according to newsweek [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16585614/sit e/newsweek/]IsikoHoff and Hosenball.  Recall anybody?  I haven't found any reaction of CT blue sites.  Does CT even have a provision for recall?  Even
so is there any campaign lit saying he committed himself to a searching investigation of the White House and Katrina?  Did any CT newspapers have anything to say about this?

A crude history of neo-cons and wingnuts.
            Many if not all the neo con's are members of my ethnic group.  That is they are Jewish.  Many were students of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago.  I  think it is important to know and understand what that means for their political positions.  
    Leo Strauss was a refugee from Nazi Germany.  He perceived what happened there as "mob rule": to wit, the behavior of an easily manipulated mob that scapegoated Jews. He came away with a fear of the mob that translated itself into a fear of democracy.
As well as a political scientist Leo Strauss was a scholar of Maimonides.  Maimonides was a Spanish Jew whose family was driven from its home in Cordoba to exile in Morocco by the Almohades, fundamentalist Berber Muslims,  and once there, apparently had to adopt some kind of mask to be perceived as Muslims.  Later of course the family moved to Egypt and he became the physician to the caliph of Egypt, as well as the head of the Jewish community there and a writer of many works, most famously the Guide to the Perplexed.
    So you have two Jewish minds across a span of nearly a thousand years who underwent similar experiences of political social dislocation.  Their direct experience was of mobs of people driven by one hatred or another to attack members of the Jewish community.  It is a scarring experience.  Maimonides himself in talking about the relationship of leaders to the community itself divides up the elite from the ordinary people and indicates that the ordinary people are to be educated only to a certain extent and that only the elite are to debate the deeper and more troubling questions of the law.  Ordinary people are to be led without question.
    Enter Leo Strauss with his education in Maimonides and his experience of the Nazis.  At the University of Chicago he educated an "elite" group of political leaders with the understanding that the demos, the people, are to be lead, treated like a mob and manipulated to place their mob like feelings and behavior where according to the know-all leaders they will do the best.
    Ok, so the neo-cons hook up with a whole series of folks who already lead groups of people by teaching them not to question.  And who, nearly as I can see, are already very upset by the civil rights movement and who have, in any event, already acquired a certain legitimacy from their connection to the Reagan conservative movement.  These folks include the religious right wing ministers, the right wing universities, and the bottom feeders in the more reasonable universities, the frat boys, the DEKE's.  Thus the tone of the right wing takeover is set.  These folks believe that the people is a mob anyway and so they attract both the people who believe that with them and the ones, like the DEKE's (read Karl Rove) who love playing rebel to the virtuous and to whom sneering becomes a life long delight, rather than a necessary phase of early adolescent intellectual development.
    Thus the tone of the quote unquote journalism that comes out of the right wing.  Thus the refusal of the American Enterprise Institute to hear that the people have spoken on Iraq.  For them it doesn't matter what the people say.
    Why do I think we should know this as we proceed to take back the country for democracy and competence.   Because it is important not to sink to the level of their sneering mob and to keep going as if all readers and voters were as smart and thoughtful as we are.
    There is one thing that I want to add because it is important to know that there is not only one reaction to oppression and anti-Semitism.  I was born in the United States just after some of my relatives fled Germany.  I do not remember a time when I did not know about the Holocaust.  I was in college when Hannah Arendt published her chapters on Eichman in the New Yorker and I managed to read them with my heart in my mouth.  What I concluded as she enumerated the countries in Europe where Jews had been saved by the people, was that we are only safe if everyone is safe.  That is why I became a civil rights activist and have remained so to this day.  I was not a holocaust survivor.  I was an American and that allowed me to safely function as an activist.  Although I will say that in the South there were times I felt scared, I never believed that my life was in danger and even if it was I knew my death would not go unnoticed.  That is an enormous difference. I have to say that although I disagree with Strauss, I respect his experience and my heart goes out to this man hollowed out and terrified by his experience.  The neo-cons I still don't get.  How hollow and fearful can they be, growing up here and in influential and well-to-do families? Shame, Shame.

Saw in the NYTimes today that the Saudis had met Cheney with a threat to finance the Sunnis in Iraq against the Shi'ites in the event of a pullout of American troops.  They have evidently recalled their ambassador, alathough that was my conclusion from the language in yesterday's Times.   The Saudis have made clear that they do not want us talking to Iran.   Did any one else pick this up. Impact? Ideas? Responses?

Politics this morning, Saturday December 2, 2006
1. After seeing the post on MyDD from Tagaris of William Jefferson's attack ad (should I say desperate attack ad) which conflated all wedge issues: abortion, gay marriage, and I believe stem cell research, into one lollapalooza of misrepresentation, and reading Dara Dickerson article in Salon on the right wing black ministers throwing the gays out of the boat I said, Wow.  we have a problem.  
     The African-American voting bloc has always been made up of Democrats, or rather since FDR. (The best campaign song ever written is still Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.) They have always been hard to get out as voters but once out, reliable. During the David Duke-Edwin Edwards race for governor I remember driving my van into the poorer areas of the lower ninth ward in New Orleans (now uninhabited) with two large male Tulane undergraduates in the middle seat to pick up and transport to the voting precinct in the Martin Luther King Center, old ladies that could not get themselves out of the house to shop for groceries.  Each came with a small sheet of paper on which was written numbers.  I wheeled one voter into the booth and she said I'll read you the numbers, you vote.  There were no names connected with the numbers.  I did check to make sure I was voting for Edwards and not Duke when I pulled the lever for her, but otherwise, even I didn't bother to read the names connected with the numbers.  Do other precincts number their slate places? Louisiana certainly did.  In any event Edwards took the New Orleans precincts by 89 percent and won.  But I at least had an uncomfortable nudge from my conscience.  Not for that race, after all the bumper stickers all over uptown read "Vote for the Crook--It's important".  But something to file for later.  It's true voting is a public communal event, but it's also a private individual event.  It was the last part that seemed unavailable to the New Oreans poor and black.  
    All these ruminations are leading me to say that it has to be not enough to get the endorsement of the ministers, there has to be discussion and discourse.  When Deval Patrick began his run for governor, a very grassroots efforts, incidentally, he went to the ministers, who had campaigned with the right wing ministers against the SJC's decision to include gay persons under the rubric of the equal protection clause, and he told them he supported the right of gays to marry and they would have to live with that.  I am sure he had had many private meetings with one or another of them until they got it and agreed to have him make that announcement.  He could not have taken the Democratic party in Massachusetts without it.  I do not know what the black ministers in Boston are doing now.  In a sense it doesn't matter.  The issue is pretty much decided here and in New Jersey and of course as the NYTimes pointed out nothing catastrophic has happened.  Married people are the quietest most ordinary of us, getting up early to get the kids ready for school, earning a living, etc, etc.  They probably don't even get up to write blogs because they don't have the time.  And their kids, normal and various, beloved and smart.  The truth is God loves them as much as anybody problably more.  God loves a courageous human.  Maybe that is what God is, human courage.
    My I am getting off the topic.  All I think I can say, without proposing a whole other educational system, is that it is important that we think carefully about the African American voting bloc when we go to campaign.  It is important that we start talking about issues among the people in the neighborhoods(that's what they a re called in New Orleans anyway) and not just who the ministers and the groups support.  Oh yes and try to do something about those lists of numbers.

Just read you are sending Tagaris to Nw Orleans. New Orleans very different from Connecticut. Got back home to Cape Cod from NO yesterday.  Myself I spent twenty-one years in NO as civil rights attorney and public defender.  I loved the city. T. needs to take a tour of the affected areas: Lakeview, New Olreans East, Lower Ninth. I think there is no one in the city who is not suffering from Post traumatic stress disorder.  There is an untouched sliver by the river where the houses are beautiful and the children go to private school.  But please note that those who live in the untouched sliver have always been the most priveleged.  Not to quibble though.  They will support Karen Carter.
I saw vitality in New Orleans East, a much more mixed and integrated area.  Every time you see a trailer parked in front of a house you are looking at someone trying to put a life back together.  If you go to the lower Ninth ward you see how horrible the poverty was, even before Katrina, that Bill Jefferson (always known as Dollar Bill) cheerfully used to support his corrupt office tenure.  There are rumors that one of the groups across the river will support Jefferson because they think he'll be indicted and then they can put their man in to run.  I forgot his name.  I honestly don't think it will happen.
But watch what people are saying about Bobby Jindal and the bill to establish drilling on the continental shelf.  They think that LA will get some money out of it.  Be careful with that.  Jindal is a very conservative guy but people in NO believe he is fighting for them.  Nuff said.