Remember back during the Vietnam War, the whole “hearts and minds” campaign? You know, the one that said we have to win their hearts and minds to get them to trust us? I personally don’t remember it due to my age, but I’ve heard enough about it to have a pretty good idea what it was about. Well, it looks like we have another “hearts and minds” campaign that has been going on since the beginning of this fiasco. But there’s a new hitch: Al Qaeda does it better than us (from CNN.com).

According to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and I quote:

Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon chief said today’s weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

What is troubling about these statements is how ridiculous they are. In a country as poor as Iraq is now, how many people do you think are carrying around Blackberries or have high-speed internet in their homes so they can publish their blog? Hell, we haven’t even secured the country’s infrastructure yet and it’s coming up on 3 years! What Rumsfeld and the rest of the clowns in the Bush Administration don’t get is this: We are losing the so-called “hearts and minds” because they hate our policies, not because we “aren’t spending enough on publicity”! The same reasons why we couldn’t win the hearts and minds in Vietnam apply here with regards to Iraq. It is our policies toward those in the Muslim community and other Arab states that they hate. If we showed them a bit of respect and actually tried to see things from their point of view instead of calling them a part of an “axis of evil”, we might fare a little better.

If this Administration could be trusted, things like this wouldn’t be a problem. But it is a problem. Specifically because they can’t be trusted. How many times since we invaded in 2003 has the message from the Whitehouse changed about why we went to war? First, it was because Saddam had WMDs and we didn’t want the “smoking gun” to come in the form of a mushroom cloud. Next we heard that Iraq was tied to 9/11. Then it was to facilitate regime change so freedom and democracy could be spread throughout the Middle East. And we expect these people to believe us when we hand out our propaganda or drop it from airplanes? The fact of the matter is that our version of “freedom” and “democracy” may not necessarily be what the people of Iraq want. Just look at their election results if you need further proof. Holding elections and everyone who votes getting an ink-stained purple finger may be a great thing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that “freedom is on the march”. The recent Palestinian elections that put Hamas in power are proof of that. Even Iraq’s own elections are proof of that.

If we want to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, we need to change our policies toward Arab countries in the Middle East. Plain and simple. We need to speak language that they understand and I don’t mean Arabic. We need to show them that their concerns are our concerns and then take steps to address them. We need to work with them rather than against them. That is how we’ll win the hearts and minds, not hiring a top-notch PR firm to utilize modern technology to keep telling them the same things we’ve been saying over and over.

The bottom line is that “Hearts and Minds” didn’t work then and it won’t work now.

Got an email yesterday from the Hackett campaign: Hackett’s dropping out.

Apparently, due to pressures from the National Party and lack of support by them, Hackett felt it necessary to remove himself from the race in order to allow the candidate the DCCC wants to win to do so. Presumably this candidate is Sherrod Brown.

One more time someone speaks truth to power and is struck down because of it. Michael of Damn Liberals in Chicago knows exactly how this is since the DCCC’s preferred candidate in IL-06, Tammy Duckworth, is undercutting Christine Cegelis there. Anyone from around that area will remember how well Cegelis did against Henry Hyde.

While this is a blow to startup candidates, it is not the end of the road. Through campaigns like Hackett’s, we have shown Democratic leadership that it is time for a change.

Well, the Superbowl has come and gone and all we’re left with is some faint remembrance of who won. It was New England again, wasn’t it? Just kidding, I know it was Pittsburgh.

Anyway, thoughts of the Superbowl lead me to almost everyone’s favorite part of the festivities: the commercials! It was one commercial in particular that kind of raised my hackles, so to speak: the Ford commercial with Kermit the Frog.

As anyone who grew up in the late `70s - early `80s can attest, “It Ain’t Easy Being Green” was one of Kermit’s oft-repeated mantras on Sesame Street. The very notion that Ford is taking that phrase and applying it to their new-and-improved Flex-Fuel vehicles is disingenuous at best. See, the reason why is that these types of vehicles are designed to run on E85 (85% ethanol - which comes from corn, thereby renewable) as well as good old Unleaded gas. However, what the commercial, and therefore Kermit, fail to tell the audience is that E85 as a passenger car fuel is not readily available. According to an article at Land Development Today, as of July/August last year there were only approximately 300 gas stations throughout the US that offered E85 as an alternative fuel. With the thousands of flexible fuel vehicles on the road now, the prospect of cleaner air gets better everyday–but only if more stations installed E85 pumps.

President Bush, in his State of the Union address last month, stated that America is addicted to oil. Well, like any addict, you need to remove the source of the addiction if you want to truly eliminate the addiction (I know, an addict is an addict for life whether on “the juice” or not). If we as a nation want to truly reduce our dependence on oil, it stands to reason that we will need to expand funding for renewable resources. The downside is that with the ties the Bush Administration has to Big Oil, that isn’t going to happen in as timely a fashion as is needed. The whole prospect of renewable resources could be a boon to the oil companies if they diversified a bit from traditional fossil fuels and expanded into renewable fuels. A similar situation is the one the Recording Industry found itself in the wake of Napster. Now, the RIAA is slowly learning to embrace downloadable music on their own terms, but not before they tried like hell to buck the technology. In the same way, by embracing these alternative fuels as the automakers seems to have done, Big Oil can and will continue to be successful. To do so will ultimately lead to cleaner air, cleaner water, a cleaner environment and better health due to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

For more information on E85 and E85 vehicles click here
National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition

For those of you not “in the know” so to speak, the title of this post harkens back to comments made over a week ago by Paul Hackett, Senate Candidate for Ohio. Like Paul, I also made a committment to comment on the little dustup his comments created. I said I’d do a post on it, and I meant it.

Paul Hackett is becoming a force to be reckoned with in Ohio politics. He is a no-nonsense kind of guy who doesn’t apologize for things he says because he is very thoughtful about what he says and when he says it. To pu it another way, he thinks before speaking, which is something our current crop of elected leaders could do well to learn. Personally, I am sick and tired of the old back and forth that goes on amongst my own Democratic Party. For example, Senator A will make a comment about Congress for Democrats being like living on a plantation. Far be it for the talking heads to report on the meaning of what the aforementioned Senator said, they proceed to lambast said Senator ad infinitum because she made a comment “which could be taken the wrong way”. Senator A then proceeds to have to clarify her remarks on the subject and thus is now on the defensive as Democrats so often are these days.

Paul Hackett is not one of those kind of Democrats. Not. One. Little. Bit. He is a man who served in the United States Marine Corps, both on active duty and in the reserve component. Like most Marines, his language can be pretty salty at times, yet in the arena of politics, his words are always carefully calculated to “put lead on target”.

His most recent comments surround the debate around gay rights. He said this:

With succinct coherence, Hackett said: “I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay-rights, I’m pro-gun-rights. Call me nuts, but I think they’re all based on the same principle and that is we don’t need government dictating to us how we live our private lives.”

When asked to elaborate on being pro-gay rights, he had this to say:

Asked to define being pro-gay-rights, Hackett said anybody who tries to deny homosexuals the same rights, including marriage, as every other citizen is un-American. Are you saying, he was asked, that the 62 percent of Ohioans who voted in November 2004 to constitutionally deny same-sex marriages are un-American?

“If what they believe is that we’re going to have a scale on judging which Americans have equal rights, yeah, that’s un-American. They’ve got to accept that. It’s absolutely un-American.”

Now that is the way to frame this debate. It’s not about cheapening heterosexual or “traditional” marriage. It’s about rights. That’s all that it is, was, and ever will be about no matter how hard the James Dobson’s, Pat Robertson’s, or Fred Phelps’ yell, scream, or protest about it. Hackett goes even further when discussing the GOP candidate, Mike DeWine:

Hackett called DeWine a “professional politician” who “is all over the map on issues,” and who’s afraid to stand up to the “radical religious fundamentalists” controlling the GOP. At that point, Hackett’s candor went on steroids.

“The Republican Party has been hijacked by the religious fanatics that, in my opinion, aren’t a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden and a lot of the other religious nuts around the world,” he said. “The challenge is for the rest of us moderate Americans and citizens of the world to put down the fork and spoon, turn off the TV, and participate in the process and try to push back on these radical nuts – and they are nuts.”

Hackett is saying what a lot of people across the country believe whole-heartedly. I’ve heard from professed Republicans who admit that they don’t like the path today’s Republican Party is taking them down. As expected though, the GOP is trying like mad to spin his comments to their favor:

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett said Hackett should apologize, saying his comments applied to any “people of faith” and, therefore, most Ohioans.

“These intolerant views have no place in the public debate, and I hope his fellow Democrats reject this divisive hate speech,” Bennett said, while calling on Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern to condemn the remarks.

What it all boils down to for Democrats is HOW WE FRAME THE DEBATE!!! For too long we have let ourselves be defined by our opposition. Paul Hackett is one of the few, literally and figuratively, who defines himself. He is a man of strong character, strong faith, and of strong belief that our country can do better. I highly suggest all of you check out his site Hackett For Ohio. Sign up saying you stand behind him as he fights to turn the Democratic Party around by hopefully winning the primary and taking on Mike DeWine.

Nick,

You’ve often asked the question your wife has hit you with concerning why the poor are in considerably worse shape health-wise than in other countries. Well, besides what Scroff, myself, and others have told you in the comments, here’s another post worth reading that should open your eyes just a bit. The post comes to us from Shakespeare’s Sister with content from a special report by the Detroit News. I’ll excerpt a bit, but you’ll have to click the link to get the rest of the story:

Apropos of a discussion going on in another thread regarding economics and healthy eating, I want to take a moment to make a very important point that ought to be of concern to progressives: Health is a class issue. We’re all very understanding about the disparity in healthcare between the upper/middle and lower classes, but we seem not to be quite so keyed in to some fundamental challenges facing low income families when it comes to a disparity in nutrition and the availability of healthy foods.

First of all, it’s important to recognize that many inner city communities have no grocery stores. Period. We’ve likely all heard the term “white flight” that is associated with whites moving out of cities and into the suburbs, and during that time, most cities experienced a “supermarket flight,” too—a phenomenon that has been studied and/pr noted by sociologists, urban planners, politicians, and community leaders concerned about the lack of access to affordable, high-quality and healthy food for inner city residents.

So go on and click the link, Nick. It will help answer yours and your wife’s questions about why the poor in this country are grossly overweight compared to the poor in other countries around the world.

Shakespeare’s Sister - Food for Thought