occupy wall street #1: mr. jesse lagreca - fox news' worst nightmare

am i the last person on earth to see the fox news interview of mr. jesse lagreca that happened earlier this week? the one they refused to air?

todd the merman told me about this interview in passing earlier today when i was wandering through the brooklyn flea with him and mpb. to tell you the truth, i almost didn't believe him. it sounded like something he made up: a generic looking fox news producer named griff jenkins plunges into the crowd in the heart of occupy wall street territory to find someone that will answer a few basic questions about the movement. sounds easy, right? especially easy when you think of the way fox news tends to twist questions and tilt everything towards their side of the argument.

he ends up with what looks like a fairly harmless victim -- an expressionless, clean shaven, pudgy looking white guy in a civil war cap. who would have guessed that guy was jesse lagreca, a freelance writer and frequent commentator for the daily kos. mr. lagreca proceeded to give this producer a gigantic smackdown of epic proportions politically on camera that has reverberated around the world, one internet click at a time.

of course, fox refused to air the footage. this from the "fair and balanced" network, after the producer said that they were there to give voice to whatever he had to say. (and yes, he said that on camera.) that's okay, though, because someone shot the interview. that footage exploded onto the internet and now media outlets all over the planet are interviewing mr. lagreca, including abc news' this week with christiane amanpour on sunday. i can't wait to hear what he's got to say next.

if you'd like to read a transcription of the following video, click here.



...and here's a pretty cool follow up interview.

ralph nader is right

no, ralph nader did not call president elect obama an uncle tom -- though him using that term was enough to send everyone at fox news off the deep end in an indignant self-righteous huff.  i suppose that's the way some behave whenever anything racial is mentioned, which makes their behavior even more suspect to me.  sometimes all it takes is a little context and some real live perspective to understand what's going on.

what he basically said was that obama can either be a president of the people or he can be a corporate tool.  and you know what? he's right.  

this video is of mr. nader defending his initial remarks beautifully, in spite of the interviewer's attempts to bully him.

yikes.

what they're not showing you...

frankly, i was pretty shocked when i saw this: father michael pfleger, a long-time chicago activist and catholic priest defending rev. jeremiah wright and minister louis farrakhan. on second thought, it only makes sense. father pfleger knows both of these men and their work and history in the community very well, and considers them friends and colleagues. even on video, his righteous indignation is almost tangible. what shocked me was that any white anyone was coming to their defense in public.

it's way more than that, though. anyone that's really been paying attention knows that certain members of the religious right have said things that were way more inflammatory than anything that's ever come out of rev. wright's mouth. according to pat robertson and jerry falwell, it was the gays, the feminists, the ACLU, the 40 million abortions and more that have infuriated God and brought his wrath against us via the 9/11 terrorist attacks and hurricane katrina. it wasn't our foreign policy or our political involvement and nefarious goings on in the middle east and in other parts of the world. it wasn't COINTEL-PRO. or the FBI. and it definitely wasn't the CIA. oh, no. it was gloria steinem.

why haven't you seen any 30 second clips in the media of this father on fire in his pulpit defending rev. wright, with the white people in his congregation standing up and cheering him on? why won't the media show this over and over again?

what's clear is this: when white people in positions of authority speak against the government, they're being critical and are lauded as heroes; when black people criticize the government, it's considered treason and they are dangerous and subversive.

ps: sorry you've got to sit through the oh-so "fair and balanced" FOX News if you watch this clip -- but how one-sided they are only underscores my point.

the problem with obama's minister

i think it's important to read as much as possible from every and any perspective about the issues that concern this campaign (and of course, the war). this article is one that you're not likely to hear on the "fair and balanced" reporting that doesn't happen at ultra-conservative right-wing arch-republican FOX News. so i thought i'd post it here.

frankly, when taken in context, i agreed with much of what obama's minister said. i challenge anyone to take what he said in context and examine his words closely. want an example? it's true that the Klu Klux Klan in its inception was a terrorist organization that was condoned by the government -- and truth be told, they still are. they systematically murdered hundreds of thousands of black men, women and children and used terrorist tactics to intimidate and control them.

no one has ever acknowledged this publicly on a national level. no one puts this in schoolbooks and such so we can all learn about our collective past as americans. and definitely, no one has EVER apologized for it.

how could hard-working, tax-paying american citizens be treated this way? how could the american government stand by and let this happen to its citizens for more than a hundred years? why is the Klu Klux Klan still alive and well in this country? why hasn't the government called them the terrorists that they are and dismantled them?

i was talking to this aging white hippie the other day who agreed with much of what rev. wright said as well. and in a way, that's to be expected. think about it. old hippies are always going off about "the man" and "the government" and "foreign policy" and our tax dollars being used to fight unnecessary wars, because they lived through it in the 60s and 70s. the war in iraq is only the latest in a long line of dirty deeds done at our expense. there are many people in the world who've observed our foreign policy from a distance for quite some time and many more who are still living through its damaging aftereffects. it's lunacy to think that we could do so much harm in the world under the guise of freedom and democracy and not eventually have any of it impact us in some horrible way. according to that old white hippie, that's just not the way karma works.

the problem with obama's minister isn't that he's divisive or racist or homophobic or anti-semitic. (i mean, come on. didn't i just describe most of the presidents we've ever had? didn't i just describe nixon? get this: president wilson loved the movie birth of a nation and was completely and utterly pro-KKK. but i digress.) the problem is that rev. wright is not a well-dressed, well-heeled conservative white man -- because if he was pat robertson or jerry falwell, people may have batted an eyelash but it wouldn't have upended someone else's presidential bid. remember when they said that hurricane katrina happened because new orleans was a modern day sodom, that 9/11 happened because of the sins of the nation? who rushed to denounce them? i don't recall a national furor on a level that would come anywhere near what rev. wright has experienced. well. actually john mccain made a statement against what they said. but he needs the votes of the religious right, so he's taken all of that back now.

why isn't anyone focusing on the divisive things these conservatives said in comparison to rev. wright, or john mccain's latest flip-flop? you tell me.

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Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said The Same Thing, He Was An American Hero by Frank Schaeffer

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here's Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:

If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]... then at a certain point force is justifiable.

And this:

In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools... There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union....

Then this:

There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate... A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates it's authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation...

Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).

Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad's statements.

Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words "godly" and "prophetic" and a "call to repentance."

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to "bear arms" as "insurance" to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as "fallen away from God" at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.

Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama, and the "progressive" Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post "[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy.' (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/im-already-against-the-n_b_90628.html )

Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the "scandal" of Obama's preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama's minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back