Letters to the Editor
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"Elephantdung" is still hard of reading....
To clear it all up for you: No, Rush Limbaugh didn't invent the term "Magic Negro" and no, he wasn't the first to apply it to Obama. Rush was responding, in a highly clever and memorable way (such that it is continually talked about, on forums as far-removed as Salon), to an article about Obama's charisma in which SOMEBODY ELSE applied the term "magic negro" to Obama. In that regard, "magic negro" was not being used as an epithet; rather, it was an attention-getter in a newspaper column. The intent of Rush Limbaugh was to ridicule Obama's growing legend for charisma, and to also lampoon a press corps that appears to be fawning over Obama.
Huh?!?!? Playing "Barack, the Magic Negro" over and over and over is "lampoon[ing] a press corps" that isn't even using those two words? See my comment three paragraphs below.
Here's what I said (and to which you offer the non sequitur 'defence' above):
[Arne]: No, nothing disparaging in His Emanence Rush's song. He was complimenting Barack....
Do you agree?
All you've done, Arne, is to prove that you are too dumb to understand the Rush Limbaugh Program, which is not that high of a bar to begin with.
You're quite right, "Elephantdung". You are perceptive. How could I totally have missed the fact that Rush playing "Barack the Magic Negro" (with the context you were so kind to provide) -- over and over and over again pretty much every time His Emanence was going on a harangue about Obama -- was in fact an abstruse and arcane dig at the "press corps"? Why, I'd better rush right out, so to speak, and sign up for a course in RushLogic™!!! With that, Hooked on Phonics courses, prophylactic breathing strips for mouth-breathers, and advice on how to pay my delinquent back taxes (all as advertised continuously on the El Blobbo show; they know their audience!), I will be as smart as a Republican!!!!
As for accusing me of being a racist, I can say to you, with all sincerity, fuck you.
Where did I accuse you of "being a racist"? Hard of reading again? But I'd say your defence of El Buttboil here in his sliming of Barack certainly doesn't speak too well of you....
Cheers,
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Didn't George Orwell
Write an Essay about his time in Burma called Shooting a Golden Elephant Boy?
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Uh oh!
Trouble for St. John.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21mccain.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Seems he's a little too chummy with a female lobbyist.
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Charles Peters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303_pf.html
Judge Him by His Laws
By Charles Peters
Friday, January 4, 2008; A21People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability.
Since most of Obama's legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there -- and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously. (Another factor is reporters' fascination with the horse race at the expense of substance that they assume is boring, a fascination that despite being ridiculed for years continues to dominate political journalism.)
I am a rarity among Washington journalists in that I have served in a state legislature. I know from my time in the West Virginia legislature that the challenges faced by reform-minded state representatives are no less, if indeed not more, formidable than those encountered in Congress. For me, at least, trying to deal with those challenges involved as much drama as any election. And the "heart and soul" bill, the one for which a legislator gives everything he or she has to get passed, has long told me more than anything else about a person's character and ability.
Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused.
Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.
This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama's bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to "solve" crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.
Obama had his work cut out for him.
He responded with an all-out campaign of cajolery. It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that "Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics."
The police proved to be Obama's toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, "This means we won't be able to protect your children." The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought -- successfully -- to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping.
By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many.
Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.
Obama didn't stop there. He played a major role in passing many other bills, including the state's first earned-income tax credit to help the working poor and the first ethics and campaign finance law in 25 years (a law a Post story said made Illinois "one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure"). Obama's commitment to ethics continued in the U.S. Senate, where he co-authored the new lobbying reform law that, among its hard-to-sell provisions, requires lawmakers to disclose the names of lobbyists who "bundle" contributions for them.
Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that Obama has what Dillard, the Republican state senator, calls a "unique" ability "to deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people." In other words, Obama's campaign claim that he can persuade us to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric.
I do not think that a candidate's legislative record is the only measure of presidential potential, simply that Obama's is revealing enough to merit far more attention than it has received. Indeed, the media have been equally delinquent in reporting the legislative achievements of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, both of whom spent years in the U.S. Senate. The media should compare their legislative records to Obama's, devoting special attention to their heart-and-soul bills and how effective each was in actually making law.
- - Charles Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, is president of Understanding Government, a foundation devoted to better government through better reporting.