Butrflynet wrote:The State Dept. says there was no link between the three breaches, and
that their security measures caught the matter each time. If they had sufficient security measures in place to catch the matter each time, then how did it happen two more times after the first one?
The three dates:
JAN 9 (days after Iowa)
FEB 21 (Ohio debate)
MAR 14 (wright **** hit fan)
It is getting curiouser and curiouser, unfortunately not much more to come out tonight.
Interesting, especially if you follow the links in the story. It could certainly explain why Obama has refused to release his passport records and why there might be curiosity about them. But who was curious? Was it the McCain camp? Or the Clinton camp? Or just somebody who was curious about Obama, perhaps a fan?
maporsche wrote:I'm not trying to downplay the gravity of this passport thing....but what exactly is the big deal? I was only 10 years old when the Clinton thing happened, so excuse me for not asking these questions then.
I'm not for the invasion of anyone's privacy, but I really don't know what a passport file could show that would be damaging to anyone. Doesn't it only tell someone what countries they've been in or traveled to? I don't see what the big deal is or why the republican's would be interested in this information.
Obama has had a passport since he was a kid. There are people who are desperate to find ANY KIND of dirt on Obama otherwise, he will likely be the next president. (Why do you think the right continues to try to conflate this Wright nonsense?)
MSNBC REPORTING THAT LAURA HARDY (State Dept Official in charge of the Office of Couselor Affairs) of the first two breaches (who left last month IS TIED TO CLINTON ADMINISTRATION.
Foxfyre wrote:
Interesting, especially if you follow the links in the story. It could certainly explain why Obama has refused to release his passport records and why there might be curiosity about them. But who was curious? Was it the McCain camp? Or the Clinton camp? Or just somebody who was curious about Obama, perhaps a fan?
Yes, it was that last paragraph that jumped out at me:
Quote:If Obama wants to show where he has been, he merely has to release his passport records. Then everyone would know that his boast about traveling extensively in Europe is true -- even if this year he didn't have time to convene a hearing on the momentous issues affecting our relations with that continent and the world.
The timing is interesting - the article was published about a week before the first 'breach'. Curious, huh?
PS Read the reponses to Conason's article. First was is priceless.
Roxxxanne wrote:
Have you lost your mind?
Just checking in on this thread and it took a while to read all the pages, interesting, but a couple to three things come to mind to sum this all up. First of all, Roxxi has gone from fanatical to stark raving mad, and would be serving her fellow libs well by simply giving it up and being quiet for a while, and her fellow libs would all probably breathe a sigh of relief.
Secondly, the closer examination of Obama is not yielding great marks for him, and he will probably continue to stumble, after all he sorely lacks experience and credibility in terms of anything beyond giving a speech. The passport thing, I'm guessing it is the Clintonistas, as this is the type of thing they have always done, but if Obama has nothing to hide and tells the truth about his travels, what is all the angst? And why does it matter, and why so secret?
Third and very important, we now come to a point where something needs to be mentioned, and that is the racism that resides in the black community, not all blacks, no, but a fair number, I hope just a minority, but certainly within some of the leadership ranks. Conservative black folks have been warning us about this for a long time, but the press has ignored the problem. Whites have had to confront this problem and have been dealing with it for a long time of course, but many simply turn a blind eye or justify the reverse racism that has been bubbling near the surface for a very long time. This particular problem has reared its ugly head for all to see with the Jeremiah Wright situation. This is what results when you have a party that has trumpeted racism and that has played the racism card all along in order to capture the black vote, but now we see the real Democratic Party for what it is.
Actually, the Jeremiah Wright situation is about more than race, it is actually a lib thing, that of not liking your own country, essentially is the problem. And anger at lots of things, just general unhappiness, pessimism, and hopelessness, which defines liberalism.
The last word on the Wright silliness
firedoglake.com
Probably the most remarkable aspect of the recent feeding frenzy about Barack Obama's so-called "pastor problem" -- besides the agility and smarts that Obama has displayed in handling it -- is not as much what it reveals about the state of race in America as what it reveals about the state of the American media.
The Washington Post's report on Obama's speech observed that this was a controversy that "threatens to engulf his presidential candidacy." Yet as far as anyone can tell, it was having only a marginal effect on the polls in the race before it blew up on the networks, and it was not generated by either of Obama's political opponents, or by any particular interest groups.
No, this is a controversy cooked up almost entirely within the media realm. Once they sank their fangs into it, the whole zombielike corps of pundits, cable talking heads, and radio talk-show hosts couldn't let go of it. And equally remarkable was the bias that was on display in discussing it: News anchors and talking heads flatly referred to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's videotaped remarks as "anti-American," "hate-filled," "vicious," "offensive," and so on and on.
It's telling that none of them also observed that, for the most part, Wright's remarks (aside from his conspiracist comments about AIDS, which were indeed inexcusable, but which received little or no play before Obama's speech) were factually accurate, and deeply reflective of a reality that most African Americans live with -- and which most white Americans do their best to ignore, deny, and forget. The remarks that were broadcast all over YouTube and replayed endlessly on the cable talk shows were, no doubt, were impolitic, but they were also largely true.
Hacktackular Howie Kurtz, the Post's "media critic," in his column today -- while notably failing to critique the media for its performance -- essentially admitted that this was a media-driven frenzy:
t wasn't until last week, when Fox News and ABC News bought DVDs of Wright's sermons from the church, that the simmering controversy reached full boil. The recordings have long been sold by the church, but journalists did not seek them until now.
Kurtz's description also encapsulates the blinkered bias that was at play in not just the discussion leading up to Obama's speech, but in the general response to it:
To their credit, the network newscasts ran four or five sound bites to evoke Obama's broader argument that while the anger of older blacks like Wright, 66, is understandable, the country needs to move beyond the racial wounds of the past. But Obama, 46, is trying to win the Democratic nomination, so the anchors kept returning to one core question.
"Is it enough to reassure white voters?" ABC's Charlie Gibson asked.
"Does it make too many white voters uncomfortable?" asked CBS's Katie Couric.
Their entire preoccupation, indeed, was with how Wright's remarks might discomfit whites -- while never examining the deeper questions of whether white complacence about race might be something worth challenging, as well as their own roles in failing to make that challenge.
So let's examine the remarks by Wright that whipped up this frenzy. The controversy largely centered around these quotes:
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
And there was more outrage over these quotes:
In one sermon in October 2005, Rev. Wright addressed the racial elements at play in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
"The winds of Katrina blew the cover off America. The hurricane exposed the hypocrisy," Rev. Wright said, "protecting white folks' property took priority over saving black folks' lives." He continued, "This storm called Katrina says far more about a racist government than it does about the wrath of God."
In April 2003, Rev. Wright told his congregation that "the United States government has failed the vast majority of our citizens of African descent."
"For every one Oprah, a billionaire, you've got five million blacks who are out of work," he said. "For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you've got 10 million blacks who cannot read. For every one Condoskeeza [sic] Rice, you've got one million in prison. For every one Tiger Woods, who needs to get beat, at the Masters, with his cap-blazing hips, playing on a course that discriminates against women. For every one Tiger Woods, we got 10,000 black kids who will never see a golf course."
What Wright is talking about here, of course, is the long and ugly history of white prejudice against African Americans, a history that continues to this day.
Regardless how much Obama may concede that Wright's language was "anti-American" or "hateful," the reality is they can only be construed as such if one believes that any criticism of the USA, and of prejudiced white Americans particularly, is unpatriotic or vicious. It's akin to the long-running right-wing notion that America is like a beloved mommy, and any criticism of her whatsoever means that you "hate America."
Wright may indeed have been short-sighted in failing to acknowledge that there has been progress made, but the reality is that the progress has not only fallen far short of where we need to be, but white complacence over that progress is itself a significant roadblock for creating a real bridge to cross the nation's racial divide.
The racism he's talking about is the lazy, blinkered notion that somehow whites have already overcome racism -- that they are not responsible for the years of institutional racism, embodied in Jimi Crow, segregation, and the "sundown towns" phenomenon that created the continuing residential and professional segregation that enables young white people to form the networks and connections that are the foundations of economic and social success while leaving young blacks, Latinos, and other minorities out in the cold.
Obama, to his credit, attempted to tackle this in his speech:
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
Legalized discrimination -- where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families -- a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
Obama is hardly the first major political figure to address this. Back in 1995, President Clinton said something remarkably similar:
The rift we see before us that is tearing at the heart of America exists in spite of the remarkable progress black Americans have made in the last generation, since Martin Luther King swept America up in his dream, and President Johnson spoke so powerfully for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy in demanding that Congress guarantee full voting rights to blacks. The rift between blacks and whites exists still in a very special way in America, in spite of the fact that we have become much more racially and ethnically diverse, and that Hispanic Americans -- themselves no strangers to discrimination -- are now almost 10 percent of our national population.
The reasons for this divide are many. Some are rooted in the awful history and stubborn persistence of racism. Some are rooted in the different ways we experience the threats of modern life to personal security, family values, and strong communities. Some are rooted in the fact that we still haven't learned to talk frankly, to listen carefully, and to work together across racial lines.
The two worlds we see now each contain both truth and distortion. Both black and white Americans must face this, for honesty is the only gateway to the many acts of reconciliation that will unite our worlds at last into one America.
White America must understand and acknowledge the roots of black pain. It began with unequal treatment first in law and later in fact. African Americans indeed have lived too long with a justice system that in too many cases has been and continues to be less than just. (Applause.) The record of abuses extends from lynchings and trumped up charges to false arrests and police brutality. The tragedies of Emmett Till and Rodney King are bloody markers on the very same road.
Still today too many of our police officers play by the rules of the bad old days. It is beyond wrong when law-abiding black parents have to tell their law-abiding children to fear the police whose salaries are paid by their own taxes.
And blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong when African American men are many times more likely to be victims of homicide than any other group in this country; when there are more African American men in our corrections system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men in their 20s are either in jail, on parole or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal justice system -- nearly one in three. And that is a disproportionate percentage in comparison to the percentage of blacks who use drugs in our society. Now, I would like every white person here and in America to take a moment to think how he or she would feel if one in three white men were in similar circumstances.
And there is still unacceptable economic disparity between blacks and whites. It is so fashionable to talk today about African Americans as if they have been some sort of protected class. Many whites think blacks are getting more than their fair share in terms of jobs and promotions. That is not true. That is not true.
The truth is that African Americans still make on average about 60 percent of what white people do; that more than half of African American children live in poverty. And at the very time our young Americans need access to college more than ever before, black college enrollment is dropping in America.
These are uncomfortable truths, of course, but they are also truths. And the media have as much a role in the failure of white Americans to honestly and forthrightly confront them.
The reason we haven't done so is that we whites have done our damnedest to ignore them. We have effectively wiped the memory of sundown towns from our memories, making us almost purposefully ignorant of them and their surrounding history of ugly violence and vicious bigotry.
Indeed, as we have seen throughout the Obama controversy, the media have been consistent in encouraging white Americans to forget them. Meanwhile, the black people who have to live with these realities cannot.
Remember the list of questions the Clinton campaign sent out last week questioning Obama's readiness to be commander in chief?
Take a look at these links.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/12/clinton-camp-to-obama-yo_n_91156.html
Note this question from Lee Feinstein, Clinton Campaign National Security Director.
Quote:As voters evaluate you as a potential Commander-in-Chief, do you think it's legitimate for people to be concerned that you have traveled to only one NATO country, on a brief stopover trip in 2005, and have never traveled to Latin America?
And note this commentary inserted into the list of questions by Jim Geraghty at the National Review after the above questions:
http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjJkZGJiZmY2ZDg0MWU3MGNjMzM2YzA4OGViNTllYzA=
Quote:Interjection from Jim: The Latin American thing is pretty mild, as the presidency doesn't go to the candidate whose passport has the most stamps. But Obama has really only one visit to a NATO country? In his life? Really? It's not like they're all spread far apart, or all that hard to get to.
As I posted on the PassportGate thread, the suspicion is that it is a Hillary Mole. The woman who was in charge and covered it up was Ambassador to Peru (?) under Bill Clinton.
Very nice reporting, BFNet.
Video Jospeh Di Genova, Independent Counsel for Passportgate I
Is it still Breathtaking! Shocking! Incomprehensible!
now that it's a Clinton operative?
Foxfyre wrote:Apples and oranges OE. ALL politicians solicit support from people. Even Obama does that. Some of those people are going to be involved in practices or will have said things or will support things that we criticize or oppose.
Ticomaya wrote:The biggest issue is the fact that Obama has been a member of this racist pastor's church for 20 years [..] he is a spiritual and political advisor to Obama
You two are right: Hagee was a religious leader McCain only courted for purely political reasons. There is no evidence of there being either personal affinity or religious conviction behind his active efforts to win Hagee's endorsement: it was really just opportunism.
Rod Parsley, on the other hand, was called a "spiritual guide" by John McCain. Parsley, of course, is the guy who compared Planned Parenthood to Nazis and said things like:
"Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam [..]. It was this dream that, in part, began America"; and, "The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore."
Personally, I dont think it's all that important either way, unless you can reasonably suspect that the candidate shares the pastor's more insane ideas.
Does Obama see America as the US of KKK A? Is Obama a racist, does he feel his allegiance is to Africa?
Does McCain feel that America's mission is to defeat "the armies of Islam", and that it should destroy that false religion?
Foxfyre wrote:It could get really fun if those contractors are Democrats and Hillary supporters and were looking for information to feed to Hillary. There's absolutely no evidence of that of course, but hey if the Obama-ites can speculate what it all means, anybody ought to be able to do that.
roxxxanne wrote:FF that thought crossed my mind
And there is a link. Of course, it is becoming increasingly apparent that this was an act of political espionage.
nimh wrote:Foxfyre wrote:Apples and oranges OE. ALL politicians solicit support from people. Even Obama does that. Some of those people are going to be involved in practices or will have said things or will support things that we criticize or oppose.
Ticomaya wrote:The biggest issue is the fact that Obama has been a member of this racist pastor's church for 20 years [..] he is a spiritual and political advisor to Obama
You two are right: Hagee was a religious leader McCain only courted for purely political reasons. There is no evidence of there being either personal affinity or religious conviction behind his active efforts to win Hagee's endorsement: it was really just opportunism.
Rod Parsley, on the other hand, was called a "spiritual guide" by John McCain. Parsley, of course, is the guy who compared Planned Parenthood to Nazis and said things like:
Nice try, nimh, but you will get no traction with that. The simple reason is the same as the tenuous connection the Hagee. The statement was another example of political opportunism, and nothing more. He called him "a spiritual guide," but he didn't call him "my spiritual guide."
Wright
WAS Obama's spiritual advisor for 20 years.
okie wrote:Roxxxanne wrote:
Have you lost your mind?
Just checking in on this thread and it took a while to read all the pages, interesting, but a couple to three things come to mind to sum this all up. First of all, Roxxi has gone from fanatical to stark raving mad, and would be serving her fellow libs well by simply giving it up and being quiet for a while, and her fellow libs would all probably breathe a sigh of relief.
Indeed.
She was much more tolerable when she was sober.
nimh wrote:Personally, I dont think it's all that important either way, unless you can reasonably suspect that the candidate shares the pastor's more insane ideas.
I've spent some time reading other boards (similar to this one) in states that have upcoming primaries. A lot of people are starting to think Obama does - from his actions - share those insane ideas. They're angry and it may be that anger is drawing out those emotions. Are there enough of them to sink him is the question. Time will tell.
A few bring up the McCain/Hagee issue, but I think they realize it's not the same relationship Obama shares with his adopted family member.
maporsche wrote:Obama says that the "typical white person" is like his grandmother, spouting racial comments that make him cringe.
maporsche wrote:I didn't misquote him. [..] What I did was apply his comment about his typical grandmother with the comments he said about her during his speech. During his speech he referred to her making racial statements that made him cringe.
Regarding the ongoing references to Obama's words about his grandmother, this is what he actually said about his grandmother in that speech:
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. [..] I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. [..]
I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
This is what many conservatives, and some Clinton supporters too, are now labelling as "Obama throwing his grandmother under the train".
Can anyone explain me how people can arrive at that interpretation of the above quotes?
