Letters to the Editor
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@indigo218
Don't misunderstand although I am a Clinton supporter. I am well aware that Senator Clinton is a politican. Like you I think Obama is a POLITICAN too....
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politicians
Do you hopelessly naive people think we should have someone other than politicians running the executive and legislative branches? You want a med student doing brain surgery, or a trainee flying you across the Atlantic? Our founders were politicians to the core. The question is, good politician or bad politician. Our campaign finance whorehouse makes the latter far more likely, because the fundraising process is usually corrupting by its very nature. In that regard, the huge surge in small contributors to Obama is an encouraging sign. It's not enough, and it certainly does not mean the man is pure. Do you know any pure people in any profession? How about you? Pure? Altruistic always? Never acting out of self interest? My ass. Grow up. We, the people, need to take our country back, vote in numbers that haven't been seen for a generation, and clean out K street, the Pentagon/war machine complex, and a host of other things. Obama is not the only answer, by any means. Maybe the hope he offers will prove to be false. But it's a damn sight more encouraging than Superhawk McCain or Hillary the Hack. We have to start somewhere, or this experiment we're living in will continue swirling down the toilet. And it will be our own blasted fault, sitting on our asses changing channels on our cable and claiming all politicians are the same. They are not.
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AJ and the Pull
You referred to how posters were saying they were being convinced to vote against their best interests by the words of other posters, and were amazed you could have such a "pull". That's what made me giggle. Letting people who are basically just words on a screen make you so livid- it's just absurd, when you stand back and look at it.
BTW, I'm a Hillary supporter who's had my angry moments during this campaign. I don't think I've ever threatened to vote for McCain (have I?) but I've gotten into the whole overwrought internet thing. Ultimately, of course, I'll vote for Barack if he's the nominee, because, you know, it's important to be a grown up. Whatever my internet antics, I take my right to vote seriously.
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there will be blood....
Nordal, most Hillary supporters are NOT under the illusion that Hillary isn't a politician who at times needs to pander, connive, doublespeak, exaggerate, embellish, etc... They know all politicians do that because they have to. It's a hard job. Not everyone is cut out for the job. Only the most cunning, ambitious and slick will get to the top and stay there. It's the nature of the beast. It's a dirty business. O supporters, otoh, believes naively that those traits are beneath him. One good example is Jeffersonian.
Jeffersonian, it's time for you to do the research on your hero. I'll help you a bit:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23643866-5013948,00.html
Sooner or later, all this news will become mainstream. This campaign will be bloody, it'll be fun to watch (and don't forget to click on http://barackobamaassociates.info/... all of this comes handy for GOP). And just as I predicted, mud-slinging has just started against who else but Mrs. O. If O is the nominee, they have to make sure that she keeps her loud mouth shut. It's extremely dumb to say what she said TWICE in the same day only to deny it later that she didn't mean it that way.
O is a blank slate, people project what they wish him to be on him and supported by the biased media who has already annointed him from the get go, he plays along with it, smoothly and unchallenged. But contrary to the widely held belief among his supporters that he's this precious rare candidate of "change and hope" that transcends old politics, he is in fact more vulnerable to attacks than familiar Hillary.
Here is part of the article from the link:
The illusion that is Barack Obama
Fred Siegel | May 05, 2008
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ... That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson - a man, as with Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments - his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to "perfume the ticket".
read more here
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23643866-5013948,00.html