Today is the eve of what will be for many of us one of the greatest moments of our lives. We have made a positive change in our lives which holds the great promise for the betterment of all. Our motivations for this change are as varried as we are - yet our ultimate goal has been the same - to make the world a better place for all of humanity us to live in.
We have done what we did for reasions both selfish and selfless, and given our support in both time, money, sweat, and even blood - but it will have been worth it all if just one child lives because he now recieves health care instead of none - or one less grandmother freezes to death in the winter because she can afford to heat her house, recieve needed medication and eat at the same time.
Small victories indeed, but small victories like these are what life is all about, fulfilling these hopes and dreams are the winning of the small battles in the war on ignorance and poverty and intollerance. They are what is importaint, not the man or the movement - but the results of electing the man with the movement.
We will prevail, our victory over ignorance and fear is all but assured, but this victory we brought about isn't for his glory but ours - this will be a victory for humanity as a whole, and not a vain glory for a few or the one.
Today is Monday, today we rejoin the battle with renewed vigor and determination, we will do everything we can to combat the forces of ignorance and hypocracy - and tomorrow we will vote and then we will judge the results of our efforts.
As for Wednesday? Wednesday we will no doubt be tired and "hung over", but the hardest part of the "war" we have been waging will upon us. We must "win the peace" with our former adversaries, we must console them and re-educate them so when January 20th 2009 arives, they too will be cheering for Obama/Biden as loudly as we do.
We have a much larger a harder struggle ahead of us in the weeks and months to come - but for now you may be proud of what we have done - take a breif moment to savor what your efforts have brought to fruit.
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.
At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.
The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”
The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.
Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.
In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.
By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”
The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.
In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.
President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.
Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.
Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.
The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.
What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.
Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.
Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.
A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.
It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.
The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
I've been really involved lately with personal affairs the last month or so, but today I'm setting aside all other business to celiberate our victory.
We should have been able to do this months ago, but some people that we really do love dearly just had to draw this whole business out to the last possible moment....but that's ok, we understand why they felt the need to do so, and now that it's all behind us we welcome them back into the fold so we can march forward to a huge victory in November.
dog
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ended some years ago. In Iraq, the war ended with the fall of Saddam Hussein's government; in Afghanistan, with the fall of the Taliban government. What's been happening since is occupation and resistance to occupation.
It's always helpful to call things by the right name. One of the ways using the wrong word can trip us is illustrated by John McCain's campaign theme. We have to win the war in Iraq, he keeps saying. Ending a war implies either winning or losing. No such baggage is attached to an occupation. You can end an occupation without either winning or losing. You just withdraw your troops.
The fact that what is going on in Iraq is an occupation is proven by the nature of the conflicts. They are between factions of Iraqis. Our guys are caught in the crossfire or killed by Iraqis who oppose our presence. There are no large-scale attacks directed against us.
Those who want to continue the occupation paint a horrific picture of what they claim will happen if we withdraw – a massive civil war, genocide or a regional war. There is no hard evidence to support any of those suppositions. But even if they happen, they need not concern us. Lots of factions in different parts of the world decide to kill each other from time to time, and we don't interfere. As long as there are no Americans to get caught in the crossfire, let the Iraqis have their civil war if that's what they want.
On the other hand, there's never been civil war in Iraq. There were rebellions against the Baathist government and, before that, against the British-sponsored governments, but before our occupation, Sunnis and Shia intermarried and lived side by side. There were always Christians in Iraq and, until the state of Israel was created, Jews. That was, in fact, true throughout the Middle East.
As for al-Qaeda, it has been virtually wiped out in Iraq – not by us, but by Sunni tribesmen who turned against it because of its murderous fanaticism. McCain keeps confusing al-Qaeda with Shia and trying to link it to Iran, but al-Qaeda is a fundamentalist Sunni group way outside the mainstream of Islam. Most of its members are Saudis or Egyptians. It was never in Iraq until our war and occupation gave it an excuse to come in. It's never been in Iran. For American politicians to suppose that without us it would thrive and grow in Iraq is just proof of their ignorance.
Our presence in Iraq is the only thing that made al-Qaeda viable. Our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are the principal selling points in al-Qaeda propaganda. We have no interests, strategic or otherwise, in either country. The last thing al-Qaeda wants is for us to withdraw, which is why it should be the first thing we do.
Whatever someone imagines we gain by staying in Iraq and Afghanistan is far outweighed by what we are losing. We are losing lives in dribs and drabs, and we are losing treasure at an alarming rate. We have severe internal problems that our military presence in the Middle East aggravates. Our military is on the verge of being broken. Some Nobel laureates estimate the war will end up costing us $3 trillion. Well, plain and simple, we can't afford it.
We should never go to war unless there are tangible, identifiable benefits for the American people for doing so. Try to think of a benefit we have gained from Iraq or Afghanistan. There are none. We deposed two governments that were not attacking us or threatening to attack us, and we let get away the private terrorist group that had attacked us. It does not matter that they were bad governments. There are lots of bad governments in this world. The only bad government we have an obligation to change is the one in Washington, D.C.
If we don't change direction in this country, we're going to end up impoverished and bankrupt, and you know what? Iraq and Afghanistan will still be the messes they are today.
Here's an article from The Nation magazine online, which talks about some of the more "unsavory" aspects of Hillary's religious ideology. It's a must read.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/ehrenreich
Thanks to newly released whitehouse papers we see Hillary's stated position on NAFTA was all lies.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=300860
I'm sure that many of us here think that the Iraq war has been nothing but a needless slaughter of innocent people in order to gain control of their resources for a few in our own country, ( I personally have no doubt of this myself ). Anyway, ending this imperial resource grab is one of my primary motavations for supporting Mr. Obama, that and the fact that he's just the best canadate in this election cycle.
The present regime in power is criminally insane, I have no doubt of this, here's an example of just how out of touch the present goverement is : http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Vote2008/story?id=4481568&page=1
Here he is, the "brains" behind the throne, and he's totally oblivious to reality and the will of the people. This fool and those in this regime are psycopathic in their criminal lunacy, and we must put an end to this!
The war in Iraq is an imoral resource destroying criminal enterprise, and we should make this a priority issue in this election, our "big stick" so to speak, it is the one peak of moral "high ground" that McCain cannot hope to knock us off of, as he has allready thrown himself in with the failed regime of Dubya & his cronies.
The Vietnam war destroyed LBJ and the democrats in 68, let us use the same tactics in 08 to destroy McCain and the Republicans in this election.
Just a quickie to pass on to those who haven't allready heard this.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4218509&page=1
By Jonathan Chait
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I honestly Believe Hillary Clinton is a self serving, shameless, political hack who will stop at nothing to win the primary - and if she fails at that I think she would do a "Lieberman" on the Democratic party and support McCain in the general election!
Yes ! I honestly think that anymore, and I really don't want to go down that road either, but her words and actions lead me to make that call. And there's no way in hell I'm going to support another "will of the people be damned" president in the oval office. Good Greif ! She would be another Bush if she got the job - and who in their right mind would want that egh ?
She has proven time and time again that her self interests outweigh the interests of the the party and the millions of people who are proud to call themselves Democrats. Her meglomainac ways are going to doom us in November unless we can capture back the Democratic party from the "Insiders" and return it to those who really own it, and that is us, we are the party, it is ours, and we better let our "leaders" know it.
I have written and called, and e-mailed the DNC both nationally and locally to express my opinions on the Florida & Michagan delegate fiasco, and I would strongly suggest you do the same. I'm of the opinion a 50 / 50 split is the best way to go, and causes the least disruption and smallest backlash possible, not to mention that it's the cheapest way to go. And as to the "superdelegate" question, I think these individuals have an obligation both politically and morally to support the canadate who has the largest popular vote count by the party rank and file, for them to support someone who dosn't have the will of the majority behind them is far too close to what happened in the 2000 general election, where as you remember the supreme court voted along party lines to stop the Florida recount which would have given Al Gore the election.
Are we going to let these "supperdelegates" override the will of the people ? Are we going to let the Hillary machine run roughshod over the will of the majority ? It can and may do so unless we demand accountability from OUR DEMOCRATIC PARTY !
It is OUR PARTY, take the time to remind them of this fact, because if the election is fair, we will have Obama as our next president instead of some old man who seems to relish the thought of a 100 year war in Irac and children dying because they had no health care.
Sorry, I got a bit worked up here, but we have no choice people, Hillary and her cronies will either steal the election or wreck it unless we demand accountability from the Democratic Party. Let your voice be heard at the DNC national comittie, for you know as well as I that Hillary's propaganda machine is screaming into their ears right now as you read this.
GO OBAMA !
Dear fellow Obama-maniacs,
Okay, I'm coming out of the closet, and admitting I'm one of you. There, I can say it, at last, out loud and proud: I'm a conservative-paleo-libertarian with a man-crush on Obama.
Whew! What a relief! Now that I've got that off my chest, I can speak freely, and openly, about my condition – and, what's more, address my fellows in the spirit of mutual solidarity and support. Because it looks like we're going to need all the support we can get.
First, my story: Like many of you, I tried to deny it. I lived deeply, and tragically, closeted, afraid to face my inner desires and tortured by the possibility that someone might find out. Trying not to look at him when he came on television – which, as you know, is often. I looked, of course, but only out of the corner of my eye, and tried not to swoon as those golden words melted the very air.
I even denounced him a couple of times right here in this space, just to cover my tracks: yes, I was an Obama-basher, because I just couldn't face the truth about myself. Yet I couldn't resist the siren song of my real desires, and, slowly but surely, I inched out of the closet and into the light.
Obama kept mentioning the war – you know, the one we were lied into on phony "evidence" of a nonexistent nuclear program. Not only that, but he kept reminding Hillary we should never had launched it in the first place: he needled her until she visibly squirmed. That was the hook, the lure that drew me ineluctably into the Obama cult.
Okay, let's admit this, too: it is a cult, i.e. a group centered around a single leader, whose pronouncements and personality form the basis of belief. With Obama, the clincher is that distinctly presidential air he carries with such alacrity: he acts and speaks as if he's already the President, and is merely waiting to be officially elected out of simple courtesy and respect for tradition.
Obama-mania is indeed a cult, but that's okay: after all, I'm a longtime Ron Paul fan, too – my enthusiasms are strictly non-partisan – and so idealism doesn't scare me, I think it's a rare and good thing in politics, and in life. After all, Christianity, when it began, was a cult, and yet now we have presidential candidates chasing after the Christian constituency, no matter how wacky some of their leaders may be.
I have to say that the turning point, for me, was when Rep. Paul's presidential campaign seemed to go into suspended animation. An attempt to derail the Revolution by challenging Paul in the GOP congressional primary necessitated a tactical shift, and Chris Peden, the challenger, was crushed, 70-30. Oh, it was a great day: you could practically hear Roger L Simon sobbing and I'll be damned if I didn't hear the faint echoes of Jamie Kirchick's furious shrieks ("I'm melting! Melting!").
With the GOP presidential sweepstakes over, the antiwar voter – that is, the single-issue voter who conditions his support on the candidate's generally pro-peace foreign policy stance – was left with a single choice, and that is Obama.
This is really the core of Obama's appeal, and not just in my case: his calls to end the war, and change our crazed foreign policy, always elicit the loudest cheers at his mammoth rallies. It doesn't matter that he's not a consistent, principled, down-the-line opponent of interventionism: in the public mind, he is the antiwar candidate. Which is precisely what that 3-in-the-morning Clinton ad was all about: do you trust a peacenik like Obama to be ready to go to war at a moment's notice – to bomb now, and consider all the possibilities later?
That and the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor, shamelessly validated by Hillary herself – "As far as I know" he's not a Muslim! – generated a Clintonian mini-surge. The results of the Ohio and Texas Democratic primaries may not amount to much in terms of delegates – Clinton picked up around six, according to the system sanctioned by the party's arcane rules – yet nevertheless her comeback represents a major setback for the only antiwar candidate left in the running. The fix is in.
The combative tone of the Clintonites has given the signal to the Democratic establishment that they'd better not even begin to think about abandoning the Clintons to a well-deserved fate. In the end, as I have pointed out previously, the super-delegates will determine Obama's fate – and you don't really think they're going to let a perceived peace candidate anywhere near the White House, now do you?
It's been widely noted that, in going after Obama, the Clintonites are utilizing the same tactics the Republicans would – the three-in-the-morning phone call ad might have been produced by the Republican National Committee, for all the difference it makes. With that ad, the Clintonites announced their scorched earth policy: they would rather split the Democratic party than give up their dream of the Restoration. It's only natural that the breaking point comes in the realm of foreign policy, and specifically over the issue of the alleged permanence of our ongoing "crisis" – the entire rationale behind our foreign policy of perpetual war.
Constant crisis means constant war hysteria, and this is the key to understanding the mindset that got us where we are today in Iraq. In the world of Hillary's red-phone ad, war is a constant option – so that, at any moment, and probably close to if not exactly at 3 a.m., the President of the United States is more than likely to be woken up and forced to make a decision: war, or peace. Which is it to be? No time to think, or consult: it's either give the order to inflict mass death – or chill with a cup of coffee, and maybe even a secret smoke in the Rose Garden, before giving the order to launch World War III.
Hillary the hawk shrieks, and strikes – but, on second thought, she's more like a shrike, a fierce bird that seems to take a perverse pleasure in impaling its victims on thorns, perhaps as a display to frighten its enemies. Our Democratic war-birds have always ruled the party's nest, and the Clintons won't hesitate to push Obama and his supporters to the forest floor, if they have to.
At this point, neither candidate has enough pledged delegates to win, and neither is likely to acquire that magic number. Therefore, in the end, it will be the super-delegates – the party Establishment – who will pick the nominee. A few hundred party insiders – now that's American democracy in action. Keep this in mind the next time the US government takes, say, Russia to task for supposedly veering off he road to democracy.
The probable outcome of all this will be the complete lack of a candidate who holds anything close to a rational position on matters of foreign policy. Hillary Clinton's record on this question is disgraceful: her actual stance is closer to Joe Lieberman's than Obama's, except she doesn't have Joe's courage. And as for McCain ….
Ron Paul has ruled out a third party run, unfortunately, although we are indeed fortunate to have such a staunch opponent of interventionism in the US Congress. Paul's victory in his congressional primary is a real smack in the face to the neocons, and to the Beltway "libertarian" snobs who decided Paul didn't deserve their endorsement (or even a fair shake): screw you, guys, your smear campaign failed miserably.
All in all, however, this one victory in defense of gains already made is far from enough. As it stands now, in terms of changing our counterproductive and downright dangerous foreign policy, there will be no candidate on the presidential ballot this November worth a damn.
There are rumors that Bob Barr, the former Republican congressman from Georgia, will launch a third party challenge on the right: Barr opposes the Iraq war, and has been part of a coalition of conservatives, liberals, and libertarians who oppose the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and similarly authoritarian measures recently imposed by the Bush regime and its Democratic enablers. A meeting between Barr and Ron Paul has been reported, but, as yet, nothing definite seems to have solidified – and the hour grows late.
In my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, I inserted a quotation from Old Right lion Garet Garrett in the front, and did so for a reason that seems especially elevant now:
"Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people."
"Democracy," American-style, is the War Party's most successful scam, a device by which it gets to validate its war plans without ever having them contested at the ballot box. The primary process is designed to weed out all possible challengers to the bosses of the "major" parties, and, when that doesn't work, the Democratic wing of the War Party always has recourse to the "super-delegates," or some such device, to snatch the prize away from an upstart contender.
With the GOP effectively inoculated against anti-interventionist ideas, and the Democratic antiwar base kept in check by the super-delegate-DLC-PPI axis of Hillary, the antiwar majority is denied even a voice in the presidential election.
The system is in crisis. We simply can't afford to police the world, and we're going bankrupt in the attempt. At the present rate of deterioration, the economic foundations of American imperialism are approaching collapse – and we're looking at a very short time-frame, as such things go.
The economic and social consequences of such a reckless policy are staring us in the face, and this brings to mind another quote from the prescient Garrett:
"No doubt the people know they can have their Republic back if they want it enough to fight for it and to pay the price. The only point is that no leader has yet appeared with the courage to make them choose."
We're in a crisis, alright, a crisis of leadership – or the lack of it. Where is the politician who will challenge the War Party, and take his fight all the way to the end, however bitter it may be? When Obama, for example, is denied the nomination, when we all know he won it fair and square – when the super-delegates crown Queen Hillary with laurel leaves and proclaim "Hail, Clinton!" – what will the Obama-maniacs do? What, for that matter, will Obama do?
There's talk that Hillary will offer him the vice-presidency (certainly she'd never accept a subordinate role), but I don't believe that's any longer possible: the red phone ad pretty much says Obama isn't to be trusted with that phone, and that rules him out for the number two spot on the ticket.
If Obama is really the leader of our dreams, the messiah figure who lives up to our completely unreasonable expectations, and is fated to deliver us from the evil that's enveloped us for the past eight years, he'll launch an independent bid for the White House. Of course, it won't happen: but that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.
And yet, it could happen: anything can happen, especially in this volatile season. A popular movement demanding that he run, a backlash against the Old Politics and the beginning of a new era of tumult and rising opposition to the Powers That Be – can it happen?
Our answer must be: Yes, it can …
~ Justin Raimondo
Obama can and will get the nomination for the Democratic party, and he will be our next president. I have absoloutly no doubt of this if - and I repeat - if - we stay focused on the facts, and stand behind our canadate and defend him against these lying attacks by the "old boy - business as usual - corperate owned political hacks like Clinton and McCain.Victory in November ? Yes we can - yes we can - yes we can !!
People often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.
The phrase is proverbial, referring to people who prevent others from having something that they themselves have no use for. A typical example is the child who discards a toy — until a sibling tries to play with it. Then the first child becomes possessive about something they no longer wanted.
A twist on the story was used by Charles Schulz in a Peanuts strip, in which Lucy acquires a baseball card of Charlie Brown's favorite player, and she refuses to give it to him. After he leaves disconsolately, she decides she doesn't really like the card that well, and throws it away.
In Spanish, the story is called El Perro del Hortelano, or The Vegetable Gardener's Dog.
The metaphor is also attributed to Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas by comparing the dog with the Pharisees.
( Now, our second choice.... )
Egotism is the motivation to maintain and enhance favorable views of self to the point of being self-destructive. Egotism means thinking the world revolves around oneself, and believing one to be more important than what is actually the case.
It is closely related to narcissism, or "loving one's self," and the possible tendency to speak or write of oneself boastfully and at great length. Egotism may coexist with delusions of one's own importance, at the denial of others. This conceit is a character trait describing a person who acts to gain values in an amount excessively greater than that which he/she gives to others. Egotism is often accomplished by exploiting the altruism, irrationality and ignorance of others, as well as utilizing coercive force and/or fraud.
Egotism differs from both altruism, or acting to gain fewer values than are being given, and egoism, a determination to gain and give an equal amount or degree of values. Various forms of "empirical egoism" can be consistent with egotism, as long as the value of one's own self-benefit is entirely individual.[
( Wikipedia ).
Is Hillary the "dog" or the egotist ? Certainly she isn't "this dog", ( Me ), let me assure you that I am not Hillary - I would not aspire to the heights she has strived for - nore would I sink to the depths she seems so willingly to go to, at least I think I woudn't ....but enough about me for the moment, we're talking about Bill's wife and not Wendy's husband here.
The "dog in the manger" . A fable of a cur who kept others from getting their fair due. Certainly the assorted "bovines" deserved their food, they had worked for it and the farmer had willingly provided it for their consumption. The "dog" too had a use for this fodder, but he, ( or in this case she ), wasn't intended to recieve this bounty, infact, the dog was "stealing" the manger for her own personal shelfish desires.
Theft is what it is, it is a denial of ownership from those who deserve their rewards by one who with guile and greed means to take what is justly theirs and to put it to their own use. Does this analogy work with Hillary as the dog ? Perhaps so, but does it best describe her between the two offered choices here ? Let's now consider the second choice, egotism.
Is it ego itself that drives Hillary to do what she does ? Is this ego of her's so strong as to deny reality and for her to atempt to override the will of the majority of those she professes to call her associates and friends ? Is this ego of hers willfully driving her to lie, cheat, and steal her way to some victory goal which by all rights she has lost in a fair and open discourse? Is her "ego" driving her into some sort of meglomainac fit, and if so, if she succeeds in her quest, is this the sort of person anyone would want as "Commander in cheif" of this country ?
Haven't we had enough egotistical zellots in the oval office lately ? Can we afford another round of them for the next 4 years ? Is Hillary so blinded by reality that she will stop at nothing to bury us all in her vanity quest for something she does not deserve? Is her "egotism" that huge ?
Frankly, I think it is. And that bothers me a great deal. Now let's consider our chouces again. Let's call it the "dog vs ego" argument, and choose between the two which describes her present emotional and psycological state best. I can see where both analogies can apply to her, but I'm curious as to which one you might think is the better one.
To me she both, a "bitch" in the manger and an egotistical fool who whould wreck all for her vain glories. And frankly, I would be hard pressed to vote for her if she ever did swindle herself into the position of presidential canadate for the democratic party.
Hay, there's still lots of battles left to go ! We will win in the end - you can bet on it, so let's get it on !
Meanwile, here's a "typical" Clinton supporter expressing his somewhat insane opinions on our next president.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4389768
I wonder what planet he's from egh ?
OBAMA, Japan (CNN) — At a small bakery in a fishing village in western Japan, the ovens are on overdrive Tuesday.
"Tomorrow's the big event," said Koichi Inoue, steam rising from his freshly baked sweet "manju" treats. "We want Obama to win."
Inoue holds up a manju, his prized treat this year. Emblazoned on the front is a caricature of presidential candidate Barack Obama, with the phrase: "I (heart) Obama."
The fanatical support of this isolated town of 32,000 residents seems most unlikely until you learn its name: Obama, Japan. And this town is supporting its namesake with the sort of gusto you'd expect only from a proud town cheering on its favorite son, even though the candidate has never been here and the residents have only seen him on television.
As the U.S. primary vote returns come in Wednesday in Japan, the self-proclaimed "Unofficial Supporters of Obama" are planning a party with all the Obama fixings it can muster.
The club says up to 100 of its members are gathering in their celebration kimonos to watch American news coverage. For entertainment, members who are also local hula girls have created a dance in honor of the man who might be the next U.S. president.
Special sushi, hamburgers, and pork fillets, all made in honor of Barack Obama, are on the menu. And while their opinions won't matter when it comes to votes, they remain determined to send well wishes half-way around the world.
"I love Obama!" said Tatsyuyki Funai, the president of Funai Works Co, a lacquer chopsticks maker. He showed us his special "Obama" chopsticks he'd love to send to Barack Obama.
A pair of the city's chopsticks did go to the senator. Mayor Toshio Murakami sent a set of Obama's signature lacquer chopsticks a year ago, in honor of Barack Obama's birthday, which falls on "Chopstick Day."
He didn't hear from the senator until a week ago, but says he doesn't really mind the delay because the accompanying letter, he says, was so kind.
"Here," said Murakami, pointing to Barack Obama's signature on the letter, now an official city 'treasure.' Above it were the words, "Your friend," in Japanese. "It's very elegant and I'm honored to get this during abusy political season."
In the letter, the senator wrote to the mayor, "As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, it is exciting to hear that you are engaged in debates that reach beyond your shores. We share more than a common name."
Alcillena Wilson, an American teaching English in Obama, Japan, was surprised to learn how engaged her neighbors were in U.S. politics, thanks to the simple accident of sharing a name with a candidate.
"Many Americans have never heard of Obama the city, Japan. I'm sure we've all heard of Tokyo and Osaka and Kyoto. So it's a way to open up the means of communication and learn about each other. And I think it's great."
For Koichi Inoue, the bakery owner prepping those special manju treats for the Obama party, the connection means more than just a quirky coincidence.
"Obama is an old town and needs a second wind. Maybe this is exactly the newspirit our town needs."
–CNN Correspondent Kyung Lah
From Mother Jones Magazine online
How on EARTH can the Washington Times write an article saying the military is "expressing trepidation" about Barack Obama's candidacy, and add quotes like:
"We're very concerned about his apparent lack of understanding on the threat of radical Islam to the United States," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who is pro-Iraq war and a Fox News analyst. "A lot of retired senior officers feel the same way."
and:
A senior Pentagon official said an Obama swearing-in "will give the Arab street the final victory, the best optics, and the ultimate in bragging rights. They win. We lose."
without ever mentioning the fact that Barack Obama has received more donations from members of the military than any other candidate in the presidential race?
Last Updated: Sunday, 24 February 2008, 15:37 GMT
Ralph Nader says he does not see himself as a "spoiler, ( but he is. ).
"Ralph Nader has announced plans to run again for the US presidency.
The anti-establishment consumer advocate made the announcement in a televised interview on Sunday.
Mr Nader was accused by many Democrats of handing the presidency to George W Bush in the November 2000 elections. He ran again unsuccessfully in 2004.
Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are vying for the Democratic ticket. Senator John McCain is almost certain to run for the Republicans.
Nearly three million Americans - more than 2% of the vote - backed Mr Nader when he stood as the Green Party candidate in the 2000 presidential election.
That election was so close that a small proportion of those votes - particularly in the key state of Florida - would have put Al Gore in the White House.
Disenchanted
"I'm running for president," Mr Nader said as he announced the move on NBC's Meet the Press.
He said most Americans were disenchanted with the Democratic and Republican parties - who were not discussing the urgent issues facing American voters
People, he said, felt "locked out, shut out, marginalised and disrespected".
He called Washington DC "corporate-occupied territory" that turns the government against the interest of its own people.
Mr Nader denied he was seeking to be a spoiler candidate - and accused the main parties of "political bigotry".
Referring to the three main contenders in the race so far, he questioned: "Do they have the moral courage, do they have the fortitude to stand up to corporate powers and get things done for the American people?"
"We have to shift the power from the few to the many."
Consumer agenda
Mr Nader, 73, was born in Connecticut in 1934 and was educated at Princeton and Harvard universities.
He has spent most of his life fighting for consumers and workers against corporations.
In the 1960s his work on car safety led directly to seat belts and shatter-resistant glass being fitted in every American car.
From the 1970s he built a reputation for dealing with issues including workers' rights, public safety, the environment and the influence of corporations.
He founded a number of groups including Public Citizen, which in recent years has been active in organising protests against the World Trade Organization and World Bank/IMF.
Superdelegates switching allegiance to Obama / Guardian UK 2/23/2008
Barack Obama speaks in Austin, Texas, February 21 2008. Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP
Hillary Clinton is starting to lose her overwhelming lead in superdelegates, the Democratic party officials whose votes she is counting on to help her close the gap with Barack Obama. He has received a steady flow of backers in recent days while building a streak of 11 straight primary victories. After once leading Obama by a 2 to 1 ratio in the superdelegate chase, Clinton now has 241 to his 181, according to the latest Associated Press tally.
Most unnerving for Clinton is the trickle of superdelegates who have defected from her corner to Obama's. The shift comes as she failed to deliver a telling blow on him in their penultimate TV debate before the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4.
Latest polling shows them separated by two percentage points in Texas, well within the margin of error, and seven points in Ohio. The Clinton campaign had hoped the debate would halt Obama's momentum. Instead she came under fire for allegedly plagiarising part of a speech by former candidate John Edwards. When asked about the potential influence of the superdelegates during Thursday night's debate at the University of Texas in Austin, both candidates appeared to pull back from the brinkmanship that has been developing over the issue.
"I think that it will sort itself out," Clinton said. "We will have a nominee, and we will have a unified Democratic party, and we will go on to victory in November."
Obama said that for the nomination to be decided by backroom deals would sully the process. "The American people are tired of politics that is dominated by the powerful, by the connected."
In New Jersey, where Clinton won by 13 percentage points this month, two superdelegates have shifted to Obama and nine Democratic leaders endorsed him. "Barack can help unite this country and help us embrace our diverse nation," said superdelegate Christine Samuels.
Superdelegates who represent areas won by Obama face pressure to declare for him. One Clinton superdelegate, Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, said colleagues urged her to support Obama if he wins her district in the primary. But she said: "I want voters to be at ease that their votes truly count. But I also want them to respect each of us [superdelegates] individually for how we have perceived America's future to be."
More than half of 795 superdelegates had declared as of last week. As about 20% of a total of about 4,000 delegate votes, superdelegates are current or former elected officeholders or party officials; they vote according to their personal view, though they may face pressure to echo some presumed local or national consensus. When the primary delegate totals become evenly split, superdelegates and how they decide to use their vote become proportionately more important - and their choices are increasingly liable to be seen as "backroom deals".
The debate's most dramatic moment came when Clinton tried to exploit the charge of Obama's plagiarism. "Lifting entire passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in," she said, "it is change you can Xerox." The line was met with boos from the audience.
Asked about the most testing moment in her life, she said: "Whatever happens we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that's what this election should be about." The line is similar to one used by Edwards in December.
Clinton XeroX this :
**Bill Clinton, 1992: "The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of this state and this country have been taking for a long time.
"**Hillary Clinton, last night: "You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.
& this
Clinton Last night:
You know, whatever happens, we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people. And that's what this election should be about.?
John Edwards the December 13 debate:
What's not at stake are any of us. All of us are going to be just fine no matter what happens in this election. But what's at stake is whether America is going to be.
All Mrs. Clinton is doing at this point is making herself look like a hypocritical laughingstock, which is a shame, I would rather remember her as the great lady she once was.
One reason that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been unsuccessful is that she has failed to provide a compelling reason for many of us to vote for her. Initially Clinton’s campaign was based upon her being the inevitable winner, but that collapsed when she lost the Iowa caucus. She also claims experience as a reason to vote for her, but that argument doesn’t hold up very well either. Congressional Quarterly evaluated her claims and found they were untrue. First they reviewed her claims:
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton often boasts that she has a long resume — 35 years long, to be precise.“I have 35 years’ experience making change,” she said in a TV ad.“I’ve gotten up for 35 years every day and tried to figure out what I could do to help somebody else,” she said in a TV interview.Asked about the difference between her and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama , she replied, “Well, about 35 years of experience.”She has used the phrase “35 years” in at least 55 speeches, debates and interviews since 2004, according to our search of a public statements database maintained by Project Vote Smart. So it’s no surprise that a Google search of “Hillary Clinton” and “35 years” yields 515,000 hits.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton often boasts that she has a long resume — 35 years long, to be precise.
“I have 35 years’ experience making change,” she said in a TV ad.
“I’ve gotten up for 35 years every day and tried to figure out what I could do to help somebody else,” she said in a TV interview.
Asked about the difference between her and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama , she replied, “Well, about 35 years of experience.”
She has used the phrase “35 years” in at least 55 speeches, debates and interviews since 2004, according to our search of a public statements database maintained by Project Vote Smart. So it’s no surprise that a Google search of “Hillary Clinton” and “35 years” yields 515,000 hits.
Next they determined if her claims were true:
In simple terms, any experience counts as experience, but it’s clear from the context of Clinton’s remarks that she’s speaking about public policy experience, so that’s how we have focused our examination. We’ll start with the math.Clinton is 60, so if we assume that her 35 years were consecutive, they would have begun in 1973 when she graduated from Yale Law School at age 25. That year she joined the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group for children.But her math was way off when she claimed the difference with Obama is “35 years of experience.” By our count, Obama, who is 14 years younger than Clinton, has three years of experience as a community organizer, four years as a full-time attorney handling voting rights, employment and housing cases, and 11 years in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate. That’s a total of 18 years. So the difference between Clinton and Obama is really 17 years. We rate her claim False.Has Clinton really awakened every morning for 35 years and “tried to figure out what I could do to help somebody else,” as she claims? We can’t read the senator’s mind, so this one’s not verifiable. If she’s like us, our first thought every morning is about coffee, not helping mankind.
In simple terms, any experience counts as experience, but it’s clear from the context of Clinton’s remarks that she’s speaking about public policy experience, so that’s how we have focused our examination. We’ll start with the math.
Clinton is 60, so if we assume that her 35 years were consecutive, they would have begun in 1973 when she graduated from Yale Law School at age 25. That year she joined the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group for children.
But her math was way off when she claimed the difference with Obama is “35 years of experience.” By our count, Obama, who is 14 years younger than Clinton, has three years of experience as a community organizer, four years as a full-time attorney handling voting rights, employment and housing cases, and 11 years in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate. That’s a total of 18 years. So the difference between Clinton and Obama is really 17 years. We rate her claim False.
Has Clinton really awakened every morning for 35 years and “tried to figure out what I could do to help somebody else,” as she claims? We can’t read the senator’s mind, so this one’s not verifiable. If she’s like us, our first thought every morning is about coffee, not helping mankind.
Clinton has some experience during the past thirty-five years but it is hardly sufficient to consider her more qualified to be president. Often the experience consisted of assignment to part times posts while she was primarily working in corporate law. This included sitting on the board of Wal-Mart as they fought unions. Her years as first lady are of some value, but again are hardly sufficient to qualify her to be president. I’ve previously noted reports that Clinton did not have national security clearance as first lady. Her major action as first lady was on health care, which didn’t turn out very well. In contrast, Obama was successful in his efforts at expanding health care in Illinois. It is also notable that, although she is running on her experience, she is keeping the records from her years as first lady secret until after the election.
If we are to count every year since graduation from law school, Clinton does have more years with some experience. What is more important is the type of experience and what was done with it. While Clinton’s experience was frequently based upon seeking government solutions to problems, Obama was involved as a community organizer. This might partially explain why Clinton concentrates on imposing government solutions for problems while Obama also considers ways in which people can help themselves.
While Clinton was practicing corporate law, Obama was teaching Constitutional law. This has had an impact in his strong support for separation of church and state and the differences in their views on presidential power and executive privilege as Clinton supports decreased transparency and would be more likely to continue, and I fear abuse, the powers taken by George Bush.
I’ve noted Obama’s legislative record in another post this morning. In contrast, Clinton has supported the Iraq war, voted for Kyl-Lieberman, opposed needle exchange programs, favored strict sentences for drug use (while Obama has favored retroactive changes), supported legislation to ban flag burning, supported censorship of video games, and opposed the banning of cluster bombs. These are just some of the areas where I feel Clinton was wrong and Obama was right. Clinton’s experience certainly does not mean having better judgment on the issues
Cross posted at The Carpetbagger Report
He's said it many times, in many different venues, and perhaps the words change a bit over time, and the cadences, too, but the message is always the same:
"I think the pundits have it wrong. I think the American people have had enough of politicians who go out of their way to look tough, who say one thing in a caucus and another in a general election. When I am the nominee of our party, the choice will be clear. My Republican opponent won't be able to say that we both supported this war in Iraq. He won't be able to say that we really agree about using the war in Iraq to justify military action against Iran, or about the diplomacy of not talking and saber-rattling. He won't be able to say that I haven't been open and straight with the American people, or that I've changed my positions. And you know what? The American people want that choice. Because I believe that's what we need in our next President.
"We've had enough of a misguided war in Iraq that never should have been fought – a war that needs to end."
Barack Obama said that in a Des Moines speech back in October, but he's been repeating it – with added emphasis – as his campaign has taken off. It's that last line that always gets the loudest, most prolonged applause: the audience goes wild, people stand and cheer – as well they should. We are told that the ideological differences between Obama and the Clintons aren't all that great, that in fact they barely exist, which I think is a highly dubious proposition, but, in any case, on this issue – the vital question of war and peace – the gulf between them could not be wider, or deeper.
She, after all, voted for the war, and she's been saber-rattling over Iran – much to AIPAC's delight. Obama, on the other hand, has taken a clear and consistent antiwar position on the Iraq war, as angular as one could hope for in a mainstream politician, while her insincere pandering to the antiwar instincts of the Democratic base has been absolutely shameless.
This is the real source of Obama's streak of solid victories, aside from the hypnotic effects of his oratory: contra the conventional wisdom, it isn't all about style with him, or "platitudes," as John McCain puts it. It's all about his opposition to the Iraq war. When Obama makes his appeal to Democrats, "and, yes, plenty of Republicans out there who are ready to turn the page on the broken politics and blustering foreign policy coming from Washington" – as he put it in his Des Moines speech – that is very far from mouthing bromides, as blusterer-in-chief McCain will soon discover if and when Obama wins the nomination.
Obama has emerged as the antiwar candidate, constantly driving home the point that he – unlike the Senator from New York – had the judgement to doubt the veracity of the President's case for war from the get-go.
The Clintons are desperately trying to spin this away, with President Priapus denouncing Obama's antiwar record as "a fairy tale" and The New Republic rather more subtly suggesting "Obama himself may understand that the issue is more complicated than his condemnations of Hillary Clinton's judgment." That's the last line of a rather curious piece by Michael Crowley, whose microscopic examination of Obama's public pronouncements on the war question might have been published by Antiwar.com – except for that last line.
It is a piece that starts out by chronicling Obama's memorable performance at a 2002 antiwar rally in Chicago – when very few mainstream politicians were showing up at antiwar events – and charts his subsequent equivocations, wobbles, and doubts, slyly implying that he's not really all that far away from being a calculating Clintonian himself. Crowley cites the Clintonites' contention that the liberal district he hailed from in Chicago meant he wasn't really going out on a limb in opposing the war early on, an argument that makes no sense when one remembers he was getting ready to run for US Senate. Statewide, support for the war, while not as fervent as in some other regions of the country, was generally reflective of the post-9/11 hysteria that made warmongering such a lucrative profession for so many. As Thomas B. Edsall pointed out in the Huffington Post:
"Among all Illinois voters, 17 percent said the U.S. should attack Iraq with or without allied support, 51 percent said an attack should be initiated only with the backing of allies, and 18 percent said the U.S. should not attack at all. Among Democrats, only 8 percent backed a unilateral invasion of Iraq, 59 percent said the US should attack only with broad allied support and 23 percent opposed any military action."
People wanted more evidence that an attack was necessary – 52 percent – but, in general, the good people of Illinois went along with the national zeitgeist, which was all about "taking out" Saddam Hussein and showing those Ay-rabs who's in charge. After all, a mere 23 percent opposed going to war at all, and that's where Obama was. The only reason he avoided paying the political price was due to extraordinary luck: his principal opponent in the Democratic primary was hit with a major scandal and effectively knocked out of the race. The same fate befell his putative Republican opponent – and the eventual GOP nominee, Alan Keyes, was never a credible opponent to begin with.
So, yes, it took courage to come out against the war at that point. Remember, the post-9/11 Bizarro Effect still had most of the country in its hallucinatory grip, and the War Party and the "mainstream" media were collaborating on a propaganda campaign of unprecedented ferocity, broadcasting brazen lies as if they were fact and trying to bully anyone who defied them, e.g. Democrats Mike Thompson, Jim McDermott and David Bonior.
Yet there was more than courage on display at that rally. There was also Obama's prescience. It's odd that Crowley opens his piece with the scene from that rally, but somehow neglects to report what Obama said:
"What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne....
"I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
"But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."
With most of the rest of the country swept up in an emotional rush of belligerence-in-search-of-a-target, Obama kept his cool and clearly perceived the facts as most of us would later come to see them. This is called judgement – another name for it is leadership.
That's why he's winning, beating Hillary and her much-vaunted "machine," and why the Clintonites have half-unveiled their ultimate weapon: the dreaded "super-delegates," primed to snatch the nomination away from Obama and his majority of pledged (i.e. elected) delegates at the last moment. Furthermore, he looks, acts, and sounds like a president, whereas Hillary merely reminds one of a high school class president (and Edwards the prom king).
In the face of this nationwide upsurge of Obama-mania, the War Party is making threatening noises, such as in this piece in Ha'aretz reporting Malcolm Hoenlein's visit to Israel, where he announced that Obama's candidacy may represent a threat:
"All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be is an opening for all kind of mischief. Of course Obama has plenty of Jewish supporters and there are many Jews around him. But there is a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign."
Yes, the "zeitgeist" just isn't right, according to Hoenlein, who also took out after Obama for going after Hillary Clinton's vote in favor of putting the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the official list of terrorist organizations. This election year, warns Hoenlein, is signaling a sea change away from unconditional support to Israel, which most Americans see, he avers, as "a dark and militaristic place." Gee, I wonder why? Could it be the repeated invasions of neighboring states by the IDF? Or perhaps it's the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories, which is both brutal and seemingly never-ending.
Oh well, never mind that: what Señor Hoenlein is worried about is "the greater tolerance of anti-Israel statements that wouldn't have been allowed in the past." Could he perhaps be referring to Obama's statement that "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinians."? By the standards of our American Likudniks, such a remark is evidence of vehemently "anti-Israel" sentiments. After all, doesn't he know that the Israelis have a monopoly on suffering? Has he no respect?
Hoenlein's complaints were not limited to Obama, however. He also took Ron Paul to task, saying "He is openly anti-Israel and who managed to raise $15 million in two days and is the second preferred candidate of many young voters – that is very worrying." The Lobby went after Paul, and with a vengeance, launching a campaign that climaxed in a classic smear job in The New Republic – where else? – which accused the good-natured Paul of being the second coming of Adolf Hitler. It isn't hard to imagine that the same circles have it in for Obama.
Indeed, one has to imagine nothing, since the evidence is all around us, including a recently uncovered internal memo written by an official of the American Jewish Committee that betrays "a quiet unease" over Obama's Middle East policy positions, as The Forward reports – and I predict that it won't be long before quiet unease turns to a loud howling.
In fact, I give it until sometime next week, when we'll be hearing that Obama is an anti-Semite – or, at least, that he is close to "known" anti-Semites (specifically, the Nation of Islam and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright); that he's anti-Israel, and that he – Barack Hussein Obama – is an "appeaser" whose foreign policy views are way to the "left" of right-reason. I wonder if Marty Peretz will assign Jamie Kirchick to do the job….
Another accusation to be hurled at Obama: his chief foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, has praised The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, a book by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that exposes the all-pervasive role of the pro-Israel lobby in this country and its distorting effect on American foreign policy. The Lobby will fight tooth and nail before they'll let Obama – and Brzezinksi – anywhere near the White House.
Noah Pollak, over at Commentary, is singling out Samantha Power, a foreign policy advisor to Obama, who has dared agree with Brzezinski that the Lobby's veto power over US policy in the Middle East needs to be abolished before we can move forward.
For a comprehensive compilation of the Likudnik complaint against Obama, go to The American Thinker web site, here – which, just coincidentally, is the same Web site that started the drumbeat about how Ron Paul is a white supremacist-neo-Nazi. Just a coincidence, you understand….
Señor Hoenlein avers that the current election is "transitional," and "could bring about a shift in American life" – and, by his lights, that's not a good thing. Could America really be reconsidering its foreign policy of relentless aggression in the Middle East – could the era of unconditional support to the cause of striking down Israel's foes be coming to an end? Why, it must be a neo-Nazi plot!
Of course, they're going to have a hell of a time hanging the neo-Nazi label around a black man's neck, but don't worry – there's always the Rev. Wright-Nation of Islam angle to work. And believe you me, they will work it for all it's worth before the primaries are over.
This is the fate that befalls all antiwar candidates for the presidency: the Smear Bund knows its job, and it never sleeps. Whether Obama will survive the vicious attacks that are sure to come remains to be seen. What I do know is this – the same forces that went after Ron Paul have Obama in their sights, and for precisely the same reason.
The War Party's agenda is clear and simple: de-legitimize anyone who advances foreign policy ideas that go against the grain of militarism and slavish appeasement of Israel. Anyone who questions why we are in a war in the midst of Mesopotamia for no apparently good reason is going to be smeared, and brought down. The War Party – and by that I don't just mean Republicans – plays dirty, and they play for keeps.
In the Japanese city of Obama, there is about as much excitement for Sen Obama running for president as we have here in this country.
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUST26612320080213
