With the AIG bonuses dominating the news, there’s talk of some good old fashioned populist uprising. Hosts Ted Johnson, Teresa Valdez-Klein, and Maegan Carberry tackle the big question: Is it real outrage? Are Americans actually going to get up off their couch, grab their pitchforks, and storm Wall Street? We’ve all been hearing the bad news for a couple of years now, and the really awful news for a couple of months – so are we desensitized to it all? Should we really be that surprised with the latest revelations of “shenanigans,” as Jim Cramer calls them so innocuously? (And all those politicians, who act so surprised about these Wall Street firms pulling a fast one? They definitely shouldn’t be surprised.)

On a more uplifting note, Adriana Dunn of the socially-conscious Participant Productions (of “Syriana,” and “North Country” fame) joins the Wilshire & Washington crew for a little talk about the South by Southwest interactive conference held in Austin this past week. As a blogger for Participant’s TakePart.com, Adriana covers how people use technology to drive social change, and the SXSWi festival offers plenty of opportunity for that. She discusses the Ron Paul Effect, how Obama’s iPhone app led the charge into the mobile field, and TakePart’s new blog, which will be launching the first week of May.

Ted, Teresa, and Maegan also tackle Obama on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Is the world’s biggest chin really a presidential platform, or should Mr. President be above a late night talk circuit? You didn’t see FDR just coming out, talking to the people with no go-between, did you? Well, other than those fireside chats nobody ever listened to… And finally, there’s the Meghan McCain vs Laura Ingraham Controversy, if we can call it that. Who’s calling who a fat ass, and is little Meghan becoming a fierce new voice on the Right or just another running media topic, fueled by our obsession with celebrities’ personal lives?

Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player to the right:

Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.

In a shocking move Friday, surrogates for the McCain campaign hit the airwaves, playing the race card, only to have it be revealed to be the Four of Clubs. The reaction so far has been one of disappointment.

“Well, this helps no one. I mean, it’s a four of clubs. Nobody needs that,” said campaign spokesperson Joel Cockcroft. “We were hoping for something better, a facecard or at least a Heart. But you play the cards you have, not the cards you want. We had the race card.”

The Obama campaign has, for a good number of months, boasted one of the best political hands in the business. In his pocket, Obama draws support from a wide variety of suits and political backgrounds. He features, among his support, young invigorated voters, black voters, a good portion of the entertainment and technology industries, and a number of veterans groups. While multi-suited, the hand could turn out to be a near-Royal Flush.

But what Obama controls in variety, McCain boasts in depth. His straight hand of support among white Republicans is very strong, with only a slight variation caused by a small Latino conservative voting block. However, to create a truly winning hand, the McCain campaign is going to have to throw out a couple more wild cards and hope that one of them can complete their straight flush of Diamonds.

“We’re playing this game to win,” says Danielle Plouffe, Obama’s campaign spokesperson. “We weren’t aware, however, that there were going to be so many wild cards. The race card was totally out of the blue, and of course it turned out to be black. What a surprise.”

When asked if it was any coincidence that the race card was of a black suit, Joel Cockcroft, McCain campaign spokesperson wavered. “I don’t think it indicates one thing or another. We played this card because we felt it gave us the best chance to win. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a low numbered card with a suit we just didn’t need.”

The McCain campaign is currently also considering playing the Religion Card, The One Card, the Illegal Immigrant Card, the Elitist Card, and the Secret Muslim Extremist Card. The Obama campaign is reported to be in ownership of the Confused Old Person Card and the Angry Grandpa Card, although the campaign has issued official denials about both or the possibility of playing them.

When approached for comment on the Race Card and its place in national politics, two-time World Series of Poker Champion Daniel Negranu feigned ignorance. “Are you talking about poker? What the hell’s wrong with you guys? You’re a bunch of idiots.”

My thoughts are quite mixed. On the one hand, I’ll defend their putting that image on the cover of a major magazine to death. First Amendment, and bloody hell, it is just a cartoon. People shouldn’t take it so seriously. The problem with the image, and the media’s frenzied reaction, was that the people criticizing the cover kept on talking about all these regular folks (aka dimwits) who might just not get that this was satire. The pretentiousness of this assumption is very off-putting. The people who read the New Yorker, yeah, they get it’s a work of satire, lampooning all the attacks made on Obama’s character. So do, probably, many people off the streets who do NOT subscribe to the New Yorker. Yeah, we’re a dumb country, but I refuse to believe individual people (who aren’t good enough to read the New Yorker and therefore idiots) would believe the lies printed on that cover as gospel truth, a point that once again shouts into my tiny brain, “It’s not a big deal.”

Is it tasteless? No, no, it leaves a pretty nice taste in the mouth. The taste of, “wow, this image has balls.” Is it offensive? Hardly. Is it a major media moment? It is for the New Yorker, whose editorial board is all screaming, “w00t! relevancy!” in their best Harvard-based monotones.

On the other hand, my main criticism of the cover comes in looking at it as satire (and this is purely unimportant criticism, because it’s intellectual rather than political). Satire doesn’t have to be funny. So, you can’t attack it for being unfunny. Check out plenty of editorial cartoons (cartoon is a misnomer here) and you’ll see many that make clever statements using contrasting images. They’re trying to illuminate some point, if they’re good, and not necessarily make you, um, LOL. I do feel, however, this was a half-baked joke. The concept is, “Let’s show all the lies that have spread about the Obamas in their fullest form.” Okay, good start. But what’s the punchline (or the point)? That these lies are ridiculous? That’s not necessarily what this image says. It simply presents the lies “as is” without comment. There’s no perspective. The reader infuses the image with his/her own reaction. It would be like putting John McCain on the cover, and picturing him with a walker, an AK-47 to the head of Ahmadinejad, rolling around on a pile of his wife’s money, with his former wife (disabled) despairing in a wheel-chair behind him. Oh, and throw in his black “bastard” child, with the BLACK WOMAN that he allegedly father this child with. Make her a crackhead, too. Or, for more pure entertainment, McCain sucking on George Bush’s teat.

Is that satire? Eh, I think it’s undercooked. Satire needs a straight man, or a perspective of reason, to make the point of the image clear. For me, for this image to work, they needed a punchline. And the most obvious, and kinda funny one, that I could think of was putting this image of the Obamas in a dream bubble coming from Rush Limbaugh’s head as he sleeps in front of his radio console. There’s bound to be a better way of putting us into the image, without spelling it out as I just did. Smarter men and women than I could do better than this.

War. Obviously there’s no point to it. Some malicious fucker got into power and started thinking he and his army were the bright shining hope of this earth and then things went piss-poor. Understandably, no one likes to be pushed around by malicious fuckers, and so guns come out, bodies fall, and fathers don’t come home. What more can really be said?

We’ve come to five years in Iraq. Of course, the events that brought us here are far older and often forgotten. The British Occupation; the Iran-Iraq War; the US government’s empowerment of the Bathist party, leading to Saddam’s rise; the UN’s continuing indifference toward the Kurdish tragedy; the US-supported plot for a military coup in Iraq, combined with the betrayal of said military coup by the first President Bush; Bush’s implied support of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, followed by the trampling of sacred Muslim soil during Operation Desert Storm; and the UN’s failed oil-for-food policy, frequently violated by leading nations like France and Russia, two major detractors of the 2003 invasion. This list does not even take into account the dismissive sins of colonialism, its violence bred deeply into the bones of the now liberated, or the US’s unfortunate relationship with other middle east nations such as Iran and Syria. Many events brought us here. Now we’re stuck.

Isolationism doesn’t work and it’s certainly not morally defensible because so many problems throughout the world our past actions have contributed to and helped create. We do a lot of good worldwide, but taking credit for freeing the world from the Nazis doesn’t mean we can ignore the way we have economically ravaged much of the world, time and again, over the last century.

While striving to be the best versions of ourselves, we have to remember how we got here and recognize how the sins of the past can poison the actions of the future if we do not act to correct, or at least acknowledge, them. Senator Barack Obama spoke on such a theme during his address on Tuesday, March 17, 2008, about race relations in America. And that same theme, that we poison our future by failing to redress our past, can be applied to our involvement in Iraq.

No solution to this equation is clear or forthcoming. But to think of these things, these heavy subjects, is important. What is done is done in our name, whether we choose to acknowledge or accept it. When we are old, we will be asked to explain the world and how it came to be.

There is no way out of this without darkness first. But to pay attention, to understand the poison of the present, that is a first step.