Do you know this feeling waking up in the morning and remembering the glimpses of happiness your dreams leave behind in your mind and make you get up smiling?
By the time you took your shower, hustled to work and turn on the radio … reality sinks in and the dream has vaporized into the fogs of your memory. Yep, no mercy with my dreams, they got their reality check promptly. That is what happened to me, as was to be expected, this morning listening to my beloved "Democracy Now" show.
Now, I need your help, because I, on the one side, respect both of the two men’s view points, I listened to this morning at Democracy Now, on the other side, I hate that I never can make up my mind, where I stand between the two sides. Because … that’s just the way it is. If I am honest with myself, I agree with both of them. But that leaves me somewhat paralyzed.
Amy Goodman (my female role model in journalism) had these two guests on her show this morning:
Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown University. He is a political analyst on MSNBC and Glen Ford, a longtime journalist and executive editor of BlackAgendaReport.com.
Their responses to the Obama’s speech at the convention couldn’t be more heated and opposing each other. Let me say, that I am grateful to have been able to listen to this broadcast. I value both sides’ view points and the fact that I can’t make up to make up my mind is difficult for me to accept.
So, this is to ask you for help making a decision about it, who is more right than the other of the two.
Here (starting at TC 17:16) are the introductory statements by Dyson and Glen Ford:
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: Well, it was—it was electrifying, in the sense that Obama had before him the task of repudiating all of the myths and the lies and the deceptions and the deliberate distortions generated just a week earlier in the Republican convention, but also to rally the base, so to speak. And various aspects of that base had been either disaffected because they felt that they were marginal or that his progressive agenda that he had initially articulated had not come to fruition, but many of them had been chastened by the intransigence of a Republican Congress that refused to acknowledge anything of word that the man could put forth. So he’s operating in a very difficult zone. So he’s got to organize his resistance to the Republicans, galvanize the base, give a speech flowing enough in poetry but rooted enough and public policy. Starting with Michelle Obama a couple nights before that and then Bill Clinton himself, in his vintage form, Obama, I think, took the baton and ran the last leg, and did so with aplomb, with verve and with oratorical flourish.
AMY GOODMAN: Glen Ford, your assessment?
GLEN FORD: Well, it certainly isn’t the sports-like assessment that I just heard from the good doctor. But we at Black Agenda Report have for some time been saying that Obama is not the lesser of evils, but the more effective evil. And we base that on his record and also on his rhetoric at the convention. So, we would prefer to talk about what history-making events have gone down under his presidency.
He’s, first of all, created a model for austerity, a veritable model, with his deficit reduction commission. He’s introduced preventive detention, a law for preventive detention. He’s expanded the theaters of war in drone wars, and he’s made an unremitting assault on international law.And I think that possibly the biggest impact, his presidency—and I’m not talking about his—all this light and airy stuff from the convention, but actual deeds—I think probably what will go down as his biggest contribution to history is a kind of merging of the banks and the state, with $16 trillion being infused into these banks, into Wall Street, under his watch, and the line between Wall Street and the federal government virtually disappearing.
Well, that made me almost drive my car in the ditch. My ears were literally shell-shocked and the following discussion just was outstanding. Please listen to it. There is much more than the transcript on the website so far is giving you.
Just because I know that many foreign listeners from around the world would not have many problems to support the view points of Glen Ford, I think this discussion is worth paying attention to.
PS. The transcript of the whole exchange is not yet available. I can't write a decent diary. I wished someone would pick it up and write a better summary of both men's points of view.
I have to work and can't respond very easily to any comments you might have.