From the people who brought you "Cindy Sheehan: Uncovered" and "The Rise, Fall and Rerise of Chavez", comes the stunning and long-awaited conclusion to the Gnarls Barkley trilogy.
The debate has flustered the unflusterable for years: Is Cynthia "All that is Woman" McKinney the epitome of black pride and achievement, bravely sticking up to the entrenched powers that be in Washington? Or is she a "female dog, you crazy?" nutty nutbagger from the Land of Oz?
Probably a little of both. If we had a caucus of McKinneys in Congress that might be a problem. But we don’t and the House could use some god damn diversity. Cynthia’s recent primary defeat has left Congress without a single Tupac-quoting representative (She really did quote him. And it was awesome). Frankly, that’s a damn shame. It was nice to have a real person in there for a while. Now we have to start from scratch and search for 435 actual people to represent us.
August 24th, 2006
Hugo Chavez - Not perfect, not crazy.
August 21st, 2006
What do Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney and Hugo Chavez all have in common? They’re card-carrying members of Club Crazy. Or not.
First, a little unimportant background: In my exhaustive search of a handful of google links I came across a couple articles by The Guardian’s Greg Palast. Turns out that hack had written a piece on McKinney and one on Chavez saying exactly the same stuff I’m talking about. Poorly written, but let’s face it, I had no intention of writing this post any other way than poorly. Point is, this isn’t exactly groundbreaking, uncharted territory. Nevertheless, my journey continues.
One of the problems contributing to the condemnation of said individuals is our own willingness to form split-second opinions based on limited tv snippets, soundbites and maybe some anecdotal evidence garnered from all of one source. Now, just out of necessity and limited hours in the day, we make assessments like these all the time. And usually, if it looks like it, tastes like it and smells like it, it’s a good thing we didn’t step in it. But when looking at our political leaders, the ramifications of these evaluations get bigger, commensurate with the effort exerted to sway our opinion by interested parties, and this is when we need to withhold reflexive judgments.
The easiest of these three cases is Cindy Sheehan. Youtube up a few clips of her. Check out some of her posts on Huffington’s site. Not crazy. In interviews she is patient, calm, focused, sweet, even. She doesn’t like our president. She doesn’t like the war. She loves every human being from here to Baghdad. Fair Enough.
She gets a little bit angrier in her writing. Even there, all we see is that the woman is adamantly opposed to a lot of the idiotic policies of this administration, does a good job of explaining this, and thus gets a pass. She also has the whole Gandhi revival thing going on, with the fasting and the mentions of nonviolent resistance. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems a little forced. Bottom line, she’s a good gal to have around. Not really even that extremist.
By the by, this is a three-part series. Like the Lord of the Rings. To give our poor reader some much needed rest and time for recovery. Thank you for your continuing patronage.
August 16th, 2006