Letters to the Editor
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Obama
I am so tired of journalists applying the word "brand" to politicians and political parties. I'm a citizen, not a consumer.
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Or...
are you writing this article so that right-wingers will feel better voting for him?
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Wait just a second.......
Weren't we told by our fearless leader that he had read THREE SHAKESPEARES! Take that Obama!
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A smart cookie
I can see that Obama is smarter than I am. I don't consider myself dumb, it's just that Obama is so smart.
That's just what I want in a president, someone who is far more capable than me.
Soon, Obama will go speak at the home of my ancestors, the Brandenberg Gate. It should be interesting.
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A Bit Scattershot, isn't it?
Do we have any sense that Team of Rivals, influenced Obama, other than that he happened to mention it to assuage Clinton voters? Same goes for Niebuhr, Nietzsche, and most of the other authors listed here.
The case isn't made here that these books influenced him any more than others not mentioned. Frankly, with the exception of Alinsky, they seem picked out of a hat.
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http://hattie.typepad.com/hatties_web/
It isn't so much the snobbery that galls me, though that's bad enough. It is the insufferably patronizing attitude toward the objects of charity that this piece reveals.
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viva pragmatism
Thank you Laura Miller for articulating what appeals to me about Obama-the pragmatism. I am so weary of "pie in the sky" ideals that ultimately flame out because they appeal to such small segments of the population. Will I get everything I want in Obama? No. Do I expect that? Nope. I am a grown up.
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"I'm a citizen, not a consumer."
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Come now...let's not kid ourselves. In this great country, citizen is synonymous with consumer.
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Oops
Didn't mean to post the URL that way. My bad.
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Pragmatic Sellout?
I think there is a big difference between being upfront about your "pargmatism" and utterly and explicitely presenting yourself differently before you go completely the other way. Obama directly and again explicitely took a position on FISA that he reversed completely once he won the nomination. This is "not" pragmatism". This is fraud. He deliberately positioned himself as a progresive alternative to Clinton.
I am concerned that all this *inevitable* "moving to center" IS a sell out, partly because it is a capitualtion that is misreading the landscape. It is the cowering Obama said he "does not do".
Why would it be SO hard to give a major speech on "being liberal" and rip the right and the mythology for what "liberal" truly stands for. Why this spineless allowing of the Republicans to define things. I think they can't believe the openings they are being given.
Why not take on the Media who have become the Swift Boat embodiment?
I am very wary of Obama now. I see a man who played people to win, then is changing like a chameleon. This is not being a "cagey politician". This is being an intellectual thief.
I will trust him when he has demonstrated he has earned it. Not before. (I will not support McCain or Nader, but as of now, no money, no volunterr work.)
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Obama
Re: "are you writing this article so that right-wingers will feel better voting for him?"
They're trying to prepare Democrats for the fact that Obama is not the progressive they thought he was during the primaries. But anybody who took the time to evaluate his voting record would have already known that he wasn't a progressive.
I guess if they provide us with his intellectual biography, we'll think his flip-flops on everything from the war to abortion rights, are not Washington as usual, but high minded governing and campaigning rooted in the tradition of Lincoln and the philosophy of Niebuhr. The Republicans have screwed up so badly that the Democrats don't have to move to the right. They can still win on their own platform.
I read an article by Tom Hayden in The Nation, in which he states that endorsed Obama "because of the nature of the movement supporting him, not his particular stands on issues." How guilty to you have to feel to endorse somebody for President irrespective of his position on the issues? I will never understand that kind of non-thinking. These liberals have been fooled big time. The signs were all there: the Present votes, the "trust me" rhetoric, the advisor who told the Canadian government to ignore Obama's NAFTA rhetoric, his focus on erasing the past rather than on building the future, etc. I wonder what Caroline Kennedy will say when he chooses a Republican VP.
Please tell me again why he's supposedly so much better than Hillary?
I am used to a certain amount of triangulation from Democrats, having grown up when Clinton was President, but Pelosi and Obama are off the charts. Nothing seems to be off limits to them.
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Nicely done..
Being willing to cut a deal with the enemy is part of a practical, hardheaded political strategy; as Alinsky wrote, "To the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word." An activist I know told me that the strength of the Alinsky-model groups is that "they get things done," but (as a recent arrangement ACORN made with developers in Brooklyn, N.Y., illustrates) they also leave themselves open to charges of selling out.
Interesting timing, releasing this on the heels of the great FISA debacle.
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Evil Incarnate?
Yes, I do consider them evil incarnate. Who are they? They are the entire Bush family. They are the entire Repub party. They are the right wing religious supporters of the Bushian Rethug party. That includes the Catholic church, my religion, and the evangelical fundies like Hagee, Parsley, Dobson etc. They includes the neocons. They includes the fascist businesses that control the Rethug party.
The worst of these are the right wing religious, because Jesus said 'render unto caesar... That is a clear admonition from Jesus himself. Just exactly how much clearer could He be. And our now shredded U.S. Constitution says the same. Yet being the 'moral relativists' they are the RR's just ignore those admonitions.
Yes, I'll gladly vote for Obama he is a far better candidate and will have a chance of being a far better president than McCain or any of his right wing thugs, bullies and killers for oil profits. And they dare to call themselves Pro-life and Family Values.
Maybe I'm being too religious, but if the Antichrist is on this earth he is living well and dwelling among the members of the Republican party of the 'Culture of Death' for profits and political power. And if he isn't Bush (or some other member of the Bush family, like Jeb) or Cheney then he is one of the theocons/theocrats who are aligned with them. They have made a Faustian pact for the souls of men and Satan now owns their souls.
So if Sen. Obama thinks he can heal the rift between the 59+ million right wingers and all the rest of us he can count me out of his equation. When one settles for the lesser of two evils one still gets EVIL. And I know that I'm not alone in my sentiments and appraisal of this theo-fascist agenda of death for profits that now has engulfed America.
I don't think America is on the precipice of the abyss. It seems far more accurate to say that we have sped past the 'Event Horizon' and are racing toward the all consuming 'Singularity', from which their is no escape.
As the Rapturists like to say the 'End Times' began on April 29, 2007 and sometime between now and 2013 the Rapture will take place. Well, I think of it as they will not be subsumed into heaven, but rather may find themselves dragging the rest of us to the cataclysmic 'Singularity' of their own making.
Had Pres. Carter (my favorite evangelical) not been removed from office by the likes of St. Reagan, the racist, and his theocrats we might have had a chance to stop this cabal of evil, this conflation between the Pope and Falwell and the facist oil industry all of whom who put St. Ronnie into the WH.
Pope Leo XIII decried rampant capitalism in 1879, in Rerum Novarum. He must be groaning in heaven seeing this theo-facist conflation between religion and the Rethug party and their oil gods. Mayhap the blackness of the oil reflects the blackness in their souls, as they all go about killing for oil.