Obama '08?

Wrong again, as usual. I have listened to Obama ever since he began running for president. I read his book "Audacity of Hope." I also watched and listened to the Jeremiah Wright. Have you? I was on record for hoping Obama would beat Hillary. I have tried to analyze the president's mindset and policies. I disagree with the man in very big ways. I do not hate the man. I would rather believe the president has the best intentions for America and actually believed in America, the American people, freedom, capitalism, and liberty, but frankly I have a hard time believing it. I would submit to you that such is radically different than many leftists felt about George W. Bush, whom most of them hated in an extreme fashion, and still do, thus still blaming everything on him.

Get a grip, cyclops.

Well, as RJB pointed out above, 55% of Americans polled think Bush is responsible in large part for our current fiscal woes. It seems like you are telling most of America to 'get a grip.'

I will consider you to have been routed on the Rapper point, something which you clearly know nothing about and only repeated b.c Fox News told you to do so. This is what you do when you realize you have gotten yourself in over your head in these arguments - you just don't respond and pretend that you didn't just get shown to have little knowledge of what you were talking about. But nobody here is fooled by that, I assure you.

Cycloptichorn

You didn't click on the link, did you?

"WORLDPUBLICOPINION.ORG IS A PROJECT MANAGED BY
THE PROGRAM ON INTERNATIONAL POLICY ATTITUDES
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND"

It's a website ran by a University. It studies public opinion across the world in a variety of ways and isn't partisan.

Moreso - what 'facts' do you already know on this topic? I'd love to see some facts. I think the exact opposite of what you wrote is true - you don't have any facts, personally, you have opinions and you don't want to see facts that challenge them. Right?

Here's another survey, by Pew, in 2007, which found the same thing:

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=319

Here's another University of Maryland study, from 2003, which shows that Fox News viewers were three times as likely to get basic questions about politics and world events wrong as other news viewers:

http://65.109.167.118/pipa/pdf/oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf

You sure have balls, you know that? Claiming that others are in a fantasy world, when you are too ignorant to even look at evidence that is presented to you. You are the guy I think about, when I think about the problems with the Republican party today.

Cycloptichorn

How do you mean that?

As a masochist? bush left office as the so called Great Recession was roaring away.

As a leftist? You must have seen those bumper stickers anticipating the last day that embarrassment occupied the WH.

So, what is your emotion? Enjoyment of the pain or relief that it was over, that things were better because bush was gone?

Like you, Fox is always proved wrong.

I am certain that were we to send your posts to Obama that he would feel deep and abiding pity for you. You are, after all, a radical who is simple.

God forbid that a woman would be president.

With what?

This from the person who claimed that a black man's claim to the presidency trumped a woman's.

You are such an ignoramus POM that I am ready to "ignore" you just to stop myself from taking advantage of your idiocy.

That you consider yourself the model of American liberalism is all I could hope for.

Pathetic response, but not unexpected.

So, tell me cyclops, as I look at the Fox News website, is the Mississippi River not rising as Fox reports? Also is this story false: "Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) posted fiscal third-quarter profit that fell compared with a year ago, but the results beat expectations on Wednesday, prompting shares to edge higher after the market closed."? How about this one: "Ron Paul, R-Texas, is expected to make a major announcement in New Hampshire on Friday. Having already started a presidential exploratory committee, opened an office in Iowa and raised more than a million dollars online last week on the day of the first Republican presidential debate, Paul looks well placed to make his final decision and announcement to officially throw his hat in the ring." ?

I take it that you think everything Fox reports is slanted or false, so I am curious about the real truth concerning these stories? For example, the story about the Mississippi River, is that just Fox trying to scare people to death, and that maybe the river is actually receding?

Should I consult the University of Maryland or some organization called "World Public Opinion dot org" so that I could find out the truth about those issues, cyclops?

Mississippi Delta Flooding: 'It's Getting Scary'

Two New York Muslim men arrested in al Qaeda terror plot

AP is saying much the same thing that Fox is reporting, so obviously it is all a big lie according to cyclops.

President Obama Holds on to Bush-era Intelligence and Military Chiefs

Watching Republicans clutching their pearls to see the rapper Common invited to the White House on a poetry night Wednesday has revealed a party whose stars are grievously out of touch with the culture they hope to lead, as well as to culture in general, apparently.

It is understandable that some would imagine if the Obamas convene a poetry night, the invitees would be the likes of Billy Collins or Elizabeth Alexander, who read a poem at the President’s inauguration. But this is 2011, in which in terms of people about 50 and younger, the idea of poetry as only, or even mainly, writerly observations on the printed page is about as current as the idea that a newspaper is a physical object.

Although not all process it quite this way, poetry now occupies a more central place in the lives of typical young Americans of all colors than it ever has in the history of the nation—as rap music. The only question would be why the Obamas, as today’s Kennedys, would not include a rapper on their list. Anyone who can see nothing valid in rap reaching the White House hasn’t listened to much rap since about—well, in Sarah Palin’s case, apparently 1979. Helpfully letting us know that her problem with Wednesday’s White House event was not based on being “anti-rap,” Palin told us that she knows the words to that year’s “Rapper’s Delight,” the hit that created a new musical era.

Indeed, those lyrics were cute, but hardly something one would expect the First Couple to be musing upon after dinner. Rap lyrics have gone much further and deeper than that over the past three decades, and even the days when the nasty “gangsta” variety was the hottest thing are now past. Rap is in a refractive, self-reflexive phase in which the major players, such as Kanye West and Lil Wayne, are more about how interesting they find themselves than about shooting cops.

Furthermore, one could almost have predicted that the invited representative would be Common. He is one of the foundational “conscious” rappers who has eschewed the “gangsta” routine, even including his father on one recording (Be) advising us to “be a brilliant soul, sparkling in the galaxy while walking on earth.” But to Palin, Karl Rove and their ilk, Common is just one more exhibitionist polluting the culture with a thug routine, as if 50 Cent were invited to regale the Obamas with strophes about “gats.” One could only take this view of Common with a willful blindness to context and nuance.

Big surprise: Dig around in Common’s oeuvre and you find that—get this—this black leftist bard of the black condition turns out to have some tribal affection for Black Panther sorts, despite their less-than-pristine criminal records. The Republicans’ problem this time is Common’s passing shout-out to Joanne Chesimard, an ex-Panther who was convicted of killing a New Jersey officer in a shoot-out and has long been under political asylum in Cuba. But this hardly means Common would warmly advise a young man to go assassinate some more cops, or that he applauds to hear of cops dying today.

Adulation of the Panthers is hardly ideal, to be sure, based more on drama than action. But if it’s wrong for the Obamas to have anyone over who sees a certain revolutionary heroism in the Black Panthers as people battling the more overt racism and police brutality of that historical period, then this would disqualify probably every second black writer or thinker in the United States, not to mention legions of ordinary citizens with Huey Newton T-shirts.

Interesting: I presume Rove and Palin roll their eyes at those who see racism in Southerners celebrating their Civil War military heroes. We are to be “mature,” stop being so hasty and reductionist, and understand that one can cheer for Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee without being a racist. Okay—but then, we will not, either, condemn black people with a passing fellow-traveller feeling for the Panthers as advocates of murder.

Or, it turns out Common said “burn a Bush” in one lyric. Again, who’s being immature and hasty here? Not so long ago, we were to stop bashing Palin for the likes of “Don’t retreat, reload.” I agreed—to link this kind of language to the Tucson disaster meant being studiously deaf to how metaphor pervades all human expression; no one would have batted an eye if Barbara Jordan had said the exact same thing. Well, now a rapper says “burn a Bush” and he shouldn’t be allowed on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Please: This suggests a numbness to the basic abstractness of human expression, or at least a rather pathetic inattention.

Of course, while Common is a poet worthy of the White House, he’s no political leader, and thus the sourest note about the whole fracas is that it has stirred up something that Obama’s election quietly tamped down. Not so long ago, quite a few harbored a melodramatic notion that “conscious” rap was going to undergird some kind of “hip-hop revolution.” That idea was always a distraction from real politics, which are something quite different from the earnest but idle cynicism set to rhymes over beats.

Immediately after Obama’s election, this trope lost its mojo. I suspect that the election of a black president looked so revolutionary in itself, and was ineluctably real in comparison to the fantastical “hip hop generation” vision. At the Obamas’ poetry night, rap was treated, in a high-profile venue, for what it is. That is, not something that is going to turn the Capitol upside down, but poetry—like Jay-Z’s work now sold between covers.

But the scenario is ruined when we have people of a different brand of recreational opposition protesting on the sidelines as if the Obamas having Common over were like inviting Young Jeezy or Cam’ron. Because Common now has a guru status complete with a burgeoning career in film, the criticism will come off to a healthy contingent as a knock on one of the bards of black dignity—i.e. as more evidence that Republicans are racists just as the debate over racism in the Tea Party has retreated.

Moreover, it will revive the eagerness of that same contingent to fill us in on the fact that “All rap isn’t like that!” The implication traditionally associated with this observation is that the rap not “like that” is our new Freedom Songs. But it never has been, and we’ve seen blissfully little of the pretense over the past two and a half years. It’s a shame, then, that the cotton-headed artistic sensibility of the Republicans’ poster people will pump new life into a routine with such a vast disproportion of heat to light.

John McWhorter is a contributing editor at The New Republic.

Watching liberals clinging to slavery is both funny and sad.

Have you, Okie, I mean have you really? You just use Jeremiah Wright as a code word. You think that by simply saying the name, it will dredge up all the nonsense that was written about what he actually said. And what he actually said contained a great deal of truth.

But there's no way on dog's green earth that you want to go there, is there? That would cause you such cognitive dissonance that your mind would explode.

Jeremiah Wright is a racist and a bigot ... that's the truth.

Are there any sources that you could dig up which would go any distance towards illustrating that anything you say is not a gigantic lie, h20man.

Better go change your Depend. It's leaking down your legs again.