Humour me, what is the push back to the scenario I described above.

-- walterx2

I'm not going to "humour" you. Just the last few comment posts I read between my reply to you and your reply to me that I am quoting here should have answered your question. For you to ask, "Humour(sp) me, what is the push back to the scenario I described above", tells me that replying to you is a waste of time.

A tone of pride or petulance repressed,

A selfish inclination firmly fought,

A shadow of annoyances set at nought,

A murmur of disquietude suppressed,

A peace in importunity possessed,

A reconcilement generously sought,

A purpose set aside - a banished thought,

A word of self-explaining unexpressed,

Trifles they seem, these petty souls restraints,

Yet he/she who proves them such must needs possess.

A constancy and courage grand and bold,

They are the trifles that have made the 'saints'...

Give me to practice them in humbleness,

And nobler power than mine do... grant us to hold.

~

I think I was asked about Vietnam and Bucky0; it is hard to tell with vegetables even when they do prose. Well, Bucky0 is almost dead, I doubt there is a full year left.

Did I ever get get involved in Vietnam? I have been anti-war and anti-warior since 68. I have trouble forgiving those who choose to volunteer to spread death and destruction around the world. It is impossible to read even a tiny bit of American history and not know that joining the killing machine will mean that you will help to murder innocent civilians.

A few here want to say that non-interventionism is anti-American; I suppose they are correct in a morbid sort of way. America is just as Obama's preacher told his flock, but he is not supposed to tell the truth.

I once asked an intelligence officer if the government was involved in any way in importing drugs into this country. He asked me if I thought Sunday School Teachers were in charge of the intel organizations. They never seem to want to answer a question straight out, but I think I know what that means.

Have I ever cried for the murdered innocent? A river.

On February 26th, in a response to a mocking comment by Hillary Clinton, responding to a segment of a recent Clinton speech (she mocked Barack Obama's speech-making style)....

`

... Barack Obama said:

`

....*"I thought Senator Clinton showed some good humor there. I would give her points for delivery."*

I don't believe you.

If you visit the pope,

ask him to say a Hail Mary?

A Our Father? You are a Walking dead?

One common frame about Barack Obama’s landmark speech today is that it was in response to the Reverend Wright controversy, but the depth of his examination of the discrimination issue and the way he interwove it with what had transpired in the year or so of his campaign and in his life experiences can only lead me to believe that Obama was going to make this speech anyway in some form and at some point in the campaign. And, make no mistake, this speech was more broadly about discrimination of all types, race being but one prominent form thereof and socio-economic status another.

The Wright matter was more a jumping-off point or teaching point than a motivator for this speech, a chance for Obama to lay the foundation of exposing the existing shallowness in our discourse, then beginning a process of drilling down to the core issues in our national, regional, local, social/ethnic, family and personal DNA that both affect discrimination and are affected by it, and, finally coming to realize how fundamentally this has affected and, in many instances, even determined our approach to the important issues of the day. This also happens to be dead-on consistent with his campaign to date based on the “politics of inclusion.” Many worried that this speech may be too nuanced, high-minded or whatever, but there are seven-plus months left in the campaign to build off this in much more politically-direct ways. It seems more like a starting-off point then the end.

If it was not Wright’s comments, it would have been someone else’s ten-second sound bites attached to Obama as if Obama himself made them, and I believe he understood the inevitability of this in today’s poisoned political atmosphere. DCLaw1 and other commentators here have perceptively thrown Joan Walsh’s tin ear comment back at her for totally missing Obama’s point that most, including those we love and who love us, have a little bit of prejudice and bias in them, but that we don’t reject their whole being for the small parts we may not agree with or like. The inference is that we likely will find some of this within ourselves if we our willing to look hard enough.

Joan Walsh was only reflecting the general shallowness with which the media treats our political discourse. Jay Rosen has a good take on this in his piece, Obama tells the Best Political Team on Television: You Have a Choice, @

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/

in which he suggests, correctly imo, that Obama’s speech was aimed as much at the “tin ear” Joan Walsh’s and the Wolf Blitzers as anyone. Some samples of Rosen’s piece, which he addressed directly to Wolf Blitzer:

… This is a style of analysis—and a level of thought—we have become utterly used to, especially from Blitzer but also many others on TV: everything is a move in the game of getting elected, and it’s our job in political television to explain to you, the slightly clueless viewer at home, what today’s tactics are, then to estimate whether they will work.

… In fact it was a speech aimed right at Blitzer, at the best political team on television, and the makers of our election year spectacle.

… Wolf, Obama had just said, “We have a choice in this country.” And your team at CNN has to make a choice, too. You should be asking yourselves, what’s our choice, as broadcasters and journalists…

… We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

You can do that. That’s one option. But I’m told you are the best political team on television. Surely you can think of something better to do between now and April 22.

We have been complaining forever here about how this and that Democrat ultimately would not stand up for Democratic Party principles to the point of even questioning - rightfully so in some instances - whether the Democrat in question truly believed in those principles. We have one here who not only is doing that, but is calling the media on their own role in the degradation of our political discourse and challenging all of us, as Bill Moyer once put it so well, “To look beyond our own back yards.” This is the direction Obama was headed, whether Reverend Wright or Billy Graham was his pastor.