UPDATE: 5/8/08 - I want very much to delete this diary; I no longer agree with myself in any way, shape, or form. The situation is far, far more complicated than I accounted for here (for starters, I didn't so much as touch on the media's hand in creating this disaster). The wounds to both men are deep and deeply personal and, as Bill Moyers said tonight in an interview on Democracy Now, both will likely go to their graves with them. That a disavowal was forced out of Barack Obama at all is an American disgrace, and few of us--least of all me, a daily cable news/CNN consumer--can say that we are not, at the very least, indirectly complicit. In good conscience, however, I think I'll have to leave it, if nothing else as a record of my own growing and learning process. I am not proud of it.
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Tuesday's events with respect to Sen. Obama and his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright have left me--and I suspect a minority of my fellow Obama supporters on this blog--feeling a more than a little bit troubled. Tonight (actually it's already early Wednesday morning) I'm still kinda flailing about in a stormy sea of conflicting emotions, so I guess right now I'd just like to just toss a couple of my mostly muddled thoughts out there, and then call it a (altogether poopy) night.

Who remembers that old refrain? I heard the song yesterday on the in-store sound system at the neighborhood grocery behemoth where I do my shopping. No surprise, really; it's just the kind of thing they play there. But then again it was a surprise, and it was entirely different, hearing that song Friday afternoon, September 2, 2005. Hum a few bars to yourself. Are the lyrics coming back to you?

Well, here's help. John Denver made it a hit, but Steve Goodman composed the words and music, and his original arrangement is exquisite:

http://goldenfiddle.com/~files/cityofneworleans.mp3. You might open the file in a new window and listen while you read on.

Now I don't expect for a minute that an actual human being queued up the song for the occasion, Day 4 of the New Orleans hurricane disaster. Clearly not, sandwiched as it was between incongruous, bubbly numbers from Leo Sayer, Avril Lavinge and Cheap Trick. For sure nobody's playing topical deejay at Raley's. It was just grocery store pipe. It was the music of chance.

"We cannot stress enough the enormous strain these operations will put on the SPCA's resources." You can just imagine. Click on the link if you can't.

"To support the ASPCA's Hurricane Katrina search and rescue efforts, please donate online or call 1-888-ANIMALS, ext. 128."

In the spirit of less is more and short is sweet, I have just one more announcement on behalf of les quadrupèdes:

Preparedness to go beyond obfuscation is also essential: you must be ready to lie by omission, commission, to tell half-truths, white lies, grey lies, super double secret modo lies, and lie without limit; that is, without inconvenient lines in the sand beyond which you will not go. Conscience. There can be none of that.

Another issue over which I've thus far bit my lip rather than confront is why the word "liberal" is not the same as "leftist." The latter word, as applied to me and members of my party, has recently begun to grate. Of course first I'll have to explain what leftist means exactly, 'cause when I asked her to define it, she could only say "extreme," "out there," and "anything goes."

On Wednesday afternoon, at the Sacramento-area bookstore where I work, I got into an intense exchange about abortion with a regular customer I'll call John, just as I was ringing up a boatload of history books for him.

John's a regular, about 70 y.o., considers himself a leisure historian. I grant you, he is knowledgeable about WWI and II, Vietnam, Grenada & the Gulf War. He opposes the Iraq war, and thinks George Bush is one bad dude. He's always come aross a very decent guy and possibly a Dem, so his ruminations on abortion took me by surprise. His words are loathsome, but read on: he isn't quite the caricature of an addlebrained knuckle-dragger that he seems to be (not to say his deviations from type redeem him that much).

It didn't begin this way exactly, but we got to our controversial points fast, so in the interest of brevity in the retelling of my tale, herewith I will do likewise.

It sounds as if you want to see abortion made illegal again and ASAP, is that right?" I asked.

His (predictable) answer, with an unlikely twist in the tale, after the flip.