Does Barak Obama sound a little bitter over the reaction to his bigotted remarks about guns and religion in small-town America?
Lately there has been a little typical sort of political flare-up because I said something that everybody knows is true,” Mr. Obama said, “which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter. (URL)
I’ll bet they’re making it up. Not a single bit of evidence is cited, and the reporter doesn’t say whether she even asked for any. Do they have even one example of a Florida voter who says she’ll be so angry about the delegation not being seated that she’ll vote Republican? Even Democrats tend to be more clearheaded than that. Is this anything other than the best, lame rationalization that Howard Dean could come up with?
WSJ: Democrats Fear Florida Backlash
Democratic leaders fear that if Florida’s delegation isn’t seated, voters may feel robbed of their primary votes and take out their frustrations on the Democrats in the fall.
A more accurate news item would have said, “Howard Dean claims to fear that if Florida’s delegation isn’t seated…”
Here’s a brief guide to the presidential candidates. I threw Al Gore in because of Dick Morris’s article.
If Hillary Clinton is president, she’ll wake up every morning thinking about how she’s going to grow the welfare-police state.
If Barak Obama is president, he’ll wake up every morning thinking about how he’s going to grow the welfare-police state.
If Al Gore is president, he’ll wake up every morning thinking about how he’s going to grow the welfare-police state.
If John McCain is president, he’ll wake up every morning thinking about how he can knife conservatives in the back, or pick some scab on a conservative wound that’s just started to heal. He’ll do other things, too, but that will be his top priority.
So what’s the problem? The Michigan votes WERE counted. It was reported by the news media at the time, and the results are still available. Here, for example.
“I feel really strongly about it,” Clinton said. “The 2.5 million people (in Michigan and Florida) who voted deserve to be counted. If it were my preference, we’d count their votes but if not, then they should have the opportunity to have a full-fledged primary waged for them and revote.” (AP news article URL)
Mission accomplished. The votes were counted, and 237,762 Democrats in Michigan would prefer somebody other than Clinton, Kucinich, Dodd, or Gravel.
If it’s so terrible to have a nomination decided at a nominating convention, doesn’t that mean it’s time to end the farce that these gatherings have become? Who needs them?
March 14 (Bloomberg) — Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo said the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be “ruinous” for the Democratic Party if the contest isn’t resolved before the August nominating convention.
Ok, I give up. Which is which?
Samantha Power says Hillary Clinton is a monster. This, after one of Hillary Clinton’s people compared Barak Obama to Ken Starr.
So far, it’s all good and wholesome mudslinging. But then (according to this AP article), Clinton said the two cases are different, because “one is an ad hominem attack and one is a historical reference.”
So which one is which?
I’m afraid the distinction escapes me.
I do notice that one of Barak Obama’s unofficial advisors resigned, while Sandy Berger is still an unofficial advisor to Hillary. I don’t understand that distinction, either.
I don’t get this at all. Johnnie B. Byrd says conservatives should get to work to support John McCain; otherwise the Democrats will win and will re-institute the Fairness Doctrine.
Where did he ever get the idea that Mr. McCain-Feingold would be any different? He hasn’t exactly expressed any respect for talk radio in particular or free speech in general. In fact, he has been badmouthing both.
If conservatives want to have any impact in defending the 1st Amendment, they need to work hard to defeat McCain. That’s the only way to show that free-speech advocates are still a force to be reckoned with. It’s not much, and it would be better to have some sort of positive effect, but it’s about all that we have.
And it’s not just enough to defeat McCain. The media will try to spin his loss of the conservative base in any way BUT as a Bill of Rights issue. Defeating McCain would be only the first step. The 2nd is to make sure everyone knows why he was really defeated.
If McCain wins, conservatives who support him will bear much responsibility for whatever assaults on the 1st Amendment he decides to pursue.
If Hillary wins, she will control the media machine through the usual tactics of intimidation, and it won’t do much good to have defeated McCain. But Obama might by temperment be disinclined to pursue the shutting down of dissent that most in his party desire. The knowledge that conservatives managed to defeat McCain on this issue might give have a salutary effect on him.
It’s not much, but with free speech under assault around the globe –Chavez shutting down radio stations, Democrats wanting to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, Putin having journalists murdered, Bill Clinton (who ordinarily cares a lot about what kind of photos of him get printed) getting hugs from the guy who had a dissident journalist decapitated, Ezra Levant being hauled before a tribunal — the list goes on and on. We have to use what little is left in our arsenal to defend it.
A comment I posted to another article on History News Network — an article that has this heading: “Deborah Lipstadt: Stanley Fish nails it … ‘Hillary hatred’ is just like antisemitism”
All those words, in this article and Fish’s, and not one example of a contradictory criticism of Hillary Clinton.
It’s hard to believe there aren’t any, but one would think a few words could be spared to give an example.
History News Network has reproduced an article by a Paul Mirengoff titled, “Obama’s a masked man.” Mirengoff likes what he’s read of Shelby Steele’s book, “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.”
Steele views Obama as the first black politician to ride the strategy of “bargaining” to great success. For Steele, bargaining is one of two approaches blacks have used as a “mask” in order to offset the power differential between blacks and whites. He considers Louis Armstrong the first great bargainer with white America. Armstrong’s deal was, I will entertain you without pretending to be your equal. His mask, partly borrowed from the minstrel tradition, included the famous smile and laughter.
Today the bargain that works is this: I will presume that you’re not a racist and by loving me you’ll show that my presumption is correct. Blacks who offer this bargain are betting on white decency, and whites love this.
For Steele, bargainers include Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods (to some extent), and best of all Oprah Winfrey. The power of the bargain, which is founded on white Americas overwhelming desire to get beyond racism, is capable of creating “iconic Negroes.” It confers an almost magical quality on its best practitioners, such as Oprah. This is manifested in the ability to sell almost any product to whites.
Whatever the merits of whatever “bargain” it is that Obama is making, he can hardly be said to be the first black politican to do it. A case can be made that all politicians do it. George Washington obsessed over his “character,” by which he meant his public persona. And so on, with everyone else. It’s part of the bargaining process between politician and public.
However, I think historians usually use the term “negotiated” rather than “bargaining.” I may be treading in deep water way over my head here, having had no formal education on this topic, but I run into this concept all the time in historical writing. And a little googling found me a wiki article about “Negotiated Order Theory” in which there is this statement:
As Strauss (1978: ix) has suggested, even the most repressive of social orders are inconceivable without some form of negotiation. In such total institutions as maximum security prisons, staff and inmates may negotiate their own interpretation of the social order, often constructing an alternative that may be just as formal, although tacit, as that it replaces. The concept of negotiated order provides a useful way of displaying how such social orders emerge and become processed in the mesostructure of organizational life.
Negotiated order is the consequence of give-nd-take interaction within settings predefined by broader, and usually more formal, rules, norms, laws, or expectations, in order to secure preferred ends (or “stakes”).
“The negotiated order on any given day could be conceived of as the sum total of the organization’s rules and policies, along with whatever agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained” (Strauss, 1978: 5-6).
In other words, all political relationships are negotiated (or bargained) relationships, even those among the most unequal of parties. It’s hardly fair to put down Barak Obama for doing what everyone else has to do, too.
(I was amused by the other commenter besides myself, though, when she used religious language to describe the man: “one will soon realize that it is not only Obama’s face and voice that appeal almost universally to everyone but also the content of his spoken discourse, which can transfigure us all.”)
As a conservative who will not vote for John McCain, I seem to be on the receiving end of a lot of conservative vitriol.
John Hawkins says there is nothing conservative or principled about me.
Daniel Henninger of the WSJ says I need to grow up.
Kathleen Parker says I’m a cannibal.
Linda Chavez says I’m truculent.
A commenter at In The Agora says I’m a political terrorist.
But I won’t be voting for McCain. It’s a shame, because there are a couple of important points on which I agree with him. I think he would handle the Iraq war better than any of the other candidates, and that is huge. I agree with him on protecting the ANWR (though would gladly have the whole place strip-mined if that could somehow keep him or Hillary out of the presidency).
It’s too bad, but his stance against free speech and the First Amendment is a show stopper.
I doubt I’ll vote for Barak Obama, but I would much prefer a liberal Barak Obama to an authoritarian/fascist John McCain or an authoritarian/fascist Hillary Clinton. The question for me is, is Barak Obama really a liberal? I’m not sure if it’s possible for a liberal to exist in American politics these days. But if Obama is one and the worst he wants to do is destroy the economy through redistributionist tax codes, I think we could survive four years of it.