McCain in the pursuit of what is often described as ‘protecting US interests abroad’. The third scenario would be achieved by Obama running an unsuccessful campaign, during which Jeremiah Wright appears on every news show imaginable, speaking at length about US foreign policy, race, class, and any other subject that takes his fancy.
A letter to the Washington Post illustrates the sort of effect he might have:
Like millions of Americans, I watched clips from the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.‘s sermons and thought the man was just another demagogue. But then I listened to his recent speech before the NAACP in Detroit and got the opportunity for the first time to hear a full expression of his ideas and opinions.
He is being mischaracterized by the media and others. He is a great and thoughtful speaker whose views on history, religion and race make perfect sense to me, a patriotic white American.
As he himself notes, Wright is unencumbered by the need to get elected, and could use the platform provided to denounce the blind racist imperial arrogance of the US system. He could make a series of increasingly strident accusations that Obama in fact shares his view that US shouldn’t drop bombs from a great height on civilian populations, and so on. Obama would then have to come out and denounce these outrageous views every night on prime time TV. At some stage, after a couple of months of listening to media pundits raking over every detail of Obama’s failure to call full-bloodedly and unequivocally for the bombing of everyone everywhere, the penny would drop for hundreds of millions of people in the US, who would begin to realise the need to dismantle the US military industrial complex and its TV channels, and by the time McCain got elected he wouldn’t be able to bomb Iran because it’d be ‘politically impossible’, as the saying goes.
*I never said it was a likely scenario.
Update: Dennis Perrin on liberal hatred of the Wright. I liked this:
Digs wasn’t the only lib throwing spitballs at Wright; nor was she alone in denouncing Wright’s “egomania” and “self-aggrandizement” (some added that Wright “envies” Obama’s success, and thus wants to tear him down, because, you know how certain brothers get when another begins to rise). These epithets are swiftly employed when liberals sense that their worldview is being challenged. Ralph Nader was and remains a selfish egomaniac, while Al Gore just wanted to serve his country. Jeremiah Wright borders on the sociopathic, while Obama and Hillary are merely exploring ways to save this great nation. And of course, there’s nothing egomaniacal about liberal bloggers and commentators sliming Wright while telling Obama what he must do and when he needs to do it. They’re simply humble patriots, heads held high under fluttering flags, doing their bit for the US of A.
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