Obama Meets With Dangerous World Leader Without Preconditions

I got this and the caption in an email, so I can't claim it as my own, but great stuff, ay?

In Only We Could Vote Out the Devastating Effects of Bush

As seen in this 15-minute or so PBS NewsHour piece, the effects of Bush and his crew's war in Iraq will not soon diminish (as unfortunately is the case with too many of the problems they put into place while in office--the destructive, unregulated financial industry; inhumane budget priorities; unjust tax policy; etc., etc.). The focus of the piece is on suicide rates among war veterans, and in it James Peake, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs (V.A.), has the gall to claim that the increase in suicide rates may not be due to the effects of war (I sent in a question to the V.A. through an online forum the NewsHour is hosting on the subject, so I'll be interested to see if they respond; answers are supposed to be posted here this Friday the 14th of Nov.).

A veteran who committed suicide, along with his family, are spotlighted in the piece (he's pictured above); the V.A. actually turned him down for the full extent of support he could have received because he could not remember "dates and names" of the casualties in Iraq that were haunting him. His wife says at one point in the piece, something to the effect of how her now-dead husband didn't remember names and dates, he just would just have faces and horrible scenes flash through his mind from his time in Iraq. He had been "fun and caring and giving" beforehand she said, but came home angry--consistently angry to the point that his children became scared of him; this is what war can do to men and women, and woe unto anyone who would so cavalierly send our people into it--and then on top of that, not provide proper benefits afterwards. I could see myself changing in the same ways if I was sent into war, particularly with the multiple deployments that have now become commonplace (the piece notes that those who have gone on three or more deployments have over double the risk of suicide as those who don't). The video of the piece and the transcript are available here.

Reflections on Tuesday

Charity, my wonderful and passionate aunt, living in Greece right now, recently forwarded some in my family a great reflection on the election from The New York Times--it's such a good piece. She also included a few of her own thoughts though, so I wanted to start with those; her reflections, along with the article, provide a neat perspective for those of us too young to realize some of the work and struggle that made this election possible--in terms of civil rights, but also in terms of resisting the unfortunate Reaganesque view of the world that defined too many of the past twenty-five plus years in America.

My aunt wrote:

"I read this piece below, and found that it speaks to me of wounds healed, moving ahead, of once longed for dreams becoming possible, of a Democracy that I grew up in. In all of that somehow I find myself very emotional, as if all that my parents and others in the 60s worked for in the Civil Rights movement and what we have survived and struggled against during the last eight years has come to an end. Of course, this is not so, but I believe that the page has been turned and we are beginning a new walk. This is my hope. We will see. "

And below is the article by Judith Warner, from here on The New York Times website, called "Tears to Remember":

"On Wednesday, Nov. 5, 1980, my 10th-grade American history teacher started class by unfurling The New York Times. She pointed to its triple banner headline: “Reagan Easily Beats Carter; Republicans Gain in Congress; D’Amato and Dodd are Victors.”

“Save this paper,” she told us. “This is the start of a whole new era.”

And it was. An era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off, and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency.

In short, it was the start of our current era. The Reagan Revolution was the formative political experience of my generation’s lifetime, like the Great Depression, the Second World War or Vietnam for those before us. And in its intellectual and moral paucity, in its eventual hegemony, these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way.

I will admit that back in January, when Barack Obama, in his post-Iowa victory speech, spoke about the “cynics,” the “they” who said “this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose,” he was talking about me.

I will admit that the call of “change” did not speak to me as an achievable goal.

Until it actually came.

On Wednesday, there was a run on newspapers, as voters rushed to grab a tangible piece of the history they’d made. My husband Max and I, unable to find extra copies, brought our own worn papers home to 8- and 11-year-old Emilie and Julia.

Sept. 11, the seismic event that we’d feared would forever form their political consciousness, shaping their world and constricting the boundaries of the possible, had actually been eclipsed, light blotting out darkness, the best of America at long last driving away the demons of fear. We wanted them to see that it was the end of an era.

“Look,” we said, pointing to the headline “Racial Barrier Falls.” “This is huge.”

We labored to make them understand that their world — art that day, and orchestra, and Baked Potato Bar at lunch — had irrevocably changed.

But how can you understand change when you’ve only known one way of being?

They were happy because we were happy. They rose to the occasion in that bemused way children do when adults tell them what they should feel. They were glad to be rid of George W. Bush and to be saved – for now – from the specter of Sarah Palin. (“It is not O.K. to say she’s an ‘idiot,’” I had snapped when they came home from school stoked by the mob. “Prove your case. Show, don’t tell.”)

They’d had, like many D.C. children, more than their share of politics. After first following the country into battle against the all-purpose boogeyman Saddam Hussein, they’d become antiwar. They had opinions on tax policy and spoke angrily about the “wealth gap.” In the past election year, they’d been fired up about the woman thing, in all its pretty girl versus smart girl iterations; in fact, they and their friends had remained hard-core Hillaryites long after their moms had moved on.

But the race thing? The groundbreaking immensity of the election of our country’s first African-American president?

“You’re being racist,” Emilie had said when I made a comment about how particularly earth-moving this election was for black voters. “Why should it matter if people are black or white?”

Theirs has often looked to me like a world drained of meaning. Girl power put to the service of selling Hannah Montana. Feel-good inclusiveness that occulted the very real conflicts, crimes and hatreds of history.

It isn’t easy to let go of the past to embrace something new, to risk heartbreak on the chance of the world’s actually having changed.

Or at least, it hasn’t been easy for me. But it comes naturally to some. Like the hundreds of George Washington University students who gathered in front of the White House on Tuesday night, cheering and screaming and shouting their goodbyes to the political era of their youth.

“Bliss it was to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” Max emailed me, paraphrasing William Wordsworth on the French Revolution, at 11:30 p.m. on election night, after leaving his desk to walk among the revelers downtown. I, home with the kids, was in bed, sleeping the drugged sleep of an alcohol-abstaining migraineuse after drinking half a glass of celebratory champagne.

Colin Powell did not dance for joy over Obama’s victory; he wept.

“Look what we did. Look what we did,” he said, puffy-faced, red-eyed, fighting back more tears on CNN. “He’s won. It’s over.”

David Dinkins was similarly solemn. “Things do change. There is a God. They do get better,” said the mayor who presided over New York City at a time of toxic racial tensions.

Obama, too, resisted giddy gladness on Tuesday night. But he did proclaim an end to the world as we’ve known it for far too long.

“To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you,” he promised. “This is our moment. This is our time.”

The glory of Barack Obama is that there are so many different kinds of us who can claim a piece of that “our.” African-Americans, Democrats, post-boomers, progressives, people who rose from essentially nowhere and through hard work and determination succeeded beyond their parents’ wildest dreams are the most obvious.

But there are also people who respect intelligence and good grammar. People who see their spouse as their “best friend,” as Barack called Michelle on Tuesday night. People whose children have the same knowing look as Sasha and Malia, who are probably more excited about their puppy than about their father’s presidency.

Two images will forever stay in my mind to mark this epoch-breaking Election Day. One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening.

And the other is a photo that ran in The Times on Wednesday. In it, a black mother and daughter sit on the floor of a church in Harlem. The mother, Latrice Barnes, having heard of Obama’s victory, is doubled up in tears; her daughter, Jasmine, is reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. To me, she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.

It is, I suppose, in part a matter of temperament, whether one shouts or weeps at happy transformative moments. But I also think it’s a matter of what has come before. The young people joyfully frolicking in front of the Bush White House never knew the universe whose passing was marked by Obama’s victory and Jackson’s tears.

This moment of triumph marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the “values voters” around whose sensibilities we’ve had to tiptoe for the past 28 years.

The election brought the return of a country we’d lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.

For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief. The next looked up confusedly, eager to please and yet unable to comprehend just what the tears were about."

Update: More great thoughts from Bill Moyers on the significance of this election with this TV piece here, followed by some other neat assessments of what the next four years might involve here and here.

WOW

Yep, that's it, wow.

New York Times photo credit.

Update: I love this picture of Obama and his family on the front of The Washington Post (PDF) as they came out last night for their first appearance after winning:

In Closing, First Principles

*Note: I turned some of this post into a little radio piece you can read about and listen to here.

It's a mixed bag seeing this election finally--we hope--ending tomorrow. It's been neat to feel out my own perceptions of politics and politicians, government in general and the specific issues of import in particular. What an election cycle. I wrote my first post here on December, 3rd, 2007, and appreciate everyone who has taken a chance to read some here and there, as well as those who have offered comments and engaged with me on some critical issues.

Now that things are finally, finally coming to a close (and again, I do hope it ends by at least Wednesday AM), I wanted to offer some final thoughts. Though I may throw up a post here or there over the next few weeks or months, I am looking forward to backing away somewhat from all things political (as much as I can with the vigor that will undoubtedly surround a new president, and the related drive I will have to watch who I hope will be in there as he begins to rebuild our country).

My final thoughts are simple, and thus "first principles," as I noted in my title. One of the first principles in a society, I believe, is for the less vulnerable to help the more vulnerable. Under George W. Bush, the most vulnerable have been preyed on--with unregulated mortgage lending, a war of preemption, an economy and tax system tilted towards the wealthiest among us, and a health care system that multiplies in cost, again and again, year after year. Why??

We can certainly allow it, as we have. But are we not more than animals to fight for what we can get and call it survival of the fittest? Surely we are. But it takes gumption to change this system of greed, of self-interest, of warrior mentalities and individualism.

The reason Barack Obama won out over Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, and the other Democrats, is because, in my view, he called more of us out of ourselves than did the others. If he had simply called us out of ourselves without calling us into something, that would have been the end of it. But he called us into something exponentially larger--that is, into interdependence. That's a good thing, it is. Because again, the alternative is some version of survival of the fittest, and I’m not okay with that, because we’re not all operating from an equal playing field.

Our tax code can be fair, taking into account the most vulnerable with deliberate compassion--weighed by sensible understanding of personal responsibility. And you will hear that in Obama, as he said in his 30-minute TV piece this last week, and in his stirring call in Manassas, VA tonight (available here); he's repeated the theme throughout his campaign, saying we have a "crisis in responsibility." He went on to say tonight that we have a crisis in "civility." The speech was probably the most moving I have heard him deliver. Perhaps it was due to the unimaginable timing of the death of his grandmother today (she helped raise him, as he talks about here); in fact, I imagine it is that, in combination with this, the final day of his campaign. The tenor in his voice reaches that of a leader though, even as he spoke more softly at one time or another during the speech. I finished watching it encouraged about what this man can do for our country.

Barack speaks to where we are and where we aren't. And while many of us can quickly name where we aren't, personally or as a country, he doesn't stop there--he talks about where we can be. He did that with his broad look at our country, as he ventured--or fought, perhaps I should say--his way into Republican state after Republican state.

What do we have now? An electrified country, where I can hear stories, as I did last week, of a 57-year old from Arlington, Virginia who had never voted before, but was planning to do so for Obama on Tuesday. Wow. We have a presidential candidate who dared to trek into areas like central Virginia, where no presidential candidate had gone since Nixon in '68--forty years ago; no Democrat had gone there since Abraham Lincoln's challenger, Stephen Douglas, a hundred years earlier, in 1860. This is vision--but not just vision of how to win an election, but how to mobilize people for something bigger than themselves.

You see, Obama doesn't have some delusions of grandeur, in my view, but rather simple, even modest ideas of returning the country to the many hands of our people--prodding us to get our hands dirty as we build and develop, calling us to reach down for those most vulnerable and balance out the playing field. He's brought many people along in the ways he's reasoned through how we need health care within financial reach of all Americans, bridges and roads rebuilt, alternative energies pursued and conservation championed. Everyone would be deceived, including Obama, if they thought he could do it himself. No, this is a world he has helped paint before the eyes of Americans, offering the chance to grab it if we would. And no doubt, he is standing on the shoulders of many who have come before him, echoing their calls--yet he has brought so many into the game that he stands unique among political leaders. And so the choice is ours to hope, as it were, in that more just, more communal world that he has helped so many believe is possible.

Woe is McCain: Bad Temper, Bad Foreign Policy

I couldn't help but be disturbed by this recent ten-page article in Rolling Stone called "Make Believe Maverick." It goes into John McCain's policy stances, but also his character, tracing forward from when he was young. It highlights the ways he has skated by because of his family name, from getting into college to keeping his Navy "wings" after multiple crashes. I'd encourage anyone who's thinking of voting his way Tuesday to read the entire article (you can also view a short video Rolling Stone did in conjunction with the article here). I wanted to paste the section on his foreign policy from the article below, but before I do, here are a few quick lines on his infamous temper:

"Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. 'If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print,' says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain's press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an 'immature and unprofessional reaction to slights' that is 'little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.'...

At least three of McCain's GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain's 'temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.' Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn't 'want this guy anywhere near a trigger.' And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that 'the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.' "

Now, here's the pretty damning section on McCain's foreign policy stances over the years, though I believe it fairly discusses how he was more moderate in the past:

"The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations — from pampered flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible reformer — that simply never happened. But there is one serious conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of neoconservatism.

'He's going to be Bush on steroids,' says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. 'His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun.'

McCain used to believe passionately in the limits of American military power. In 1993, he railed against Clinton's involvement in Somalia, sponsoring an amendment to cut off funds for the troops. The following year he blasted the idealistic aims of sending U.S. troops to Haiti, taking to the Senate floor to propose an immediate withdrawal. He even started out a fierce opponent of NATO air strikes on Serbia during the war in the Balkans.

But such concerns went out the window when McCain began gearing up to run for president. In 1998, he formed a political alliance with William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, who became one of his closest advisers. Randy Scheunemann — a hard-right lobbyist who was promoting Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi — came aboard as McCain's top foreign-policy adviser. Before long, the senator who once cautioned against 'trading American blood for Iraqi blood' had been reborn as a fire-breathing neoconservative who believes in using American military might to spread American ideals — a belief he describes as a 'sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity.' By 1999, McCain was championing what he called 'rogue state rollback.' First on the hit list: Iraq.

Privately, McCain brags that he was the 'original neocon.' And after 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even Dick Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. 'There's other organizations besides Mr. bin Laden who are bent on the destruction of the United States,' he warned in an appearance on Hardball on September 12th. 'It isn't just Afghanistan. We're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others.' A few days later, he told Jay Leno's audience that 'some other countries' — possibly Iraq, Iran and Syria — had aided bin Laden.

A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the anthrax scare, McCain assured David Letterman that 'we'll do fine' in Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, 'The second phase is Iraq. Some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.'

Later that month on Larry King, McCain raised the specter of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction before he peddled what became Dick Cheney's favorite lie: 'The Czech government has revealed meetings, contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mohamed Atta. The evidence is very clear. . . . So we will have to act.' On Nightline, he again flogged the Czech story and cited Iraqi defectors to claim that 'there is no doubt as to [Saddam's] avid pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. That, coupled with his relations with terrorist organizations, I think, is a case that the administration will be making as we move step by step down this road.'

That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter to the White House. 'In the interest of our own national security, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power,' they insisted, claiming that there was 'no doubt' that Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction 'against the United States and its allies.'

In January 2002, McCain made a fact-finding mission to the Middle East. While he was there, he dropped by a supercarrier stationed in the Arabian Sea that was dear to his heart: the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the giant floating pork project that he had driven through over President Carter's veto. On board the carrier, McCain called Iraq a 'clear and present danger to the security of the United States of America.' Standing on the flight bridge, he watched as fighter planes roared off, en route to Afghanistan — where Osama bin Laden had already slipped away. 'Next up, Baghdad!' McCain whooped.

Over the next 15 months leading up to the invasion, McCain continued to lead the rush to war. In November 2002, Scheunemann set up a group called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq at the same address as Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. The groups worked in such close concert that at one point they got their Websites crossed. The CLI was established with explicit White House backing to sell the public on the war. The honorary co-chair of the committee: John Sidney McCain III.

In September 2002, McCain assured Americans that the war would be 'fairly easy' with an 'overwhelming victory in a very short period of time.' On the eve of the invasion, Hardball host Chris Matthews asked McCain, 'Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the postwar scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq, or at least a large number of them, will treat us as liberators?'

McCain was emphatic: 'Absolutely. Absolutely.'

Today, however, McCain insists that he predicted a protracted struggle from the outset. 'The American people were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach,' he said in August 2006, 'which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking.' McCain also claims he urged Bush to dump Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 'I'm the only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go,' he said in a January primary debate. Except that he didn't. Not once. As late as May 2004, in fact, McCain praised Rumsfeld for doing 'a fine job.'

Indeed, McCain's neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse their party's nominee [After this article was written, Powell endorsed Obama]. 'The fact of the matter is his judgment about what to do in Iraq was wrong,' says Richard Clarke, who served as Bush's counterterrorism czar until 2003. 'He hung out with people like Ahmad Chalabi. He said Iraq was going to be easy, and he said we were going to war because of terrorism. We should have been fighting in Afghanistan with more troops to go after Al Qaeda. Instead we're at risk because of the mistaken judgment of people like John McCain.' "

Again, the full ten-page article can be read here.

Pro-Life and Pro-Obama?

That's right, some folks fall into the pro-life, pro-Obama category, and rightly so in my view. I have been pro-choice for the most part, though I can't say that I've thought about it as comprehensively as I would like to--it's a tough issue. As many say, in an ideal world, there would not be any unintended pregnancies. But given that our world is far from ideal, I can understand the circumstances that lead to abortions--indeed, I can see how I could end up choosing an abortion if I were in similar circumstances.

Regardless though, I can come down on the side of Obama as he talks about ideas such as "strengthening of support for prenatal care, health care, maternity leave, and adoption," which "will make help drastically reduce the numbers of abortions [according to studies]" (that quote is taken from ProLifeProObama.com, a site dedicated to this whole issue). There's more info about Obama's stance on these issues on his website, and there's more on the views of conservative supporters of Obama on this and other issues at ConservativesForChange.com.

What the above websites suggest is, not to rule out abortion stances as a consideration, but to view it as one issue among many. Why? Because issues of "life" deal with many areas beyond simply abortion. How about war? Or health care, or poverty, or destitute, third-world countries without the basic opportunities so many of us take for granted? Many of those who we pass by on the street, or hear about in the news, are losing their lives or tragically suffering in life because of the stances taken by politicians--and yes, most recently and most prominently, in my view, the stances by so-called "conservative" politicians.

As is noted in the article I'll paste below:

"Regardless of the official position of the Supreme Court on abortion, a country in which all Americans are offered some sort of dignity and hopeful future would be a place conducive to the kind of optimism each of us must hold in our hearts if we are to welcome children into this world. But if our highest aspiration is to be a consumer with no thought or care for our neighbor, we will remain a culture in which abortion is not only inevitable but logical."

That sort of ethical, empathetic view of the world around us is one that I embrace, above and beyond any religious affiliation or political viewpoint; it is the type of perspective that really guided my thinking throughout the last year-and-a-half or so as I wrote this blog and sifted through candidates' stances (as I particularly attempted to highlight with the series I put together on Obama's ethics, titled "The Value, and Values, of Barack").

As a sidenote, this naturally goes into the realm of faith-related considerations for some; as I've previously mentioned, having come from a religious background, I can relate. (I don't consider myself religious now, though I intend to come full-circle and consider questions of faith again at some point.) Because of that background of mine though, I naturally have friends and family who still consider themselves religious or spiritual, and I fully respect that; I would say though, that it is devastating to me how much of the Christian camp specifically has been convinced to vote unquestioningly for the Republican party from one election to the next. Much of that has to do with folks being convinced that their vote is no more complicated than one or two issues--a perspective I would respectfully take issue with, for the reasons I mentioned above.

Additionally, I would encourage any people of faith out there to take a look at Obama's stances on the full spectrum of issues. Most, if not all, are governed by the simple principle he has repeated in one capacity or another throughout his campaign: "We have an individual responsibility to be our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper" (that line is taken from here (PDF), which provides an overview of his stance on many faith-related issues; more details are also available on his website). He and John McCain both talked about faith and values at a recent forum in September; you can read my quick thoughts on that and watch videos of it here. I would also strongly urge any interested in his faith perspective to listen to the below, in-depth speech he gave two years ago; it's on faith across religions, though Christianity receives a good part of the focus (it was given at a "Call to Renewal" conference):



Lastly, here is the first part of an article from Huffington Post called "Why I'm Pro-Life and Pro-Obama":

"I am an Obama supporter. I am also pro-life. In fact, without my family's involvement in the pro-life movement it would not exist as we know it. Evangelicals weren't politicized until after my late father and evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer, Dr. Koop (Reagan's soon-to-be Surgeon General) and I stirred them up over the issue of abortion in the mid-1970s. Our Whatever Happened to the Human Race? book, movie series and seminars brought the evangelicals into the pro-life movement.

(Dad's political influence persists. Last week one of my father's followers -- Mike Huckabee -- was interviewed by Katie Couric, along with all the other presidential candidates. Couric asked the candidates if they were to be sent to a desert island and could only take one book besides the Bible, what would that that book be? Huckabee answered that he'd take my father's book Whatever Happened To The Human Race?)

Fast forward...

In 2000, we elected a president who claimed he believed God created the earth and who, as president, put car manufacturers and oil company's interests ahead of caring for that creation. We elected a pro-life Republican Congress that did nothing to actually care for pregnant women and babies. And they took their sincere evangelical followers for granted, and played them for suckers.

The so-called evangelical leadership -- Dobson, Robertson et al. also played the pro-life community for suckers. While thousands of men and women in the crisis pregnancy movement gave of themselves to help women and babies, their evangelical "leaders" did little more than cash in on fundraising opportunities and represent themselves as power-brokers to the craven politicians willing to kowtow to them.

Fast forward...

Today when I listen to Obama speak (and to his remarkable wife, Michelle) what I hear is a world view that actually nurtures life. Obama is trying to lead this country to a place where the intrinsic worth of each individual is celebrated. A leader who believes in hope, the future, trying to save our planet and providing a just and good life for everyone is someone who is actually pro-life.

Conversely the "pro-life" ethic of George W. Bush manifested itself in a series of squandered opportunities to call us to our better natures. After 9/11, Bush told most Americans to go shopping while saddling the few who volunteered for military service with endless tours of duty (something I know a little about since my son was a Marine and deployed several times). The Bush doctrine of life was expressed by starting an unnecessary war in Iraq that has killed thousands of Americans and wounded tens of thousands more.

The society that Obama is calling us to sacrifice for is a place wherein life would be valued not just talked about. As he said in his speech delivered on February 6 in New Orleans, "Too often, we lose our sense of common destiny; that understanding that we are all tied together; that when a woman has less than nothing in this country, that makes us all poorer." Obama was talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but his words also apply to our overall view of ourselves..."

Read the rest of the article here.