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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (284495)	4/19/2006 12:37:46 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572555

Re: I have told you that race is a complicated issue in this country as it is in the world. It differs from one person to the next. You would be wise to give it up here. And you would be even wiser not to fancy you're the only insider-who-knows-it-all about US politics.... Why? I am essentially saying the same thing.........however, they are getting paid to say it so they say it with much greater detail. To understand Massachusetts politicians, study Massachusetts. To understand Texas politicians, study Texas. If you try to understand American politics as a philosophical debate between "left" and "right," you will go crazy. It all makes sense, however, if you see it as a struggle of shifting coalitions of ethnic groups and regions--Northeast and Midwest, South and Pacific Coast, Latinos and Jews, evangelicals and Catholics, whites and blacks. The striking correlation between ethnicity and partisanship--between being black or Jewish and being Democratic, for example, or between being a white Southern Protestant and being Republican--is impossible to explain in terms of individually-chosen ideology or even class interest, because ethnic groups and regions in the U.S. tend to vote as blocs, regardless of income. Yes, that's true to a degree, and yet, thirty five percent of us are independents.....meaning we vote whatever we fancy at a particular moment and are not loyal to any bloc. [*] Americans fancy they all live in the same country... LOL! How wrong! The vastness, the geographical expanse of North America gave them the illusion thereof. Yet, it's now obvious that two different Americas have grown alongside over the past fifty years, one of them being the reactionary South that, somehow, never kept up with the civil rights, the end of segregation, and the demotion of the Judeo-Protestant creed as just another religion.... White southeners have been circling their ideological wagons and have been fighting a rearguard action ever since the 1960s --against the civil rights, the Vietnam trauma, gay rights, secularism, and... Israel. Of all the latter battlegrounds, only Israel happens to be situated OUTSIDE the US. Hence the blind support of Israel provides white Zionists with a convenient outlet to vindicate their domestically frustrated agenda while not rocking the boat at home... Cynically, we can put it this way: better for the Bible belt's unremitting racism and religious fanaticism to unleash themselves half a world away in backward Arab "failed states" than at home. In this sense, I believe, the US crusades in the Middle East, conveniently suits the Judeo-Protestant elite.... Peace at home, hell abroad --but for how long? Yes......this is true too....I said the same thing just two posts ago. However, JF and CJ and my cousin are from the South.......and they each have a slightly different perspective on race, religion and guns. So even the South is not quite the bloc that many of us fear. I told you its complicated. The GOP who mostly represents the South and the rural West but also has some power in other parts of the country as well has been in control since 2000........and they've overstepped their bounds and messed things up. Its now that things get serious. How the GOP behaves between now and 2008 will most likely determine the future of this country. They do have power....there is no question about it, but the places where they don't have power still have the majority of the wealth and the educational talent. That means the North and the West still have a couple of chips to play. As I said, its likely to get pretty serious [and interesting]in the next few years.