Reflections From a Murky Pond

Jesse Jackson’s response to Sen. Barack Obama’s Father’s Day speech at at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago was both stupid and brutish. Jackson made a rude and thuggish comment to a fellow guest at Obama’s speech, not realizing that the microphone he was wearing for an upcoming interview with FOX News was already on.

See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based…I wanna cut his nuts off. Barack…he’s talking down to black people.

– Rev. Jesse Jackson

Jackson was apparently incensed by Sen. Obama’s call for Black men to take responsibility for the children that they sire. Jackson was angered enough by Obama’s desire for Black men to become involved in the lives of the children they breed to both forget he was wearing a FOX News microphone and to feel the need to threaten to castrate the Senator.

At first glance the situation and Jackson’s reaction seems fairly typical, stereotypical in point of fact. The elder generation of “Black Leaders” have a long history of denouncing and deriding anyone - especially any Black man - who speaks out on the issue of absentee Black fathers. Their “party line” has always been that Mother and Father being replaced by Baby Daddy and Baby Mama in the Black Community is solely or primarily the fault of Whites and racism. Bill Cosby and now Barack Obama have run afoul of people like Jackson whenever they admit that the irresponsibility of Black men is a major part of why 67% of Black children are born into single parent households.

If one looks a bit deeper into this though, it becomes plausible that Jesse Jackson was not just spewing the same vitriol as one would expect. Obama’s speech may have hit Jackson far too close to home. For Jackson the feeling of insult might have been entirely personal.

In the early weeks of 2001 the national press was reporting the scandalous details of Jackson’s long-term adulterous affair with Karin Stanford, a top aide working for his Chicago-based Rainbow Coalition, an affair that resulted in the birth of a daughter in 1998. Jesse Jackson then used his Rainbow Coalition’s funds to pay his mistress $35,000 to relocate her to Southern California and to provide her with continuing $3,000 a month in support. He also used $365,000 in funds from the Rainbow Coalition to purchase Stanford’s house.

By any reasonable accounting, this was a gross misuse of the funds of the Rainbow Coalition, which is a tax-exempt entity bound by strict rules governing dispersement of it funds. Yet, the Rainbow Coalition not only didn’t complain about spending this money on Jackson’s mistress and bastard daughter but actually signed off on it with their official approval. The larger organization willingly chose to overlook Jackson’s behavior and shield him as best as they could from the consequences of his transgressions.

Yeah…I think Jackson’s anger was quite personal. Any admonitions about taking personal responsibility for your misdeeds and the children they engender is going to hit far too close to home for Jackson’s comfort.

InfoWar or Information Warfare is the use and management of information in pursuit of an advantage over an opponent. Information warfare may involve collection of tactical information, assurance that one’s own information is valid, spreading of propaganda or disinformation to demoralize the enemy and the public, undermining the quality of opposing force information and denial of information collection opportunities to opposing forces.

InfoWar has always been important in political and military struggles. In the modern world it possibly even more important for adversaries in a conflict to control and shape the information available.

Below is a video reporting on how some African citizen journalists - read that as Bloggers - are waging campaign of information warfare against the ruling parties in their lands who seek to maintain their authority at least partially by controlling and censoring what information is provided to their citizens and the world through the media.

This video is courtesy of Current_TV

These are some very brave and committed people who daily risk their freedom and their lives in an ongoing attempt to break their governments’ stranglehold on information dissemination. Across the globe citizen journalists - bloggers mostly - are engaged in an asymmetric war of information. They often manage though the porous nature of the internet to do what the Main Stream Media (MSM) is unable or unwilling to accomplish - the free and open release of information about unpopular, uncomfortable, and/or unprofitable issues.

232 years ago a group of insurgents rose up to cast off the shackles of an oppressive foreign power. Using asymmetric warfare techniques they forced an eventual withdraw of occupying and counter-insurgency troops from their land, despite being outnumbered and vastly out-gunned by their opposition.

They won their freedom from foreign tyranny and forged a new nation that still stands today.

Happy Birthday, America!