Jarrett-Carter.com

Between picking Sarah Palin, “that one,” and incessantly blinking during debates, John McCain has done all in his power to lose this election. And that’s not very surprising considering that his party is making him the mouthpiece for values and policies he does not support.

What’s surprising is that so many people are trying to blow it on his behalf. And that the people trying to blow it for him are getting caught out there in the media.

We knew about the old lady who thought Barack Obama was an Arab, but now we’ve got a McCain supporter crying wolf on being assaulted by an Obama supporter. Even Crystal Mangum knows enough not to tie herself up with the Obama campaign.

And then, John McCain’s brother is calling 911 because he doesn’t like sitting in traffic? And they think Obama is an elitist? Have you seen the George Washington bridge?

Face it. Nobody really wants this guy to win. Even the people that think he’s on a mission from God to save America have to wonder how much God approves of predatory lending practices, which are popularly aligned with shady Republican economic policies.

Just throw it, John. Nobody will be mad for getting out of the way of an historical freight train. Besides, concession can’t be any worse than what you and your supporters have done up to this point.

I always knew he had it in him, like many other Republicans around the country. For so long, many held Gen. Colin Powell in the vein of a sellout or a Uncle Tom because of his public political affiliation.

But when its all on the line between a country having hope and a country falling into despair, who else could you count on but Powell to come through with an eloquent and logical take on what this election means?

After all, he is a hero.

And don’t let that affiliation fool you. I’ve long believed that that his Republican views were more morally motivated than politically. If he happened to get paid off of them in the interim, more power to him.

He may not be down for gay marriage, he may not be down for abortion, and he might not even be down for gun control. But affirmative action and support for Barack Obama is more than enough from CP.

We’ll work on him about the rest of the stuff.

He’s already got the ball, now all he needs is a Swoosh T-Shirt, a Neptunes beat, and Tiger Woods standing by nodding in approval.

The future of American politics hangs in the balance, and holding the balance are a plumber and an alcoholic.

Joe the Plumber and Joe Six-Pack have gotten the lion’s share of attention in the presidential and vice-presidential debates, and with 19 days left until the general election, it will be those two guys that will likely push the election - and the country - into a new direction.

And so we have to ask ourselves, should the plumber and the alcoholic yield that much influence over the country?

Maybe it is elitist, maybe it’s arrogant to ask. But I like my plumbers close to me, and my alcoholics even closer. Both are okay when they are family men, going to work everyday, and enjoying the little trappings of life that we strive to hold onto. Both are okay when they are neighbors, co-workers and guys at the bar with a good sense of humor and a pride about themselves.

But in the booth? The voting booth? I’m not sure I trust them so much.

I’m scared that a lot of plumbers and alcholics like John McCain’s war hero persona. I’m concerned that a lot of plumbers and alcoholics are wrapped up in Barack Obama’s calm nature.

But what scares me most is that most of the plumbers and alcoholics aren’t truly up on the platforms of either candidate, so whether its Obama or McCain, they won’t truly be able to take advantage of their promised benefits, or see their how they might get the shaft.

I’m scared that they won’t see beyond the physcial personas, or go deeper into the rhetoric of the candidates. Will the alcoholic notice that McCain talks more about business owners in his tax plans than the majority of Americans who don’t own companies? Will the plumber know that Obama’s tax plans will indeed cost him more to provide health care for his employees?

I’m scared that they don’t care to read about it, listen to pundits about it, or research what it all means, simply because most of their time is spent between work and chilling with a drink.

Ultimately, the race is going to come down to comfort and trust, and no one is more qualified on those two fronts than plumbers and alcoholics. I can only hope that they are educated enough and caring enough to arm themselves with information, as they decide who my next president willl be.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from Gadi Dechter, a reporter/editor for the Baltimore Sun newspaper. He didn’t know I was no longer a public relations executive for Morgan State University, which was the basis for our relationship over the past three years.

And I didn’t know that his phone call was for yet another article in his repeated attempts to discredit Morgan State University.

See, the thing you have to know about Gadi Dechter is that his journalistic integrity is wrapped up in how much he can break down the integrity of a subject. He made a nice name for himself by getting former Sun columnist Michael Olesker fired in 2006; the kind of work that can move an aspiring young reporter up the ladder.

But it would only be a step ladder, as Dechter moved on to the flailing, shrinking rag that is the Baltimore Sun.

And onto a new subject. Morgan State University.

It started harmlessly enough. A piece on if historically black colleges are still relevant. He must feel really good about that one, too, as it made his blog’s hot list with several other pieces that subtly scream, “Black Colleges? For What?”

But while that may be beside the point, it’s not beside the personal, which is what Gadi’s body of work against Morgan is to me. Personal not only in the sense that I attended the school, but personal in the sense that Dechter, and the Baltimore Sun as a news outlet, can make it their mission to embarrass and discredit an institution that by its mission, does the state a solid on education for minorities.

To be fair, I have to credit Dechter with being a fine journalist. He’s a supreme jerk, and cares not whom he offends if they are in the way of his stories. That’s what it takes to chase bylines for a living, and damned if he doesn’t track them like a stalker.

To be balanced, I can say that Gadi Dechter doesn’t know the meaning of the word. In his tenure with the Sun, he has had an allergic reaction to any and all positive news emanating from the corner of Cold Spring Lane and Hillen Road. Any text following a Dechter byline on Morgan State is likely to contain reporting on scandal, deceit and not-so-subtle hints at mismanagement. Are these things going on at Morgan State? Absolutely.

But is Morgan State the only institution guilty of such reprehensible actions? Of course not.

And yet, Dechter and the Sun would have you to believe otherwise. He told me as much in a conversation some months ago, when I pulled him to the side to ask him about his obvious slant against the university.

Amidst lines like “these stories come to me,” “taxpayers deserve to know what’s happening,” and other latent right-wing bailout talking points, I found myself getting angry. Angry that print journalism deserves to die, because it has created editorial boards that feed on inflammatory and unbalanced reporting. I became angry that he held racist tensions against my school, and despite the proof in black and white, would defend to his grave that he did not.

But what made me the angriest in our brief exchange, is that I wanted to yank him by the pet-hair covered collar of his blue blazer, and growl through gritted teeth, “this is the place that built me to be more than a man who would like nothing more than to break your face right now.”

And then I realized that it was not Gadi Dechter after all. It was the system that makes Gadi Dechter necessary, even in a post-race world. Because if you don’t have a Gadi Dechter, you lose focus on how far America needs to go, and how little time contemporary journalism has left.  If you don’t have a Gadi Dechter, you can be lulled into a false sense of hope about institutions who have been against you far longer than they have been for you.

If you don’t have a Gadi Dechter, you will never see it coming.

In a strange way, I admire Gadi Dechter. I would imagine that there is a certain amount of liberation in perpetuating chaos, because it minimizes the discord in your own life. Maybe one day, his chaos will get him a Pulitzer Prize, and I’ll give him a call.

Interestingly enough, he’ll never know that my purpose will be to boast about how Morgan State University launched yet another superstar into the stratosphere.

Distortion of facts? political bluster without substance? Yeah, are boy Bill O’Reilly is doing his thing again.

Except this time, Rep. Barney Frank shows that guests have just as much bark as the closet conservative.

If there’s one thing you can give Sarah Palin and the Republican paty credit for, its the fact that they don’t take too much stuff for too long. After a couple of weeks of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin portraying herself as the town idiot in the national spotlight, the pitbull in lipstick pulled it together enough for last night’s debates to ineffectively duck questions, and turn the forum into a Mayberry town hall meeting with a flurry of “doggone its” and “darn rights.”

What party officials don’t seem to understand is that this thing called the Internet serves as the ultimately informational equalizer. Before, you could tell poor folks anything, and if you sounded like you knew what you were talking about, we’d believe it. Now, you can’t go three steps without everybody logging onto youtube or some social network to hear about the latest hot mess.

And mess doesn’t get much hotter than this year’s political race.

Literally, everybody and his mama knows that Sarah Palin is like the majority of Americans, uninformed and blissful in its peril. Where you get our attention is when you mess with our God or our money, and not necessarily in that order. The failure of Republicans is not that their policies are terribly stupid, but that greed is going out of style and everybody knows it now.

Foreclosures, wars and high gas prices have everyone seeing through the smokescreen of small government and moral fiber platforms. People are broke, and it doesn’t take long for you to get smart when you have less money than you used to. But instead of taking the cleanest way out and admitting “Look, we thought giving rich folks money would make it down to you guys, but this go round, it didn’t work out,” they instead try to ignore failed policies and rickety promises of relief by talking to you, the voter, as if you are sitting at a bar.

Let’s be real. Some people are going to admire that and vote for the McCain-Palin ticket because it sounds trust worthy. It sounds like things will be okay. But when you have Fox News conceding that Palin’s performance was more a “moral victory” than anything else, you know that exceeding dirt low expectations just isn’t going to cut it any more.

Just when you think you couldn’t get a national executive any dumber than George Bush, meet Sarah Palin. Her scheduled debate tonight with Sen. Joe Biden is likely going to be the stuff of legend for biggest and fastest public meltdown in American political history.

And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Sarah Palin is an idiot for not reading a newspaper on a daily basis, or for not knowing more than one Supreme Court decision, or for even lauding her foreign policy experience as running the state closest to head-rearin’ Putin. No, the stupidity comes two-fold for Palin and the Republicans.

For Palin, because she’s too stupid to lie, and for the Republicans, because they are too stupid to replace her.

Palin must be so conservative, so entrenched in her own little world of all children being born and having access to handguns, that she can’t even muster the brain power to make up the name of a newspaper she last SAW. I read several newspapers on a daily basis, but if I were asked about one that I do not read, I would spin it to the ones I do read and have answer backing up that statement.

You don’t sit there and look helplessly ignorant about reading, when everyone knows you don’t know anything about the potential job you’ll have.

And the Republicans are sitting by watching this unfold. If I were a Republican, I would be near the point of heart failure knowing that my party was giving the election away. Perhaps its all a strategy for 2012, when Michael Steele will be ripe enough to trot out as America’s hope and black folks moral compass.

But in the meantime, its almost as if the Republican Party assumes that the majority of people like stupidty and ignorance. Perhaps the memo about Bush being the most disliked president of all time hasn’t reached their Facebook page. And yet, the ideals and idicoy march into St. Louis tonight like a lion chasing its tail off a cliff.

I’m fully expecting the deabate to be like Amateur Night at ‘Showtime at the Apollo’ for Palin, but the sad news for Sarah Palin is that there is no Sandman to pull her ignorant ass off the stage when she blunders and stumbles her way through the most basic of political inquisition.

Go easy on her, Joe.

By now, everyone has heard about Sen. John McCain’s plans to suspend his presidential campaign in order to focus on the economic crisis. What a lot of people may not know is that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban suggested this days ago on his blog, and it appears McCain has followed it to the letter.

“Based on the series of events on Wall Street this past week, I am withdrawing my economic proposals. Once the market settles down, I will meet with Secretary Paulson, who has done a phenomenal job in handling this crisis, and gain a better understanding of where the economy is and where it can go from here. Based on that information, I will present to the American people my new economic strategy.

In the meantime, because the economic future of this country depends on the funding of the plan Secretary Paulsen has proposed, I will set aside my campaigning and work with my colleagues in the Senate and across my party to quickly get this bill passed. The future of our economy depends on it”

Well, from one Maverick to another, its certain an interesting turn of events. The man who can’t get David Stern to see things his way might have just changed the course of American political history?

Charles S. Dutton, whom most of us affectionately know as “Roc,” has confirmed that he is working on six-part mini-series on the life of Louis Armstrong, to be broadcast on HBO.

The interesting thing about Louis Armstrong is very few musicians did as much as he did to advance black culture through music, and yet, he is usually regarded as a background figure among the great champions of our history. People in New Orleans, and hardcore jazz enthusiasts know him well, but for a person who tied his art and talent to social and political movements and was still beloved by the masses to not receive recognition, makes this project that much more meaningful.

Many of his day regarded him as an Uncle Tom; a willing party to social segregation and a silent observer of Southern injustice. But looking back, you could say that Armstrong’s life was forged out of the hardening experience of poverty and exploitation. Truly, he worked diligently for civil rights and equitable treatment around the country, but it must’ve been hard to take a grinning, dark-skinned trumpet player seriously in his times of dark clarity and somber substance.

I’m looking forward to watching the mini-series, not for musical purposes but for the insight into the life of a man who became a funny little legend among black folks.