H.N.I.C. Rebukes G.O.P.

For years, Colin Powell has been the Republican Party's favorite black man, their beloved "Head Negro In Charge" who didn't threaten any of the Party's leading presidential contenders because he was not going to run for president. He was their light skinned Morgan Freeman - wise, solemn, with a dignity and a bearing that made him the conservative movement's bulwark against the Jessie Jackson's and the Al Sharpton's, an accomplished, polished, no nonsense kind of black guy whose dynamic personality appealed to the GOP's free enterprise capitalism ideologists.

You couldn't have ordered a black actor from central casting, if Morgan Freeman was busy, who could better play the role of the Republican Party H.N.I.C. than Colin Powell. Which is why Sunday's announcement of him coming out in support of Barack Obama was all the more heartbreaking for John McCain and his allies.

In an excerpt from a piece of short fiction I wrote a couple of years ago, titled The Black Folks Guide To Survival, I expounded on the Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice's images within the power structure, and how they were relevant to any young black professional who had his eyes on the executive suite:

There are ex-Crackers out there, especially the ones you work with, who wonder why we all can’t be like Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell – smart but not uppity, aggressive but not angry, ambitious but not power hungry.

As unpopular as some of the decisions are that Rice and Powell have made in our community, they are still two black folks in blue suits using complex language on television to articulate their thoughts.

DO NOT FALL FOR THE OKIE DOKE! Condi and Colin don’t want to get to the top spot in their organization. You do. If your goal is to be “The Man” in your organization, you are going to have to take the gloves off and duke it out sometimes.

As I watched Powell calmly and methodically lay out his reasons for supporting Barack Obama, his mannerisms seemed reminiscent of those of a high school principal who has gotten tired of his students who are perpetual troublemakers. His blunt assessment of his own party's failings was probably the most candid seven minutes of presidential election commentary that has been shown this year.

The talk radio court jesters didn't miss a beat, mercilessly pounding on the validity of Powell's actions since then, but what they don't seem to realize is they are not talking about O.J. Simpson.

Colin Powell has stood in foxholes.

Colin Powell has commanded battalions.

Colin Powell has four stars to go along with the rank of general.

Colin Powell has been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Colin Powell has served as the Secretary of State of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Beside Powell's thoughtful, measured comments, these radio shills sound like all the other pretend Republicans and fake conservatives who feel the need to cling to a rigid ideology instead of allowing their thinking to be guided by core principles. The "Straight Talk Express" can't haul much more of this hypocrisy - the wheels were already starting to fall off of the McCain campaign.

Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts are trying to turn the clock back to 1945, when black soldiers who fought to keep America free were supposed to get back in their "place" when their ships hit our shores. When the black man's opinion, whatever his station in life, only mattered when the rest of the country wanted it to matter.

The drumbeat on the airwaves, the kind of revealing dialogue being shown between these scared white men and their audiences about what THEY'RE feeling - by last night, when the evening news shows came on, I had become more than a little ticked off, partly at myself for lumping this rhetoric into the same old "this is the kind of shit black people have to put up with" and partly at the way the media pundits had taken out their toolkits to subtly reshape the boundaries of discussion, imperceptibly pointing their commentator colleagues into directions they were more familiar with.

If our faith-based friends would only exhibit a little more "faith" in the process, instead of worrying about what they see in front of them, I think they will be able to get through this.


Because Colin Powell and Barack Obama are going to be black for a long time.

Doing The Colin Powell Bounce

In the last twelve hours, I've heard Chris Rock advise white people on when it is appropriate to use the word "nigger" in public, come across a very recent photo of Colin Powell doing the "Colin Powell Bounce" on stage in London, watched the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin replace her own alter-ego in a cameo appearance on a comedy show AND sing along to a rap song that makes fun of her own candidacy, all capped off by the announcement that Barack Obama's campaign raised $150 million dollars in September.

Whew!

Then "The Last Boy Scout", Colin Powell, decides to finally announce his presidential election endorsement, after shaking up his image this week with an impromptu performance on stage with a hip-hop group.


Powell commented at the Africa Rising Festival on Tuesday in London, ""I stand before you tonight as an African-American. Many people have said to me you became secretary of state of the USA, is it still necessary to say that you are an African-American or that you are black, and I say, yes, so that we can remind our children.

"It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history. I didn't just drop out of the sky, people came from my continent in chains."

Colin Powell was back to his stone-faced self this morning, though, as he praised Barack Obama, criticized John McCain, and then looked into the Meet The Press camera and said "I'm voting for Barack Obama." His announcement got the cable news pundits atwitter, with some of them, especially the ones on CNN, reading so much into the phrases he used that you thought they were fortune tellers instead of journalists.

Watching Newt Gingrich on the George Stephanopoulos show, I had to force myself to remember that he had been a college professor before entering politics, because the stuff coming out of his mouth this morning was more ridiculous than usual as he recited a laundry list of "leftist" and "liberal" policies that were about to be unleashed by Obama and Congress on the American public.

To hear Gingrich say that Democrats wanted to "redistribute" the hard earned money of ordinary Americans almost made me fall out of my chair. We just gave the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the country to the smallest, most personally financially secure sliver of citizens EVER, a "redistribution" that will dwarf anything coming down the pike for years, and people who can add "2 + 2" are supposed to react to smug faced sound bite?

The thing all the Democratic pundits missed was an opportunity to hammer home Powell's endorsement. The reality of Powell's decision is that he threw his support behind the most conservative candidate in the race. If you can see beyond the rhetoric of the hot button issues, what you've got is what you always get when a black guy rises to a high level in America - someone who does their homework and is prone to act out of an abundance of caution.

I need to go practice my dance steps - looks like Powell might have a few moves on me.

Dense & Intense - This Week On The Web

In the course of keeping up with the news and doing research, I come across some great stuff you might not see in your hometown newspaper or on the nightly news.

Dense & Intense - This Week On The Web is a compilation of longer, more detail-oriented stories and humor pieces that caught my eye during the week.

COLIN POWELL "gettin' jiggy wit it"

In the few short months I’ve had this blog, I’ve come across some pretty interesting blogs that I have listed on my blogroll that runs down the right hand column of your screen. I really like the feature the Blogger platform provides that presents a snippet of each blog’s latest post – it gives me a running list of headlines, kind of like my own presidential election newspaper. So this edition of "Dense & Intense" is devoted to the bloggers I read.

If you haven’t visited any of the blogs on my blogroll before, click on a few links. The things that stood out for me this week are:


Moderate Left - "Dead Cat Bounce"

Booker Rising - "Quote Of The Day"

Cogitamus - "Barack Obama"

Donklephant - "Why A Powell Endorsement Matters"

Jack and Jill Politics - "Obama Raises More Than 100 Million In September"

Keep It Trill - "What About Jamal The Plumber?"

Oliver Willis - "Bush Led Kerry At This Point In 2004"

Political Irony - "Jesus Hussein Christ"

Writes Like She Talks - "Will The Real Anti-Americans Please Stand Up?"

Slacktivist - "Racism and Litigation"

The Field Negro - "KILL HIM! - The Sarah Hate Tour, Continues"

Wearing Obama Everyday - "Day 43: The Word On The Street"

FiveThirtyEight.com - "On The Road: Western Pennsylvannia"

The Black Snob - "21 Days and Counting"





This picture by Art Maggot can be found HERE.