Barack Obama

Not to take away from the joking thread about Obama (which i'm enjoying), but i thought we could start a slightly more serious consideration of his experience and positions. To kick it off, here's one man's take on why a voter could back Obama:

For proof Obama can manage, look at his campaign

If he gets the democratic nomination, you better believe I'm voting for him.

But if anybody thinks he's the "uncola" or a door to something fresh and new,
just consider that he's slightly to the right of the Clinton's, has come out against mandated universal health care and has yet to say that an Obama presidency would abolish the american gulag, re-affirm a commitment to the geneva convention, condemn waterboarding and all other forms of torture or do anything at all concrete to help repair the deformations in our economic system
such as eliminating "Enron Accounting" and actually regulating the Stock markets according to the laws now on the books?

I dont know who we'll be shooting at in 2012, but does anybody seriously think we'll have peace and prosperity by 2012 or 2016?

We already passed legislation which was supposed to fix such Enron accounting practices--it was called Sarbanes-Oxley. Thanks to that piece of legislation, foreign direct investment fled the country at a tremendous pace. London is now the financial capital of the world instead of New York.

But please, let's mandate and regulate away. We need more of it.

I worked in a corporate legal dept pre & post SOX. SOX just made corporations tell more downright lies in their SEC filings. I didn't see it actually change practices all that much. Perhaps it did later, I dunno.

I found that piece unconvincing. Clearly the campaign is doing well, but how does that translate into foreign policy knowledge and negotiations, managing a relationship with Congress, economic decisionmaking, intelligence decisionmaking, etc? Also, who actually manages the campaign?

Also, what happens when he's in office and all of his decisions are questioned, derided and he's not the media's darling?

I am not making an argument that he would not do well at these things, but neither can I make an argument that he would do well.

But, heck, he can't be any worse than what we got now. In fact, he'd have to be better. If he's the Dem nominee I will gladly vote for him.

Hey guys, I have to convince my wife, who is a Clinton delegate right now. You gotta do better than this!

littlegeek, your description is pretty much government in a nutshell. No Child Left Behind is another one of those let's do something bills which turned out to be a bust.

Unintended consequences, unfortunately, are a simple fact of every piece of legislation.

Yeah, and that Military thing, too. Clear case of government ineptitude. Thank god for private militias. Not to mention the cops. Or the roads. And, hey, borders! Why do we let government deal with our borders? They clearly are incapable.

The courts? We need a private system of justice in this country. The constitution is just another bureaucratic document that gets in the way of people trying to be free from government tyranny, obviously hoisted on us by other pencil neck bureaucratic government geeks. (No offence, LG!)

The Fed? bah, more government. I should be able to print my own money. What do those incompetents know about money, except how to spend mine, trying to make their look pretty. Those statehood quarters? What a waste!

Now you're just being demagogic, Arctic. One of my intellectual idols, Hayek, wasn't against welfare in general. Nor am I. But we both know the government has limits. When we expect the government to do things beyond what it's most suited for (protecting sovereignty, engaging in diplomacy, and enforcing contracts), we can expect government to become larger and more voracious in its appetite for control--don't be surprised if it consumes your liberty.

But, I have to ask, why do we have troops in Germany and South Korea? Are they really necessary in those countries?

The Fed? Don't get me started. I actually believe it should be abolished. And private money doesn't sound all that bad either. Friedrich Hayek even wrote a book about it called Denationalisation of Money. You should check it out sometime.

We had at one time. There was a reason we went to a federal reserve. The issue with private money was that banks would go under, and your money is now worthless, or another bank wouldnt trust your bank, so again, your money was worthless.

"Have some EnronBucks! They are really cheap these days!"

The point I was making is that government is not automatically incompetent just because it is government. I happen to agree with you on No Child Left Behind. It was a poor policy, but the answer may not be to say, get government out of education. Instead it may be to say, How can we do this better?

Right now I believe that the government is in no way prepared to take on health care. While I tend to favor a National Health Plan, we are not ready for that now. On the other hand, government can work with insurance companies for better regulations. THAT, they do well.

Arctic, my point about SOX wasn't that we shouldn't try to make corporate evil go away, it was that it really had no power to do so. You can't make corporate CEO's stop lying just by asking them a few more questions.

You gotta hit them where they live--pocketbooks are the only things they understand. I haven't seen anybody getting in any trouble post-SOX, have you?

>2 modalursine: Modalursine, I must say, I completely disagree with your analysis.

On the issue of healthcare, one of the Hillary-loving NYT's reporters (as opposed to an op-ed polemicist) noted recently (in December) that any honest analysis of Hillary's health care proposal indicates that millions of Americans will also be operating without health care coverage, regardless of the mandate. As such, if we are to conclude that both health care programs, being purportedly 95% alike (not to mention the fact that they are based on the work of the same Yale Professor, and that that Professor has endorsed Obama), are destined to leave a small portion of our 300 million strong populace without health care, the question we have to ask ourselves is this: which candidate will be more willing to reform his or her own health care program within his or her own four or eight year period of service as circumstances dictate? The candidate who does not require a mandate (on the basis that he believes that individuals like myself--those whom do not have health care--will willingly buy into the system if costs are dramatically reduced) or the candidate who speaks of a mandate (quite similar to the one which has failed in Massachusetts) like a street preacher speaks of the power of Jesus?

As for Obama being to the right of Clinton, he was just ranked the most liberal Senator by the National Journal.

On to other matters, Obama has come out against water boarding:

"No administration should allow the use of torture, including so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' like water-boarding, head-slapping and extreme temperatures. It's time that we had a Department of Justice that upholds the rule of law and American values, instead of finding ways to enable the president to subvert them." He has said, "Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America's standing in the world, not how you strengthen it."

Similarly, he does support the Geneva Conventions:

"It is illegal and unwise for the President to disregard international human rights treaties that have been ratified by the United States Senate, including and especially the Geneva Conventions. The Commander-in-Chief power does not allow the President to defy those treaties."

Finally, he has laid out his fiscal agenda on his website, but it would probably be easiest for you to check it out at length (instead of reading a short blurb of my choice here).

mccain is not exactly a facts and figures type, so i doubt obama would be at a disadvantage in this area. clinton 'knows her stuff', but command over policy details seems less significant this year: as tom brokaw commented, these campaigns are about "personal stories."

BGP, why not post a link to the fiscal agenda?

ref #12
Ho Ho! I have an "analysis". Thanx for the flattery and would that it were so.

If Obama has come out against waterboarding, torture as an instrument of policy, and for the geneva conventions, good for him.

I'm wondering now why the news has not come to Troghaven, except indirectly, through your post.

I see your point... a formal mandate that is too expensive for some important part of the population
and hence evaded leaves us in the same place as not having a mandate in the first place.

But I agree with Krugman though. If there is no mandate, the system will be "Gamed" by healthy risk takers to lower their own costs at the expense of all others.

The whole point of universal access is to dilute risk with the largest possible pool.

Of course, the whole debate may be purely academic. The likelihood as I see it is that whoever is preseident will have have to work with the same "constellation of forces" which may very well include a veto by Harry and Louise.

ref #3,#4
Well, yes, you certainly have a point there. The world is ruled in part by the great god Unintended Consequences. SOX is mostly a pain in the butt and not much of a corrective. But of course, if people can game the system they will. Thats the clever thing about people, they will use the rules to their advantage if they can find a way, and boy! are people good at finding a way.

But if investors cant trust that the financial descriptions of various business proposition are more or less "honest" and not blatantly fraudulent, and that the businesses are run approximately honestly (perfection is never the question) they'll just sit on their money and not invest it. That will lead to a credit crunch that can sink the economy. Hmmm...gosh, look Ma we seem to be having a credit crunch now. Chickens homeward bound?

> I agree with Krugman though. If there is no mandate, the system will be "Gamed" by healthy risk takers to lower their own costs at the expense of all others. The whole point of universal access is to dilute risk with the largest possible pool.

Agreed.

some thoughts from else-lt:

Obama's at the right place at the right time with the right message. After 8 years of Bush nightmare, we all want some light. And after 15 years of divisive, stalemated politics we want someone who says he can and will work with the other side.

I have a growing sense that not only is 2008 Obama's chance, but that it may very well be his only chance. So much of his campaign centers on the idea that now is the moment, his moment, that the stars are aligned for his kind of breakthrough. How could he possibly duplicate the atmosphere and image he and his campaign have created and cultivated in a subsequent campaign? Sure, he could reinvent himself, come at it with a different message, but could the aura that now surrounds him be forgotten, and could he be forgiven for becoming something, and somebody, else? Hillary, McCain, Romney, Edwards -- just about any of them, or any of this year's crop, could -- and would -- run again and again, and we'd hardly bother to compare previous efforts. But Obama, I think, is a different case. For him, it's now or never.

THe young hero of the movie Back to the Future (played by Michael Fox) visited the past and was asked "Who is President". "Ronald Regan" he answered to general mirth and disbelief.

Now you're saying America is going to vote for a black candidate named Hussein, Barak Hussein Obama.

Betcha 30 or 40 or more percent of Americans will think he's moslem before the campaign disinformation blitz is finished with him.

Could it happen? I guess so. Will it happen?
I'm from Missouri.

I think the general philosophy of government of the Republics claims that government can't do anything as well as the free market can, so since it is a foregone conclusion that government will mess it up anyway, why worry about or even think on ways to make government more effective. It will be better to put Republic ideologues in power so the purity of the Republic agenda is maintained, rather than have competent persons. The first thing competence is going to do is change the governing philosophy to competence in government. This is a step that will discard a lot of the Republic shibboleths as useless and downright harmful, and replace them with practical solutions that work, or create new solutions.

In terms of government I would say this:

Republics = incompetence. It appears to be the Republic governing philosophy, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shoddy government proceeds from the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Democrats = competence, however, considering the extent of the damage to our polity, our government, our economy, our position in the world, our declining level of education, and the gross mismanagement of 13 years of Republic rule, it won't be fixed nearly as quickly as it was ruined. In fact, thanks to BushCo and 13 years of Republic rule, in order to recover we may have to find a new place in the world.

Won't that warm the cockles of your hearts!

A vote for John McCain is a vote for four more years of incompetence, bickering, back-biting, name-calling and so forth just as the Republics treated us to with Clinton. The Republics will tear themselves apart with John McCain as president.

God knows what a vote for Huckabee entails. A new constitution, maybe? Which way will his flip-flop on Cuba go? What about raising taxes, probably, the single smartest thing anyone can do at this point?

The thing people like about Obama is his freshness and his energy. But probably the most enticing thing about Obama is that he is a two-fer: he's not a Clinton, with all the baggage that entails, although I'm sure that as the campaign goes on we will be treated to his baggage, as well, and he is not running a negative campaign, something the Republics are genetically incapable of doing. This last is the place where people have hope for Obama, that he can restore some sense of commity and mutual respect to our political process, rather than continue to maximize oneself by diminishing the other. And, of course, a vote for Obama is a vote for competence and an effort to make government work, rather than deliberately setting out to destroy its effectiveness.

Hillary, on the other hand, has all the aforementioned baggage and is perfectly capable of slinging mud. In fact her willingness to get down in the trenches, covering herself with dirt, is probably the biggest reason she has started doing so poorly. People are fed up with politics as usual and want something different, and lots of them know it's possible because we didn't grow up in this polarized country, and we want our country back. This applies to both liberal and conservatives. Consider the Obamacans. The electorate has had all the arrogance and incompetence it can stand and wants to get on with their lives without all this unnecessary Bushwa. BTW, a vote for Hillary is a vote for competence and an effort to make government work, rather than deliberately set out to destroy its effectiveness.

The Democrats are a fairly unified party, probably moreso than at any time since Kennedy, while the Republics will hold their noses and vote for McCain and then, if he is elected, proceed to shred themselves.

So the question comes down to how we see ourselves: are we a united country and a beacon to the world, or are we ideological purists that will end up on the ash heap of history like all ideological purists, just another country that destroyed itself by living in a make-believe world, because the real one didn't fit our ideology?

Perspectives on truth and O, from a NY Daily News columnist:

When Obama talks, as he did yesterday in Maryland, of voters being "tricked, bamboozled, fooled and hoodwinked," he is condemning her generation. When he says voters "are tired of the politics of the past, tired of spin, tired of PR," he doesn't have to name names.

We've all known this side of the Clintons, and yet, because we accepted it, they succeeded. And because they succeeded, others copied them. The result is a disaster, with apathy and cynicism toward government our secular religion.

Hillary's little lies about her campaign remind me of the way Bill started his presidential race in 1992. In March of that year, a Daily News reporter asked him whether he had ever used drugs. Clinton answered firmly, "I have never broken the laws of my country."

Technically true, but in plain English, a lie. The desired implication - that his answer was no - was misleading because he later admitted he had smoked marijuana in London. Even then, Clinton had to suggest he was innocent, saying he never inhaled.

Fast forward 16 years to Obama. After admitting in his first book he used drugs, including marijuana, Obama was asked by a playful reporter whether he had inhaled. Obama smiled and said, "that was the point."

The topic is narrow, but the contrast is striking. And that's the point. If we can't trust pols to tell us the truth on small things, why should we trust them on big things?

>14 NativeRoses: Quite frankly, NativeRoses, I was too lazy. Here it is.

>15 modalursine: Modalursine, I disagree with Krugman's gaming theory for a number of reasons: 1) everyone 25 and under is covered by Obama's plan through their parent's health care program; 2) every woman without health care over the age of 25 is going to sign up, for reasons which I should not have to go into; 3) every young family is going to sign up, in order to cover their child/children; 3) every impoverished, working class and lower-middle to middle-middle class male over the age of 25 will sign up, for, if they haven't run into their own issues with the health care system (I just had to fork out $419 to the bastards!), they have undoubtedly seen someone in their life--be it a friend, family member or associate--suffer quietly without health care for some period in their respective lives; and 4) everyone who is sufficiently placed on our social ladder (the upper-middle to upper class citizen) is advised on what to invest in (and that includes conversations about all kinds of insurance). So, what do we have left? A handful of middle-middle to upper-middle class single males over the age of 25 who have been too stupid and too isolated from the realities of life to discover that everyone else around them is insured. What are the odds that a significant portion of this small number of individuals will need coverage for: a) a minor situation, which nevertheless warrants attention (a knee injury; an infected minor wound; an ear infection; a physical required by one's employer; etc); or b) a life threatening situation which requires exorbitantly priced coverage (a car accident; bullet wounds; organ failure; etc)? Given my experience (which includes more than a few bitter phone calls between temporarily uninsured college graduates), there are going to be quite a few minor injuries which warrant attention, and, when John Doe finds himself $419 short after a ten minute appointment with Dr. !@#%^, he's going to find himself looking to his health care options.

>17 NativeRoses: While I am certainly an intra-partisan in 2008, I can honestly state that I do not know if I would be in his corner in 2012 or 2016 (after all, I do not know who his challenger would/will be). Nevertheless, I don't see much trouble at all in a future election bid: instead of being all hope on the stump, and a policy wonk in the debates, on the net and on TV interviews, it would be half hope on the stump, half policy wonkery. In other words, instead of "hope" v. "experience," it will be "hope & experience."

ref #21
I dont know what's going to happen, and of course as my friend Sextus never gets tired of telling me, "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert".

Nonetheless, President Obama, or anyone in the hot seat, will face quite a challenge in getting the price of a health care policy worth having down to an affordable figure.

A private health care system, in order not to go broke, must charge most people more than they will be payed back in benefits, so that there will be money to pay the "winners" who have heavy medical expenses. For young and healthy people the cost is almost sure to be way more than the benefit. But young people, especially young males, tend to be risk takers. They are also invulnerable. Assuming health plan costs are economically viable, each young person can save a boodle by not having a plan. If he has the bad luck to get sick or to break a leg, he can join up then, because there will be no "prior illness" impediment. But even if everybody does the prudent thing and joins the system, it still has to cost more than you're going to get back for the first forty years or so. The more expensive the plan, the more the temptation to freeload until the odds catch up with you.

I was brooding over how it could be that Troghaven didnt get the message about Obama's
positions on torture, the geneva convention and the american gulag. So I went to Obama's campaign website. There on the home page, there's a menu item "issues". I clicked on issues.
There was a paragraph on each of several talking points. I read my way down to the one on Foreign
policy. THere is a link labeled "Read more" if you want to know more than the paragraph talks about. I hit "more". Lo and behold There is a blurb about how Obama says torture is not OK (thats seems to be his complete position as far as the website is concerned). What will he do about it? Eats me. He will close Guantanamo. Great. What about the network of CIA "Black Sites"? Eats me. He'll end the war in Iraq. What about permanent bases, enduring bases, the "Embasy" that ate tokyo? Eats me. He will resore Habeus Corpus. I sure hope so. I didnt see anything there about the Geneva convention.

Is he better than Bush? Absolutely. Better than McCain? You have to ask? Worth jumping up and down about? YMMV.

There are two words about Obama's foreign policy that make me nervous: Zbigniew Brzezinski, who happened to be in Syria, this week.

Hmmm.

http://www.nysun.com/article/71373

If i had to guess, i'd guess that one of our people found and assassinated the Hezbollah terrorist, Imadh Mugniyah, with the car bomb. Either that or President Assad of Syria believes this is what happened, went into a rage, and threatened or vowed revenge. If so, the Clinton and Obama people may have been there in an attempt to pacify him and head off a bloodbath. Since saving face is so important in that part of the world, C & O would have to send high level officials. The official blurb about the discussions doesn't discount the possibility:

talks dealt with recent regional developments, affirming that both sides have a common desire to achieve stability in the region, which would benefit both its people and the United States.

'Course, i coulda read way too much Ludlum and leCarre as a teenager. :-)

He was there under the auspices of the RAND, Corp.

#25 Native Roses
One of the scariest things about today's world is what we would have considered impossible a generation or so ago is reality. A president who invaded a country we were not at war with so that we could have their oil supply? A camp in Cuba where no one is allowed to visit that is filled with people who have been detained with-out trial? A presidential election turned over to the supreme court to decide? All the money borrowed from China? (Not to mention the jobs sent there) After they killed Kennedy, I worry about the safety of anyone who stands up to our "Imperial America we have more nuclear bombs, weapons & missiles than any one else." I pray for the safety of senator Obama because there are so many nuts running loose. I always wanted to vote for a woman for president, but will she just give us more of the same? Most of all I worry about the world my granchildren are growing up in. Will it still be there?

ref #24
Funny think about Brzezinski. In the days before the fall of the soviet onion, he seemed to be a hard core cold warrior who (or so it appeared to me) would not have minded if the cold war became a hot war.

I thought that was pretty scary and that his understandable zeal to see the back of the russian empire might get us all sunk but good.

Much more recently (circa 2004 and recently) I've seen him on various talking heads shows where he lambasted the Bush administration for its "Orwellian" language in getting the US into Iraq in the first place, and outlining his ideas for getting out. He seemed to be talking such good sense that I had to pinch myself.

Is this the same fazersnapper I wanted to throw tomatos at not so long ago? Has he mellowed in his old age, or have I changed my weltanshaung so radically over the intervening years that I could listen to a Brezezinski while nodding "Yes!... reasonable, plausible, properly informed, intelligent, coherent, right minded, helpful... Go Zbigi " ? Or has the administration drifted so far to the right of Genghis Khan that Zbigi looks progressive by comparison?

#28: perhaps the problem is with you. Do you have a persistent need to throw tomatoes at anyone in authority? Many people do. They often think it is evidence of a capacity for critical thinking, when in fact, it is just throwing tomatoes.

It isn't enough to just 'question authority' - you need to have a coherent question to ask.

'Governments are like diapers; they need to be changed regularly, and for the same reasons'

H L Mencken

'The heresy that politicians commit is to believe in themselves'

Oliver St John Gogarty As I was Going Down Sackville Street

Authority should be questioned, especially if said authority is abrogating more and more rights to itself while placing more and more limits on what the rest of us can do. If they're not questioned, they tend to get drunk on power.

'The heresy that politicians commit is to believe in themselves'

I just wanted to hear that one again. Good thing Obama only believes in change.

Nor has McCain fallen into that trap. He believes in straight talk. And that it is safe to go to the market in Baghdad. (Assuming you are surrounded by 100 of Blackwater's finest.) He also believes he is a Baptist.

ref #29
Well of course, I surely own the problem. I'm a pretty dull sort of fellow, "A bear of very small brain" I'm afraid. Unimaginative. Dull.

"Generations have trod, have trod/ Sheer plod / Plough down sillion".

If I had the wit to extrapolate a small factoid such as "I find myself, many years later, agreeing with a fellow with whom I had formerly disagreed" to a suspicion that I harbor a "persistent need to throw tomatoes at anyone in authority", well gosh, who knows what I might think of next?

As for asking the right questions; I think you're pushing on an open door.

There used to be a fellow on educational TV. a Dr
Julius Miller, if memory serves. who taught popular physics on public TV. He was known for saying "It is important to know what questions to ask".

As in physics, so in most other areas of life.

Perhaps this is fodder for another thread, but what
questions would you like to ask, assuming you could get a straight answer?

/sermon mode

In the end, the only authority we really need pay heed to is the voice within ourselves. This is not to say that we never trust others. Nor do I mean that we do not learn from others.

There was a time when I stood up in a pulpit and spoke "the Word of God." I was a good speaker...witty, intelligent, persuasive, and forceful. I believed in what I said. However I was also often...well not wrong, but I said things in my time that I would not repeat. I was an authority for many people, but that could only work if they were able to separate the wheat from the chaff.

At this point I have no authority in my life other than myself. I believe in God, I teach the Bible, I have bosses, and there are tons of people out there who are much smarter than I am. But in the end, it is what I decide to do with these things that counts. Everyone is fallible, even the man in the funny hat in Rome. To throw tomatoes at someone simply because of who they are is as great an act of stupidity as to follow someone blindly, simply because of who they are. (I am not saying that you throw tomatoes indiscriminately Modal. That last sentence was not directed solely at you.)

I find it interesting that when I threw my lot in for Obama, people wanted to show me where he and I disagree, as if that might be news for me. Since I am not in the race, and I am the person I agree with the most (not on everything, mind you!) I assume I will have major disagreements with whoever I end up supporting.

I used to wear a button that said "Question Authority" and I still agree with that sentiment. The Book of Job exists because Job looked heavenward and screamed, "What the hell are you doing God? And Why?" Naomi gets to play her part in the Book of Ruth because of her complaints. Even Jesus gets his moment when he cries out "Eli, Eli Lama Sabachthani!" (My God, My God, where the hell are you!")

For too long in my own life I looked for authority figures I could trust, and by trust, I meant that I could go on autopilot, and let them do the thinking for me. I still believe in "standing on the shoulders of Giants" but you have to the act of climbing up there yourself, and you still have figure which Giants to ride, and when to get off.

Well too much said, probably. But it was on my chest.

/end sermon mode

#33 It may be fodder for another thread, but first the questions that I would ask myself:

Is my support/opposition of this candidate/authority figure based on political affiliation or partisan bias?

Is my support/opposition for this candidate/authority figure based on reason or is it based in emotion?

Can I support my arguments or detractions? What is my motivation in making these arguments/detractions?

So, supposing I am honest with myself, I could then proceed on to posing some questions to the candidate/authority figure:

And, essentially, they are the same questions:

What is your rationale/motivation/philosophical framework for taking action x or advocating policy z?

Enevada, one must be able to trust the answers.

As a Reagan Democrat once told me when I tried to explain the BS factor of Reaganomics during the 1980 election, leadership is more than having answers. Indicating that Reagan's crossover appeal was not necessarily rational, but based heavily on irrational expectations due to his charisma and that he represented something different.

His actual presidency is filled with problems and contradictions.

I expect most people make their decision based on the ineffable rather than reason. Of course reason is not always the best way to select our leaders. BushCo is the perfectly reasoned candidate (he must be, he has never varied from the Republic Party line on an issue) yet most Americans feel they've been led down the primrose path. Are many of his reasoned positions failures because they are faulty in and of themselves, or did they fail because BushCo's reasoning was faulty?

There must be something more than reason to take into consideration such as character, willingness to change direction when the path is blocked, willingness to listen to criticism, willingness to tell the truth. Willingness to deal with reality rather than create an alternate reality and operate out of it. These are all subjective issues that must be considered before one casts an informed vote.

Reason and emotion go hand in hand in selecting our leaders like they do in all aspects of human life. What made Dr. Spock such an interesting character? He was devoid of emotions and operated solely from reason and logic. He was not human and it wasn't the pointy ears that gave him away. Keep in mind, Capt. Kirk, a human with both emotions and reason usually got superior results when they differed in approach to a problem.

I know that I get emotional when I point out the reasons why I believe BushCo has been a disaster, but I do give reasons.

To deny emotion in favor of reason is to deny ones humanity. Government bound solely in reason is only half a government.

ref #35,36
I'm not likely to be able to find out what I'ld most want to know simply by asking.

What harm are you planning?

What are you going to cost me ?

Why do you want to hold the office you're running for?

To guess the answers with any hope of hitting the mark, we look at what the candidate says publicly, we look at what he's done in the past, we look at who his political friends are, who he "hangs" with, who votes with or against him, who gives him money or other resources, and we consider the advice of that Mark Twain character with the politically incorrect name of N-word Jim : "Tell me how a man gets his corn pone, and I'll tell you what his opinions is".

We put all that into the round pot, heat and stir, season to taste, and dont pretend its science.

>37 modalursine:

Or there's the Jeremy Paxman shortcut when interviewing politicians:
'Why is this bastard lying to me?'

There are two qualities about Obama that I find really exciting:

1. His honesty. Not only does he speak frankly about things (like his teenage drug use) that other politicians feel the need to weasel about, he does it in a perfectly relaxed way that suggests he's not even tempted to lie about things that other politicians lie about reflexively. I used to think a degree of dishonesty was something I just had to accept in politicians because Americans wouldn't vote for people who told the truth as a general policy. It appears that is no longer the case, and I am thrilled.

2. His ability to speak in way that inspires people. After decades of increasingly divisive politics that predated GWB but which he exacerbated to the point of disaster by exploiting people's fears, we desperately need someone who can inspire people to pull together. We need to solve a lot of very serious problems, the solutions will necessarily involve complexity and compromise, and we will not be able to solve them if various factions dig in their heels and refuse to accept a plan unless it contains some clause or other that a different faction will refuse to accept unless the clause is removed. At this point, only an inspiring and persuasive leader can get people to give up their pet projects in the interest of the greater good. I think we are very fortunate that Obama has come along just when we need someone with his rare talent.

#ref 39
I'm hearing that a lot these days. I suppose its good that people are at last tired of being lied to as a matter of routine, but as to whether Sen Obama is as good as one wishes him to be...well I'm from Missouri.

The part that makes me most skeptical is the "non partisan" rhetoric. There are powerful forces that are doing just fine with current arrangements and are not the least bit happy to see any changes in which they might cease to get richer at a rate to which theyve become accustomed, Harry and Loise are not going away, THey are going to come out swinging and loaded for bear , to mix a few metaphores. The problem, as I see it, is not that there's been too much partisanship, as that no one is fighting for my side.

All in all, for people in my position, and in some sense for the country as a whole, I'm judging that the democrats are by far the lesser evil; but as to whether any of them is actually any good for me and mine or for the quality of civilization......I dont see it.

People like to faint at Obama rallies. You don't get to see the faces of the over eager, but I'm willing to bet 20 Iraqi Dinars that they are all white.

There is a certain kernal of truth hiding in the Barak Obama Messiah phenomenon.

The quality of individual character plays a huge role in history, despite the fact that we can also identify poweful impersonal social forces pushing human society in a certain direction.

The personality of Abraham Lincoln was critical to the outcome of the Civil War -- and his assassination probably played a very detrimental role in its aftermath.

Had the New York taxi that knocked down Winston Churchill in the early 30s actually killed him, all of world history might have been different.

Had we had an isolationist Republican, instead of FDR, at the helm in 1940, we might have found ourselves Home Alone on the planet, the sole remaining liberal democracy, even if Churchill had led the British.

The relatively peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union owes a lot to the fact that Mr Gorbachev was a Good Man. (I know I will get a lot of stick from some of my co-thinkers for saying this.)

Being a Good Man is not enough. I think that Jimmy Carter -- here comes more stick -- was something of a Good Man, but that this quality was mixed with an irritating self-righteousness and a fatal naivety about the nature of the world and of our enemies.

You've got to be very self-aware, and intelligent, and knowledgeable about your political environment, as well as being a Good Man, if you are to make a positive mark in history. In other words, you have also got to be a good politician -- and this qualty tends to pull against being an honest person.

There is a saying, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man," but I don't believe that's true. And sometimes it is true, but negatively, as Adolph Hitler proved.

People who like him see Obama as a Good Man, and, furthermore, one not severely constrained by prior ideological or special-interest commitments.

My own misgivings -- beyond the usual conservative objections to liberal statism -- are based on the fear that he will be inadequate in the area of world politics, where admittedly the challenges are huge.

We shall see.

My question is: Why wont Obama be swore in on the bible--True we have freedom of religion, but being sworn in on the bible is our rule. Why does he not acknowledge the American flag-watch his campaigns- he turn his back on the flag everytime. He will not say the Pledge of Alligence. Is the Al-Quada funding his election?? There are more ways to bring down the United States besides guns. Had my vote until I started to pay attention. A good orator, but in my opinion, not an American. Surely the Democrats can do better than what they have come up with. Hilery's claim to office is "I have spent 8 years in the White House" NOTE: So has the White House Chef. Sadly, Obama is the black man's messiah. Colon Powell a much better choice.

Are you perhaps buying into the rumors that Obama is a Muslim? He's not. There are chain e-mails running around saying that when Obama was sworn into office as a US Senator, he did not swear on the Bible. These reports are untrue. From the article below: "Two press reports from Obama's swearing-in ceremony in January 2005 mention specifically that Obama took the oath of office by placing his hand on his own copy of the Bible."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/238/

As well, the rumors about Senator Obama not acknowledging the flag or saying the Pledge of Allegiance are untrue. The former was based on a single incident blown out of proportion. As to the latter, you can search the web and find videos of Obama leading the Pledge of Allegiance in the Senate.
Here's a link on this stuff:
http://www.barackobama.com/factcheck/2007/11/12/obama_is_a_patriot.php

I'm not in the mood to be snarky today, so I'll save that for another day. At any rate, one of two things applies here, either: 1) You're knowingly spreading lies, in which case, shame on you; or 2) You are incredibly gullible (or willing to be so when it suits you), in which case, it would be best for you to learn not believe everything you hear, about Obama or about anyone and anything else. Google can be your friend.

(I'm usually a lurker in these threads--which I enjoy quite a bit. Would have waited for someone else to do this, but I guess I have some time on my hands.)

>43 easydale:

With all of the attention Obama is getting, it is not surprising that silly rumors are out there. He has been at or near the top 25 list on Snopes.

Any time you find a candidate's opponents highlighting deeply emotional issues, it is good to ask why they aren't discussing that candidate's record and positions. Probably because the actual record is not sufficiently inflammatory to produce the desired result.

I might also direct your attention to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which says, among other things (bold emphasis is mine):

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

(Sorry, edited to close italics)

Can someone please tell me how to set up a hyperlink. I would really like to link you guys to some interesting articles about Obama, which touches specifically on the idea that the "personal" and the "political" are indissoluble.

I think most people think that great oratory is somehow antithetical to action (or solutions), ergo "style" vs. "substance"; this couldn't be farther from the truth.

Particularly given the fact that there are no major programmatic differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton, it only becomes reasonable that people will tend to vote for the person with whom they most identify or like. It's just Hillary's bad luck that people don't like her (or that people like Obama more than they like her). Therefore, emotions will inevitably play a larger role in the democratic presidential nomination; it can't be any other way.

Hence Hegel's proclomation: "the unreasonable origins of reason".

Are there Republicans out there rubbing their hands together with glee? Yes, the old "Divide & conquer" trick. Gets them every time.
If we can unite with an Obama/Clinton or Clinton/Obama ticket & do it soon to cut off the snarking-- there are 2 good, qualified people seeking elected office & neither deserves to be exposed to the slimey side of the campagne. Settle this soon so we can debate the real issues...

Someone else will have to tell you how to do a hyperlink with a label or something, but if you just copy the full web address in, the hyperlink will happen automatically.

In the meantime, the sort of stuff easydale is spreading is along the same lines as the rumors about McCain collaborating with his North Vietnamese captors.

Those spreading both should be ashamed of themselves.

Well, here are the links to the Obama articles:

http://hnn.us/articles/46356.html

http://hnn.us/articles/46811.html

http://hnn.us/articles/47017.html

These articles should dispel our propensity to dichotomize style and substance as opposing forces.

Obamarama: Why Some Liberal Academics and Journalists Are Suspicious of Obama

Obamarama: The Absurd Arguments Being Used Against Him

Why Obama's the Real Deal

Big Al, as you can see, i set up title links for your articles. if you want to see how: 1. right click on the screen, 2. 'View Source', 3. search for the articles title in the text, and then you'll see how the programming works. To stop italics, include "", without any spaces, at the beginning of your text.

How do you stop italics?

You can stop italics by typing in the "less than" symbol (Shift + the comma key), then /i and the "greater than" symbol (Shift + the period key). Substituting { and } for "less than" and "greater than" so they will show up properly, that's:

{/i}

To begin italics (same substitutions), it's {i}.

An LTer kindly explained this to me, so I am passing it on!

Doug, I appreciated your thoughtful analysis in post #42. Essentially, you're discussing what is often called the "great man" theory of history. Apparently, you take a middle ground on this issue, as I do. I think individuals can have an important effect on the world around them (whether or not we are in the public eye), but also that tides in the mood of the general public arise in response to various developments (positive, negative or neutral) - for example, inventions like the internet, copycat crimes like school shootings or corruption by governmental officials, wars, etc. - thereby making certain kinds of shifts in the course of events very likely, though not inevitable.

Thanks guys.

If you'd like to snazz up your links a bit, Al, you can use the <a href> command.

If you type <a href="XXXXXXXXXX" target=_new>ZZZZZZZZZZZ</a>, replacing the XXX's with the link that you want to send people to and the ZZZZ's with what you'd like the link to read as, you get a slightly cleaner link.

So -

<a href="http://journal.readerville.com/" target=_New>Readerville</a>

would show as -

Readerville

Or, to trim it down even further, you can type:

(a href="url")Text to be displayed(/a)

Just be sure to replace the parentheses with greater than/less than symbols...

Clinton Aide Accuses Obama of Plagiarism

reeks of desperation

This was a silly charge to make. I cannot imagine that a single person will take it seriously.

Anyone who reads a lot, and who cares about words, and who uses words professionally, will subconsciously, even consciously, remember well-crafted phrases, and conceits and tropes and metaphors. Some of them are at the level where, if you use them, you need to provide a reference, or at least indicate that they are not original with you ... others not ... and some are in between.

The Clinton campaign's problem is that there is little or no progammatic difference between the candidates, so people will make their choices on the more intangible areas of personality. Even the issue of "experience" is subordinate to this. And here Obama has a clear advantage.

ref #51
I forget who said it first (not me) that the key to originality is the ability to hide ones sources.

I think its long been the case that mathematical proofs arent patentable and that copyright materials are subject to "fair use" by others.

The basic idea... defend yourself against the charge that you're just throwing words around by quoting some heavy hitting words...seems pretty natural to pick up the basic idea and run with it.

Why wouldnt that be fair use of the original quotation (loosely paraphrased) and legitimate use of the mathematical/logical/legal l idea?

Heck, I'm pretty sure I'm going to use it myself in the not too distant future. Its a great line. Thanx senator uh, er ...dang! Forgot already. Sorry.

#56 - I agree. And this hardly seems like an "explosive" charge, as the journalist described it, especially when the person whose ideas and general phrasing Obama echoed approves of him doing so. It's been pointed out many times in writing classes and conferences I've attended that ideas can't be copyrighted, only specific word-for-word expressions.

As an exercise in political tactics: let us assume that Hillary now knows she will not get the nomination.

Given that she still would like high office, now, or later ... what should she do?

For instance, if at this point she graciously conceded, with nice words about avoiding a damaging fight and not helping the conservative enemy, might she be well-placed for a future run at the Presidency in eight years?

Or maybe she could bargain with Obama, and get the VP spot ... and still aim at power eight years from now? That would probably be a bad idea, since she would probably lose him votes in the election campaign, and she would also be identified with the inevitable failures and sense of letdown that will certainly set in, a couple of years into an Obama presidency.

But if she becomes a spoiler, gets the nomination by hook and crook, and loses in November, she has zero status in the party. She becomes the New Nadar (Or new Bush). I think she will plug on, and I am not sure that is a bad thing at this point. Assuming the Dems dont anything really stupid (and that is a huge assumption!) so far every caucus or primary is an excuse for cheerleading the candidates. Turnout is really high, and people are excited.

Best strategy for her...see what happens in TX and OH, and then gracefully bow out if the outcome is certain. Otherwise, let's have an exciting convention, free, I can hope of major back room deals that thwart the general wishes of the electorate at this point. It would be interesting to go to the convention not really knowing, and have a positive outcome there, with Democrats leaving the convention really excited about the fall.

The latest CNN poll, through 2/17, shows Clinton/Obama 50/48 in TX. Story in yesterday's Dallas Morning News says that North Texas may decide the winner of the Texas primary.

i read WJC's calling superdelegates and chatting them up.

61
Are you sure you didn't mean "the new Nadir"?

Are you aware, Arctic, that, as per the NYT Sunday Travel section, you can book an Alaskan cruise with the real Ralph Nader/Nadir?

Sorry to go off topic! Carry on.

Well, if anyone here does that, please come and see me.

But don't bring Ralph.

Nader on a cruise? How strange is that? Maybe he is going along to inspect the safety equipment.

My guess is that, with the big Wisconsin loss and analysts now saying she would have to win by 60% in Texas and Ohio to pull ahead of Obama in pledged delegates, Clinton already knows (or it will soon sink in) that she is not going to win the nomination. I think that, in good faith to her supporters, many of whom do feel strongly about this primary and want the chance to vote for her, she should not and will not concede before the Texas and Ohio primaries. But I suspect she is already going through the internal process of reconciling herself to losing the nomination and thinking about where to go from here.

She will still be an important Senator after this election is over. She's proven she can be very effective in that role. And I think that after the Bush Administration's consolidation of more power in the Presidential office than the founders of our country deemed wise, it will be important to have both a President who is focused on inspiring and empowering others and a Congress that is sensible of the need to re-establish its intended Constitutional role in the balance of power between the three branches of government.

I don't think Clinton would ever accept the office of Vice President. She's already been First Lady, a position which is really similar to that of Vice President, whose only power under the Constitution (while the President remains alive and able to serve) is to break a tie vote in the Senate. She will be much more effective and valuable continuing her work in the Senate.

As a woman who would love to see more women in high office in government, I'd like to see Obama choose Kathleen Sebelius as VP. She gave a great Democratic response to the State of the Union speech this year. She's governor of a "heartland" state, Kansas, and she understands the importance of bringing people together on crucial issues, rather than dividing us with fear and name-calling.

Well, if people stop calling me and mine racists and gun-nuts and corporate shils and imperialists, I will be happy.

As for being "divided by fear" ... we ought to be united by fear. Because we have something to fear.

We were "united by fear" after 9/11, and look where that got us. It was our fear that allowed us to be suckered into a war in Iraq, which unnecessarily cost us thousands of precious lives along with untold trillions of dollars. I don't think its ever a good thing to be united by fear. It is fear that tells us to do anything, no matter the costs, to win "the war on terror". At some point we can no longer allow our judgment to be clouded by fear.

(... the following is very similar to something i already posted over in poly cons, so skip this if you've already seen it)

Big al made a good point. We were "united by fear," trusted our elected leaders, and got exploited:

Billions of dollars are going "to the war," but what does that actually mean? "The war" is an abstraction. Where, actually, does all that money go? It's not going to the soldiers. They're not adequately armed, they're not protected, they're poorly paid, they're poorly cared for, they're underinsured, when they come home wounded or disabled or traumatized, the treatment they receive is very inadequate, or they're actually disqualified for treatment. All that money is not going to the soldiers, so where is it going?

It's going to buy airplanes, tanks, bombers ~ all sorts of instruments of annihilation that are manufactured by U.S. corporations. It's going to private military contractors, like Blackwater, mercenary outfits, in short, which are run by private corporations from the U.S. A large amount of it is going to "reconstruction." That is, to huge corporations like Halliburton, and Bechtel, to reconstruct ~ or, it seems, to not reconstruct ~ at great profit, what has been destroyed by the airplanes and the tanks and so on that similar corporations manufacture.

So there's no motivation not to destroy, when they profit from the reconstruction. And now of course the big joke is that Halliburton is going to Dubai, where they won't have to pay U.S. taxes. So, in short, it's you and I, with our U.S. tax payments, who are funding profit-making corporations to knock things down and get people killed.

As big al says, we were suckered.

#67

The trouble is, fear doesn't 'unite' people, it sends them scurrying round like headless chickens.

Were Londoners 'united by fear' during the Blitz? Were the troops going over the top in WW1 'united by fear'?

I think they were united by something a good deal more positive than fear.

Remember, it was long after 9/11 that Bush decides to play on people's fears to get us into a senseless war. The first war he got us into, Afghanistan, was a natural outcome and reaction to 9/11 and would have been done by any of these Presidents. Then Bush, under the guidance of misguided neocons who lacked real understanding of Middle Eastern politics or culture or military strategy, preyed on both ignorance and fear. Fear was natural. It was the ignorance, from the leadership and the legislature, that let him go into Iraq.

So, as we assess these candidates, who is going to act from ignorance, without considering their courses of action wisely or taking counsel well? Which candidate has the best and most carefully considered judgment?

At least McCain has real military knowledge, but come on, this guy doesn't have the temperment for the job.

> Remember, it was long after 9/11 that Bush decides to play on people's fears to get us into a senseless war ...

i don't know when they decided on the fear tactic. i do remember Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone's notes from his meeting with Department of Defense (DoD) Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held on the day of the attacks. By 2:40 pm on 9/11, Rumsfeld was arguing for us to "go massive" including "things related and not" in reference to the war against Iraq:

"Hit S.H. {Saddam Hussein} @ same time—Not only UBL {Osama bin Laden} .... go massive—sweep it all up—things related & not"

I stand corrected. It was long after 9/11 that we went into Iraq; I don't know when the decision was made. The campaign to play on our fears, with all the misinformation available, was certainly in full swing well before then.

Unfortunately, this war is like no other we have been in.

If our enemy was a state, or coalition of states, we would have a template (actually, a choice of templates) for our response.

Or if it was -- as most liberals seem to believe -- just a loosely-allied group of the criminally insane, we would also have some tried-and-tested methods of responding. (And we could go about our business without paying much attention to developments, much as we do not really obsessively follow the developments in the endless "war on drugs" -- one narco-master killed, one gang broken up, one South American government suborned ... no big deal.)

And this, I think, is the only really important issue in world politics today, and the only real dividing line among people of good will.

Socialized vs private medicine -- we'll live either way. Gay marriage or not -- we'll survive one way or the other. Left and Right in the civilized countries, after a century of near, and sometimes actual, civil war, have pretty much reached a consensus on how to run society: free market + welfare state. We can get pretty heated over the details, but we won't kill each other over them.

But the Islamist threat is something else again. Communism and fascism were products of the West, and entirely understandable.

I don't think anyone really understands Islamism -- the "Christian" interpretation (just a continuation of the age-old contest) seems wrong to me; as does the related simple-minded idea that suddenly these folks sat down and read the Koran and found lots of nasty bits in it which they decided to act out. Nor does the "Islamo-fascist" designation clarify anything -- it's just another way of saying these guys are wicked; it does not provide insight about what is driving them.

One of the problems is that Islamic fury is widespread, but diffuse, and at present has not found a competent leader and organization to unify the murderous Islamist sentiment now shared by about one hundred million people, who include individuals fully capable of utilizing all the scientific and engineering achievements of modernity.

An Islamic Hitler -- someone who was charismatic and intelligent, but shrewd enough to enforce rational tactics in the struggle for power in the Islamic countries, and knowledgeable enough about the deep-seated and growing weaknesses of the West to string us along for a while by telling us (or, rather, our isolationist conservatives and most liberals) what they want to hear, as Hitler did so brilliantly in the 1930s -- that would really be something to fear.

So my principal criterion for judging political leaders is whether or not they understand this. You can be on the Left and understand it -- indeed, I think Leftists have access to certain modes of understanding the problem that Rightists do not -- and you can be on the Right and not understand it.

I don't think Obama, no matter how attractive a human being he is, understands this. And, what's more, his entourage will push him entirely in the wrong direction.

This does not mean he could not grow in office, as they say. Many Presidents have. He even has some qualifications for understanding the Third World and its discontents that are denied the other candidates.

But I wouldn't voluntarily roll the dice on this issue.

69

Nothing (well almost nothing) gets those on the right more upset than suggesting that there are some big money boys making a *gasp* profit off of the suffering and mayhem. No one has yet convinced me (and no, this isn't an invitation) that raking in the dough for Bush's cronies ("..some call you the elite, I call you my base...") was not a happy corollary of the Iraq invasion. But, hey, didn't people make money off of WWII? Same difference!

General:

The unaccustomed sense of vulnerability, and the fear it engendered, from the 9/11 attack (and the arguably more scarring anthrax scare that followed) opened the door to use fear as a tool for expansion of Executive power.

9/11 was a happy catalyst - an opportunity to put the fear-mongering machine into full swing and to castigate those who didn't go along as "un-patriotic"*. I don't know if there was an orchestrated campaign. I just think the Administration and its enablers found that they could push the envelope much farther than even they envisioned.

The absurd simplicity and transparency of it is what scared me - anyone who skipped the cappuccino in Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of "1984" had the game plan all laid out for them in exquisite detail. But the envelope was ultimately pushed too far, and the utter incompetence and heavy-handedness of the men behind the curtain were made startlingly obvious. Which is why so many on the left and right (save for a few dead-enders) cannot wait for the present administration to be flushed down the memory hole.

*I believe the fearmongering was also a smokescreen, as the administration became aware that its own incompetencies pre-9/11 were coming to light, per Richard Clarke et al.

After watching George Bush for five years flailing around as the governor of Texas (he did have the steadying hand of a Democratic Lt. Gov. to hold the ropes for him, something BushCo never had), followed by an additional nine months of ignorance, arrogance and ineptitude, the first time I heard Bush say the world has changed and will never be the same, I knew we were in for a big mess in some way. One thing the previous seven years taught me was anytime George W. Bush gets a hair up his butt, indeed the world will never be the same, it will only get worse.

BushCo bought the entire fear deck on 9/11 and indeed proceeded to change the world.

Oh, btw, if you want to know how much the world changed on 9/11, ask the British in Northern Ireland, or ask the Germans about the Bader-Meinhof gang, or the Red Brigades, ask about the Haymarket riots, ask the Indians about the massacre at Amritsar, ask the redcoats about their retreat from Lexington-Concord to Boston. Then there is Guy Fawkes and his hearty band. How about this - etc. etc. etc.

Terrorism has been an activity engaged in by revolutionaries since there have been revolutionaries and other forms of unhappy people. On 9/11/01 the world didn't change, it came to America. As a result we allowed ourselves to believe the world had changed and began pursuing policies to battle this imaginary new world. Unfortunately, for us, the Iraqi's and all the troops who have been impacted by this totally erroneous misadventure, the world has most definitely changed now, by dint of the self-fulfilling prophecy engendered against our fear and uncertainty by an incredibly cynical administration (all you Bush backers out there, they were either incredibly cynical, or incredibly stupid, you chose), at any rate, they played on our fears while running roughshod over good, loyal Americans who knew the jingoism of 2002 was dangerous BS leading to war for the sake of war.

If we're afraid, it ain't the terrorists causing our fear but BushCo.

Estimates for worldwide Muslim populations range from 1.2 billion to as many as 2 billion. Don't you think they could roll over us any time they wanted, especially in alliance with Russia, North Korea, China, or anyone else with a grudge against the West?

But that's assuming that these are just a homogeneous mass of ignorant peasants with sabres in one hand and the Koran in the other.* That they don't have their own lives, social systems, values beyond those taught in the madrassas.** And that they aren't content to tend their own gardens, rather than come here to cut our throats as we sleep.

But, no, there's no fear mongering here. We're just waiting for the barbarians.

*Not unlike that other mass of swarthy peoples massing at out southern borders, rakes in one hand and Virgin of Guadelupe statuettes in the other, just itching for our women and those lucrative lawn-mowing jobs.

**Yes, I know that there are disaffected, unsexed youth ready to follow OBL and commit mayhem at his order. The question is, what alternative are we giving them? Where, beyond sending Karen Hughes to make a fool of herself as an expert in Middle Eastern culture, is the show of good will? A serious attempt to deal with the Palestinian problem would be a good start. Belligerent bullsh*t language doesn't seem to be working.

#74 'But the Islamist threat is something else again. Communism and fascism were products of the West, and entirely understandable.'

Yeah, I mean the Nazis killing six million people because of their religion is entirely understandable.

joehutcheon, I don't think that's what Doug meant; he didn't mean that killing six million people was understandable, but rather, Doug is saying that we can atleast understand the historical circumstances, which lead to communism and fascism. In that sense, given the historical context in which Hitler and Stalin came to power, I think communism and fascism was entirely understandable. Those leaders channeled the dissatisfaction of their constituents into reasons for killing a millions of people.

On the other hand, I don't think we really know where islamic extremism comes from, probably because we didn't pay attention to it until we got attacked.

79
Well, my guess is that when heavily traditionalist societies with fear of change are acted upon by outside forces, they explode with righteous fury as they see their way of life threatened by inevitable change.

But then, maybe that only accounts for Republicans...
(rim shot!)

Islamic fundamentalism, as we know it today, is not conservative. It's radical and revolutionary.

#81

Depends. When the Afghan and Chechen Moslems were fighting the Russian Commies they were freedom fighters. Since the Russians ceased being Commies, those freedom fighters have become terrorists.

81
Who said it was conservative?

But to pursue the point, I suppose it depends upon how you define "conservative". There is a case to be made that the radicalism arose from the traditionalist/conservative (Wahabi, for example) element that wanted to get back to what they perceived as a purer form of Islam.

On another tack, the radicalism could be perceived as an outgrowth of Western (well, U.S.) pro-Israeli policies at the expense of the Palestinians. Or frustration at the dictatorial regimes of the Middle East, take your pick.

Might the the makings of another thread, as we (myself included) have gotten away from the Obama question...

On the other hand, I don't think we really know where islamic extremism comes from, probably because we didn't pay attention to it until we got attacked.

Radical Islam did not spring up from a vacuum, nor was it an essential part of Islam from the beginning. We don't know, but that does not mean this is no answer. How many of us have studied Muslim culture and religion? How many of us have had interactions with Muslims? How many of us took any courses in Middle Eastern history, politics or religion during our college years? How many us know, for instance, who Mohammed Ali is? (NOT the boxer!)

We start our journey with Sayyid Qutb, who really is the founder of modern Islamofacism. Of course it did not start just with him. The roots go back to the Muslim Brotherhood, but then we can probably trace a lot of THAT back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The sad part of the current situation was a) Iraq was a brutal SECULAR government, and on OBL hit list, b) The Taliban is retaking Afghanistan and c) GWB is the poster boy for recruiting people to radical Islam. Oh, and the fact that a large majority of Muslims have as much in the radicals as Catholics to the Crusades.

Can I ask two questions? How many of you have read the Pope's speech at Regensburg? and How many of you understood it?

This is one of the most learned men in history, speaking to us about the sorry condition of our own intellectual scholarship - though he is too polite to say that, I will.

In # 84, "and the fact that a large majority of Muslims have as much in the radicals as Catholics to the Crusades."

This smacks of incomplete thinking. There is a crucial word missing from this statement. Trying to pull the wool over our eyes, eh, Arctic? This is a Republic argument by subtraction. When dealing with the semi-literate this kind of reasoning works just fine. For the rest of us though, it's non-sensical bordering on the unintelligible.

Wanna clue us in to the missing word or phrase?

I think you refer to that one speech twice as much as I quote the entire oevre of Rush.

#87 Perhaps - it is an important document. Have you read it?

important for catholics.

Arctic, I'm going to disagree with something you said there. You noted radical Islam was not part of Islam from the beginning; I disagree. I think today's radical Islam can only be understood in the context of Islam as a whole, and, even more so, the pre-Islamic society of the Middle East - the same pre-Islamic society that gave us Judaism and Christianity. You can read about the Battle of Jericho in the Old Testament for the roots of Islamic fundamentalism. The lineage is absolutely a direct line.

For the most part, contemporary Americans and Europeans chose to elide this aspect of our culture, making it difficult for us to cross an imagined divide and understand a religious and political Islamic subculture (a) that is self-certain and infallable, (b) that identifies itself as elect or chosen, and (c) that believes, deeply, in miraculous and counter-intuitive outcomes. But none of these characteristics is foreign to the West.

Islamic people see Christians, Jews and Muslims as part of the same Ibrihamic culture; we reject them as members in our tradition and try to deny there is any similarity. Part of our inability to understand Islam and its workings, and radical Islam in particular, is our unwillingness to explore this side of our own history. We force Islam to be much more exotic and much less comprehensible than it is. But the common ancestor of every Christian or Islamic fundamentalist (other than Lucy, of course) is Joshua.

#89 - such an inquisitive mind you have, certainly you have read it? It was addressed to all.

"...one of the most learned men in history..."

Now, there's no bias speaking, is there?

And please stop browbeating people on what they haven't read (or, *snort*, understood). That's a sad argument, and doesn't really help argue whatever case you are making.

As for being addressed to us all, apparently the Pope lost my address.

87
Are you speaking of the band, or the drug-addled viagra popper?

Having read it, I'm not sure why it is relevant here. Enevada, perhaps you can elucidate.

Oh, there is bias, absolutely. As for browbeating - it is a suggestion. If you have read it and don't see the relevance - I can't help you. But, I know who can: George Weigel and his Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism.

The idea of God as Kokopelli that the Muslims have is a great impediment to Islam moving from the Middle Ages to Modernism.

Everything that happens comes from God, whether it be rational or not is of no consequence. While everything does come from God, it comes by human understanding of the world. The rationality or irrationality does not come from God, but from man. As God says, I AM. Creation simply is (maybe). God does not set off an explosive vest in a crowded marketplace, humans do and the rationality of the act lies not with God, but with the human.

To lay EVERYTHING on God is not only wrong, but is a manifestation of wilfull ignorance (the hallmark of fundamentalism of all stripes) the most arrogant of all sins. Not understanding the responsibility of humans in the world as agents of God is very dangerous and only leads the relationship between God and Man into a dead-end with the end of human life on earth.

Sounds like a successful religion to me.

God and Fate are NOT the same thing.

95

Say whaa?

I thought the Hopi (or was it Navajo) thought of God as Kokopelli? Now I'm even more confused than ever...

;)

I'm sorry, I think of all images of God as the trickster, which is the basic conception of a capricious God, as kokopelli. It is just such a perfect description.

Big Al is right. By "understandable" I do not mean "justifiable". The word "understandable" is sometimes used to mean "justifiable", when someone wants to apologize for something very nasty. But that is not how I am using it.

I mean ... anyone who has grown up in the West,and who has a bit of empathy, can understand tpretty easily the thinking of the average Communist, or Nazi.

Communists in the developed countries wanted to end class society and create a classless one. Communists in the Third World wanted to end imperialist and colonialist exploitation of their countries. Both saw a planned economy and central planning as the way to achieve rapid economic growth and a fair distribution of the proceeds of that growth. They turned out to be wildly wrong about how to achieve these good ends, but their thinking was understandable.

The Nazis were motivated by extreme German nationalism fused with Aryan racism and anti-Semitism, given special impetus by what they saw as Germany's betrayal by liberals and Jews, and its unfair treatment by the victorious Allies after WWI. Their policy of extermination of those they saw as inferior was extreme, but, sadly, well within the norms of human behavior. Many peoples have found themselves wiped out by other racial groups, although this was usually done in "hot blood" -- it was the cold-bloodedness of the Nazi actions, by a civilized people, which give us pause, and to some degree might justify a query as to whether they were "understandable". I won't argue the point.

The only point I will argue is that we don't have a very good understanding of Islamism. Even our own history of mutually-exterminatory Christian groups doesn't really give us much of an insight.

I can see some of the old-fashioned Leftists here want to assimilate Islamism to anti-imperialism, and the Bush Administration's response to it to the old leftist view that the Cold War against those nice Communists was motivated by the need to keep a War Economy going while stealing the resources of the Third World.

I won't argue those points either. I think they are grossly wrong, but deserve a separate thread for proper analysis.

Islamism is something new in the world. Of course, we can trace Islamic fundamentalism back for decades, even centuries. There are a thousand dormant bizarre politico-religious bacilli out there -- the question is why one of them has begun to grow, and to find a mass audience, and what the implications for liberal democracies of this are, in the age of nuclear weapons, the internet, and mass Muslim immigration into Western countries.

Liberals largely have their head in the sand on this, and conservatives tend to lack the sort of conceptual fluidity and capacity for empathy with the oppressed, that might provide the basis for a serious theoretical response.

As I read all the liberal responses here, and think that a President Obama will be surrounded by people who think like this, I am filled with foreboding about the future.

You can read about the Battle of Jericho in the Old Testament for the roots of Islamic fundamentalism. The lineage is absolutely a direct line.

The Ban, which I think you are refering to here, is an ancient practice of Pre-Exilic H'abiru (Hebrews) during their conquest of Canaan. Assuming any historical accuracy (the remains of three Jerichos have been found; none correspond to the time frame of the event you are refering to) it is more a matter of history for Jews, rather than Abrahamic/Ibrahamic standard. While the story was preserved, it is more for a picture of Who We Were And How We Got Here, and perhaps even as a counterpoint the historical sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (and Israel by the Assyrians). It is entirely possible that they preserved these particular narratived during the exile as a way or reminding themselves that they were no different than their Babylonian captors at one time in their history.

Oh, and the Joshua story "takes place" around 1400 bce, the Exile was 586 bce and Mohammed didnt make the Hejira until 633 CE. That is a thousand year time span, give or take a few decades.

When Saladin was fighting Richard the Lion Hearted in the Third Crusade (The Last Crusade, everyone numbers these things differently) Richard was unhorsed during battle. Saladin stopped the battle, and gave Richard one of his horses.

Also before said battle, Saladin and his war Lt decided that since the Christians prayed to God for victory in battle, they would pray to Allah. (In essence they were mimicking Christian behavior.) They find an Iman, and ask him to help them pray for victory. The Imman has no idea how to do that, so they make something up on the spot. The idea of asking Allah to intervene in a battle, or even to fight in the name of Allah was foreign to the greatest military leader of the Muslim world. He had to learn how to do it from Christian crusaders.

And yes, I read the Pope's speech. (I even attended the University of Bonn, and was a part of the OTHER faculty there, in the mid-80s. --by part of the faculty, I mean a student.)

This particular pope is a very smart man. Very smart. The problem with his speech, which he cannot see, is that he is using an entirely different definition of reason than the secular world. For him, transubstantiation, immaculate conception, virgin birth, and plenary inspiration of Scripture are reasonable concepts. For much of the secular (and protestant) world they are not.

Also, I have a problem with him making generalizations about Islam from a series of dialogs between an Orthodox Emperor under seige and his probably captor. In fact, emperor Manuel II Paleologus would have better made the point 200 years earlier to his Roman Catholic visitors who were on their way to Holy Land to free it from the infidels. I don't exactly see why Paleologus would be considered an authority on the historical scope of Islam.

Edited to Add; If you want to see how the Pope's ideas really play out, read Milbanks Theology and Social Theory which is a much tougher, but more fulfilling read than the Pope's speech.

2008 Wisconsin Democratic Primary Results Map

Perhaps the green represents jealousy, while the purple is America's version of royalty. ;-)

98
Yes, well as I'm sure you are aware, it is the Liberal Agenda to subvert and destroy Civilization As We Know It. I myself spend pretty much my entire waking hours plotting to do just that. Mr. Obama is our secret weapon by which we shall achieve these aims.

I can send you some pamphlets, if you like. ;)

Doug, I'll confess, I usually don't read your posts when they exceed a couple paragraphs (I'm sure that's mutual, as well), but there is something to some of your analysis this time.

I continue to say that I don't believe there is much new at all about radical Islam, though I do think it has a somewhat different resonance in today's world than in the past. For a good book that might highlight some of the things that are not new, I'd recommend some of my current reading, Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World; todays radical Islamicists are yesterday's Almoravids (so watch out for the Almohads who come next). (The book has an introduction by Harold Bloom, so it is approved for reading by conservatives).

BUT, when you note that "liberals have their head in the sand on this, and conservatives ten to lack the sort of conceptual fluidity" you are hitting on some key elements here. There are both liberals and conservatives with their head in the sand; as well as both liberals and conservatives who lack conceptual fluidity. Bush and Cheney represent both elements: they couldn't understand that bin Laden represents a much graver threat to us than Hussein ever did, and they lacked the conceptual ability to realize that an attack on Iraq would help, not hurt, radical Islam.

As to Weigel, well, he's a comfortable ideologue who served as a cheerleader for Bush's ignorance. I wish he'd do something like get a degree in Middle Eastern history or culture before deciding he's an expert on it. It is an enormous problem with neoconservatives. There are educated, intelligent conservative thinkers out there who have done their homework (such as Fouad Ajami). Weigel, no.

But if someone can't explain the relevance of something they cite, please, just don't bother.

Arctic Stranger, I don't view the fundamentalist aspect central to Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, but I think that it is there in each and deeply related, historically as well as philosophically. Jericho was one symbol, to me: a people so self-confident in their own righteousness and selection, and in the blessings of The One God for their cause, that they engage in an act of wanton slaughter and cruelty. I do think we find, throughout the Recitations, and through the Bible as well, some basis or grounds for these visions. We know that it is more an historic or minority strain within Christianity, for example; we need to figure this out for Islam as well, and can learn it as much by looking to our own culture as theirs.

In # 84, "and the fact that a large majority of Muslims have as much in the radicals as Catholics to the Crusades."

This smacks of incomplete thinking.

My fingers often work a lot slower than my brain. The complete sentence should read, "and the fact that a large majority of Muslims have as much in common with the radicals as Catholics to the Crusades."

Does anyone else that problem?

Edited to end bold.

No, I have that problem.

Are you assuming we Catholics have little in common with the crusades?

We have all heard about white guilt, but you should remember about Catholic guilt, as well.

File this under How Low Can You Go?

I am very surprised the National Review would touch this.

I what you saying.

Wow, twenty years after the defeat of the USSR a child of two pinko, commie, liberal, fellow travelers may actually take over. Stalin (or is it Mao) wins in the end.

Does anyone see the direction the Republic campaign is going to take. Can we trust the commie child of a commie? Fasten your seat belts everyone, the mud is about to fly.

Maybe had we known that Bush's great-grandfather loaned money to the Nazi's for weapons, etc. we could have saved ourselves from the clutches of Authoritarianism. Oh, but wait, we did know that.

Hmmm, do I want a grumpy old man with grumpy old ideas or do I want to take a chance on a second generation commie, pinko, liberal, fellow-traveler. Oh, the crushing responsibility. The grumpiness, oh, the grumpiness!

>108 geneg: Where's Joe McCarthy when you need him?

#120: Ajami, fine by me. Also Bernard Lewis, both cited extensively in Weigel's work.

If you look in the Catholic Tradition group you will see that Regensburg Speech and the larger question of Islamic exegesis is covered - I'd rather continue that discussion there than in this unwieldy thread.

I haven't much time today, to repeat further, so please excuse me, but if you really are interested it is a decent discussion with quite a a bit of substance to it:

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=27443

Makifat: You are relatively new to this Group, and not really familiar with the political character of the people who post here, which is why your sarcastic parody of what conservatives supposedly believe about liberals doesn't really hit the target. In any case, I believe you are more in the hard Left part of the political spectrum -- seeing American capitalism as the source of most of the world's problems -- rather than representative of mainstream liberalism. Liberals, having little ideology of their own, will, it is true, tend to be inordinately influenced by hard Leftists, but they are -- as I am repeatedly reminded here -- not the same thing. I say all this as an explanation for why I must decline your offer of pamphlets, most of which I have probably already read, and one or two of which I may actually have written (long ago) -- if I may say so myself, I don't think you will find a better justification for the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion anywhere than in something I penned about thirty year ago.

On the topic raised by Arctic-Stranger: There seem to be two issues involved:

(1) Are the political beliefs and practices of a politician's parents a legitmate topic for discussion?

It would seem to me that they are, with the understanding that, obviously, people can move beyond their parents' beliefs.

It would be especially worthy of discussion if those beliefs were (1) very bad ones, and (2) included the assumption that it was legitmate to advance them by deception.

If a Republican candidate were found to have been raised in a pro-Dominionist (theocratic) home, and one in which the followers of this belief were taught that lying and dissembling was a valid tactic, I would assume that discussion of what the candidate now thought about these beliefs would be in order.

(2) But was pro-Communism really so bad? Given the propensity of liberals to adulate Stalinists like Angela Davis, I think this is the real issue.

"McCarthyism" had two meanings: First of all, false accusations of current sympathy for Communism, made against liberals who may have been fellow-travellers in the past, but were no longer; or who had simply been involved in joint work with Communists for goals that were shared by both, such as establishing trade unions or fighting for Negro rights.

Secondly, harrassing pro-Communists. There was, and is, a strain of liberalism which did not see Communism as a threat at all, and which rather sympathyzed with it. Naturally, this sort of liberal regarded any exposure or criticism of pro-Communism as "McCarthyism," whether it was true or not.

Thus, in my opinion, it was not McCarthyism of the first sort to point out that the woman who was apparently Hillary's first choice for Secretary of Education in 1992 was a Communist sympathyzer, because it was simply true. But to pro-Communist "liberals" it was McCarthyism -- of the second sort.

Since we have little idea what Obama really believes , knowing what sort of political atmosphere he was raised in would seem to me to be a legitimate question. Of course, there is no Communist threat today (God bless you, Ronald Reagan!, and God bless our superiority in the arms race, which bankrupted the bastards). (And in fact, bloody-minded hard-nosed secular Communists are more likely, in the Muslim world, to be our allies rather than our enemies.)

But it would still be interesting to know whether Obama's parents believe that Amerikkka is the world's biggest terrorist state, and all that other dreary nonsense. (Although I can understand that people who believe that this characterization of the US is not nonsense, but simple truth, would not like to explore the issue.)

No, my point was her impeccable logic.

A) Most people I knew who were the product of biracial marriages in NYC were also the offspring of communists.

B) Obama is the product of a biracial marriage,

C) Ergo, he is a communist.

Well, if this is the calibre of people who have been running the country lately, that explains a lot!

Makifat, theoria, others:

For those who won't entertain an argument from the Pope because he is too Catholic (and, yes, that would be funny if it weren't so sad), perhaps you'd be interested in the same argument from an atheist, Oriana Fallaci and her The Force of Reason.

And from an 2005 WSJ interview with Tunku Varadarajan, Ms. Fallaci herself said,

""I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger." I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."

interview here:

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/tvaradarajan/?id=110006858

>113 enevada: '"I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."

Not at all. The pope and the atheist might be equally incorrect in what they think.

#114 Both are pretty esteemed in the intellect business - what are your credentials?

# 114 But not, as eneveda was saying BECAUSE they are a Pope or an atheist.

Note the word 'might' in what I wrote. I was contesting the logical fallacy that just because the pope and an atheist agree on something means that there 'must' be some truth there. Anyone can be mistaken, whatever their credentials in the intellect business.

Stating the obvious, in other words, thanks for that.

You're welcome!

Arctic: You said: "No, my point was her impeccable logic.

A) Most people I knew who were the product of biracial marriages in NYC were also the offspring of communists.

B) Obama is the product of a biracial marriage,

C) Ergo, he is a communist. "

That would indeed be a stupid argument. But it is not really the burden of her article.

Her observation was just a lead-in, whether true or not, to her main argument, which is based on this article.

And it is not a question of Obama being a "communist", but rather, of his having the sort of mentality, concealed by the necessity for taking part in practical politics, of the Berkeley City Council.

111
Uh, you see, I don't really have any pamphlets. I thought the little ";)" would have clarified that.

As for your insightful analysis of my worldview ("I believe you are more in the hard Left part of the political spectrum -- seeing American capitalism as the source of most of the world's problems..."), it's quite interesting, but has the disadvantage of being wrong. If you choose to extrapolate comments about someone making a buck off of a war into a worldview, knock yourself out. I'd like to think my own view of the world is a little more complex than that, but then it wouldn't fit into a nice convenient little category, would it?

#121 Why am I more concerned about the fact that some people think this is an issue rather than the issue?

I must be one of the hate America crowd.

Better get this Obama guy to a re-education camp, quick. Get rid of all that evil nasty communist influence.

Doug wouldn't want his children serving as President, certainly. We know of his checkered ideological past.

Good Gawd Amighty, a real commonist in the woodshed. Get the axe, maw, I'm a gonna git me a commie.

"Takara says that Davis "espoused freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. He urged coalition politics."

Uhh, and in just what way does this differ from liberal politics?

Let's see:

Many of us already had freedom. It's entirely possible that Mr. Davis would disagree with that assessment.

Radicalism, isn't this the political wing currently occupied by BushCo? No, can't be any problems with radicalism.

Solidarity, remember how we all cheered solidarity in the Polish shipyards in the 80's? Or how about the legendary phrase "Gentlemen, if we do not hang together, we will surely hang separately"? Solidarity is as American as apple pie. Just watch the Republics as they bash John McCain for not maintaining solidarity.

Labor Unions. If you are a member of the middle-class, find a union worker and thank him or her.

Due process, as we've seen due process is more of a hindrance than a help. When you are busy lynching someone, due process isn't high on the list.

Peace, well 'nuff said about THAT idea. BushCo has proven that peace doesn't matter.

Affirmative Action, there goes that commie supreme court again. So what if it was actually successful in what it set out to accomplish, it's just a commie idea for subverting the blacks in this country. Those uppity nigras just need to accept their place in society and stop whinin'. Maw, whar's my whip?

Civil rights? Civil Rights? Rights, civil and otherwise proceed from the barrel of a gun. Why do nigras need civil rights? We'll take care of 'em like we allus have, just leave us alone. There ain't no nigra problem so don't get het up about civil rights. They can't handle 'em anyway. "Sides, they jist git in the way o' doin'.

Negro History Week ?!?!?!?

True democracy. Well when Republicanism (the political philosophy behind our peculiar separation of powers, not the ideas of the Republic Party) doesn't work for you, true democracy may seem like a reasonable option, especially in areas where you outnumber whitey three or four to one.

And why does he believe in these obviously dangerous ideas? Because he:

was opposed to imperialism. Wow, what a loser. BushCo has taught us the joys of both imperialism and colonialism in Iraq. If a good, patriotic American such as George W. Bush believes in imperialism and colonialism then obviously this Davis fellow is a traitor.

was opposed to colonialism (see imperialism).

was opposed to white supremacy. What? I wonder why. I'm sure he misunderstood. White Supremacy, why everyone knows whites aren't superior, just smarter, and better. Now, if we can just catch up to the Indians and the Orientals.

Boy, i'm sure glad you pointed this stuff out.

Obama may also be in favor of "freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy." Geez, I may have made a mistake and voted for these things, by voting for Obama. Or I may have gone against my government by unknowingly voting against imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy.

And coalition politics. Isn't that like having right-wing Christians, Neocons, Conservatives of most stripes, Authoritarians, and Reaganomists, true believers all, bundled together in one political party with one goal?

I can't believe I almost voted for someone influenced by these things. How totally un-American.

I just went to check my TV listings to see when Howdy Doody was coming on.

Jesus.

126
What? The President's making a speech?

> 113
i don't worry that the pope is "too catholic." but since i'm not catholic, i don't feel a need to consult him on matters of religion, intellectual life, or anything else.

Little boxes.

Nonetheless, he writes beautifully.

128
Right. And when I need some insights on Islam, the Pope isn't the first one I'm going to ask.

I'm not trying to argue, I'm just saying.

You wouldn't ask a world class theologian? Really, you people are shutting yourselves off from the thinking of one of the world's best minds...because he is Catholic.

Keep talking, amongst yourselves, then. I'll open the window.

I think what people are saying is that the Pope comes with a warning label. "I represent a certain way of thinking, and to be honest, I will not, nor can I deviate from that way of thinking. I think Christianity, specifically Catholicism, is the cat's pjs, and anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight. I cannot question God, the Church, or stray far from 2000 years of recieved dogma. You are not likely to hear me say anything surprising, given the box I live in. If you like this box, you will find me smarter than most, and well worth your time. If this box does not fit you, than anything of meaning I have to say to you will be accidental."

But seriously, I have read my share of Catholic theologians, going back to Augustine. Not that I believe any of it, but I find some of it enjoyable and elucidating in it's own right.

I'm just trying to be honest about it. It's the same reason that I would rather read scholarship on Islamic history and theology than a book on Islam by someone who makes a living as a FOX news commentator.

But still, I will admit that there is always value in getting a different perspective on a vital aspect of the state of the world.

If you give a link, I will have a look.

(Edited to remove a wisecrack that some may find offensive. Rest assured I will spend some time in hell for it, if what I don't believe turns out to be true.)

I think what you are saying is people are small-minded. Gotcha.

134
If by that you mean that they don't give the same value to certain people and perspectives that you do. That street runs both ways.

> 131 I am sure i've read authors who were catholic and gained insight from them (not that i worry about the religious orientation of authors). what distinguishes these authors from Benedict XVI is that the Pope speaks for the Church. That's too much baggage for me to weed through to figure out whether I should extend "hermeneutic generosity" to his arguments.

On a completely unrelated Barack-themed topic, I got an email from a friend inviting me to this. Pardon me if I throw up now.

It makes me wish I'd voted for Hillary. Why do people have to go overboard and ruin everything?

> Re: Ratzinger

Enevada: if I want to understand Wahabism, I'm going to read Qutb. There can be no questioning the fact that the Pope is the preeminent authority on Catholicism, but, for an atheist, agnostic, protestant, Sunni, Shiite, Hindu, Buddhist and so on, there is absolutely no reason to pursue the opinion of the Pope when the subject is unquestionably outside of the boundaries of his purview. If we wish to understand the Catholic view of the subject, then the document in question is well worth our time; unfortunately, under all other circumstances, there are a multitude of primary sources which are far more valuable to a student, public citizen or politician.

We all understand your deep respect for Catholicism in general, and this Pope in particular. Where we differ is on the relevance of his views on the matter under discussion.

Now, back to the subject of the thread:

>137 littlegeek: Who cares? Some people sing for Christ, for their lovers, for the local glee club and others sing for themselves. I sing for no one, for purely aesthetic reasons (I have a bad singing voice, and am almost certainly tone deaf). That said, if I had Al Green's voice, you can damn well believe that I would be singing at political rallies. Just for the hell of it.

Switching one's vote because other people are looking for a good excuse to sing reeks of sour grapes...

I just dont want to be there when they do it.

>139 Arctic-Stranger: On that I am certainly in agreement!

ref #85
I'll take some wisdom from whatever quarter. How about giving us a teaser... say the top three ideas we are most in need of hearing?

Funny. I have learned some very important things from the Dalai Lama, yet am Catholic.

ref #137
I have been criticized for being "too Anglo Saxon" by which our interlocutor meant "not sufficiently touchy-feely"...no one would mistake me for a Saxon at any angle. Not my cuppa.

I have a theory (not in the scientific sense, but in the popular sense of half baked hippopotamus) that people are yearning so for a "clean sweep" a "newer deal" , an "un-cola", that they'll manage to find one in any candidate that makes a halfway credible and sustained effort to foster the illusion.

After the high, the crash. This is going to be one sorry soggy country long about high summer 2009 or
early fall 2009.

I was once given a bit of wise advice which I cant always take myself, but when I do, I'm glad. "Dont
pay in advance!" So lets be cheerful until then.

>142 A_musing: Yes, but how many of them have been about Islamism?

BGP - the Regensburg speech was primarily about the West's lack of understanding and appreciation for its own intellectual tradition. The same argument made by two prominent atheists Marcello Pera and Oriana Fallaci among others. It was an invitation to dialogue that was met favorably by more than 38 Islamic scholars. (A far better reception, I'll note, than among this esteemed group of Library Thingers - hmm.)

That's all, from me - I discuss this elsewhere - and do apologize for the shift in the thread.

#138 I was kidding. I just find that sappy stuff annoying.

Actually, I have learned something of Islam and how we communicate across religions from the Dalai Lama. But that was a long time ago and I don't think anyone would have used the word "Islamism" then.

>146 littlegeek: Ah. The perils of drinking too much coffee...

>147 A_musing: "Islamism" and the term "Political Islam" have been used interchangeably for decades by those who have followed and studied the political movements of fundamentalist Muslims, as well as the Islamic or semi-Islamic polities established in a handful of nations by the very same Islamic fundamentalists. It, unlike the asinine misnomer favored by neoconservatives, christian democrats, and the like ("Islamo-fascism"), is no stranger to this world.

BTW, did the Dalai Lama happen to mention his role in the suppression and ostracism of the Tibetan supporters of the Dorge Shugden deity when he spoke of religious cross-communication or did he ignore the subject of how religious freedom is viewed by his followers in Tibet and his little fiefdom in India?

Don't get me wrong; I will happily concede that the man has charisma. I had the good fortune to see him at a small event in Portland (250+ individuals, as opposed to the 20,000+ event attended by most), and he owned the crowd (a younger version of myself included). I've never seen a public figure duplicate that mood...

I have heard that Thich Nhat Hahn can do the same. Something about these Buddhist teachers.

On that note I highly recommend The Jew in the Lotus a story of how the Dalai Lama invited several Jewish leaders to come teach him what it meant to be a religion in exile.

I am trying to remember the most compelling speaker I have seen.

Couldn't have been too compelling ... ;-)

Knowledgeable, intelligent people, from whatever tradition they are operating in, can provide us with insights into the world. And sometimes those insights are driven by aspects of their tradition that they have assimilated and that someone outside that tradition would not be able to access, or not be able to so well.

I don't you can call yourself an educated person today and have not read at least some of the great Marxist historians, for example. And before anyone snorts at "economic determinism," you should know that within the Marxist explanatory framework, there is a lot of room for subtle interpretations of events.

And I would assume the same to be true for Roman Catholicism.

I suppose a lot of the resistance to reading the new Pope -- which, on self-examination, I share -- comes from the fact that before he was Pope, he was widely pictured as a dogmatic reactionary. But evidently this is wrong, or inadequate as a description of his thinking.

I haven't read him yet -- sorry, ENevada! -- but I am going to.

Maybe it will be the case that precisely because he takes faith seriously, as the Muslims do, he may have access to insights denied atheists and agnostics (like me). And in understanding these people we need all the help we can get.

By the way, reading the liberal responses to the part of this thread about Obama's possible youthful influences, you can see why so many liberals were caught up in the Communist Party's Popular Front in the 1930s, and why the Roosevelt Administration just laughed off revelations about Soviet agents working for it in high places. Hey, they were all fighting for peace and social justice, right?

Or as the old Trotskyite song, sung to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel", had it:

The Popular Front, was quite a stunt
It took in many a sucker ..
Now many a Dame,
With a Mayflower Name,
Is ... ridding the Daily Worker.

Leaving aside the particular issue of the Regensburg speech, it's not that difficult, looking back into European history, to see how religious faith has influenced history.

Most of would be willing to kill or die to protect our families; either in the immediate sense or indirectly by fighting in a war of national survival. Some of us might be prepared to kill or die to protect our property.

(Some) religious people, and by this I would include those whose faith is in a secular prophet such as Marx, are prepared to kill or die for something less tangible. In England, for three successive reigns, you could be put to death for worshipping the same God in the 'wrong' way. Those doing the killing took the view that it was better that a few should die rather than allow their heretical views to prevail.

Such religious differences often had political motivation and/or fall-out; thus in the 30 Years War, Catholic and Protestant states fought bitterly, particularly in those territories where no one faith was supreme. The same mentality can be seen in the violence between different Moslem sects in Iraq; it's partly territorial/political, but religion is a major factor.

That, to my mind, is what faith brings to the equation; not just war to acquire territory or to defeat an aggressor, but war to save people's souls, and to ensure that the 'correct' version of whichever religion should become supreme. 'Killing people for their own good', in brief. Faced with that mentality, sweet reason and common sense struggle to get a hearing.

Some Obama realism from the left.

There's also a suggestion in the comments section for Obama supporters to have a listen to Living Colour's 1988 hit, Cult of Personality. Great song. Great band. Whatever happened to them?

Doug, are you saying "freedom, radicalism, solidarity, labor unions, due process, peace, affirmative action, civil rights, Negro History week, and true Democracy to fight imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy." are all code words for more nefarious activities, or that they meant something different in the past?

I have a hard time getting TOO worked up over the attempts to come to terms with a politics that looks to treat blacks and whites the same in the philosophy of the politics, especially in a time when the superior American politics was fighting to exclude black people from its polity. If he had been you I would be somewhat more concerned.

Yes, I will give you that Communism is a blighted philosophy and certainly that it is dangerous to our own freedom and success as persons and a country, but once again when your country refuses to allow you to participate, it probably makes smart people look about for alternatives.

If Obama is elected I promise to keep an eye on him.

#154: Living Colour went the way of all decent bands: the European Tour circuit. Not a bad life.

On the Obama bubble – I call it froth, but bubble works – the question of when it pops is before or after the election?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/02/the_everpresent_obama.html

“But as Democrats - and Americans - are searching for their next leader, the Illinois senator's record, and not just his rhetoric, will be examined under a microscope. As president, Obama will be faced with countless difficult decisions on numerous gray issues, and voting "present" will not be an option. He will need to explain those "present" votes as a member of the Illinois Legislature if he hopes to become America's commander-in-chief.”

- Nathan L. Gonzales, political editor of The Rothenberg Political Report.

When did the Reagan bubble burst?

(And no, I am not comparing Obama to Reagan, except for the way people fall all over him, making him into something he was not.)

Jeez, I hope Obama does a better job than Reagan. Otherwise, we will continue in deep stuff.

Yes, I agree A-S. When JFK campaigned for the Presidency he did not have the star power that Obama appears to be gathering. The debate between Nixon and Kennedy was not a slam dunk and probably was "won" by Kennedy only because Nixon's sweaty face looked so bad on the TV. Not a great reason to choose a President.

I really don't agree with analogies being made between Obama and Kennedy. And even if I did, Kennedy's tenure in office was not notable for accomplishments, mostly just lovely images and wonderful international public relations.

Well, there was that Cuban Missile thingie. And Bobby taking on the Teamsters.

i don't buy the bubble-about-to-burst metaphor, but i do think people will start to take a closer look at Obama's record. While Obama may not have been in the Senate long, he has been busy. In Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy comments on his background:

"I'll say something about the peculiar idea that Barack Obama is all style and no substance.

I came to Obama by an unusual route: as I explained here, I follow some issues pretty closely, and over and over again, Barack Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet" -- though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look -- he's over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn't even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation."

It strikes me the bubble about to burst here is the McCain bubble.

My favorite comment was the first McCain campaign statement, that said "He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists..." - don't they mean, never done any favors for a special interest or lobbyist other than Keating? He keeps forgetting that fall/redemption storyline...

While there is a way in which this is all a tempest in a teapot, he has donned the mantle of purity in the time since Keating, which was a long time ago, and it is a very difficult mantle to wear. His denials are a bit too strong right now.

Gene: Of course Communists and liberals share many of the same motivations: concern over "social injustice", indignation that corporations profit from human hunger and misery (by supplying food and medicine, but for a profit), the desire to see the little guy get a fair shake. But these are just dispositions, reflexes.

Communists had some definite ideas about how to remedy these evils, and they got a chance to put their ideas into practice over a third of the earth's surface for several decades.

Liberals -- who generally don't have a competing set of definite ideas to rival the Communists' -- were inclined, during the 1930s and early 40s, to look sympathetically on the "socialist experiment" being carried out in the Soviet Union. Some of them became active apologists for the totalitarian system there.

When that system expanded dramatically after the Second World War, most American liberals woke up to the ugly reality of Communism, and became Cold Warriors. That's why you got a free trip to Vietnam.

After Vietnam, this liberal anti-Communism faded away. A new generation of young leftists was positively infatuated with the new generation of Communists, who were more hip and interesting than the rather dull "goulash Communists" of the USSR.

But the split in the world Communist movement, and then the collapse of the USSR, has made the Communist threat a thing of the past.

So I am not at all worried that Obama will be another Alger Hiss.

Rather, I would worry that he has imbibed, at an early age, the sort of general radical hate-America stuff that is the stock-in-trade of the far Left. I would worry about his Presidential appointments -- that these people would come out of the woodwork, mouthing the usual stuff about "peace and justice" that Stalinists know that naive liberals love to hear, never mentioning that for them, "peace and justice" is to be found in the Gulag states.

Oh, never mind.....

>163 Doug1943: "I would worry that he has imbibed, at an early age, the sort of general radical hate-America stuff that is the stock-in-trade of the far Left." -Doug

Really now? Name one policy position or political association which supports this suspicion of yours? Who, exactly, are you afraid he will pull out of the woodwork? He has no ties with, say, the Alexander Cockburns of the New Left, let alone the political heirs of the Old Left...

More importantly, given the fact that he frankly supports the Geneva conventions, opposes torture (and that includes waterboarding), has taken the right stance on the administration's machinations over FISA and so on, your hypothetical "Obamaian gulag state" sounds downright progressive.

But then, far be it from me to dissuade you from casting aspersions...

The general scale of politics in the US has shifted from the left to the right quite far since 1970. A person in the middle today finds himself in favor of fiscal responsibility, government out of our personal lives and bedrooms, and a realpolitik that would easily have elected Nixon over Kennedy, or Goldwater over Johnson. A person in the middle of the road today would have found him(her)self a member of the pre-Reagan Republican Party. There are fewer Democrats of the leftist stripe that you continue to refer too. The post-Rockefeller Republic party has taken a real lurch to the right. The result is BushCo. Many of the people who are voting Democrat today are voting mostly to support the political ethos of the Rockefeller Republicans.

After nearly thirty years of Reaganomics, the question becomes how far and how quickly must we move to the left to avoid the impending national disaster which Reagonomics and other aspects of corporate welfare is about to drop in our laps.

I would like to indulge this thread in an off topic moment because I don't know where the appropriate place for this is. I've seen it referenced in a thread, but can't find it. Please forgive me for this side-trip. If anyone wishes to discuss, please start a new thread.

Someone mentioned Halliburton moving to Dubai to be where the oil action is in the Middle East. I found another possible reason for moving to Dubai as well, "No extradition or mutual legal assistance treaties (MLAT) exist between the United States and the UAE,".

Call me paranoid, but my guess is this factored into their decision as well. This places all the high muckety-mucks outside the subpoena power of Congress. We won't be able to find out what happened to that $10,000,000,000 that we gave them that has gone missing, or at least unaccounted for. Much of it probably went to move them out of the reach of the law.

Thank you for your indulgence. Now, let's get back on topic.

BGP: I said "worry" not "believe". Here is my worry: an intelligent person whose deeply-held political beliefs are at great variance from those of a large part of the the polity, who believes he needs to win the support of a fair number of them, is immediately faced with the idea that he should conceal his beliefs from them.

Now, I don't automatically see anything sinister in this. I think all politicians do it to one degree or another. And it needn't even be a conscious process.

The old Communist Party were brilliant at this. To the ordinary naive liberal, they were just liberals in a hurry, but better organized.

They believed in trade union rights -- except where they had power.

They believed in racial equality -- except for reactionary races, in the places they had power.

They believed in democracy. They believed in peace . Except ... etc.

This sort of dissumulation became a way of life. Eventually, for sure, the mask grew into the face -- at least in the democracies. Today, the remnants of the old Communist Parties are just social democrats in terms of their practical policies, given that they are adjuncts of much broader leftish coalitions.

But the hard Left mentality of the Stalinists -- capitalism is responsible for all social ills, and anything to destroy it is justified, including lying and violence -- is very deep-rooted.

My worry would be that Obama has absorbed some ofthis worldview -- his wife certainly seems to have it, being someone who has been given many privileges because of her race, and yet who still burns with resentment towards her own country.

How might it express itself in practice? The President of the United States, even with a heavily Democratic Congress, would still be constrained from doing too many destructive things.

My fear would be the kind of people he would surround himself with, and give power to. I don't want policy in the United States to be influenced to the least degree by people who, for example, see Cuba as some sort of model society. And that is exactly what all those peace-loving anti-racist "progressives" like Obama's mentor, which all the liberals here are acting so naive about, do.

On the other hand, there is an optimistic variant, summarized in the word, "backlash".

Are you also worried that McCain may have been brain-washed while in North Vietnamese captivity and is really a "sleeper" agent?

>163 Doug1943: "I would worry that he has imbibed, at an early age, the sort of general radical hate-America stuff that is the stock-in-trade of the far Left." - Doug

Check the man's body language.

>168 A_musing: "Are you also worried that McCain may have been brain-washed while in North Vietnamese captivity and is really a "sleeper" agent?" - A_musing

Ah ha! That's what happened to Bush while he was AWOL. He was being programmed by Halliburton operatives to take over the country. Bwa ha ha!

It's a painful subject for those few liberals who remember their history, I know.

Better to make a joke about it. Or use the word "McCarthyism".

"Better to make a joke about it."

Or to prattle on with old-school Marxist irrelevancies.

As Karl Marx didn't say ... those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

As Groucho Marx said ... I'm sorry, but those are my principles. if you don't like them, I have others.

As my beloved old Classics professor Gwyn Morgan used to say, apropos of the cyclical view of history: "This is something historians say so they don't have to go get a real job."

I'm with the first person who quotes Sancho Panza in this exchange.

'Badges? We don' need no steenkin' badges!'

Satchmo Panzer? Didn't he play trumpet under Rommel?

Ok, I'm sorry. I'll go away.

You can see the day to day movement here:

http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/2008/01/superdelegate-list.html

Discussion of Obama's history in Powell's review of Shelby Steele's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win.

Thanks for the link, NativeRoses. The review is really interesting!

Stanley Fish doesn't think Obama can win, either, and it has nothing to do with his race:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/why-mccain-would-vote-for-obama/index.h...

Shellby Steele is, to use the parlance of my generation, a "hater." His polemic is completely without merit.* As for Stanley Fish, he completely ignores the fact that most Americans are not opposed to: conducting diplomatic relations with our enemies; acting on, you guessed it, actionable intelligence against our non-state enemies; and ending a war which is being sold as a near victory even though there has been zero political reconsiliation**, the Iranian President is treated like a genuine hero by the sitting government and the only region within the nation which ever had a chance at establishing a degree of autonomy/political stability is currently engaged in a soft war with the region's greatest military power, Turkey.

The debate between Obama and McCain will be a debate between a Realist and a Neo-Conservative, and, after nearly eight years of neo-conservative bungling, Realism will win the day.

*"Here, sit down awhile and listen while I psychoanalyse an individual I don't even know..."
**excepting, of course, the new design for the Iraqi flag--that was a major victory!

If McCain hopes to win on foreign policy, good luck to him. American foreign policy is hanging in tatters after 7 years of blundering mismanagement. Any Republican nominee hoping to capitalize on an area where a good number of Americans (rightly or wrongly) have little interest and only bitter memories is, I believe, barking up the wrong tree. It's a hot topic among policy wonks, but looming recession and other domestic issues tend to obscure its significance.

As for the Iraqi "success" story, I'll believe it when George Bush can walk the sunny streets of Baghdad with the same supreme confidence as the President of Iran. They owe us a dozen roses for delivering this prize straight into their hands. Conciliation between Iraq and Iran - now there's a foreign policy coup!

btw, thanks for the link, it was an interesting read nonetheless...

fish is a bit naive to think the republicans will only raise the iraq war and economic policy issues against obama. barack hussein obama will be depicted as a radical islamist, far leftist, crypto-stalinist, manchurian candidate, who additionally supports the Weather Underground. michelle obama's BA thesis will become campaign fodder as an example of a lack of patriotism. republicans will suggest that obama court appointments will include al sharpton and lani guinier. if obama can withstand this sort of thing, he'll be in good shape on november 4th.

(edited to reflect new information provided in #201)

Oh, theoria, it is much worse than that: according to this editorial in the NYT last Friday those diabolical Republicans plan to attack Obama on...the issues, and - have they no decency? - his voting record:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/us/politics/29oppo.html?hp&pagewanted=prin...

I was pleasantly surprised to see that McCain made it clear that Obama's middle name is not a campaign issue. In fact, he went much further than that, and for that I applaud him.

I was NOT surprised that he had to do it. The Republican Dirt Machine is one reason I will rarely vote in that direction. Willie Horton....GAY MARRIAGE!!! Swift Boat...

I hope McCain will stay above the fray, but I fear it won't be long before we start hearing about feminazis or IslamObamafascists.

I would love to be proven wrong.

I'm afraid the 527's will be more than happy to do the dirty work. Didn't George Bush kinda sorta condemn the "swiftboating"? It's a way for candidates to benefit from dirty tactics without getting their hands dirty.

The fact that Limbaugh et al. can holler like stuck pigs and have minimal impact on the election thus far gives me cautious hope that the era of hatespeech and blatantly false propaganda as a means of motivating voters is coming to a close. But I'll believe it when I see it.

Well, you won't be proven wrong - there will always be that sordid element to politics, but I think too many people give it far too much credence.

In chess, the best defense against flank attacks is controlling the center. I think the same holds in politics.

I think Makifat has the correct view, in this instance.

If it were just Limbaugh, I would rest easy. But Limbaugh was not responsible for Willie Horton, or the Swift Boaters. Limbaugh was not the one who made Max Cleland look like a traitor to his country.

My point was that Limbaugh and his ilk are the end of the meatgrinder, where the sausage comes out and is disseminated to a (hopefully shrinking) gullible audience. Far be it from me to suggest that Rush was the "brains" behind any organization. As to whether there is a close coordinated effort between the clandestine campaign operatives, the 527 muckety-mucks and the right-wing media, I don't know. I just think that stuff rolls downhill.

Regarding Horton, we mustn't forget that Rove learned at the feet of Atwater (who, incidently, spent his last days on earth begging forgiveness from those he'd slandered). I don't really believe that Karl is sitting this one out.

Why, enevada, I don't know what to say! I'm glad you added "in this instance". ;)

#191: "in this instance" : Yes, no planets will collide or anything, that way.

I think there is a brand of Republicans, McCain perhaps included, who are beginning to realize the damage that pandering to the loud mouthed bigots has done to their party. Yes, they've built a very strong base in the South and West, but it's cost them Wall Street, and they've scared off so much of the New York/Pennsylvania establishment Republicans that it's looking like it will be a long time before they can take back the Congress.

Of course, there is a new generation of loud mouthed bigots, like Coulter, and we won't really know the impact they have for another election cycle or two.

Is it really beyond the ken, to think that there is a great majority of Republican voters who make decisions based on issues and grounded in basic political philosophy? And that these Republican voters are your neighbors, your friends, your local PTO supporters, your bus driver, etc.?

It seems to me that you all pay much too much attention to the loud-mouths, to the mytholigical base than to actual voters.

But carry on.

yes, actually it is beyond the ken.

For evidence I present George W. Bush, for eight years.

Not at all beyond the ken, but also not at all beyond the ken to thing that some of those people (especially the ones I'm actually related to) really do fit into the category of loud-mouthed bigots. But, then, you'd have to meet my relatives some time.

My favorite so far this year...the email that Barak Obama is a radical muslim. The email points you to snopes.com to verify the contents. Of course, if you go to snopes, they will tell you it is a fabrication.

Imagine that. The spinmeisters are so cynical about the intelligence of their target audience, they are willing to offer proof that what they are saying is bogus, on the assumption that no one will bother to check.

I would love to think that my conservative neighbors and bus drivers are influenced more by Wm. F. Buckley than by "Doc" Limbaugh. Unfortunately, while LT conservatives are definitely more towards the thinking end of the spectrum, the conservative plumbers, co-workers, neighbors, gym associates, etc. that I have encountered over the last 20 years have, almost to a man, considered Rush to be a representative man of the people, who tells it like it is, and calls a spade a spade (and I do mean that in the most obnoxious sense).*

Drive down Thomas Street here in Phoenix on just about any Saturday, and you will see crowds of these folks, misspelled placards in hand, raging against the Mexicans. I doubt they're all stoked up from watching "The McLaughlin Group" on Friday night.

*Note that these are the same endearing "qualities" that managed to squeak George Bush into the White House, not once but twice. Apparently, you can fool most of the conservatives most of the time.

197
"..on the assumption that no one will bother to check."

Well, that's what we have Faux News for: to make up the facts so we don't have too.

#198: It would be very interesting to get their impression of you.

I don't mean that as an insult - but, perhaps you are operating on misperceptions?

I like the quiet conversations that I have with people as they always reveal great depths to people that I would have otherwise assumed weren't there.

#185 - You mean like Barack Obama's association with known domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers?

200

Oh, I think they suppose I'm just a poor deluded soul. I was going to give an example of my "misperception", but it would probably get me flagged. I will only say that when I have feigned sympathy (or at least kept my mouth shut), I have heard things that made my blood run cold. Like the old guy in the library who, while smiling sweetly at my 3 year old, informed me that the Mexicans were "vermin" and should be "exterminated." Mainly because they sit in a garage in his neighborhood, drinking beer.

I'm well aware of extreme positions on the left. But it seems that they are more or less marginalized as "kooks". I tend not to look at advocates of genocide as kooks.

201
Ok, maybe not all lefty kooks are harmless.

btw, I just heard Mr. McCain on the tv last night stating that just because he accepts endorsement/contributions from certain parties, it doesn't mean he supports their beliefs. Perhaps Mr. Obama feels the same way about the "good works" Ayers has apparently done in Chicago, and shrugs off the "revolutionary" statements of an old leftie bomb-thrower reliving his past "bad boy" glory.

Do you only associate with people whose beliefs and opinions you endorse 100%?

My best friend is a liberal, but then again, he hasn't tried to bomb our nation's capital. Well, I don't know for sure. I'll have to ask him about that.

I do kind of find it interesting, however, that people made such a big deal out of Ron Paul accepting a donation from a white supremacist, refusing to return the donation, and not apologizing for accepting it. But that's politics, I suppose. No one ever said the game was rational.

Wasn't it Ms. Coulter and Mr. Bolton who both advocated bombing some key buildings? At least Mr. Ayers had the courage of his convictions (sorry, sick joke!).

I hadn't heard that about Paul. Doesn't change my opinion of him one way or another. I just wish his supporters would clean up after themselves.

>204 codyed: The Weather Underground was not a liberal organization. They formed in order to initiate a full fledged class war within America. That has never been a part of the liberal agenda. Yes, it is true that multiple former members of the organization are now a part of academia. Yes, at least two of the former members reside in Chicago, one of them (Ayers) works at the same university which Obama taught at and Obama and Ayers are "on friendly terms" because the two of them sat on the board of the same local NGO.

All things considered, there can be no disputing the fact that Ayers and Obama viewed and actively engaged the world in their youth in very different ways. The Weather Underground were responsible for quite a bit of property damage, and they certainly should have been held accountable. They weren't. That is unfortunate, and it is in no way Obama's fault. Ultimately, it would be foolish to contend that Obama has violated some moral or ethical principle by establishing a working and friendly relationship with an individual who is a practical and active member in an NGO which fights for community rights in a perfectly legal manner.

I will return to the initial subject of the thread, which I take as "What kind of president would Obama be?" I expect to vote for him, as I think another Republican president at this time would be an utter disaster. And I think he would be entirely competent. However, as a liberal, I have some grounds for concern on that question. An article by Matt Gonzalez summarizes some of the issues:

http://beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5413

Matt Gonzalez is the vice presidential candidate on the Nader ticket, so you have to consider the source, but he points out some troubling facts in Obama's record.

-- He has voted in favor of every war appropriation
-- He voted to confirm Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of state
-- He voted to re-authorize the Patriot Act
-- He campaigned in support of pro-war Lieberman and against Ned Lamont
-- He has repeatedly advocated adding 100,000 combat troops to the US standing army
-- He has said that he will keep many troops in Iraq, and that those withdrawn may be redeployed to Afghanistan
-- He voted in favor of the so called "class action fairness act" which forces such cases into Federal courts. These are both backlogged and dominated by Republicans.
-- He voted against capping credit card interest rates at 30%
-- He opposed a bill to reform the Mining Act, an 1872 law that allows mineral extraction from public lands with almost no royalty payments to the government -- perhaps under lobbyist influence.
-- He is a big supporter of corn based ethanol as a gasoline replacement. Corn ethanol production is driving up food prices, makes no economic sense, must be supported by massive government subsidies, and is bad for the environment.
-- He voted against censuring George Bush for breaking the law in surveillance of US citizens.

I can add that both he and Clinton have turned the primary battle into a stupid personality contest.

We have seen that many people, especially young people, who had previously been uninvolved in US politics are excited by who he is and by his oratory, so that they are drawn into the political process. That's good. But what we'll get, if he is elected, is a guy whose political positions are calculated, not heartfelt.

Monday morning's smile

* if you're a delicate soul who cringes at the word f---, b----, or s---, don't click the link

Idaho?

I been to Idaho. He ain't from Idaho.

more monday morning humor

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-3oOjg2Cjs

who knew? :-D

>212 NativeRoses:

You know someone is a serious contender when the tabloids start printing trash. But Obama is not really on the "A" list until he gets to meet the space alien.

From a recent article ~ This Good Friday Let Us Not Crucify Barack Obama:

As I see it our choice is between a good and heroic old man whose time has past and who will perpetuate failed policy, a jaded woman of the establishment, who will do anything to perpetuate her family's dynastic "claim" to power, and a brilliant, openhearted new founding father the likes of which America has not seen.

>215 NativeRoses:
I hope you're right.

> a brilliant, openhearted new founding father the likes of which America has not seen.

A bit over the top, don't you think?

> a jaded woman of the establishment

A bit under the top for a woman who has worked and paid her dues in pursuit of this job. Far more than the her Democratic competitor, she has mastered the details of policy and knows the talent to fill the thousands of jobs that will develop & execute the next President's agenda.

While I hope for the sake of the country that Senator Obama is all that his supporters believe, I really do think that Senator Clinton is the better candidate to stickhandle all the truly difficult, boring, IMPORTANT and not charismatic tasks that await the next President.

i'd have to disagree based on the way she's run her campaign and the 'talent' she's utilized. Obama surpasses her in both areas.

We should give credit where credit is due. HRC has shown some clear leadership on the wave of mortgage foreclosures. Obama still hasn't been crisp on the issue. He ties it to the war, which isn't quite correct: The war economy did not cause the collapse in credit. That was caused by too much easy money without regulation or transparency. The war economy does make it very likely that remedies for the credit crunch will lead to stagflation. I think Obama gets too many economic ideas from that neoliberal adviser from the Univerisity of Chicago, Austan Goolsbee. Goolsbee's position on subprime lending was very poor.

On the other hand, those who actually saw Obama's speech on Wright and issues of race, see in Obama, correctly I think, one who could influence belief structures in this country to achieve change. That may be the critical quality we need.

I think both Clinton and Obama have handled the Michigan/Florida problem very cynically: Clinton by attempting to dodge the rules to pick up cheap delegates, Obama by blocking the revote, which could hurt him in November in those key states.

As for McCain: Clearly he has no understanding of the economy -- his recent speech on this showed as much -- and if he is elected, the wars will continue until the country is utterly broke and discredited. He may even intend military strikes on Iran, which would be a catastrophe.

Update -- Obama's latest speech on the economy hits pretty close to the mark, and seems to leave the neoliberalism behind. I liked it.

Obama's Inner Circle

* originally posted to the RV forum