profession of faith to that person's religion and that person's views pertaining to religion?

That's a bit of a stretch.

"As long as black people are angry that is the lens they will be viewed through. It seems every other minority that came to America has made the most of the opportunity. From the Irish to the Vietnamese, they have made their way."--shooter242

There is one HUGE difference. No-one kidnapped the Irish, Vietnamese, Korean, Polish, Puerto Rican, etc., people and FORCED them to come to this country. I certainly don't blame the black people for feeling like we owe them something.

I doubt you have a clue what a prole is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat

I suppose next you'll tell me there are nothing but rich elites in the military. Elite units are something else. Just keep quiet more often.

But look, here's my question and I ask you cause You guys probably know the most about it: Can the Iraq War go on, and go on being fought the way it is, if Obama is elected?

Since I do have to go to work (but will be back to see if you do desire to answer) now, I mean now (!)

Do you think the military can go on fighting the war if they cannot (even if it's in their own minds) depend on the White House for cover, and to implement their own, and the White House's worst instincts? Won't it fuck them all up?

Would you waterboard for Obama? Sure, you can count on Bush to have your back, but Obama?

Thanks to all, gotta go.

If there were the sum of it, we wouldn't be having this exchange.

It is the sum of it. The sermon was about the injustices America perpetrates. You and your kind latched onto it to do a little racist swiftboating. You got nailed, because the guy you targeted didn't flinch or let some marketing jerk tell him what to say.

The last time you guys trotted out the phrase 'bottom feeder' it was about Larry Flynt. What he'd done was expose the supposed 'youthful indiscretions' of Henry Hyde while Hyde was trying to impeach a president for having an affair.

Didn't work then and it doesn't work now. You are the bottom feeders, who have no lower bound on what you'll do to insure that an election not be on the issues, and to appeal to the prurient interests of your Puritan base, regardless of your own personal religious attitudes. People who support a torture president have no standing to use the expression 'bottom feeder'. They rot at the bottom themselves.

Nevermind my return question - just refer to Uncle Fester's response.

Unless you happen to think membership in a church does mean you swear fealty to every one of the beliefs of its pastor.

it occurs to me that white Western man has always needed his boogie-men, real or imagined - to justify his less-than-noble rhetoric and activities.

You need to get out more, michmog. Your cultural ignorance is showing.

It's the nature of some men, period, no matter what color. Perhaps you never heard that the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, blamed AIDS on the CIA. Or the rumors all over the Middle East that 9/11 was carried out by Bush and Cheney. (And some kooky French actresses apparently believe this too.)

Maybe you didn't know that Muslims all over the Arab world blame everything (from bad drinking water to the unavailablity of mangoes) on the United States.

Every culture has its boogie men that demagogues use to enflame the masses. The moonbats of Salon have their own convenient ones in Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Questions about Mr. Obama’s “blackness,” though, quickly threatened to obscure the reasons he believed himself most qualified to become the country’s next president. A Rolling Stone article linked him to the militant preaching of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The story quoted the minister as saying in a sermon, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.”

Mr. Axelrod said he and Mr. Obama decided to take Mr. Wright off the program for the campaign announcement in February 2007, concluding that the attention would drag the pastor into a negative spotlight and might distract from efforts to portray the senator as a candidate capable of unifying the country.

The day after the rally, which was on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Illinois, Mr. Obama was sharply criticized by African-American academics, media celebrities and policy experts at a conference in Hampton, Va. Among the most often cited was Cornel West, the renowned Princeton scholar. He and others argued that Mr. Obama should speak forcefully about the legacy of racism in the nation and not cast the problems that disproportionately affect blacks as social ills shared by many Americans.

white Western man has always needed his boogie-men,

Well, duhh! Maybe now I don't admit, but at one time I couldn't go a day without the Average White Band or The Village People, the Bee-Gees and how many others?

Michmog, we all need to boogie, everybody everywhere, and we all have our own boogie-men! Those are some of mine, what're your's?

I'll read your answer after work, bye!

Most Americans have had real tribalism extinguished -- bred or beaten out of them, or taken from them through various means -- so they tend to use substitutes, like political affiliation, education, "heritage," class, etc. Organizing into affinity groupings is instinctive in humans. But tribalism itself can be overcome with the application of enough pressure -- or opportunity.

Most of us are members of several overlapping pseudo-tribes, but many of us see outsiders as representing single tribes. And there is always some goat-tribe, of which there have been many in American history, whether it be the Indians (as it was originally), or Orientals, Irish, Jews, Blacks, or nowadays, Arabs and Muslims generally.

It is a struggle to overcome the tendency to ascribe EVIL to the goat-tribe of the day, and many people just don't want to bother with that struggle, so they go along with whatever scapegoating of The Other (whomever it may be) is fashionable at the moment.

This is one reason why it was so relatively easy for Nazis (and others) to scapegoat Jews, and eventually to exterminate them in Europe. People went along with it because it's too much trouble to fight it. Banality of evil indeed. Ondelette's link to a der Spiegel story about it earlier in this thread also pointed to the fact that opinion polls in this country after the war showed that 20% of Americans agreed with what the Nazis did to the goat-tribe-Jews, and another 19% said the treatment of the goat/Jews was perhaps "exaggerated" but essentially correct.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,542245,00.html

Just so with today's goat-people, Arabs in particular, Muslims in general. There is an extreme danger that Americans could fall in to the same eliminationist frenzy -- to exterminate the brutes -- that other peoples have experienced, and Americans have partially experienced several times in our history.

Obama gets it from all sides, being basically "part everything alien" -- which is also his appeal, but that's another topic for another day. Hillary gets it for being a Clinton, a very special status of goat in this fair land of ours.

McCain, despite being old, crotchety, wrong, and ridiculously addlepated has yet to be consigned to the goat pile. After all, America loves its coots. Especially when they say: "My friends."

If he were a Boomer, instead of an Elder, he would be much more likely to suffer the goat-fate of all the other out-tribes. But as it stands now, he's immune, no matter what.

And as we know, Republicans are masters at playing tribal cards, pitting groups against one another, and giggling at the carnage that results.

Dems are in general powerless to resist.

As the blond said when seeing a banana peel on the sidewalk: "Oh no. Here we go again!" (h/t A Prairie Home Companion)

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2008/03/08/