The Last Acceptable Bigotries in America

Befitting our political culture, appeals to the contemporary American bigot are accomplished with sophisticated brands, images, impressions, and coded vocabulary, and not overt prejudices and stereotypes.

But there are two exceptions to this operative prohibition against overt bigotry: Arabs and gays. Two bigoted parties, long-time Editor-in-Chief and owner of The New Republic, Martin Peretz, and the Republican Party, reveal this dynamic.

As for gays [a broad term] the Republican Party and the religious right appear to owe their very reason for existence to the compulsion to marginalize and deny gays due process and equal protection under the law so often are gays the political scapegoat of GOP-religious right operatives. So, we're not surprised to find U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (R) dissenting in a landmark civil rights case, LAWRENCE V. TEXAS (02-102), writing:

Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.

This is retrograde and repulsive thinking to most Americans, but not most Republicans. Almost daily, we can find anti-gay appeal from Republicans.

Arabs and The New Republic's Martin Peretz

Arabs also enjoy a distinct status as the object of acceptable bigotry in this current milieu (environment) extending across partisan lines. An often bipartisan consensus keeps Ahmad in his place in America. Glenn Greenwald's The Right Kind of Bigotry is nothing short of spectacular in revealing this bigotry widely unchallenged. If you read nothing else, read this 300-word piece below, singling out The New Republic's Martin Peretz as a self-admitted bigot who is also a disingenuous slander artist.

From the long-time Editor-in-Chief and owner of The New Republic, [Martin Peretz] this morning [March 6]:

There were moments--long moments--during the Iraq war when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.

The point here is so obvious that it makes itself. In the bolded sentence, replace the word ‘Arabs’ with ‘Jews’ and ask yourself: how much time would lapse before the author of such a sentence would be vehemently scorned and shunned by all decent people, formally condemned by a litany of organizations, and have his livelihood placed in jeopardy? Or replace the word ‘Arabs’ in that sentence with ’Jews’ or ‘blacks’ or ’Latinos’ or even ‘whites’ or virtually any other identifiable demographic group and ask yourself this: how many people would treat a magazine edited and owned by such a person as a remotely respectable or mainstream publication (notwithstanding the several decent journalists employed there)? Yet Marty Peretz spits out the most bigoted sentiments of this type -- and he's been doing this for years, as is well known -- and very little happens, because, for multiple reasons, this specific type of hate-mongering remains basically permitted in American political discourse. The double standard at play here is as extreme and self-evident as it is pernicious, but it doesn't matter. And we'll all wait with bated breath for the next installment of The New Republic's righteous, accusatory attacks on the entirely fictitious manifestations of the one strain of bigotry that bothers them, because they're such credible arbiters and opponents of prejudice.

The Occupation

The Occupation - Written and performed by Johnny Punish in honor of Rachel Corrie (April 10, 1979 - March 16, 2003), human rights activist murdered in cold blood by the state of Israel. Why?

I wrote and recorded this painful sad song to bring more attention to what’s going on in the Holy Land.

The future of our soul is at stake. We simply cannot look the other way while U.S. Taxpayers continue to fund this mess. The children of Palestine are people too!

I’ve also dedicated this song to the late Rachel Corrie, a true blue American Hero. She stood up and gave her life for all of us…..

We need to start a movement to get a monument to her made in D.C. so that millions of Americans can learn what a hero she truly is for her people and everyone around the world who supports liberty, freedom, and the right to self-determination. So I kindly urge you to learn more about Rachel.

Finally, if you feel compelled, please pass it around and post it on your social networking sites.
- Johnny Punish

The Occupation
Your trail of tears
Mark through your years
Making enemies of men

Your blood runs red
You find your children dead
It’s hell on earth to fight in the street

They build a wall
It’s 2010 feet tall
As if Berlin had never been

Where’s is the law
Deals made at the casbah
Your brother is selling you out

The occupation
Just a segregation
Humiliation
Is this the nation
That you cry for
A confiscation
Your exploitation
Obliteration
No-Self-Determination

Rachel Corrie
Hero death or glory
Do you even know her name?

She sacrificed
then gave up her life
In the battle of the home Bulldozers

If God had mercy
Then what the heck’s the hurry
Can’t they see she’s just a young kid

Are they insane
Now we know their name
It’s Mister I Hate Humanity

The occupation
Just a segregation
Humiliation
Is this the nation
That you cry for
A confiscation
Your exploitation
Obliteration
No-Self-Determination

Self-determination is the free choice of men
With the power to decide how you want to live again
It’s the right of the people of a nation to be governed
As they please without the influence of another

They stole your land
Now you understand
How the art of war has been played

But it’s too late
60 years of hate
Has left with you a rock in your hand

But they got bombs
And the soccer moms
You know they got a gun to your head

What can you do
This coke is for you
And no one will ever be free

The occupation
Just a segregation
Humiliation
Is this the nation

That you cry for
A confiscation
Your exploitation
Obliteration

Who will fight for
the liberation
what’s the explanation
Capitulation

Cause you know that
our generation
An Obama-nation
With a fixation

On the world of
Globalization
A complication
For self determination

la la la la la la

Racism in the Fox Valley

A police officer from Fond du Lac told me last year those distributing racist fliers are "cowards" who never show their faces because they are afraid to stand behind their anonymous words.

Two Wisconsin colleges in the Fox Valley are looking for the idiots who distributed racist fliers on their campuses yesterday. They can check the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Hate Map that shows eight racist groups operating in Wisconsin, likely some of the same white supremacist groups operating in the Fox Valley that hit UW-Oshkosh and St. Norbert College (De Pere).

And likely they're the same geniuses who left anti-Obama, racist fliers around Fond du Lac in 2008, and dropped white pride lit on car windows at a Latino pride gathering at the Fond du Lac Public Library last January.

Quit hiding, show your faces.

Wisconsin Statute Struck Down Instructs National Civil Rights Case

As a great civil rights case of our day (Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger) winds its way up the federal court system, a 1970s Wisconsin state statute struck down as unconstitutional stands as a major precedent for marriage equity for gay and lesbian Americans.

There are no serious arguments against marriage equity for gays and lesbians. 'I believe what I believe' does not qualify as a serious argument (as most of us learned in elementary school composition) anymore than my-god-mommy-religion-tells-me-so counts as argument.

As with the major civil rights battles of the past 60 years, a coalition of religious and political forces allied with unvarnished hate is armed with a striking lack of intellectual artillery in their views opposing the Constitutional rights denied a class of Americans, in this case the right of gay and lesbian Americans to marry.

Zablocki v. Redhail (No. 76-879)

Wisconsin's statute enacted in the late 1970s -- preventing those falling behind in child-support payments from getting married -- was overturned as unconstitutional (Zablocki v. Redhail ((No. 76-879)) in an eight-to-one decision opposed only by the late, statist-reactionary Justice William Rehnquist.

The Court ruled the right to marry is so basic that the economically impoverished or those otherwise refusing child-support obligations do not lose their fundamental right to marry, even if the state of Wisconsin, for example, enacts a law mandating this penalty. A state legislature, or a majority of a voters in a state similarly cannot determine that certain classes of Americans cannot marry just because a temporary majority does not like certain Americans: Gays, blacks, the poor, lesbians, Chinese and so on.

The relevance of the Wisconsin case to Perry is the Court's establishing, along with other precedents, the Constitutional importance of the right to marry. Having established marriage as a fundamental right, it becomes constitutionally difficult to deny this right to a particular class of Americans, though this difficulty will not likely prevent at least four (Republican) U.S. Supreme Court Justices from voting specifically to deny this right to gay and lesbian Americans.

But a majority of Americans in a given state in favor of bigotry towards gays and lesbians does not place the majority on firm constitutional ground.

As attorney David Boies said recently (Bill Moyers Journal, Feb. 26, 2010):

If you didn't tell the majority of the voters they were wrong sometimes under the Constitution, you wouldn't need a constitution. The whole point of the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment is to say, 'This is democracy. But it's also democracy in which we protect minority rights.' The whole point of a Constitution is to say there are certain things that a majority cannot do, whether it's 52 percent or 62 percent or 72 percent or 82 percent of the people.

They can't say, for example, that blacks and whites can't go to school together -- even though 82 percent of the people may think that. They can't say that women aren't allowed to vote, or are not allowed to work in the workplace, or not allowed equal rights or equal wages -- even though a majority of people might vote that way in some places.

There are certain rights that are so fundamental that the Constitution guarantees them to every citizen regardless of what a temporary majority may or may not vote for. And remember, what Ted said is very important. Nobody's asking to create a new constitutional right here. This is a constitutional right that has already been well recognized by the Supreme Court. And what the Supreme Court has said is that even a democratic-elected legislature in Wisconsin cannot decide by majority rule that marriage scofflaws, (p)eople who don't pay their child support, who abuse their children, abuse their wives, cannot get remarried again.

They said marriage is so fundamental that you can't take it away, even for people who have abused an initial marriage.

Boies' colleague in Perry, Ted Olson, amplifies the point:

David mentioned that we have a Constitution and we have an independent judiciary for the very protection of minorities. Majorities don't need protection from the courts. The original Constitution didn't have the Bill of Rights attached to it. And the framers of our Constitution had a big debate and people said, 'Well, we're not going to ratify that Constitution unless you attach a Bill of Rights, which protects individual liberty, individual freedom, the right to speak, the right to assemble,' and those sorts of things.

Over our history, the voters have decided, because they get passionate about certain things, and they may not like certain minorities. Minorities are disfavored. Blacks have been denied the right to vote. California prohibited Chinese, a Chinese person from having any kind of business in California, or getting married. Those kind of votes are not acceptable if they violate fundamental constitutional rights. ...

The Congress and the President of the United States 50 years ago made it illegal for someone who is a gay or lesbian to have a job working for the federal government. Many states made it a crime for a homosexual to be in a bar and have a drink. We all remember the '50s. When civil rights were taken away from people because they were suspected of being a member of an organization that -- those sorts of things happened.

And we frequently go to the courts and, Bill, it often happens that the measures that are passed almost unanimously in Congress, because Congress gets carried away, are overturned by the Supreme Court. And you go back to Members of Congress and you say, 'What happened there?' And they'll say, 'Well, we knew it was unconstitutional. We expected the courts to take care of that. We wanted to get reelected. The courts are the ones that come back and help us.'

The Internet offers us a window in the slow-motion civil rights battle of what will likely be a landmark legal case when it reaches the U.S. Supreme Court sometime in the next one to four years. See Proposition Eight Trial Tracker for legal and political updates.

Perry et al v. Schwarzenegger

From David Boies:

Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Why Ted Olson and I Are Working to Overturn California's Proposition 8
by David Boies

Monday, July 20, 2009

When I got married in California in 1959 there were almost 20 states where marriage was limited to two people of different sexes and the same race. Eight years later the Supreme Court unanimously declared state bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

Recently, Ted Olson and I brought a lawsuit asking the courts to now declare unconstitutional California's Proposition 8 limitation of marriage to people of the opposite sex. We acted together because of our mutual commitment to the importance of this cause, and to emphasize that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue, not a liberal or conservative issue, but an issue of enforcing our Constitution's guarantee of equal protection and due process to all citizens.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to marry the person you love is so fundamental that states cannot abridge it. In 1978 the Court (8 to 1, Zablocki v. Redhail ((No. 76-879)) overturned as unconstitutional a Wisconsin law preventing child-support scofflaws from getting married. The Court emphasized, 'decisions of this Court confirm that the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals.' In 1987 the Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional a Missouri law preventing imprisoned felons from marrying.

There were legitimate state policies that supported the Wisconsin and Missouri restrictions held unconstitutional. By contrast, there is no legitimate state policy underlying Proposition 8. The occasional suggestion that marriages between people of different sexes may somehow be threatened by marriages of people of the same sex does not withstand discussion. It is difficult to the point of impossibility to envision two love-struck heterosexuals contemplating marriage to decide against it because gays and lesbians also have the right to marry; it is equally hard to envision a couple whose marriage is troubled basing the decision of whether to divorce on whether their gay neighbors are married or living in a domestic partnership. And even if depriving lesbians of the right to marry each other could force them into marrying someone they do not love but who happens to be of the opposite sex, it is impossible to see how that could be thought to be as likely to lead to a stable, loving relationship as a marriage to the person they do love.

Moreover, there is no longer any credible contention that depriving gays and lesbians of basic rights will cause them to change their sexual orientation. Even if there was, the attempt would be constitutionally defective. But, in fact, the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians is as much a God-given characteristic as the color of their skin or the sexual orientation of their straight brothers and sisters. It is also a condition that, like race, has historically been subject to abusive and often violent discrimination. It is precisely where a minority's basic human rights are abridged that our Constitution's promise of due process and equal protection is most vital.

Countries as Catholic as Spain, as different as Sweden and South Africa, and as near as Canada have embraced gay and lesbian marriage without any noticeable effect -- except the increase in human happiness and social stability that comes from permitting people to marry for love. Several states -- including Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont -- have individually repealed their bans on same-sex marriage as inconsistent with a decent respect for human rights and a rational view of the communal value of marriage for all individuals. But basic constitutional rights cannot depend on the willingness of the electorate in any given state to end discrimination. If we were prepared to consign minority rights to a majority vote, there would be no need for a constitution.

The ban on same-sex marriages written into the California Constitution by a 52% vote in favor of Proposition 8 is the residue of centuries of figurative and literal gay-bashing. California allows same-sex domestic partnerships that, as interpreted by the California Supreme Court, provide virtually all of the economic rights of marriage. So the ban on permitting gay and lesbian couples to actually marry is simply an attempt by the state to stigmatize a segment of its population that commits no offense other than falling in love with a disapproved partner, and asks no more of the state than to be treated equally with all other citizens. In 2003 the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas held that states could not constitutionally outlaw consensual homosexual activity. As Justice Anthony Kennedy elegantly wrote rejecting the notion that a history of discrimination might trump constitutional rights, "Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."

There are those who sincerely believe that homosexuality is inconsistent with their religion - and the First Amendment guarantees their freedom of belief. However, the same First Amendment, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses, preclude the enshrinement of their religious-based disapproval in state law.

Gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters, our teachers and doctors, our friends and neighbors, our parents and children. It is time, indeed past time, that we accord them the basic human right to marry the person they love. It is time, indeed past time, that our Constitution fulfill its promise of equal protection and due process for all citizens by now eliminating the last remnant of centuries of misguided state discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The argument in favor of Proposition 8 ultimately comes down to no more than the tautological assertion that a marriage is between a man and a woman. But a slogan is not a substitute for constitutional analysis. Law is about justice, not bumper stickers.

Mr. Boies is the chairman of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP.

via mal contends

Pakistan Maverick Khan Looks for America in All the Strange Places

- ‘Americans can’t tell a Taliban extremist from a Sufi moderate cleric, but can pick a Methodist from a Lutheran in seconds’ -

Pakistan’s public figures have no real analogues in America.

Domestic Pakistan, under constant domestic terrorist attack (unlike America), cannot be asserted as an America in the Middle-East, though strains in the fractured culture evince an admiration for the U.S.—both qualified and yet unreserved. No contradiction there. That’s the reality of this cultural strain of this enigmatic place known as Pakistan.

Gordon Duff’s piece, Looking for America in the Strangest of Places, sheds light on an intriguing political figure in Pakistan, Imran Khan.

Imran Khan (not to be confused with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb), is part Arnold Schwarzenegger, part Ross Perot with a little Warren Beatty thrown in.

Duff just arrived home from an informational trip to Pakistan and met with Khan, along with American writer and analyst, Jeff Gates.

Following is an excerpt from Duff’s piece on Khan, who offers candid insights into Pakistan, American ignorance and the violence to which U.S. policy appears at time addicted with all the joy of heroin addict.

Khan appears he may be the type of leader with sufficient popular support and commitment to ideals that America just may make an effort to reach out and engage in the incomprehensible monolith that the world seems to have become at our behest.

Looking for America in the Strangest of Places

By Gordon Duff

Traveling around Pakistan is a challenge for an American nowadays. It’s not the highways. It isn’t even that our second vehicle was ‘armed to the teeth’ as we weaved through traffic and up and down superhighways and dusty back roads. The difficulty is the landscape itself, a land, at times, very American in appearance and yet strange and wondrous too. It was the similarities that scared us.

We were there last week as Americans for a series of lectures and meetings to discuss economics and regional politics at universities and ‘think tanks.’ Pakistan, a country of poverty and wealth, a nation threatened like no other, was much like looking in a mirror, perhaps a mirror into America’s future.

A couple of nights ago, author and economist Jeff Gates and I along with Editor Raja Mujtaba of Opinion Maker, the controversial open forum where academics, military leaders, and political dissidents from that region fight it out daily on the internet, met with Pakistani political leader, Imran Khan.

Meeting Khan was important to us because he is the only political figure in Pakistan who is widely respected in Afghanistan, a nation that could, potentially, bog American down for years in a bizarre and indefinable combination of ‘counter-terrorism’ and traditional tribal warfare. Only Khan is respected on both sides of the border, Khan and General Aslam Beg, former Army Chief of Staff in Pakistan.

That there is suspicion between Pakistan and Afghanistan is an understatement. Millions of Afghanis and Pakistanis are, not only ethnically identical, but members of the same tribes, even families, which poses its own problems.

Today, up to 4 million refugees from Afghanistan live in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These refugees combined with elements of a Pakistani Taliban have created a drain on Pakistan’s resources, a breeding ground for religious extremism and provided safe havens for Taliban sects that are clearly extremist, terrorist, and criminal in nature.

With as many as 50 million people considering themselves ‘Taliban,’ most non-extremist, differentiating between good and bad ‘Taliban’ has been difficult and, in the case of American efforts, something approached with questionable intent.

Not that many years ago, the United States and Pakistan trained and armed the Mujahedeen, both Afghan and foreign fighters to overthrow Soviet dominance in Afghanistan. A generation later, our failure to demilitarize and rehabilitate these elements and the region has led to untold instability, world terrorism, and a war against Pakistan supported by terrorist elements aided by massive funding and sophisticated weaponry and training whose origin can be traced with little difficulty to India and Israel.

Man or Legend

If a man can epitomize ‘controversy,’ it is Imran Khan. Few people define the hopes of Islamic moderates as does Khan. This ‘Khan’s’ empire, a superstar athlete of the cricket world, a sport unknown to most Americans, consists of that huge portion of the world our maps used to color pink, the regions we used to call the British Empire, a region covering 40 percent of the globe. When the British conquered the world, they took their most beloved sport—cricket—with them.

What if an American baseball pitcher won 30 games a year with an earned run average of 2.0 and batted .400? Then surround him with controversy, a Muslim with a Jewish ex-wife; looks and charm; and a reputed ‘way with the ladies’ that keeps the tabloids stalking him and, oh, I forgot to mention this, make him the head of a political party. You will now begin to understand the enigma of Imran Khan.

It gets worse.

He is Pashtu, a Pashtun, one of the same ethnic group Americans know as the Taliban, a group well out of the mainstream in Pakistani politics. In a country ruled by the ‘Europeanized’ Punjabi and Sindh, a Pashtu political leader makes Barack Hussein Obama seem ‘mainstream.’

It gets worse still.

Khan is not only a controversial celebrity but an outspoken reformer fighting government corruption. Khan is a friend of Americans but a strong enemy of American influence in Pakistan and very critical of the west for its mistrust of Islam. He believes the west doesn’t know the difference between a Taliban extremist and a moderate Sufi cleric but can pick out a Methodist from a Lutheran in seconds.

Imagine an American sports hero who is an Oxford trained economist, who sponsored the nation’s largest cancer center, and who is now building a university for those who would never otherwise see a higher education.

We had to meet this guy.

His political offices were moderate. We had visited political parties in Pakistan that looked more like Ivy League campuses. Khan’s party was used furniture, peeling paint, and the sound of work, footsteps up and down stairs and a lot of noise. It was an election night in Rawalpindi. A seat in the national assembly was up for grabs and charges of election fraud had charged the air.

I almost felt like I was back in America. For the office of a man whose very mention that I planned to meet him had a flight attendant asking for my autograph, it was unexpected. Khan wasn’t a dilettante or elitist, he is a fighter, capable of holding his own in any political arena. The language was easy to understand. He believed what he said and knew what he was talking about.

We weren’t used to that.

If you ignored the TV crews outside, you noticed a few things. There were no lights; power had been cut off, a result of terrorism’s costs to Pakistan. Khan had a small rechargeable lantern on his desk; he turned it on so we could find our way and had us sit down. It was clear that we hadn’t entered the corridors of power. This was something else entirely.

We had walked in on a crusade for political accountability and reform. If this were America, it would have been that ‘third party’ we all dream of but never get.

Not what we expected.

When Khan called President Musharraf ‘George Bush’s poodle’ and threatened protests when Bush visited Pakistan in 2006, he was placed under house arrest. When Musharraf declared a ‘national emergency’ in 2007, Khan called for his immediate arrest and execution for treason. Khan was jailed for this, went on a hunger strike and was released.

You can’t help but love a guy like that!

Khan wasn’t a tabloid playboy, though he looked the part, that and more, nor was he much like anything we have seen in America in many years. Khan believed what he said and could more than hold his own on any subject from economics to foreign policy with depth, clarity, and understanding, not only of economic theory but someone with solutions, not just ‘sound bites’ but solid programs, economic reform, political justice.

All of this was steeped in a passion and a drive you could feel across the room. It was electric. Mostly, however, I could feel his frustration. Reforming politics is impossible, certainly in America, at the best of times. Pakistan is beset by enemies on all sides, terror attacks are daily across the country and the threats are far worse than debt and unemployment. People are fighting for their lives.

Interview Turned Around

Khan asked us about everything. I was grilled about American veterans, how they were treated, how their families suffered during multiple deployments, how much Americans sacrificed in a war he believes is being handled without adequate understanding of the factors involved and the solutions available.

Khan wanted to know everything about America, as we saw it, opinions on the war, 9/11, and why Americans believed what the press told them about Pakistan and moderate Islam. His point, of course, is that extremism in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the result, as it had been in Afghanistan, of lack of education.

The aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union had forgotten to rebuild the battleground of that war. Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, where the millions of refugees had settled, areas now subject to poverty and extremism as the ‘war on terror’ had virtually collapsed Pakistan’s economy and destroyed much of its infrastructure, more than any western nation had imagined or bothered to look into.

Few European or American schools have soldiers, armored personnel carriers, and ‘TSA level’ security at their children’s schools. ...

What We Saw

Pakistan’s current president, Zardari, may actually be less popular than ‘W’ after either Katrina or the infamous ‘Bush financial crash’ when real estimates of approval entered the single digit range. Being an ‘unsuccessful politician’ in Pakistan and hated by ‘party line’ newspapers is a clear sign of personal integrity.

Zardari actually passed a law making it a crime to tell jokes about him. This must be hard on a lot of people. Pakistan is a country of folks who know humor. Sometimes it is all that keeps them alive.

Meeting an honest politician, one willing to tell Bush, Israel, or anyone else exactly how he feels, to the point of doing jail time for it, is a bit of a shock. You could ask Khan something and he would simply tell you what he thinks, tell you the truth. Combining this with being educated, devoutly religious, with an established history for charity work and paying the price for standing up for what is right, even at great personal cost, Imran Khan is an enigma.

How Would Americans View Khan?

Jeff and I looked at each other the second we left the door. Jeff remembering his years as Chief Counsel for Senate Finance hit on it immediately: ‘We could get this guy elected President of the United States in a flat minute.’

Thinking back over the last 40 years, there was nobody who could stand up to this guy in terms of media, debate, programs, especially if women were voting.

What would Americans really do?

Khan would be crucified by the press. He would demand an end to corruption, end foreign influence in Washington, Israel, China, India, Saudi Arabia, everywhere. The wars would end, we would begin addressing the root causes of terrorism, defense spending would plummet, and America would start working again.

He would be dead in a week.

Why think about a guy from Pakistan?

The information revolution has made the world small. Imran Khan is ‘out there,’ on YouTube, the Internet, not so much in America but people know him. He isn’t perfect like some Americans, you know the ones we are talking about, all ‘goodness and light’ on the outside and underneath it all, corrupt, addicted, lives of failure reinvented by money, power, and foreign lobbyists.

America is at war, and Pakistan is the front lines. When you talk terrorism, Pakistan is the victim, not the United States. They get it from every side, American papers, Islamic extremists along with India/Israel and games some of us can only imagine or talk of in whispers as ‘conspiracy theory.’ When a school is blown up in Pakistan, the list of potential suspects often has some names that would surprise many Americans.

With a world in the hands of folks like Bush or Obama, Gordon Brown or Tony Blair and the EU folks, Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France, anyone with signs of human life and intelligence is always welcome. Italy’s prime minister spends more money on lesbian prostitutes than an American senator can steal in a lifetime. Imran Khan is a saint in comparison.

- Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, grunt and 100 percent disabled vet. He has been a United Nations diplomat, defense contractor, and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues. He is active in the financial industry and is a specialist on global trade. Gordon Duff acts as political and economic advisor to a number of governments in Africa and the Middle East. Duff serves as senior editor for VeteransToday.com.