Remember when John McCain decried that New York Times piece on his lobbyist connections? Or when Hillary Clinton complained about her media coverage? Well, the true victim of the media this cycle has been Obama. It's truly reprehensible what the media is doing to him right now -- focusing for a week on comments he never made and has outright rejected while the war continues for another year and the economy circles the drain.
Make the Beltway and Virginia media realize: the media is being unfair to Obama.
Maybe we need to start an internet campaign and see if there is any audio or video footage of the McCain's choices of pastors that he has hooked up with. Unlike Barack Obama (who did not elicit support from Farakan) and whose "private" pastor--Wright--who has been renounced for his radical statements and now has no ties with Obama's campaign,John McCain sought, received and has not renounced the support of John Hagee and Rod Parsely whose cases of breathtaking bigotry are as bad if less well known than Farrakhan's.
If this can get a decent amount of airplay it should have some counter effect of leveling the playing field among the independent voters.
Buzz...Buzz...
One is here.
The other is here.
This speech is one of the best public addresses since Franklin D. Roosevelt. It describes the path to a united America.
You want to know what I think? I think that I'm going to go Paypal Leslie Byrne's campaign $5 just because I'm annoyed with you.
there are plenty of other threads to discuss to chew over the whole Byrne-Connally thing.
One of the two, Hank, who just posted here is now a teacher in Roanoke, but it seems as if he came from North Carolina too.
I engaged them in dialogue at first but frankly I think they are trolls, pimping their own site and trying to create diversion and dissension in Virginia.
Worse, they are using Ben's hyperbole to discredit Leslie. Does anybody here really think Leslie, or any other candidate, could actually rein Ben in?
I almost suspect, but only because I'm paranoid, that they are being paid by one of Leslie's opponents to do this. Everybody here knows who is in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce and big business and who has fought for the middle class and has the backing of most of the unions.
Trying to link Leslie to Ben's over the top posts is very much like trying to discredit Obama because of some hyperbolic remarks by his minister. The Scrutiny Hooligans would object to that but they aren't above using the same tactic themselves. And against somebody about whom they know nothing.
My own experience here has been that BS gets detected fast at RK. Even if folks don't challenge you publicly, my sense is that not much is getting put over on the people regularly reading and/or posting here.
Anyway, if that's the game that's afoot, don't kid yourselves. This relatively disinterested observer thinks that you're not helping your candidate.
Obama didn't. I'll take my cue from him.
He is the front-runner and that spotlight can be harsh and blinding sometimes. Right now, yeah, he's being treated unfairly. But if we run around presenting Barack Obama as a victim, then that is how he will be seen. And what do we tend to feel towards victims? Pity.
There never was a vote cast out of pity.
Yeah, Obama is getting swiftboated by Hillary Clinton and the right wing. But he's fighting back beautifully. The man turns lemons into lemonade. This isn't John Kerry we're talking about.
If Obama supporters start crying foul at the mainstream corporate media and at the right-wing pundits, then we just look weak. The thing to do is to fight the fight that's in front of us. We can cry foul at the Clinton campaign, since there is a different standard for how members of the same party behave towards each other in a primary. Other than that, I say keep your eyes ahead, keep your guard up and hit back harder than you got. Don't ask for time out.
The best lesson from the Kerry episode is to launch an immediate and powerful counter attack. Steve Jardin did this successfully in the Webb for Senate campaign in 2006.
Barack Obama has learned the lesson well and has shown that he can and will counter attack with style and class from a position of strength.
Now, it appears to me that this whole Obama/Wright business is a right-wing hit job, based on the involvement of Fox News and right-wing radio's long-time flogging of Obama's association with his church.
That the remainder of our MSM media goes along is par for the course, given their record of laziness, incompetence and herd mentality.
So far, Sen. Clinton appears to have stayed away from the issue. Personally, I wish she had more vigorously defended Obama (or if not Obama, the general principle that people frequently find meaningful spiritual guidance from someone with whom they disagree on political matters), but at least she has not tried to explicitly and publicly use it to her advantage -- yet.
However, in a speech the other day, she came close, with an oblique reference, in connection with the re-vote dispute in MI and FL, to it not making a difference "which church you worship in," or something to that effect. Was that a subtle reminder of Obama's current problems? It could be, but it could also be the more general point that the value of one's vote should not depend upon where you live, your race, your religion, etc. I'm not sure.
Then, I come across this in today's NYT:
[T]he [Clinton] campaign hopes that Mr. Obama will have been battered by five rough weeks that raise questions about his past, including the pastor's incendiary comments, that would underscore Mrs. Clinton's warning to Democrats that they were rallying around someone who was untested and unvetted.
NO! NO! NO! This controversy did not arise because of a lack of vetting, but because, as Rob notes above, of the political hit job strategy known as "swiftboating." No amount of vetting can guard against this kind of dishonest, immoral and shameless tactic of trying to associate a candidate with the political views of his spiritual leader.
While there may be a relationship between one's religion and one's worldview and politics, one's spiritual life and one's political life also exist in two completely distinct realms. I don't need to ask, as some of our idiotic political punditocracy has over the past several days, why Obama did not disassociate himself from this Reverend previously and leave the Church. The answer is obvious: Rev. Wright was not a political mentor for Obama, but a spiritual mentor -- his Reverend's political views were quite properly beside the point for Obama.
If America means anything, it means that a person be able to choose the spiritual path that they find most meaningful (which includes, in my mind, a lack of belief in any deity) for themselves and their children without fear of retribution or necessity of explanation.
So, it disheartens me to also read this:
Mrs. Clinton's advisers said they had spent recent days making the case to wavering superdelegates that Mr. Obama's association with Mr. Wright would doom their party in the general election.That argument could be Mrs. Clinton's last hope for winning this contest.
I, for one, will be forced to abandon Hillary Clinton should I continue to see this argument being made. It is offensive. It will be my line in the sand. To the extent that there is a Clinton advisor who reads RK, and who cares what one of your candidate's most ardent defenders on this blog thinks, tell her to stop it now.
Link to full NYT atricle here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03...
h/t - TPM
P.S. Sorry - I try not to get on a soapbox here at RK, but this is just pissing me off no end.