On Marcin Wasilewski

My review of pianist Marcin Wasilewski and his trio, in today's Inquirer.

Hillarygaffes

Think Hillary's RFK gaffe is bad? Why isn't anyone talking about her far worse Zimbabwe gaffe? Via Yglesias yesterday:

Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when "people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded."

"We're seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," Clinton explained. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people," Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

Do I even need to continue? In Zimbabwe people are being beaten, terrorized and starved. HRC goes well out of her way to invoke their plight for her own ends, with this nonsensical comparison. These are the words of someone unfit to lead the United States.

McWhorter on conscious rap

"Why The Roots make cool art, but lousy politics," goes the headline of John McWhorter's three-page discourse on "conscious hip-hop." McWhorter's a conservative fellow — I mean that literally, he's a fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute — with a deep appreciation of rap but a contrarian take on the employment market, the prison-industrial complex and so forth. Lots of statistics and sociology in the piece, and some undeniably good one-liners: "Did black men start leaving their children to be raised by their mothers alone because the Lutzkys no longer lived down the block? Are black boys shooting each other practically for sport because the Houlihans moved away?" Well, yes, in part, if the post-Lutzky neighborhood was subsequently abandoned and left to rot by city, state and federal governments...

Ok, plenty to argue over, and it will be.

When McWhorter turns to the rap group dead prez, however, he misses something big: he doesn't touch upon the group's actual political affiliation, which is something I wrote about online in 2004 for The New Republic. The link is inoperative, but what I argued was this: dead prez is a willing propaganda arm for the African People's Socialist Party, a cult outfit run by the charismatic orator Omali Yeshitela (born Joseph Waller). Chairman Omali, as he's referred to admiringly on dead prez's album RBG, appears here frequently in Philadelphia. Last year I went to hear him speak and saw a befuddled audience, mostly newcomers, get strong-armed into a standing ovation before the first word — a guy in the back of the room started shouting, "Stand up if you believe this! Stand up!" Here on YouTube is Omali speaking on the evil that is Barack Obama, under the headline "White Power in Black Face."

McWhorter writes of conscious rap not being truly progressive, but in the case of dead prez I'm not sure he knows the half of it.

He's right, however, to identify dead prez and The Roots as part of the same political milieu, even if The Roots haven't taken positions nearly as extreme. dead prez appear as honored guests on Dave Chappelle's Block Party DVD, on which The Roots are the house band. Mos Def had dead prez on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and said, "They make me feel like I'm in high school again, be wantin' to be down with them so bad, whatever I could do, cheerlead, mascot..." Of course, Mos Def thinks 9/11 was an inside job, so there you go.

McWhorter's right: Radical hip-hop can make for amazing music. And arguments about jobs, the criminal justice system and so forth need to be had. But the problem with dead prez, and the de rigueur praise the group has inspired, goes even deeper.

Where to begin?

“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch.

This appears early in Jodi Kantor's piece on Florida Jews and the election. Since Obama's "attitude towards Israel" is roughly 100 percent supportive, it's hard to know what Ms. Weitz means. But it becomes clearer further down in the piece:

“His father was a Muslim and you can’t take that out of him,” said Ms. Chotiner, 51, who said she would still vote for Mr. Obama, out of Democratic loyalty. “Do I have very strong reservations? Yes, I do,” she said.

Ok, still a vote for Obama, but imagine the sentence as, "His father was a Jew and you can't take that out of him." It could come from the mouth of a Klansman.

It needs to be said that as a community, American Jews defy easy assumptions. There are Jews with yarmulkes who are to the left of Obama. There are secular Jews who'd think nothing of scarfing down pork on Shabbat who are nonetheless implacable Zionist hardliners. As for Florida's old guard, they're stuck in the past on the subject of Israel, and their words reflect not so much political analysis as Pavlovian response. Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg, in separate NY Times editorials this past Sunday, did much to clarify what's wrong with the assumptions embedded in many of the statements in the Kantor piece. Hopefully these arguments will make a dent between now and November.

I don't agree with Goldberg on everything, but I like the fact that he's a target of scorn on the radical left and the radical right. One hard-right blogger, Pamela Geller (imagine Ann Coulter with a lobotomy), has attacked Goldberg as a "Jewicidal jihadi." She has almost no capacity for rational thought — and over six million page views.

I want to say things are looking good for Obama, but a serious battle lies ahead.

[Meanwhile, here's Jeffrey Toobin on McCain's insidious agenda for the Supreme Court.]

The Israel-Syria talks

My good friend Yigal Schleifer of the Christian Science Monitor on the lead-up to the current Israel-Syria negotiations in Turkey.

From Cali to Gambia

The welcome news from California on marriage equality has generated lots of reactions, so I thought I'd note something quite in the other direction: this headline, via Brett at Harry's Place — "President plans to kill off every single homosexual." That'd be President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, the tiny sliver of a country that bisects Senegal. In preparing for my Senegal trip in February (see here, here, here, here), I read a fair amount about Gambia, and I knew its democratic record was pretty well tarnished. Didn't know how much.

Murder by inaction

It is to the Chinese government's credit that it is acting aggressively in response to the Sichuan earthquake, a tragedy beyond comprehension.

But this shouldn't obscure the destructive role China continues to play in the unfolding Burma crisis. Discussing the aftermath of Cyclone Nagris on the NewsHour the other night, Chinese ambassador Zhou Wenzhong told Margaret Warner:

I think we also need to respect Myanmar. Eventually, it's up to the people there to do the rescue. ... Others can only provide help. I think the people in Myanmar have to provide the rescue, the kind of rescue by themselves, eventually, fundamentally speaking.

MARGARET WARNER: But what if 500,000 people more are at risk because the government refuses to accept the assistance that it pretty clearly needs to?

ZHOU WENZHONG: I think they are not really refusing foreign assistance. They are receiving foreign assistance. Actually, lots of foreign assistance is beginning to arrive in Myanmar. And they are getting organized.

They're getting organized in terms of stealing the emergency aid, in fact. Otherwise, the junta is content to let the cyclone victims rot, literally. If the generals allowed a concerted international relief effort, it would expose their xenophobic state ideology as an edifice of lies. Retaining power is all that matters, and the more people die, the fewer the regime needs to imprison or shoot.

[PS - Chinese pressure is perhaps the only thing the Burmese generals would respond to, but China has scuttled any UN action on the matter.]

"I hope we will give them some time to get further organized," says ambassador Zhou. Translation: Let's proceed according to the regime's needs and priorities, not the victims'. From today's NY Times:

Tom Malinowski, the Washington Director for Human Rights Watch, said that the international community was walking a tightrope. “We get a tiny foothold for humanitarian aid, and for fear of losing that hold, we operate on the junta’s terms,” he said. “Nobody wants to lose the 30 visas they gave us.”

China alone could make the difference here and chooses not to.

The Olympic Games are meant to celebrate human achievement in a context of global fellowship. This summer the Games will provide comfort to a government indirectly responsible for Burmese deaths on an epic scale.

[Update: The U.S. has some shaping up to do as well:

Both President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush have been personally engaged in the Myanmar issue, administration officials say, but one official said that beyond the President and First Lady, there is no one single high-ranking American official who has taken charge of America’s response to Cyclone Nargis.

Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, has been consumed with his efforts to negotiate a North Korea nuclear deal, while R. Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s former undersecretary for political affairs, has left the government, with no successor in place. Henrietta Fore, the head of USAID, has come under fire for appearing in a photo on the airfield in Yangon, smiling as she shook hands with a Myanmar official. Human Rights advocates said that such photos will almost certainly be used by the military junta as propaganda.

There has been some discussion, a second senior administration official said, of whether the United States and France should crack down on Chevron and Total for their work on a natural gas pipeline in southern Myanmar, from which the military junta derives much of its wealth. American sanctions against Myanmar ban most companies from working there, but Chevron owns a 28 percent stake in the pipeline, which is operated by Total. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that so far, talk of suspending Chevron payments to Burma have not gone very far.]

McCain: appeaser?

John McCain was for negotiating with Hamas before he was against it. (Via.)

On that note, David Brooks has an interesting column about Obama on Hezbollah. He starts out skeptical, even hostile, then presses Obama further and gets a remarkably nuanced set of answers on the Lebanon crisis.

Obama is striking exactly the right balance: No to Bush's cowboy diplomacy, no to ultra-left apologetics (or worse) for terror. Negotiate, don't accommodate.

All this hypothetical talk about the need to engage Iran can make you forget that the U.S. has already been negotiating with Iran. (At least until recently.) In the recent Basra fighting, as Fred Kaplan has noted, the U.S. and Iran were on the same side.

Anyhow, Bush has quite a nerve to lecture the next president on foreign policy, huh?

The week on disc (18)

In case you missed the last one...

Ellis Marsalis, An Open Letter to Thelonious (ELM)

Francisco Pais Quintet, School of Enlightenment (Product of Imagination)

Bill McHenry Quintet, Sonic Pressure (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Yitzhak Yedid, Oud Bass Piano Trio (Between the Lines)

Enrico Pieranunzi, As Never Before (Cam Jazz)

The Roots, Rising Down (Def Jam)

On Michael Pedicin

My review of saxophonist Michael Pedicin and his quintet, in today's Inquirer.

Quote for the day

We’re giving the people of Zimbabwe another opportunity to mend their ways, to vote properly. This is their last chance. 

— A member of Zimbabwe's ruling party politburo, on the upcoming runoff "election"

[Via.]