Dark Days Ahead

First, congratulations to my blogger buddy Josh Micah Marshall for winning a prestigious George Polk Award last week -- the first blogger to ever do so. Josh was all over the firings of U.S. attorneys that eventually forced Bush appointee Alberto Gonzales to resign as Attorney General, and he kept at it until the mainstream media finally caught up with him.

All forms of journalism, including investigative reporting, are gradually making the transition from old to new media, and Josh's blog is one of the best for political junkies, as I've previously noted here.

Meanwhile, Ralph Nader has decided to enter the race for President. Democrats, remembering Florida in 2000, are beside themselves with anger that Nader might once again help aid Republicans to steal an election away from them.

But I doubt that will happen this year. Actually, I am sympathetic to Nader's motive, which is to broaden the choices available to the American electorate. We can only hope that a conservative candidate also enters the race.

It won't be my personal favorite, Mike Huckabee, because he smells an opportunity in 2012, now that he has established himself as an attractive national candidate within the Republican establishment. We've not heard the last from him, trust me.

But perhaps some other renegade (Newt Gingrich?) could decide to compete with John McCain for the Christian conservative base, which is only lukewarm toward the presumptive GOP nominee.

The last two Democrats standing -- Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- are fighting it out to the death. And death is exactly the paranoid fear now sweeping the African-American community.

The legacy of the Sixties -- when Malcolm X, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy all were assassinated, not to mention so many other civil rights leaders, continues to prey on the minds of black people in the United States.

They can be forgiven for suspecting that the residual racism in this country will not allow a black man to ascend to the highest elected office in the land.

Of course there are those who would try to kill others simply to attain a sick measure of fame. We know this all too well now. Perhaps this is the main lesson from the painful murders of the '60s -- it wasn't a conspiracy of the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence that we most had to fear, but a far more insidious enemy -- those among us so alienated that the only way they can imagine to attain glory is by extinguishing the life of somebody famous, or (in the case of the school shootings) a mass of innocents.

It is always hard when you are in the midst of an age to recognize its distinctive patterns, but I suspect we are living not in a time when sociopaths try to kill leaders as so much as they decide to kill peers.

Neither is acceptable, of course, and that will be part of the social agenda facing the next President of the U.S, whoever he or she may be.