Obama Exposed As Black

McGentrix wrote:

For every mouth piece on the right, there is an equal and opposite mouthpiece on the left spewing the same sewage.

Except that right when you tried, a couple pages ago, to showcase how the liberals do smears just as violently as the right, the first and most egregious example you came up with actually was from a conservative anti-McCain group. And the liberal example of a low attack was widely condemned by the readers of "the mouthpiece" in question - and commondreams is about as far left as you get over there.

No, mud slinging obviously is not a trait belonging solely to the right -- but your attempts to sketch some broad, general equivalence are falling flat. The kind of hypocrisy you just showed up from Dean is bipartisan and bidirectional, for sure. But the real sewage, the kind that Kiley and Sampley engage in, or Mr. Roger "C.U.N.T." Stone, is another matter.

Stone gets a sympathetic portrait in the Weekly Standard ("Roger Stone shows how it's done--again") and guest appearance as analyst for MSNBC; not for the first time. And attacks like the one you quoted by Ted Rall on McCain were absolutely commonplace against Kerry four years ago throughout the conservative blogosphere - but you didnt find half the readers objecting there. There's no equivalence here.

blatham wrote:

But on this topic, we aren't going to get very far simply because you won't stretch your information sources far enough or broad enough.

Give it a rest. You aren't correct merely because you devotedly read salon.com and the NY Review of Books on a semi-regular basis.

LOL

I think The Nation needs to be put at the top of the list.

Can anyone be more pretentious than an educated liberal?

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

LOL

I think The Nation needs to be put at the top of the list.

The Nation? I know that it's an article of faith for the conservative mind that every pinko liberal intellectual must religiously read the Nation, but I dont think I've ever actually seen Blatham quote the Nation more than once in a blue moon, really. Or anyone here, come to think of it. Maybe I've missed it all.

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

Can anyone be more pretentious than an educated liberal?

You give yourself far too little credit, Finn.

I've never read The Nation, much less quoted it. Does that mean i don't get to be a librul?

blatham wrote:

... On this thread or another, Nimh recently observed that this election was not bringing out the best in us. Elizabeth Drew, writing in the New York Review of Books, said "This election is dividing friends and families like no other I've seen." That's a significant observation, given that Drew has been doing bright political journalism all her adult life and was born in 1935.

Part of what many of us must be trying to get our heads around is, how did we get here? How has it come to be that such depths of passion are presently aroused?

Is this proposition really true? Are the political passions surrounding the Democrat primaries or the coming contest between the candidates in the election really much greater than what has occurred in the past. I think the answer is fairly obvious -- NO. Even a quick and superficial search of materials relating to presidential campaigns of the past century reveals that the contemporary furor is merely typical. The major political parties have their seasons of hotly competed rivalries between opposing factions and others of relatively calm dominance by a single group or faction. However, in nearly every campaign since 1940, one party or the other (sometimes both) has usually been deeply engaged in contests between opposing candidates involving deep conflicts and passions evbery bit as dramatic as those we see today. Examples abound, ranging from 1952 when Senator kefauver entered the Democrat convention having already won 94% ot the delegates needed to secure the nomination in various primaries, and ended up losing the nomination to Adalai Stevenson who entered the convention with almost none.

In that same year an equally bitter struggle went on in the Republican primaries and convention between the very conservative supporters of Senator Taft of Ohio and those supporting Gen Eisenhower in the struggle for the Republican nomination.

Similarly, the elections of 1960, 1968, 1972 and many others saw bitter struggles, either within individual parties or between them, for the Presidency.

blatham wrote:

... It is somewhat clarifying to imagine the immediate present had Romney or Giuliani or another Republican candidate achieved the nomination rather than McCain. I doubt there would be any significant difference to what we are now witnessing.

But remove either Obama or Clinton and a very different picture presents itself. Or, to make the difference even more clear, imagine neither of them running. The left, given the last eight or twenty years, came up to this nomination cycle passionate and mobilized and would surely have been so absent Obama or Clinton, but both of these individuals have fostered particularly acute and serious constituencies. Gender and race are key. That's not a bad thing, it is just a real thing. Can we imagine a Biden/Richardson battle now engendering the same level of internecine passions?

But the swiftboating of Obama was inevitable and predictable to a full 100% certainty. If Clinton comes out ahead, we'll see it again directed against her. And we would have seen it if Biden had won, or Richardson.

It is simply the nature of the modern american right, via it's leading personalities and via the propaganda mechanisms it has established, and via the easy facilitization of modern news media for stoking fears and emotions rather than addressing policy or wonk stuff.

And every day here, we read posts from tico or foxfire or nappy or okie or gunga or McG or real life or others and we have all the evidence we'd ever need to see how an entire segment of the american population has been, and are being, trained to think (and thus perceive) in very particular ways. That training is NOT designed to bring out their better angels. Reaction out of fears and hatreds is the goal.

This is certainly a very comfortable theory that will surely exempt Blatham from any necessity for critical thinking or reexamination of his own beliefs and prejudices. The opposition is composed entirely of well-trained automitons who neither think nor act for themselves, but instead merely follow the dictates of 'the vast right-wing conspiracy' that so invisibly and effectively guides them. His tribe, on the other hand, is composed only of self-reliant, thinking, rational souls who alone know what is really good for everyone. Nonsense.

What was "the swift-boating of Obama"? The phrase of course arises out of the response of his fellow officers to Senator Kerry's false and exaggerated claims about his military service and the truly contemptable and false testimony he gave to a Congressional investigating Committee in the event that first propelled him to national attention and launched his political career. In this case the accusers appear to have been self-motivated by the hypocrisy of the esteemed Senator himself.

Obama's issues with the Rev Wright appear to have arisen out of the probably inevitable media discovery of the character of Wright's sermons and expressed beliefs -- the emergence of this kind of stuff is hardly surprising in any political campaign. It may well have been inevitable, but was it the work of some unseen conservative conspiracy?? Moreover the questions that arose out of the disclosures were, themselves, real and meaningful, given his presentation of himself as a representative of a new approach to racial issues, one that has left the old resentments and bitterness behind.

It is the nature of advocates of big government to prefer discussions "policy or wonk stuff" to more fundamental examinations of whether the government intervention that is at the heart of it is beneficial at all. In this Blatham is merely defining the opposing arguments as evil or invalid instead of confronting or dealing with them. Perhaps a neat trick, but hardly enough to deflect a serious observer.

Nonetheless, all this was a remarkable collection of sophistries.

Cheshire Cat, Bunny and Pooch rally around their boy blatham! It's quite touching.

and there's more critters than that here, Mr.Le pew...

and there's more critters than that here, Mr.Le pew...

And you might want to get an attestation from Tico that he has always granted this level of authority to the opinions of factcheck org

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I guarantee you there is no shortage of African-Americans who find Wright's sort of blatantly crude sexual hijinks as offensive, and it is rascist to suggest otherwise.

Are you trying to tell us that the average African-American is A-OK with bringing his or her kids to church on Sunday so they can hear their spiritual pastor shout about "doin to us what he did to Monica Lewinsky," and "Ridin Dirty!" and simulating sex from the alter?

Sorry, but the African-Americans I know would have fled that church with their hands over their kids' ears. I suppose they are all "Toms," right blatham?

The polling data [from the Pew Research Center], however, exposed key racial gaps. While 58 percent of white voters said they were personally offended by Mr. Wright's sermons, just 29 percent of black voters said they were upset by his remarks.

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

Cheshire Cat, Bunny and Pooch rally around their boy blatham! It's quite touching.

Jealousy. That would be really strikingly unbecoming of you, if you were in any way pleasant or charming.

Ovation greets Wright at festivities for Angelou

Chicago Sun-Times
March 30, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor surprised a South Side congregation Friday night by showing up at an event marking poet Maya Angelou's birthday.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright received a thunderous, standing ovation from members of St. Sabina Church, which hosted Angelou as she nears her 80th birthday. "When he came out, people literally went wild," said St. Sabina's pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger. [..]

Wright did not talk publicly about Obama on Friday night. Instead, he gave the benediction at St. Sabina and smiled as the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to Angelou. Wright attended at the invitation of Pfleger, who called recent criticism of Wright "shameful."

"I wanted him to come here so he could see that people really stand with him and support him while he's under all this attack," Pfleger said Saturday. "America, unfortunately, has been really cheated of knowing the real Dr. Wright."

After giving the benediction, Wright went to a nearby office, and dozens of people lined up to greet him, CBS2 reported.

Ideology:

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

I guarantee you there is no shortage of African-Americans who find Wright's sort of blatantly crude sexual hijinks as offensive, and it is rascist to suggest otherwise.

Are you trying to tell us that the average African-American is A-OK with bringing his or her kids to church on Sunday so they can hear their spiritual pastor shout about "doin to us what he did to Monica Lewinsky," and "Ridin Dirty!" and simulating sex from the alter?

Sorry, but the African-Americans I know would have fled that church with their hands over their kids' ears. I suppose they are all "Toms," right blatham?

Reality:

Quote:

The polling data [from the Pew Research Center], however, exposed key racial gaps. While 58 percent of white voters said they were personally offended by Mr. Wright's sermons, just 29 percent of black voters said they were upset by his remarks.

(As posted on this thread earlier already.)

I guess that in reality, "the average African-American" has a more realistic perspective on the issue than Finn's boogeyman vision, reducing decades of service to a handful of nasty soundbites. Or they may have had enough first-hand experience to relativate the way the right's still beating the drum of outrage over this weeks after.

Apparently, "the average African-American" has given Wright's exclamations the cluck of disapproval and shake of the head it deserved, and moved on. They're the smart ones here.

On a related note (I'm cleaning out my bookmarks):

Quote:

Ovation greets Wright at festivities for Angelou

Chicago Sun-Times
March 30, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor surprised a South Side congregation Friday night by showing up at an event marking poet Maya Angelou's birthday.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright received a thunderous, standing ovation from members of St. Sabina Church, which hosted Angelou as she nears her 80th birthday. "When he came out, people literally went wild," said St. Sabina's pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger. [..]

Wright did not talk publicly about Obama on Friday night. Instead, he gave the benediction at St. Sabina and smiled as the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to Angelou. Wright attended at the invitation of Pfleger, who called recent criticism of Wright "shameful."

"I wanted him to come here so he could see that people really stand with him and support him while he's under all this attack," Pfleger said Saturday. "America, unfortunately, has been really cheated of knowing the real Dr. Wright."

After giving the benediction, Wright went to a nearby office, and dozens of people lined up to greet him, CBS2 reported.

Outreach to prostitutes

In 2000, Pfleger received international attention for encouraging his parishioners to buy time from prostitutes as a means of inviting the women to counseling and job training. The Chicago Archdiocese largely distanced themselves from Pfleger's efforts, to which Pfleger responded, "How is what I'm doing not part of the Gospel? The church leaders talk about evangelization. Well, if this isn't evangelization, I don't know what is." Saint Sabina raised several thousand dollars for Pfleger's program, attracting many donors from outside their parish. St. Sabina has used similar methods to reach out to drug dealers.