Letters to the Editor
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In the mix
Dear tb.
You, who posted anonymous and wrote this:
Short version- "everyone's obsession with all of this mixed-race stuff. All black people in this country are mixed. Hispanics are mixed. White people are mixed. WE'RE ALL MIXED. GET OVER THIS LIMITED LINE OF THINKING."
Thank you.
I agree with your post and have lived in neighborhoods of every creed, race, culture and persuasion, everyone just living together. I like it best this way because it is reality. Damn right we can get along. I abhor these pundits and everyone who says otherwise. We are all sharing space on this planet, wanting basically the same things from life, so what's the big deal about the color of someone's skin? Or their gender? Or... OK, I'll stop here, but come on America, get over it! It is, as both Michelle Obama and HRC have said, "Silly".
Whew. That made me tired. I think I'll go back to watching mindless TV now and over to safe ground... Heather Havrilevsky's column maybe. Weeds. L Word. Something silly, and something that is still shocking, to some folks.
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AKA, you've got this right!
"I actually think the more dangerous Obama supporters are people who actually are some of the crossover voters who are extreme Hillary-haters. Sure as the sun's gonna rise, those voters will vote for McCain in the fall."
Yep. Been saying that for a while now. It's a bummer. I still wish Hil and Obama would just team up. A walking Republican nightmare, that pair.
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@ Anonymous 5:54 PM
You are right. People shouldn't call Obama's supporters childish and they shouldn't refer to Obama as a kid. He's a boomer technically. So they shouldn't say things like "All Obama's supporters are childish." However, they could say in response to a particular poster -- I have one in mind: "I find your name-calling childish and your ideas undeveloped." I actually think the person who would best fit this description in this thread is older than I am. Childishness is not a quality of age always but sometimes of mind.
To me, it is okay to critique people's ideas and language. This is just normal debate. However, when people are reduced to name calling or always reach for the most extreme adjectives, they have actually lost the argument.
Personally, I would like to see people's discussions be more precise, specific, and detailed. To me, elevating the debate means elevating the language and not just having good manners. I don't want the debate to go away. I think debate is good for us. I used to teach English with a particular emphasis on critical thinking. I would introduce the class by saying that we were going to learn to argue. Always, some of my students, many of whom were 18 or 19 were uncomfortable. They had been taught not to argue. They had learned nothing about how to argue. They did not understand that in order to refute someone's opinion, that they actually had to try to see that other person's viewpoint. In my class, I taught them to value the bones of argument. (It was a remedial class.) All the fancy flourishes of flesh were secondary.
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@ lateagain
I don't know if you want to read it all, but one of the same divisive poster in this thead ...
http://letters.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/02/06/obama_present_votes/view/index1.html?show=all&order=asc
... is also posting here. It is time we put extreme Hillary-hating to bed. It would harm us in November if she is the nominee and, the sooner we get rid of the phony-types who pretend to be Democrats or Obama supporters in order to hurt her, the better it will be for the Democratic Party, the future of our nation, and to end the war.
We don't want a false picture of what sort of odds we are facing in November. We need a true picture.
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Who is the media here?
How long on MSNBC and other cable news shows have I been hearing that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Nominee? I'd say, for a good year before Obama even announced he was running.
I think among other things, there was is a backlash over the utter presumptuousness of that assumption, and maybe "the media" is picking up on it. Maybe, Hillary Clinton is yesterday's news. Those newsshows are structured like tabloids, why shouldn't it follow that they have their current stars?
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@AKA Smith
Totally with you on eliminating the Hillary haters--I just want to do the same with the Obama haters. If Hillary is the candidate, I will support her, and yes, it makes me nervous that Republicans are taking notes here and on other sites and putting together all the points that Democrats have so willingly laid out for them. But the same is true for the other side: All the accusations about zombie/puppet supporters for Obama DO NOT help him. This will be picked up immediately and used (if he is the nominee). My objection is not merely that it harms him; my objection is that it's not true. There's no question that many find him inspirational and there's no question that he chooses not to weigh his speeches with statistics and policy, but imo that is a style difference and has nothing to do with the actual content of his policy. I remember all the way back to 1992 when everyone was vilifying Bill Clinton as "Slick Willie" and talking about how silver his tongue was, etc.; a friend and I lamented how unfair it was that people assumed that just because he was a good speaker he was slick. I think a slightly different twist is happening with Obama: Just because he is a good speaker, he is shallow. The whole "Where's the beef?" lack of substance thing is already being thrown around by the right (Bill Bennet on radio today), casually, as though completely unassailable. Let me tell you, there is nothing featherweight about editing the Harvard Law Review, and substantively, there is genuinely little difference between him and Clinton.
For your information, after much thought, these are the precise reasons that pushed me over the edge against Clinton:
1. her vote in the fall of 2002. I think it was a political miscalcuation.
2. What she/Bill bring out in others. It's a hard, hard reality and it is a legitimate argument. I'm just not up for another 4-8 years of right-wing orgasmic nastiness against the Clintons. It took everything out of me from 1998-2004, and I've lost friends over it. There is a part of me that will never forgive the US press and the legions of American idiots who sidelined US policy for years while we fiddled around with the Lewinsky thing. I can't stand the way HRC was damned if she did and damned if she didn't (stay with Bill, run for Senate then Pres, whatever), and while you may see her run as some kind of redemption, I see it as potential resurrection for the right-wing conspiracy that's currently lost some steam.