Cher's got Cherokee roots and Buffy has Cree and, after we got over our shock at Buffy's wig, we were left with the realization that this was as close to her 'roots' as Buffy was probably going to get.
We don't mean to imply that it was all heavy. For example, Amy Goodman provided lots of laughs. We especially laughed at, "After hitting the top of the charts in the early '60s, the outspoken performer suddenly disappeared from the mainstream airwaves during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon years."
Now Buffy was blacklisted and we're not trying to make light of that. But when exactly did she ever hit the top of the charts?
As we understand it, before 1965, the Beatles and the Supremes hit the top of the charts. In 1965, Cher would hit the top of the charts with Sonny ("I Got You Babe"). As we understand it, "the top of the charts" is number one. So, help us out, when did Buffy ever hit number one?
We'll be kind. How about number two? Number three? Top ten? Top twenty?
Buffy's highest charting single was in 1972 (when radio stations were encouraged not to play her) when she hit number 38 on the Top 40 with "Mister Can't You See."
Okay, we'll maybe she wasn't a singles artist. Not everyone is. Maybe, like Barbra Streisand, she's more of an album's artist? Okay, when did she top the charts with an album?
If the top of the charts is still number one, then never. Nor did she make it in the top ten, or top twenty, or top thirty, or top forty, or . . .
Her highest charting album thus far is 1966's Little Wheel Spin and Spin which made it to number 97 on the Billboard Top 200.
We've told you many times before that, when Amy Goodman tries to talk music, you shouldn't listen.
Buffy's career was harmed by the blacklist put out by LBJ and Nixon. But let's not pretend that she was harmed in terms of top 40. She's not a top 40 artist. She never was. She was like Joan Baez and Judy Collins during the sixties and early seventies and none of them were singles artists. Judy came the closest. Joan never cracked the top forty until 1971 with "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (number three on the Top Forty) and she'd make it to number 35 with "Diamonds and Rust" in 1975. Joan may very well have been blacklisted, we wouldn't doubt that she was also targeted. Discussing the blacklist last Monday, Buffy stated, "He had a letter on White House stationery, you know, commending him for having suppressed music that deserved to be suppressed, and it was about me. Eartha Kitt was affected. Taj Mahal was affected. A lot of people were affected." A lot of people were affected, Buffy said, she did not list Joan Baez.
Judy Collins had more success on the charts. "Both Sides Now" (written by Joni Mitchell) was a number 8 Top 40 hit in 1968. Two years later, she made it to number 15 with "Amazing Grace."
In 1973, she'd make it to number 32 with "Cook With Honey." In 1975, she'd take "Send In The Clowns" to number36 and, in 1977, it would chart at number 19.
Judy's not generally seen as a "peace queen." But Judy was speaking out against the war in Vietnam and against the same things Joan and Buffy were. Judy also had a real label behind her: Elektra. Buffy and Joan were both on Vanguard which, by the early seventies, both women agreed didn't know how to promote artists. It never did. And part of their problems had to do with the label they were on. At one point, Vanguard was having a hissy fit over a Buffy album (one Buffy herself would go on to disown) and they needed something that would sell. When a label needs something from an artist that will sell there are two choices: a live album or a repackaging 'best of.' Vanguard decided to go with the latter . . . two times in a row.
The thing about 'best of's is that it can be the death of a career. And doing a Best of Vol. 1 and, the following year, a Best of Vol. 2 tends to send a message that the recording career is over which is why real labels never do such a thing. But Vanguard wasn't a real label.
Judy had the real label. She was also leading and not following. For example, before Joan Baez decided to dabble in baroque (Noel, October 1966 if you're generous; Joan from August 1967 if you're honest), Judy had already done an album in the genre (In My Life, released in June of 1966). Buffy showed up with baroque in July 1967 with Fire & Fleet & Candlelight.
Her label hated Illuminations (a judgment she later agreed with it) which is too bad because it's one of the strongest albums of 1969, like nothing else anyone was doing and her new album's "No No Keshagesh" sounds a great deal like "He's A Keeper Of The Fire" from the 1969 album.
A male folk-rocker caught Buffy's act Monday and phoned us to convey this sentiment, "She's on the ground, legs spread, furiously fingering herself while she's got her mouth buried in Barack's crotch." And that pretty much sums it up.
She declared:
I know we're having hard times in our -- in the world right now, economically, you know, and yet I still so believe in the soul of people, you know, of individual people and our capacity to work together and to elect a great president. I supported President Obama, not because he grew up in Hawaii, where I live, and not because he was half-black, half-white, but just the idea of a professor of constitutional law in the White House, you know, the idea of someone with that kind of background and understanding who had also been a community organizer really, really touched me.
It was shameful, it was embarrassing and it was disgusting.
Joan and Buffy always self-presented as the Peace Queens but the two have become the Piss Queens. If that sounds harsh, you should have heard all the comments being made to us last week by men and women who know both.
Judy Colllins is probably waxing over Barack herself. But no one saw Judy as a peace queen and no one saw her as anything but a woman who would vote Democrat no matter what.
Joan and Buffy? They were supposed to be about causes. They were supposed to be about peace. Both women rejected party politics during their hey day. Both disgraced themselves in 2008 as they rushed to whore for Barack.
As bad as it was for Joan -- and it hurt her as she discovered when she tried to tour recently -- it was worse for Buffy. Despite being a Latina, Joan avoided her ethnicity. Buffy's always claimed her heritage.
What does that mean?
Well, as a historian put it, "Seems to me the attackers didn't just show up and start mowing down the natives, they had to be welcomed in and isn't that what Buffy's done with Obama?"
Yes, as she furiously fingers herself, that's exactly what she's done.
For Buffy or any Native American to whore for Barack is disgusting.
Samantha Power isn't a woman of peace. She is a supporter (a public one) of "counter-insurgency." Counter-insurgency is war on a native people.
It is an attempt to defeat them and to colonize them. No Native American should ever support counter-insurgency. It's desired effect is the same destruction and colonization that stole the land from the Native Americans.
Power currently sits on the National Security Council. Power wasn't just an adviser to Barack's presidential campaign, she also worked for his office when he was a US Senator.
Then there's our online stalker Sarah Sewer (Sewall), Sammy Power's kiss-kiss friend. She's not just a supporter of counter-insurgency, she's a 'guru' and, like most of the Carr Center trash, she backed Barry. She was also an adviser for his presidential run. She even bragged, as we may have been the only ones to note, that she could get him to say what she wanted.
Counter-insurgency is about 'neutralizing' the 'opposition.' During Vietnam, the Phoenix Program, as both Buffy and Joan damn well know, was an example of a counter-insurgency program. As with that program, the current counter-insurgency (taking place in both Iraq and Afghanistan) allows for the 'termination' of lives and the intimidation that results from that and other tactics.
It is terrorizing the local population and. if you don't hear a great deal about it these days, it may be due to the fact that their efforts to lie don't go over well. In October of 2007, for example, Monty McFate was lying through her teeth (a given for Monty) and 'explaining' to Susan Page (filling in for Diane on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show) that the counter-insurgency 'social scientists' give their names to people when 'researching them' and are was just anthropologists talking to the people. When a New York Times correspondent joined the discussion later, he wasn't aware Monty had been lying about the anthropologist "Tracy" and he began discussing her (Tracy).
David Rohde: I saw her briefly, but I don't know what she does at all times. She personally, um, actually chose to carry a weapon for security that's not a requirement for members of the team, I've been told. And she wore a military uniform which would make her appear to be a soldier, um, to Afghans that she wasn't actually speaking with.
Susan Price: And so you think Aghans knew that she wasn't a soldier even though she was wearing a military uniform and carrying a weapon? Or do you think that they just assumed that she probably was?
David Rohde: I would think that they assumed that she was.
Of course they'd assume she was a soldier, she's carrying a weapon and wearing a military uniform. No, she's not practicing science and no one doing counter-insurgency is. Excuse, us they are doing a bastardization of science, the same way Hitler did. But in terms of true science, a field which does include ethics, they've got nothing to offer.
And that these people aligned with Barack Obama and he with them should have been reason enough for Buffy Sainte-Marie to have avoided him like the plague. Instead, she still can't stop babbling and whoring. We see her as the eternal welcome wagon lacking common sense and imagine a Buffy in 1492, so eager to curry favor, that she wraps herself around Christopher Columbus. We, and the surviving Tainos, know how that story ended.
Barack worked for a CIA-front company out of college and then went on to do some bad community organizing that left him eager to run from community organizing. (We discussed Barack's community organizing here a year ago.) But Buffy sees no accomplishments and isn't bothered. Sees counter-insurgency -- the very thing that killed off so many Native Americans -- and thinks, "Hey, great!" It's disgusting.
And Buffy's disgusting for refusing to call it out and refusing to back away from her endorsement of Barack.
She's disgusting and she's a fraud. That becomes obvious as you listen to her new album Running For The Drum and hear the lyrics to the third track, the finger-pointing "Working For The Government." Excuse us, but isn't Buffy doing the same damn thing?
As you grasp that, you being to realize that Buffy Sainte-Marie is no more real than Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson. Buffy Sainte-Marie is nothing but a creation, a character, something to sell records. A chocolate Easter bunny -- pretty on the outside but hollow.
Piss Queens posing as Peace Queens have a way of revealing themselves. "Eventually," as Carole King used to sing. And thinking of faux Peace Queens, of Piss Queens, naturally had us thinking of Medea Benjamin -- the gal who puts the stink in CODESTINK.
For some time, we've been warning you that CODESTINK wasn't about peace anymore. And leave it to Medea to do us a solid by going public on that fact. It happened first with The Christian Science Monitor but she swore she was misquoted. Then last week, Scott Horton interviewed her on his Anti-War Radio (link has text and audio) and, while still insisting she was misquoted by The Monitor, she repeated the same exact statements. She's not for the US pulling out of Afghanistan any time soon. She has other concerns. And she was a 'responsible withdrawal' (which will be addressed this edition in another piece).
On Democracy Now! in September, I Need Attention Benjamin was bragging about the petition -- she's such a hard working peace activist (sarcasm) -- and insisting, "We have to be heard. So I would say that the most important thing is to reactivate the networks that were so active during the Bush years to force Obama to do the right thing, which is to set an exit strategy and bring our troops home." These days, Medea thinks Troops Home isn't a pressing issue.
And she wonders why she's seen as such a joke? The woman who tried to turn a pie-ing into a drive-by shooting.
Piss Queens are never really about peace. They're about themselves. Which is why Medea's only shown real regret and hurt when discussing her pie-ing. Which is why Joan Baez thinks she's cute calling African-Americans "Negroes" -- Laura Flanders apparently found it cute as well since she broadcast Joan doing just that in August of 2005 on her Air America Radio show. (Most interviewers have just eliminated that word from Joan's published interviews for the last 30 years.)
Piss Queens aren't about peace, they're about themselves. And sometimes, if it helps them or looks like it might help them, they'll stand up for peace. But take a picture quickly because Piss Queens tire easily and really can't handle anything more than a momentary stand. That's the real lesson of last week.