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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
How about that Hillary Rodham Clinton telling white Pensylvania folk that they've just been insulted by the elitist Barack Obama! Are Pennsylvania's god fearing gun lovers so daft that they need Hill to tell them when they've been insulted by one high fallutin Barack Obama? Only a Clinton could be so shameless and pathologically ambitious to paint the first serious African American candidate for president as the elitist. Obama came from a dadless and often momless family and was raised by his granny. Who can forget Bush Sr.’s Willy Horton poster used to scare the white American working class away from Dukakis back in '88, Hill's doing the same now by trying to paint Obama as a Vanderbilt! Wow, what spin! The elitist candidate isn't Anglo-American but African-American! Bill and Hill have made $110 mil the past 8 years. What more proof does anyone need on just whose personal interests the Clinton's politics have served during their careers other than their own? Theirs is not a politics of hope or change, but a politics of dirt to exploit an "enemy's" weakness, exploiting that weakness for their own personal gain. Perhaps you've met people like this at work. You are more than competent at doing your job and then some lazy selfish SOB wants to climb on top of you so they don't do the hard work but scheme and cleverly slander you in the presence of those who can forward their careers. The repubs are just as bad when it comes to Obama, old-moneyed military academy McCain and his heiress wife are just as rich as the Clintons, perhaps the Clintons ought to consider switching parties, as they are now pandering to the red-neck faction of the democratic party, the faction that would really be more at home in a "red state", and would more naturally form a part of the Republican base. Knowing now that Hillary Clinton was a gun-toting good-ol’ gal as a girl in Pennsylvania, now trumpeting the American right to bear arms, and that she supports the NRA, really seals the deal for me on her character; for Pennsylvania's sake she's morphed into a female Charlton Heston: she really is the devil in blue dress or whatever color dress she happens to be wearing on any given day. Her response to criticism is to not take a reality check if the criticism was deserved, but to exact revenge and stab her most recently identified enemy in the back. What about that Bosnian yarn she spun and spun until some old news footage proved her to be a liar? Hillary is the personification of a bitterly ambitious human being who's feels she's entitled to beknightment, and she's the multi-millionaire so many times over, not Obama. Revolting! She still believes the old American adage that there's a sucker born every minute! If she wins Pennsylvania and then goes on to win the nomination she'll prove there is! If Obama loses the nomination this independent voter is going to vote for McCain, he actually did come under fire, unlike the phoney Hillary. The Clintons live in a fantasy world of their own making, their genius is to get their toadies to slavishly believe in their BS.
Does it strike anyone else besides me as odd that a black man from Chicago raised by a single mother is being called elitist?
The Truth Hurts. Obama has said exactly the same thing before, but it was framed differently and people agreed. It was in no way meant as an insult, but the truth about what has been going on. Republican has used guns, and religion to creae bitterness and distractions from the real issue for years. No Hillary Clinton a member our own party is doing the same ting. Hillary has done a real disservice to our party by taking a statement made at a private funraiser and made it into a big issue.
The working class needs to look beyond the rhetoric and listen to who will really try to help them. Obama has a lot more empaty and voting creditials that help the working class. He also speaks more to the truth about these jobs not coming back.
It was changes in the technology and changing manufacturing needs. It is hard for some people to move on when change comes, and if there is no opportunity for training it is even harder.
There should have been some incentives and training programs for these foks to get trianing in different career.
Those jobs did not just disappear because of jobs going oversees.
The “controversy” over Obama’s “bitter” remarks is the best example so far this campaign season of the utter bankruptcy of our political “process”, and the complicity of “journalists” in our media with making a shambles of our “democracy” – as well as great excuse to overuse “ironic” quotation marks ;-)
You can apply a lot of different adjectives to this sort of thing and the way it’s been covered: tired, hysterical, clichéd, sad. I’m just happy that I don’t watch TV – merely the thought of listening to talking airheads parse Obama’s words, spinning their impact, and following the birdbrained “Obama is elitist, naïve, out of touch” narrative like a flock of noisy seagulls makes my head ache. It’s bad enough to read it in print or on the web.
The media created this non-story, and the media perpetuated this non-story as well as the accompanying narrative which has now been rotting on the vine for a week (“Obama is elitist! Joe Six-pack must be furious!”). Obama was in fact speaking in favor of the interests of Mr. Six-pack honestly. His only mistake was in using wording that gave Clinton and the media an opening for a cheap shot, and the ability to spin the “elitist” narrative for all it’s worth.
In reality, each of the three candidates would seem to be wealthy, politically connected and “elitist” to some degree. Why do the chattering airheads not acknowledge this? The answer is that they have little capacity for digging into the minutia of voting records and the nuts and bolts of policy. They are incompetent and shallow, and have convinced themselves (and are apparently desperate to believe) that they are Serious, Weighty Political Analysts. Character-driven, horse-race, identity politics driven political coverage is all they know or are competent to write about, which basically means they write about what each other thinks.
Obama’s unique advantage is that he does not think voters are too stupid to think for themselves, and therefore he speaks of things that the current political elite knows but doesn’t want to say, i.e. bitterness among working-class voters. The subject is not new, nor is Obama the first to speak about it – he’s merely the first politician to really acknowledge that this conventional wisdom exists. I don’t even think he was necessarily saying he agreed with the characterization, either – however even if he did, that is not really grounds for the “elitist” narrative.
What a sad state of affairs we’ve come to when out-of-context remarks are used to pass judgement on the “character” of a candidate, as if the media spin about said “character” is anything but a media creation in the first place, interpreted and endlessly self-reinforced by the wizards of punditocracy that “know how things work”. Then we get 30 years of politics more divorced from reality every passing week.
News flash: there is a lot of “bitterness” out there towards our “elitist” media and their idiotic, shallow manipulations, too. Michael Lind (his Salon column this week was an egregious example), Chris Matthews, Tim Russert and every single political columnist on Slate never seem to comment about that, though.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
