I have planned for several weeks now to write about the enormity of the challenge that Obama must meet in order to achieve for America what he inspires us to hope when he says “Yes We Can!”
Even if he succeeded in winning the nomination in a good, clean fight, I was thinking several weeks ago, the Republican slime machine could be counted on to throw every kind of disreputable mud at him –without regard to truth, or responsibility, or fairness– to discredit him, to frighten the American people, to do whatever it would take to hold onto power.
Evil has had a field day in America, these recent years, and it is not going to yield to goodness without doing EVERYTHING it can to hold onto its dominance. How could it hold anything higher than satisfying it’s own desires? It’s evil.
It is in the nature of evil that it holds nothing higher than feeding its insatiable hungers for more –the greed for more wealth, the lust for more power, the jollies it gets in its twisted way from dominating and humiliating and destroying.
If fairness and truthfulness were values that inhibited those lusts, the past two decades –and especially the past seven years– of American politics would look very different.
So I was preparing in my mind to write about what is required of us –those in the American body politic who both see that evil and yearn for a restoration of basic goodness to our nation– in order to help Obama, the one possible source of such transformational leadership for America, to succeed. Even after winning the nomination, he would need us to help combat how the forces of darkness will do ANYTHING to block his coming to power. And even after winning the presidency, those forces will continue to do ANYTHING to prevent his being able to wield the power of the presidency effectively.
But, as it turns out, the challenge posed by the fact that “Evil is Not a Good Loser” has come earlier in the process.
I am not saying that Hillary Clinton and her campaign are as profoundly possessed by evil as the Bushites, who have perhaps stolen two presidential elections, and who have allowed no law, no rule, no provision of the Constitution to restrain their lust for domination. But Hillary Clinton has herself been traumatized by such ruthless forces in her years in public life, and she has lately shown that she has absorbed some of the spirit of the forces that assaulted her so relentlessly, and that she has made her own pact with the devil.
In substantiating that, I’ll confine myself to quoting this passage from a piece by Gary Hart, “Breaking the Final Rule,” published on March 7 on Huffington Post:
It will come as a surprise to many people that there are rules in politics. Most of those rules are unwritten and are based on common understandings, acceptable practices, and the best interest of the political party a candidate seeks to lead. One of those rules is this: Do not provide ammunition to the opposition party that can be used to destroy your party’s nominee. This is a hyper-truth where the presidential contest is concerned.
By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party’s nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.
Hillary’s bargain with the devil is not as egregious as John McCain’s, back in 2004, when an honest statement from him about the nature of this Bushite regime could have saved this country, and the planet, a huge amount of damage. McCain COULD have earned himself a heroic place in American history by speaking the truth about the Bushites. Yes, it would have cost him the fulfillment of his political ambitions, and perhaps even his place in the Senate. But it would not have cost him his life. So the heroism required was not at the level of that of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in his attempt to defeat the Nazi evil. Even McCain’s just keeping his mouth shut, back in 2004, would have been much better for the country. But such was his willingness to put his ambition ahead of the good of the country that McCain, who surely must know what gangsters these Bushites are, kissed Bush’s ring and helped this presidency maintain its grip on power for another four, terrible years.
No, Hillary’s deal with the devil has not been so destructive as McCain’s, but for all we know that’s because she wasn’t in McCain’s position. Now she’s in a position, as Gary Hart says, where she’s had to choose between her own ambition and the well-being of her party– seeking to take back the White House from a Republican Party that has given us a criminal gang in place of a legitimate presidency. And as Hart says, she’s “revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power.”
She’s shown that if she has to choose between being a good loser and an unscrupulous winner, she’ll choose the path of “it’s all about me and my ambition.” I’ll not say that Hillary is evil. I won’t even say that I’ll refuse her my vote if she’s the nominee. But I will say that she’s shown that –like McCain– when it comes to her ambition she’s sold a vital part of her soul to the devil.
So the confrontation with evil begins now. That requires Obama to respond to the new challenge in a new, creative way that nonetheless still has integrity. And that requires us, who are depending on Obama to lead our way out of the reign of evil, also to find our own powerful and effective ways of meeting the challenge. Evil will not lose gracefully. But it must be defeated.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
"Whether evil masquerades as good in the public eye, or whether evil is cowardly and sneaky in its murderous ways, it has been and still is very powerful in its ability to kill and destroy those who would deny it power to rule over the people. That’s the main problem in the world today."
"Many of us have or had fathers and grandfathers who paid dearly for the freedom they fought and died for during World War II. But, even though that freedom has been eroding due to the greed and folly of spiritually blind men, lasting freedom, as it turns out, is ours to achieve and establish peacefully, together. All we need is the wisdom to acknowledge the way to save and improve our world, and the courage and faith to make it so."
"May God bless the world and every person, every nation, every religion, every race, and every culture, and let no one keep clinging to the misguided notion that theirs is superior to all others."
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