Letters to the Editor
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The Swift Boats have landed
So, what do we think the strategy meeting sounded like.
"Well, we can't call him the "N" word, that won't fly anymore. People are not THAT racist. Oooh, here is an idea, what if we call Obama the racist!!!! That's what is lurking in a lot of white folks deepest fears-reverse racisim. Nah, that wont stick. OOOH, better idea, what if we say that his friends are racist?!!! That would work. Slime by association!!!!"
"Do you think it will work" Are you kidding me? We got people to believe that John Kerry and Max Clealand were traitors and that John McCain fathered an illigitimate black child. People are stupid."
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Should Obama step down?
Kuriya's foam-mouthed idol-worship of the Oblahma notwithstanding, what we're starting to hear increasingly (from loyal Dems!) are rumblings that the best course for him at this point may be to step down from the race. This would be seen as a noble gesture by him in that it would unify his party, defuse all the intra-Dem destructive campaigning, and produce a united front against the hated Republicans. It would also provide him necessary time to mend the serious damage done by his clearly close relationship with the racist Rev. Wright, which no number of evasive and high-flying rhetoric can erase.
And he's still be young enough to run (with full party support) next go-around!
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jjppmd
Hillary Clinton doesn't stand a ghost of a chance in the general right now.
She has been successfully painted as running a racist campaign. Part of the Democratic base is the black vote and a lot of the black vote's support for Obama is based around the perception of Hillary running a racist campaign.
Further, the attacks on the UCC are going to cost the Democrats big, it is after all, the biggest black church in America.
In essence what you have here is a situation which may help Hillary in the primaries, but this "Win at all costs" strategy is going to kill her in the general.
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misdirected patriotism
I cheered when Obama took off his flag pin. I was so disgusted when everyone in Congress jumped on the hyper patriotism bull of the Bush administration and started wearing those pins. They remind me of Nazi Germany, that and "homeland" security. Equally disgusting were all those people driving around with gigantic flags on heir cars and trucks after 9/11. Nationalists governments always instill FEAR through patriotism in thier citizens to control them.
As far as Rev. Wright. frankly I agreed with him on much of what he said. Besides the comments were taken totally out of context. Unless you listen to the entire sermon, they have a different meaning. Only the white racist will be bothered by Rev. Wright and they won't be voting for Obama anyway.
Obama has been vetted and has proved he has the leadership skills to withstand more attacks. I still suppport him, as he represents true patriotism.
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Someone once said:
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just
is this individual reviled as an anti-American or a hater?
I think not
since Thomas Jefferson was a 2 term president and appears on the nickel
A
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We've come a long way down since Eleanor Roosevelt
Gary's point about how narrow the field of allowable public discourse is now is right on. I happened to watch a PBS bio of Eleanor Roosevelt only a day or two ago. During FDR's administration, she consorted with known Communists and was unapologetic about it. She went on TV in the 1950s and said that the developing world is suspicious of America because of discrimination against colored peoples at home. Can you imagine Rosalyn Carter saying that?
It sometimes seems to me that the modern conservative movement has been dedicated to reversing the New Deal, a point Paul Krugman made in his book, "The Conscience of a Liberal." At least one feature of the Depression Era was the widening of American politics to a more European spectrum on the left. While FDR and the New Deal were really seeking to combat that, they didn't demonize the left (that I know of) the way that Reagan and his followers have. Obama is really just another victim in a long list of decent people made to look nefarious.
Totally off the point, Eleanor Roosevelt was scheduled to make an appearance at a meeting on racial justice in the Nashville area in the 1950s. The FBI warned her not to go, that the Klan was planning an attack and they couldn't (wouldn't) help her. Undeterred, she went by herself, was picked up at the airport by another elderly woman, and they drove to the meeting with a pistol sitting between them on the front seat. Can you imagine Hillary doing that? Or really, any politician today putting their life on the line like that?
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Patridiotic
Patriotism is a myth which is used as emotional blackmail by Conservatives to get others to do what they (usually) would not do themselves given a choice. It is a sliding scale version of three card monty where the targeted person can never guess the proper approach and where the definition varies according to whom it is applied.
Today we live in an age of Neo-Barbarism where the majority of younger people are lucky if they understand all the words in their Sunday newspaper. The primary cause of this is the deliberate dumbing down of education which occurred as a direct result of the protests against the Vietnam war. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, the US government was faced, for the first time in history, with a relatively educated populace which was opposed to its foreign policy. The solution to this problem for the government and for the plutarchy of Wall Street investors, the actual owners of this country, was clear. It was to narrow public education to the mere basics of rudimentary reading skills, simple Mathematics and minimal Science. Gone were the studies of the Arts, Literature and World History as well as anything else which might lead to the ability of having critical analysis skills.
Replacing them also was an onslaught of teachings which were overt boosterism of the godliness of the nation, how the United States excreted ice cream, peed lemonade and could never, ever take actions which were not rubber-stamped “Approved” by God Himself. Nothing in US history ever had any causes; things just happened. The best example of this is how 9/11 could not possibly have anything to do with 50 years of oppressive international intervention by the CIA and US military. The country was told, “They hate us for our freedoms” and people actually believed it. An ignorant populace is a docile populace which can be easily steered toward anything like sheep as we all saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Make the realm of education so narrow that the citizenry can run the machines, total the accounts and read the propaganda fomented by the government and spread by the corporate media owned by the plutarchy of the investor class. Period.
Proponents of this philosophy are as Un-American in their ideals as any external enemy this country has ever faced. They are happy to sit safely at home in their Stratolounger and cheerlead for something they obviously do not understand, while better men than themself die for their foolishness. This brand of cowardly warmongering makes me ill. I certainly didn't see any of them in Vietnam either, although they were plentiful at home while we were being maimed and killed daily over there.