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Thursday, January 08, 2009

A disturbing pattern of Bush water-carriers in the new Administration

Posted by Jill | 4:14 AM

Look, it's one thing to try to establish some kind of spirit of bipartisanship. I'm not with those who are clinging to the idea that Barack Obama's embrace of people like Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, or his plan to make CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta the next Surgeon General is some kind of head fake. I always knew that Obama was basically a centrist with an annoying tendency towards capitulation to the right, but the dearth of serious progressives in his Cabinet when combined with the kind of outreach he's doing to wingnuts doesn't bode well for any kind of significant change.

It was bad enough that Camp Obama's idea of gay outreach was to tout Rick Warren's work on AIDS in Africa as a reason to include him in the celebration, especially when, as Max Blumenthal finds, that work consists primarily of embracing the work of an anti-gay pastor known to hold condom burnings:

Warren has not been particularly forthcoming to those who have attempted to look into it. His Web site contains scant information about the results of his program. However, an investigation into Warren's involvement in Africa reveals a web of alliances with right-wing clergymen who have sidelined science-based approaches to combating AIDS in favor of abstinence-only education. More disturbingly, Warren's allies have rolled back key elements of one of the continent's most successful initiative, the so-called ABC program in Uganda. Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told the New York Times their activism is "resulting in great damage and undoubtedly will cause significant numbers of infections which should never have occurred."

Warren's man in Uganda is a charismatic pastor named Martin Ssempa. The head of the Makerere Community Church, a rapidly growing congregation, Ssempa enjoys close ties to his country's first lady, Janet Museveni, and is a favorite of the Bush White House. In the capitol of Kampala, Ssempa is known for his boisterous crusading. Ssempa's stunts have included burning condoms in the name of Jesus and arranging the publication of names of homosexuals in cooperative local newspapers while lobbying for criminal penalties to imprison them.

When Warren unveiled his global AIDS initiative at a 2005 conference at his Saddleback Church, he cast Ssempa as his indispensable sidekick, assigning him to lead a breakout session on abstinence-only education as well as a seminar on AIDS prevention. Later, Ssempa delivered a keynote address, a speech so stirring it "had the audience on the edge of its seats," according to Warren's public relations agency. A year later, Ssempa returned to Saddleback Church to lead another seminar on AIDS. By this time, his bond with the Warrens had grown almost familial. "You are my brother, Martin, and I love you," Rick Warren's wife, Kay, said to Ssempa from the stage. Her voice trembled with emotion as she spoke, and tears ran down her cheeks.

Joining Ssempa at Warren's church were two key Bush administration officials who controlled the purse strings of the president's newly minted $15 billion anti-AIDS initiative in Africa, PEPFAR. Museveni also appeared through a videotaped address to tout the success of her country's numerous church-based abstinence programs.

Abstinence programs. THAT is the anti-AIDS work that Rick Warren is doing in Africa. Stop the black people from having sex. Don't allow them to protect themselves when they do, just encourage them to stop. And this is the fulcrum of Barack Obama's evangelical outreach. You really need to read the entire article, because it is a disturbing sign that little due diligence was done before giving Warren a high-profile role in the inauguration.

Now the President-elect, who has made health care a priority for his new Administration, is choosing a Bush shill to be his surgeon general. Who can forget Dr. Sanjay Gupta's water-carrying for the Bush Administration about Michael Moore's movie Sicko:

Michael Moore is inflammatory, and she's zhlubby, and he wasn't named one of People magazine's sexiest men. But that doesn't make him wrong, and in this case he isn't wrong, and Larry King playing the Fox News card and saying that "balance" means truth on the one side and utter horseshit on the other still doesn't make him wrong.

Perhaps Camp Obama didn't hear how Gupta had to backtrack after finding out the facts:

But the bigger picture of this exchange, which was followed up by another joint appearance by the two, is Gupta's acceptance and embrace of the status quo about the state of health care in America. When the Obama transition team is actively soliciting health care horror stories on its web site, and then picking someone with the kind of video track record that Gupta has, it seems to be yet another case of giving lip service to change. Once again I think of the words of the grandmother of another commenter on another web site, "When the mouth and the feet are both moving, watch the feet."

As Paul Krugman notes:

ou don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

[snip]

Gupta didn’t say “Michael Moore is an annoying blowhard”; he didn’t say “We question his interpretation of the evidence”; he said he “fudged the facts”. In other words, he accused Moore of lying. That’s a very strong accusation, which had better be backed by solid evidence. Instead, we had CNN misreading a number from Moore; CNN objecting to Moore using a projected health care spending number for 2007 instead of an actual number for 2005 (and the projection was right, by the way); CNN accusing Moore of not showing a number that was in fact right there in the movie. And Gupta did not apologize, except for the misread number.

There are reasons I have to tread carefully when covering health care topics, which is one reason you won't see me do it much. But that shouldn't keep YOU from going to, say, Google, and doing a blog search on "Sanjay Gupta." You might be interested in what you find.

I understand why Team Obama would be interested in having a handsome celebrity doctor as surgeon general. This way you get a household name, one whom people are accustomed to seeing on television, which for some reason gives these guys credibility in the eyes of Americans that some no-name guy who just happens to be one of the best at his practice wouldn't have. If I were going to guess at the conversation that occurred around this, I would speculate that the first of these guys discussed was Dr. Mehmet C. Oz, who is closely associated with Oprah Winfrey, and then they decided that Oz' association with Winfrey, combined with the fact that he is from a Muslim family and is also associated with integrative medicine, knocked him off the list in favor of the equally handsome, equally ethnically-interesting Gupta, who is a reliable voice for the status quo.

4 comments

4 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Remember Dr. Oz in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? It was heartbreaking and he was determined. I appreciated his grit then.

Did you see Assif Mandhvi on the Daily Show last night? If not: hint hint.

1/8/09, 6:53 AM

Unknown said...

Like I said, it's not too late to get the sticker.

1/8/09, 7:14 AM

Anonymous said...

Barry, isn't there something constructive you could do besides haunt Jill's comments? How about volunteering at the men's shelter in Gaza City?

1/8/09, 12:25 PM

Unknown said...

>Barry, isn't there something constructive you could do besides haunt Jill's comments?

Of course! But if everyone decided to become "constructive" all of a sudden, the blogosphere would implode overnight. Just doin' my part.

1/8/09, 1:20 PM