Johnson Leading Over McKinney
Here’s some good news:
A new poll by Insider Advantage shows challenger Hank Johnson with a hefty lead over incumbent Cynthia McKinney in the Democratic run-off for the 4th District congressional race.
The poll shows Johnson leading McKinney, 46 to 21 percent, with a third of voters undecided. The survey recorded the responses of 489 likely voters and has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 5 percent.
Run-offs are notorious for low turnout, which often makes telephone surveys unreliable. Matt Towery, CEO of InsiderAdvantage, said he was unwilling to say that McKinney was headed for certain defeat. “But is she in deep, deep, deep, deep troube? Yes,” he said.
July 28th, 2006 at 5:13 am
McKinney has done a great job of representng the mentality of most of the people in her district along with that of the Democratic Party. However, her base is particularly notorious for poor turnouts on this type of election, so Johnson is likely to win. At least McKinney’s voters don’t have to show a picture ID for this election, so maybe she can stir up everyone who has died or moved.
July 28th, 2006 at 5:58 am
Did you know that Andrew Young, President Carter’s ambassador to the U.N., endorsed McKinney? http://boortz.com/nuze/200607/07282006.html#mckinney
July 28th, 2006 at 6:01 am
Whoops. Here’s the actual article on Andrew Young’s endorsement of McKinney: http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/dekalb/stories/0727metmckinney.html
July 28th, 2006 at 6:29 am
Well, I hope McKinney loses. She’s a great mascot for GOP turnout, but the nation suffers for it.
July 28th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Is this the same Jimmy Carter who supported the extreme rightwing islamists in Afghanistan who later went on to bring down the Twin Towers? Sounds like someone that Woody should be comfortable with, no?
“During his presidency, Carter proclaimed human rights to be “the soul of our foreign policy.” Although many journalists promoted that image, the reality was quite different.
Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.
Elsewhere, despotic allies — from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran — received support from President Carter.
In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala — again contrary to enduring myth — major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.
After moving out of the White House in early 1981, Carter developed a reputation as an ex-president with a conscience. He set about building homes for the poor. And when he traveled to hot spots abroad, news media often depicted Carter as a skillful negotiator on behalf of human rights.
But a decade after Carter left the Oval Office, scholar James Petras assessed the ex-president’s actions overseas — and found that Carter’s image as “a peace mediator, impartial electoral observer and promoter of democratic values…clashes with the experiences of several democratic Third World leaders struggling against dictatorships and pro-U.S. clients.”
From Latin America to East Africa, Petras wrote, Carter functioned as “a hard-nosed defender of repressive state apparatuses, a willing consort to electoral frauds, an accomplice to U.S. Embassy efforts to abort popular democratic outcomes and a one-sided mediator.”
Observing the 1990 election in the Dominican Republic, Carter ignored fraud that resulted in the paper-thin victory margin of incumbent president Joaquin Balaguer. Announcing that Balaguer’s bogus win was valid, Carter used his prestige to give international legitimacy to the stolen election — and set the stage for a rerun this past spring, when Balaguer again used fraud to win re-election.
In December 1990, Carter traveled to Haiti, where he labored to undercut Jean-Bertrand Aristide during the final days of the presidential race. According to a top Aristide aide, Carter predicted that Aristide would lose, and urged him to concede defeat. (He ended up winning 67 percent of the vote.)
Since then, Carter has developed a warm regard for Haiti’s bloodthirsty armed forces. Returning from his recent mission to Port-au-Prince, Carter actually expressed doubt that the Haitian military was guilty of human rights violations.
Significantly, Carter’s involvement in the mid-September negotiations came at the urging of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras — who phoned Carter only days before the expected U.S. invasion and asked him to play a mediator role. (Cedras had floated the idea in an Aug. 6 appearance on CNN.)
Carter needed no encouragement. All summer he had been urging the White House to let him be a mediator in dealings with Haiti.
Carter’s regard for Cedras matches his evident affection for Cedras’ wife. On Sept. 20, Carter told a New York Times interviewer: “Mrs. Cedras was impressive, powerful and forceful. And attractive. She was slim and very attractive.”
By then, Carter was back home in Georgia. And U.S. troops in Haiti were standing by — under the terms of the Carter-negotiated agreement — as Haiti’s police viciously attacked Haitians in the streets.
The day after American forces arrived in Haiti, President Clinton was upbeat, saying that “our troops are working with full cooperation with the Haitian military” — the same military he had described five days earlier as “armed thugs” who have “conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests.”
The latest developments in Haiti haven’t surprised Petras, an author and sociology professor at Binghamton University in New York. “Every time Carter intervenes, the outcomes are always heavily skewed against political forces that want change,” Petras said when we reached him on Sept. 20. “In each case, he had a political agenda — to support very conservative solutions that were compatible with elite interests.”
Petras described Carter as routinely engaging in “a double discourse. One discourse is for the public, which is his moral politics, and the other is the second track that he operates on, which is a very cynical realpolitik that plays ball with very right-wing politicians and economic forces.”
And now, Petras concludes, “In Haiti, Carter has used that moral image again to impose one of the worst settlements imaginable.”
With much of Haiti’s murderous power structure remaining in place, the results are likely to be grim. ”
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2263
July 28th, 2006 at 11:11 am
This Carter guy sounds like someone Woody should be pretty comfortable with actually?
“Nicaragua 1979: Part I–Carter and Somoza
In June 1978, President Jimmy Carter sent a private letter to the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza lauding Somoza for the “human rights initiatives” while he criticized Somoza publicly. Carter had made “human rights” a centerpiece of his interventionist propaganda ( Morris Morley, Washington, Somoza and the Sandinistas, 1994, pp 115-116). This two-faced policy occurred during one of the bloodiest periods of Somoza’s rule when he was bombing cities sympathetic to the revolution. Carter’s rhetorical declaration of concern for human rights was for public consumption, his private assurances to Somoza encouraged the dictator to continue his scorched earth policy.”
Nicaragua May 1979 : Part II–Carter Proposes Intervention
In June 1993 the Foreign Minister under the late Panamanian President Torrejos told me of President Carter’s briefest regional meeting. It took place less in May 1979 less than two months before Somoza was overthrown. Carter convened a meeting of foreign ministers of several Latin American countries who were opposed to Somoza’s dictatorship. President Carter entered and immediately tabled a proposal to form an “Inter-American Peace Force”, a military force of US and Latin American troops to invade Nicaragua to “end the conflict” and support a diverse coalition. The purpose, according to the former Panamanian minister present, was to prevent a Sandinista victory, preserving Somoza’s National Guard and replace Somoza with a pro-US conservative civilian junta. Carter’s proposal was rejected unanimously as unwarranted US intervention. Carter in a pique ended the meeting abruptly. Carter’s attempt to throttle a popular revolution to preserve the Somocista state and US dominance clearly belied his pretensions of being a “human rights” President. His legacy of using “Human Rights” to project imperial military power became standard operating procedure for Reagon, Clinton and both Bush presidencies.
Afghanistan: Carter Finances the Invasion of Islamic Terrorists
In the late 1970′s Afghanistan was ruled by a nationalist secular regime allied with the Soviet Union. The regime promoted gender equality, free universal education for women and men, agrarian reform including the redistribution of feudal estates to poor peasants, the separation of religion and the state and adopted an independent foreign policy with a Soviet tilt. Beginning at least as early as 1979, the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia orchestrated a massive international recruiting campaign of Islamic fundamentalist to engage in a “Jihad” against the “atheistic communist regime.” Tens of thousands were recruited, armed by the US, financed by Saudis Arabia and trained by the CIA and Pakistani Intelligence. Pakistan opened its frontiers to the flood of armed invaders. Internally the displaced Mullahs, horrified by the equality and education of women, not to speak of the expropriation of their huge land holdings, joined the Jihad en masse.
The Carter Presidency (and not Reagan) was responsible for the organization, financing, training of the Islamic uprising and the terror campaign which followed. Zbig Brzesinski later wrote of the US–Afghanistan campaign as one of the high points in US Cold War diplomacy–it provoked Soviet intervention on behalf of the secular Afghan ally. Even when confronted with the consequences of the total devastation of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and Al Queda and 9/11, Carter’s former National Security Adviser, Brzesinski replied that these were marginal costs in comparison with a war which successfully hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. President Carter’s intervention in Afghanistan initiated the Second Cold War, which was pursued with even greater intensity by Reagan. Carter backed a series of surrogate wars in Angola, Mozambique, Central American, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Carter was clearly an advocate and practitioner of the worst kind of imperial intervention and a master of public relations: he was an early practitioner of “Humanitarian Imperialism”–humane in rhetoric and brutally imperialist in practice.
http://www.counterpunch.org/petras07082004.html
July 28th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Guess what. I didn’t read anything after the first line.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Woody:
“Guess what. I didn’t read anything after the first line.”
If anyone had any remaining doubts about the intellectual method behind Woody’s worldview, let them accept the man’s own explanation of it. Thanks Woody!
July 28th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
At least in the Cold War, conservatives had a core position in favor of freedom and civil liberties. In the war on terror, there is no competing ideology to attack, no serious national rivals and no core belief in freedom on the part of either side.
July 29th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Woody,
I think Jose has a good point, Carter’s foreign policy doesn’ t sound that radically different from Reagan’s in point of fact. Odd that you should be all that opposed to a defender of US imperialism like Carter.
July 29th, 2006 at 11:02 am
If someone starts a rant and the first line is to attack me and he expects me to read the next two-thousand words, then the person writing that “removes doubts as to his own intellect.”
What in the world does this topic have to do with Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy? I mentioned that the former mayor of Atlanta and the former ambassador under Carter endorsed McKinney. That was it.
I think that Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy is best exemplified by his ordering of the Marines in our Irananian embassy to lay down their arms and allow our embassy and its staff to be hostages and be terrorized for well over a year.
I guess if someone caters to those Islamic terrorists that much, then it’s no surprise that his U.N. ambassador would endorse a representative who does the same.
July 29th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Dear Stuckinatree:
Good reportage! Carter was a typical Kennedy liberal – decent rhetoric about human rights and democracy, but when you look at what he actually did, almost indistinguishable from Reagan; Samozista without Samoza… Reagans infamous increases in military spending were pretty much along the lines of Carter’s recommendations before he left office…his behavior in Haiti in the 90s was embarrassing!
July 30th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Sez Woody:
Guess what. I didn’t read anything after the first line.
Kind of similar to how I look at your comments.
July 31st, 2006 at 10:48 am
An alternative view:
“Cynthia McKinney is a unique presence in the Congressional Black Caucus: a genuine “movement†activist. For that reason, she is hated and feared by white racists”
Link: http://www.blackcommentator.com/193/193_cover_mckinney.html
July 31st, 2006 at 11:54 am
Woody’s a very sensitive man, perhaps oversensitive. I thought the argument put forth in the first line was, as Watters seemed to get, that Woody should feel comfortable with a president like Carter who pursued foreign policies and goals that were so similar to Reagan’s in defense of US imperialism.
The example cited of support for radical islamic rightwing extremists in Afghanistan was a very appropriate example of one such similarity.
The negotiating with Iranians was quite similar to Reagan’s negotiating with Iranians in his term too, I don’t really see any big difference.