The Baumgarten Report

McConnell

There are those who argue that the United States will be less secure if Barack Obama is elected president of the United States because our enemies will view him as weak and vulnerable and exploit that.

Others argue that the possibility of renewed terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is minimized with an Obama presidency because he understands diplomacy and will take steps to lower the anger level against the United States around the world. They say that John McCain is more likely to provoke a terrorist attack.

Then there are those who believe that, despite his other failings and his low approval ratings, one thing Pres. Bush has done for us is keep the fight “over there.” There have been no additional terrorist attacks (though some plots have been thwarted) they argue since September 11, 2001. Whoever is the next president, they say, needs to continue that policy of taking the fight to the terrorists.

But the nation’s intel chief says, it doesn’t really matter who the next president of the United States is. He is going to be tested by terrorists. Tested, very likely, on home soil.

In a Nashville speech, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell projects the next president, whether he be Barack Obama or John McCain, faces a volatile future. Sounding a bit like Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, McConnell, noted that the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. came early in the George W. Bush administration. He predicts whoever is elected on Tuesday will face an early surprise. During what he calls a “period of most vulnerability.”

Tomorrow’s News Talk Online on Paltalk.com will focus on how well the news media are covering the presidential election campaign.

Is the coverage biased? Or is the perceived bias in the eye of the beholder, not the news organization?

And how many of us are turning from the old mainstream media in favor of getting our information from the new media?

Joining us to discuss the coverage of the campaigns will be Fox News Talk’s Mary Walter and WACK News Director Rus Jeffrey.

Prior to joining Fox News Talk, Walter spent over 15 years in talk radio. The majority of that time was spent hosting “The Passion Phones” on NJ 101.5 (WKXW-FM) out of Trenton, NJ. The show was a combination of relationship based talk topics and relationship advice and was the first show in its time slot to simultaneously rank in the NY and Philadelphia markets.

A graduate of Villanova University, Walter also spent four years hosting a politically based, morning drive, talk show at WCTC-AM where she became the New Jersey’s first female morning drive host.

Now at Fox News Talk, Walter regularly fills in for Brian Kilmeade, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Spencer Hughes and John Gibson. She has also appeared on The Alan Colmes Show. Fox News Talk can be heard throughout North America on both Sirius and XM. Walter also has filled in for Steve Malzberg on WOR and been a guest commentator on The Man Show with Geoff Pinkus on 560 WIND in Chicago, which also appears on Paltalk.

You can also find Walter on The Fox News Channel as a guest commentator on their weekend segment, “America’s Voices” and also as a guest commentator on “America’s Newsroom.”

Jeffrey is a frequent contributor to News Talk Online. He has over a decade of radio experience in both small and medium radio markets.

Before moving to the United States, Dr. Rus held positions at several Canadian radio stations including CKPT in Peterborough, CJBQ in Belleville, and CJSS in Cornwall.

In addition to his duties as news director at WACK AM, Jeffrey is senior pastor at Fresh-Wind Ministries.

To talk to Walter and Jeffrey on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com at 5 PM New York time Friday October 31 CLICK HERE. There is no charge.

Paltalk is the largest multimedia interactive program on the Internet with more than 4 million unique users.

News Talk Online is also syndicated by CRN Digital Talk Radio to an additional 12 million households.

African nations are forgiven their debts. So too, says Danny Schechter, people who are defaulting on their mortgages in the United States.

Author, media critic, journalist and filmmaker Schechter was my guest today on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com.

He says the Congress pushed through with urgency a bill to bailout the financial industry. Then the very next day, Pres. Bush, in his weekly radio address to the nation, told the American people things will be OK in the long run. So where was the urgency, he asks.

While Schechter recognizes that people who took out flexible loans that put them in default on their mortgages have to be responsible for their decisions, the scales of responsibility tip toward the lenders who used predatory sales tactics to get them to sign for the loans in the first place.

All this talk about excitement over the election. How so many first time voters are happily planning on going to the polls and how they might decide the outcome.

But not all young people are enamored by the process. Some are tired, after two years of listening to the claims and counterclaims on and off the campaign trail.

Today, my son Daniel’s friend, Mark (last name redacted) wrote an e-mail about how strongly he feels about the election. In a negative sense.

Daniel then responded with an extensive, well expressed, reply. Basically telling Mark to take a chill pill. But then, interestingly, coming to basically the same conclusion. It’s not worth voting.

First, in italics, I present Mark’s initial missive. Followed by Daniel’s reply.

Your comments are encouraged and welcomed.

Mark’s message:

I am turning off my phone on Novermber 4th, and I will not be answering any e-mail from that day, either.

Thank you.

Daniel’s reply:

Honestly, I don’t see what’s so depressing about democracy, or rather,whatever you choose to call the ritual currently being avoided.Why, for example, are Obama supporters “ridiculously enthusiastic?” What is so ridiculous about their enthusiasm? There are plenty of enthusiasms that are much more worth avoiding. Chinese nationalism is one of these. The greedy self-assurance of a bullish Wall Street is another. Not only is it absurd to be enthusiastic in these ways for many reasons, but they are much more common than the enthusiasm regarding the presidential election every four years.

Most voters this year believe that the presidential election is very important for the future of the country. They are probably wrong. For years now, politicians have had no real vision to offer the public. It is as if society in America were held together by its packaging. Our rituals of government no longer protect us, they no longer give life and order to society, and they no longer represent a significant understanding of the world.

What they do provide is a sense of belonging, either to party or country, and an ill-founded faith that the above functions really are still served by the government.

Thence comes the apparently ridiculous climate of sentiment surrounding this year’s presidential election. However, in a society which has to a large extent redefined itself as a market, the expression of individual desire — that is, economic demand– is both inevitable and necessary. If consumers suddenly became selfless, or principled, then Wall Street would face an even larger depression than the one for which the supply side is currently responsible. The market is incapable of responding to morality, because it is incapable of arbitrating its definition. The success of our consumer economy is fully predicated upon the ability of advertisers to sell consumers things that they don’t need, and wouldn’t want, were no suggestion given regarding their desirability.

One product in particular justifies the rest, through the example of its success as a public spectacle. That product is the president of the United States.

The president is the spokesperson of the entire country. For the duration of the president’s term, the United States as a whole is conceptually dealt with in terms of the iconography of that particular presidential brand.

For example, if the President is a professorial-sounding liberal, then America is thought of by Americans and others as a progressive, intelligent, perhaps elitist nation. If the President is folksy, stumbles over his words, and partakes of saber-rattling often, then Americans will think of their country as closer to the American cowboy archetype — either stronger or more “American,” or trigger happy and stupid.

The election, in any case, is an act of collective self-expression. In voting, the voter at once affirms his personal autonomy, and submits his will to the infallibility of the collective. It is the exact same paradox posed by the use of mass-produced accessories as a means of expressing one’s individuality.The logic of electing a president is essentially identical to that of choosing an MP3 player. It is a fashion statement, and an indicator of socioeconomic status.

The presidential candidate’s ideological associations are assimilated into the family of brands that voters for the candidate have also chosen. In this way, the display of corporate logos becomes a statement of belief. Starbucks, Google, and Apple are liberal brands. The American flag is usually conservative, and so is Wal-Mart. It is only through this ideological association that consumerism is applicable to every facet of public life. Therefore, the primary function of the president in a consumer society is the transformation of political and moral thought into material excess. I mean by this not that the thought creates material excess, but that it is material excess.

Human values, as they are regarded in the public consciousness, retain the character of unnecessary, diverse, irrational things, the same as children’s toys and different styles of clothing. In turn, these unnecessary products are blessed with an intrinsic value, as they are partially constitutive of the consumer.

The person hood of the consumer is inseparable from the products that define it. This point needs emphasis. To repeat: the person hood of the consumer is inseparable from the products that define it.

In the absence of a political process, the tacit acceptance of the previous proposition becomes untenable. As well, if the proposition is consciously rejected, then American democracy loses its peculiar significance. Thus, strong emotions surrounding the presidency are both natural and necessary as centerpieces in the self-consistent relation of unconscious assumptions that “is” America. But they are just as absurd as the whole complex, which in particular finds its origin and justification in the financial profit of large corporations, which base their success in the faith that overproduction is sustainable, and in fact require what has revealed itself as a very elaborate system of rationalization to explain that this is the case.

I will for the time being call this climate of opinion the “modernmetapolitic,” only to highlight that its basic assumptions, like those of modern scientific metaphysical materialism, go unquestioned in its own field. The major problem with the modern metapolitic, as well, is the same as that with scientific materialism, i.e., taking a cue from Whitehead, the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” That is, an attempt has been made in the project of the 20th century to construe all political phenomena in terms of the foundational abstractions of consumerism, which themselves explicitly deal only with the question of how profitable mass production is possible in ways other than through supplying basic, ubiquitous needs for survival. In a sense, it is an attempt to abstract economics from the larger concrete situation in which it finds itself, and build an entire world unto itself in replacement of that which it casts off.

The history of the last century should indicate that this project has failed. However, the identity of a nation now depends on that project. If I am right, then the 2008 election may become the final straw for the public; unable to understand anymore why the world progresses as it does, we may be forced to consider other ways of thinking. Even if I am wrong, the amount of emotional investment in the election ought to be welcomed.

Even if it is annoying.

Conservative Florida web and radio commentator Rich Swier says there are four factors that could result in John McCain carrying Florida, a key battleground state in the presidential election.

Swier says a proposition on the ballot which defines marriage as between one man and one woman is drawing out a lot of conservative voters.

He also points to the large number of veterans in Florida, who, he says, as a group, favor McCain.

Swier also believes many Jews, concerned about Barack Obama’s relationship with Palestinian Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, who Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin described as “a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization,” during a speech in Bowling Green, Ohio. Khalidi, a leading scholar of Middle Eastern studies, denies he was ever a PLO spokesman.

Hispanic voters, as well, in southern Florida, are leaning, Swier says, toward McCain.

Swier’s comments came during an appearance today on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com.

Citing increased fighting between rebel and government troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Council on Foreign Relations today called for the United States to press the UN to expand the mandate of peacekeepers in country.

In a special report, the council calls for efforts to end, “the rampant violence and insecurity in eastern Congo.”

Report author Anthony Gambino credits the UN with providing the only stability in the war-torn nation.

Gambino, former USAID mission director for the DRC, writes that “the Congolese army does more to compound insecurity than to bring peace. The Congolese police force…is violent and incompetent. The Congolese police also are part of the problem in eastern Congo today, regularly mistreating civilians.”

The report blames insecurity in eastern Congo for the failure of the peace agreements signed by the Congolese and Rwandan governments in 2007 and by 22 Congolese armed groups this year.

Although it acknowledges successful national elections two years ago, the report finds that rural North and South Kivu, “remain humanitarian disasters, with 1.2 million displaced people and rampant ceasefire violations, other violence, and persistence insecurity in rural areas.” Recent estimates suggest than an additional 200,000 people have been displaced in North Kivu as a result of the recent fighting.

Gambino says, if the United States doesn’t press for an expanded UN role for altruistic reasons it should as a matter of self-interest. He writes that Congo is “endowed with vast lodes of important minerals, the second-most important forest in the world, and enormous hydroelectric potential.”

The United States, Gambino says, should use its diplomatic power at the UN Security Council to ensure that UN peacekeepers have the necessary personnel and mandate to effectively reduce insecurity and provide training to create a reformed Congolese army and police force that can perform basic functions while respecting human rights and the rule of law. The current UN peacekeeping force’s mandate is up for renewal at year’s end. But, given that the situation is so quickly deteriorating, Gambino says the Security Council can ill afford to wait until then to act.

Phillip Berg says he’s a lifelong registered Democrat and is more politically aligned with Barack Obama than with John McCain. But he says that if Obama fails to produce his birth certificate by next Tuesday, people shouldn’t vote for him.

Berg is the attorney who filed a federal lawsuit, dismissed Friday night, which demanded that Obama produce the birth certificate to the court. Berg is in the process of preparing an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Berg believes that Obama was actually born in Kenya, and therefore not qualified to be president of the United States. And he believes that there’s a good chance that the supremes will agree to hear his lawsuit and will rule before Election Day.

If they do, and find in his favor, it would create, if not the constitutional crisis he envisions, certainly a political crisis for the Democratic Party.

Berg, appearing on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com, is dismissive of independent fact checking organizations that claim they’ve inspected Obama’s birth certificate and find him to be a natural born citizen.

I may have alienated both Barack Obama and John McCain supporters during today’s News Talk Online on Paltalk.com. But I concluded that, not only are the claims that Obama’s tax plan makes him a socialist overblown, but there’s relatively little difference between his and McCain’s.

We played Obama’s discussion with “Joe The Plumber.” Then we went back to what McCain was saying in 2000 about taxation. I didn’t hear much of a difference between them.

So that begs the question. Which plan does McCain really support? The one he proposed eight years ago? Or the one that’s become a staple of this campaign?

He’s not the only one who has “flipped” or “evolved” on the issues, of course. The first and only goal is to get elected. Say whatever you think will propel you into office. Figure out the rest after Election Day.

As we went to air, the news of the plot to kill Obama and more than 100 black Americans broke. So I’d like to make mention of the fine job the ATF did in thwarting the plot.

It reminds us, as we were in 1995 when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City that not all terrorists are foreign born.