*I wouldn't vote for anybody who chooses to align himself with a paranoid black supremacist church.

How about a Lutheran? Is it okay to be a Lutheran? What about the fact that Martin Luther was virulently anti-semitic?

Would you vote for a Catholic? Why would you vote for someone who has "aligned" with a Church that conducted the Inquisition, covered up for abusive priests, etc?

The fact is that if we start smearing people based on church association and congregational politics, a lot of people are either going to have to give up politics or give up church.

"Not one among us is innocent."

*I wouldn't vote for anybody who exploited the incredibly corrupt system of the "community development" movement, particularly when the choice to jump on that particular gravy train appears to be the main career choice made. And also, particularly, if that person used "community development" as the jumping block to......

..... I know dozens of people who operated this way, and every single one of them lined his pockets, and many advanced their political careers. And that did real harm to the underclass, at precisely the time (ironically) that Bill Clinton was finally offering them some type of constructive (and highly successful and effective), real hope. Which Obama opposed.

Your personal experience aside, you are simply singling out Obama for being the most succesful player in a system that you claim engulfed an entire major American city in unprecedented corruption (which would be no mean feat in Chicago.)

My spidey sense tells me that you might be leaving out a little bit of detail and nuance regarding your own experience with "community development" (which, incidentally, to the rest of the world outside of Chicago, is a pretty generic descriptive phrase that does not necessarily imply a coterie of conspiring slumlords).

How do you personally know "dozens" of people who were openly stealing money intended for the poor? Were you conducting an undercover sting? Were you working for these nefarious villains? If you were so breathtakingly up-close-and-personal with the seamy underbelly of local politics, then what makes you any different than Obama, besides the fact that he went on to have an amazingly succesful national political career and you are currently writing angry personal attack letters about your former employer to Salon?

*I could vote for somebody who benefitted from affirmative action, but I couldn't vote for somebody who did so then refused to acknowledge it or talk about it -- because our generation has been severely damaged by these policies. And I really have to wonder why it is that so many people in Salon howl if you even mention affirmative action negatively -- if they support the practice so intensely, then why is even mentioning it out of bounds? If you believe deeply in something, you should be able to defend it. Are we actually supposed to pretend it doesn't exist in academia and academic hiring? That's either delusional or dishonest. I wouldn't expect Obama to turn opportunities down just because equal opportunities weren't available for whites (well, I'd morally prefer him to do that, but, whatever), but I refuse to pretend that his gig at Chicago wasn't a race-preference case, for just one example. I won't pretend that Harvard Law Review doesn't have a system of racial quotas, because it does. Telling the truth is not racism. Nor is opposing racial preferences.

Well, nobody can deny that Harvard Law School is a known bastion of racial and economic egalitarianism. You've got Communism, you've got Stalinism...and then you've got Harvard Law School, which takes revolutionary anti-establishmentarianism to a transcendental level that Chairman Mao could only have dreamed.

Give me a break already. Harvard Law School decided that they should find a black guy to join their club--boo fucking hoo. Then they apparently liked him so much that they made him president. Am I supposed to consider that as some kind of serious social injustice? I actually am somehwat against affirmative action, on principle, but I certainly wouldn't dream of villifying someone because they happened to catch a lucky break.

And finally, although I should have asked this two paragraphs ago: what exactly is your evidence that Obama became president of the Harvad Law Review because of affirmative action?

That one reason the Democratic party cannot win by challenging the current economic situation we are in is because it is a firmly-entrenched pillar of the very system with which most Americans are dissatisfied.

I wish I had followed this discussion since the article was published. But after reading seven pages of response, I'm disappointed that the notion of a third party was not even mentioned.

In the midst of such astute analysis, I wonder why nobody mentions the decay of institutions, the inexorable dominance of a minority of social acquaintances and hereditary benefactors within any institution over time, and the fact that simple math (exponential functions) necessitates the constant increase ofthe numerical superiority of political "outsiders" (i.e. average citizens) relative to any Party machine's governing elite (as a percentage, not as a constant.) Such trends are the easily-discernible impetus for pretty much every historic social change that comes to my mind.

In other words, the politically cunning becaome wealthy and powerful. They spend their days in luxury and beceom increasingly isolated from the populace. They also stop having children. Meanwhile, the great unwashed masses keep working, keep having more babies, and are eventually forced to eat the dogs at the top of the pile, just for a little breathing room.

The Republicrat party can analyze and punditize this process to death, but it is occurring in front of our eyes.