Barack Obama made a huge deal out of ending partisanship in DC.
He then pretty much slammed the door shut once he was elected. Democrats got all the positions of power. When Nancy Pelosi moved to squelch any chance of open, public debate on any issue, Obama was dutifully silent.
Yesterday we got a perfect example of just how partisan things are in DC under Obama’s spirit of bipartisanship. Obama had this opinion on the U.S. Department of Homeland Securitys Intercity Bus Security Grant Program:
“the awards are not based on risk assessment, and the homeland security investments in intercity bus security should be evaluated in the context of the risks faced and relative benefits to be gained.”
That opinion caused either one of two events to occur:
- The super-powerful American Bus Association sprung to action , rallying the voters to apply pressure all over the country. Feeling the pressure from disgruntled inter-city bus riders, Senators all over the country, including states that have no inter-city buses, caved under the pressure, and threw Obama under the inter-city bus and voted to keep the funding in place.
- OR, the fact that the amendment to remove the funding from appropriations was submitted by a Republican was too much to bear for the highly charged partisan Democrats and they couldn’t support it for that reason alone. Again, throwing Obama under the inter-city bus for no particular reason other than they couldn’t vote with a Republican.
Bottom line, Obama’s recommendation failed 51-47. It got so bad that among those voting against the amendment Obama recommended were Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Harry Reid of Nevada ( of course ), Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana, Thomas Harkin of Iowa, both Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Mark Begich of Alaska. Can anyone tell me why someone from Hawaii would feel they know more about urban bus security than the President of the United States of America? Senators with obviously no dog in this race felt compelled to go against the President, and most ranking member of their party, rather than support a Republican. The world’s not going to come crumbling down because we, according to Obama, are wasting another six million dollars. But, don’t expect any miracles from this leader. When push comes to shove, Obama disappears.
During the presidential campaign of 2008, John McCain, the straight shooter, said he’d consider taxing health benefits in order to pay for expanding health coverage to everyone else. It was one of the deciding factors in deciding the race. Obama jumped all over McCain on the issue, and of course, promied everyone his coverage would be free. He would never tax health benefits. Think I’m exaggerating a bit? Let’s look and see at a few examples:
Now, after being elected, Obama is open to taxing health care benefits:
President Barack Obama is leaving the door open to taxing health care benefits, something he campaigned hard against while running for president.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., raised the issue with Obama during a private meeting Tuesday with the president and other Democratic senators and later reported the president’s response: “It’s on the table. It’s an option.”
I’m waiting for all those groups that so enthusiastically trashed McCain for pondering the idea to do exactly the same to Obama. Come on you unions and firefighters, I double-dog dare ya to stand by your word.
30
Oct
Some media are having a difficult time reacting to the charges by McCain that they are completely and unashamedly pushing their candidate. They have discussed it, they have debated, and some to a small degree, have admitted it. If one has any doubts at all, all they need to is go to CNN’s front page this morning and look at the headlines:
Obama is featured in no less than SIX headline articles. Joe Biden’s mentioend in one. The only mention of John McCain is CNN finding members of his own party criticizing him.
I don’t want to ever hear CNN make the claim they are an unbaised, fair, reporting media again. Ever. They’ve gone beyond biased to the point of poisoned.
I rarely read something I just love any more. It seems to me most media, and I’m not talking main stream media, I’m talking the whole enchilada, are hell bent on dumbing down their content for entertainment value. There are a lot I’m sure that just can’t help it. I mean does anyone really expect high prose from Markos Moulitsas or Matt Drudge? However, a lot of them could do better, but just don’t try. A major part of that would be showing respect and civility. To me, the discourse is top-down. If you set a standard as an author, your readers will be much more likely to respond in kind due to nothing more than peer pressure. I don’t allow garbage and trash talking. Without overtly saying it anywhere here, my comments by and large seem to reflect that. They can tell it in my tone, and I think, respond in kind.
Mike Shelton takes a view at this rush to be witty, creative, and most usually insulting to a larger scale. He cites many instances where people are trying to help Obama, but really cause him a lot more issues than help by being so over-the-top or insulting. He mentions Sandra Bernhard, I mentioned her here as well. By being insulting and talking trash, she most likely hardened some lukewarm supporters of McCain. Or, most likely, hardened some lukewarm anti-Obama voters. Sure, she’s a comic, but her intent was completely undermined by her inability to communicate in a civilized manner. And, I also feel she felt she had a license to talk the way she does because she’s a comic and she therefore can just say whatever she pleases without any consequence whatsoever. He could tell Hollywood to keep the rhetoric a little lower key, but he won’t, they’re his messengers with cash.
But, I digress, it’s the overall situation of communication in America that bothers me, and I think Mile Shelton as well. It seems people have to go for the kill when simply stating their view would work. Most often, as Joe Biden will tell you, it is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. He’d be President today possibly if he had stuck to the point and not gone for the slam dunk. Most often, his content was correct, his slam dunks way off the mark. People completely forget the intent or content, his slam dunk screwups will stick with him forever.
I am also curious as to why so many people feel a need to refer to others in bizarro misspellings of their names. I mean, I have seen Obama referred to as:
- Obambi
- Nobama
- Obamalamadingdong
McCain’s had his share of name distortions. Biden a few as well. I can’t even repeat a lot of the name distortions for Palin here.
Clue here peeps, that really makes you look childish. I don’t do it, I focus on the content.
Then there’s the content. I have noticed in this race probably the highest level of inaccurate information I think I’ve ever seen in any race in my lifetime. From Obama being a certified Muslim-in-hiding terrorist to Palin’s husband being the father of their daughter’s baby. In Palin’s caase, it has been ceaseless.
Clue here peeps, whether Dan Rather or just someone posting a comment on a board, when you post something that’s easily proven wrong, you’re ruined. Sure, others may chime in and join the mob, but in the long run, people will know you just prefer to gossip and are void of verified information.
The reason I mentioned Mike Shelton earlier is because he cited a few examples of what I have harped on here in the past. In exuberance of support for their candidate, by being offensive, insulting, trashy, and disrespectful, they are not doing their candidate any good at all. It makes a lot of people feel they personally are being attacked for supporting their candidate. Some people who might not feel compelled to vote will vote simply because they feel pressured to do so because they were attacked. What was simply a DC issue becomes personal.
And, to a large degree, at this point, since it’s been going on so long, I hold the candidates partially responsible. Obama could tell Kos and Moveon to take the high road, but he hasn’t, and won’t. They’re his foot soldiers. He could tell Keith Olbermann and others to lay off the hyperbolic hate, but he won’t, they’re his messengers. He could publicly chastise those that do go over the top. But, he won’t. They are doing his work for him. And, they may cost him the election.
I don’t believe the polls much at all. If a race is a blow-out, the polls will tell you that. If the race is close, the polls will tell you that. However, when it comes to saying which candidate will win in a close race, they’re not that good. I also think that polls generally tend to reflect the latest headlines. However, as with the last two elections, the polls did not very well reflect the outcome of the race. A lot of people, especially in 2000, could NOT understand what had happened. I think it was simple. There’s a large number of people out there that do not take polls, do not post vitriol online, and do not go to those places online where vitriol runs the show. And for the most part, avoid most of the internet because vitriol and disrespect are so rampant on this “anonymous” venue. Whereas a lot of the disrespect and vitriol comes from people who will not vote, these people do.
Think about that. And, if you’re not gonna listen to me, listen to Mike Shelton.
A lot is being made over Obama’s lipstick on a pig comment. Some are interpreting it to mean he’s sexist. Some are interpreting it to mean he thinks McCain is a pig. If you wanna get real crazy, you could call it it Muslim ideology:
Now, Obama has resisted prevailing rumors that he is ( gasp ), Muslim. So, to use a pig as an insult kind of reinforces that prevailing issue. Sure, that’s not what it’s all about, but I believe the subconscious has a lot more influence on people than given credit. When you keep reinforcing something, it tends to eventually affect your overt actions. Used systematically, this is called brainwashing. Some media does it quite well by repeating the same message over and over and over. Eventually, some people just accept it as fact and alter their decision making process accordingly. The message has been put out there that he’s a covert in-the-clost terrorist-sympathizing Muslim. The last thing he needs to do is covertly reinforce that image. He just did that. The other side is he’s completely ignorant of Muslim tradition and therefore could be a liability dealing with the most pressing of our foreign relations issues. Not good.
Pretty nutty huh? Yeah it is. But to his credit, he’s now saying that it couldn’t be all that bad since he got the line from McCain. In other words, he plagiarized it, stole it, whatever. It was not his original line. The defense quite honestly, sounds worse than the “crime”.
And then of course, there is the issue of whether he’s slamming Palin because of her lipstick hockey moms comment. If so, then he’s sexist. Implying that hockey moms and pigs are the same.
But, the real issue with that quote in my opinion is the stammering delivery. I hate “uh”. It makes the presenter sound kind of stupid. It is Bush’s habit of stammering with “uh” that has killed his image in my opinion. Now, considering this was not an interview of any sort, but a prepared speech, that makes it even more disturbing to me.
Bottom line, using that analogy was a no-win situation for multiple angles. “Lipstick” belonged to Palin, the entire comment belonged to McCain, pigs having religious connotations which either he respects but carries a stigma in the US, or he is completely ignorant of, and while McCain was comparing it to an inanimate object, Obama was describing another person.
Bottomest line, it was a horribly poor choice of words for the context it was presented in. Someone should have clued him in. Or, most likely, he’s wingning it. If so, not good. People keep talking about what a magnificent speaker Obama is. However, so far, I am far from impressed. If it’s prepared and rehearsed, he’s good. If not, he’s quite often very bad. When the campaign’s over, he won’t have the opportunity to prepare himself for all deliveries. Think about that.
And while you’re thinking about all that, think about this cartoon:
Cartoon ran immediately before Obama's speech
And his speech 0m 9/8/08:
‘Watch out George Bush,’ Obama said with sarcasm, according to NBC News. ‘Except for economic policies, and tax policies, and energy policies, and health care policies, and education policies, and Karl Rove-style politics — except for all that, we’re really going to bring change to Washington ! We’re really going to shake things up!’”
Disclaimer, he had previously used the the cartoon and attributed Toles. However, I think if you’re going to lift lines straight from someone else, you need to cite them every time. If you don’t, then you wind up with people seeing the one incidence and thinking, well, it was stolen. Just another example that makes me wonder what exactly it is about Obama’s speech skills that make people think he’s very good at all. Of the speech we’re discussing now, the two most memorable lines were taken directly from a cartoon and his opponent. Of course, I have omitted the “fish stinks” line entirely. That one is so old and used that it really doesn’t say anything at all about the presenter.
H/T: AKD from The Volokh Conspiracy
Yet another update: I am quite pleased in the fact I was made aware of the Tom Toles cartoon plagiarism thingy apparently before Scott Ott was. Now, if I could just make my posts wittier or funnier than Scott’s, I’d be set!
Thursday night John McCain gave a rousing speech, finishing it off with a call to fight. His urge was barely audible over the wildly cheering crowd:
Apparently excited that they finally had a candidate that felt their pain, several hundred anarchists promptly got arrested chanting “F**k the police!”.
OK, hands up here, how many people ever thought they’d see the day when anarchists would be openly displaying their support for a Republican?
I’m stunned.
Since when do towns have “Governors”?
Obama cites her title, then ignores her position.
Her position as running a state government qualified other notable candidates in the past as “experienced” such as Ronald Reagan, which Obama has praised in the past. His position is he has more experience than a small town mayor. I guess we can all agree on that. However, he obviously doesn’t have as much experience as a governor. That’s where his problem is. Two other sides to the problem he’s facing making this argument:
- He’s running on change. However, he’s trying to position himself as better at every angle than McCain/Palin. Which is it? He can’t be more experienced than McCain and still be an agent of change. He just needs to drop that angle and use it to his advantage. Something like “change you can believe in” or something like that. Surrounding himself with insiders and claiming he’s been doing this for years just undermines that “change you can believe in” argument since almost no one trusts Congress any more.
- He needs to quit swift-boating himself ala Kerry. Kerry worried himself to death on a non-issue ( exactly what he did in Vietnam thirty years before ), and allowed other issues to go unanswered and unchallenged. He should have just dropped it and moved on. If he had, it would have been forgotten in short order. Obama’s bizarre focus on “experience” is having the same effect. Issues he could be hammering McCain and Palin on are being over-shadowed by Obama worrying himself sick over proving he’s right on every single minutae. This is not an issue Obama’s going to win this year. However, it’s not an issue he has to win this year. It is an issue however, he can beat himself with. And the more he works to prove the unprovable, the more likely he is to make more really dumb statements like he is more experienced than governors of small towns.
29
Aug
Now, my peeps here know how I feel about Condi Rice. So, I think, smarting from the Obama/Hillary dustup, Anderson Cooper decided to try and turn the wheels on McCain by planting the seed of discontent in folks like me over McCain “snubbing” Condi in the manner of Obama snubbing Clinton. Two serious differences here that should have been blatantly obvious to Cooper:
- Condi never showed any interest at all by attempting to run for president.
- Condi flat out said she was not interested in pursuing politics of any sort after she serves her time in DC. She’d rather be the NFL commissioner.
Bottom line, it was never an option. Now, the media put a lot into the “vetting” process. Some people claim that Condi was never even vetted ala Clinton never being vetted. Who the hell would see a need to “vet” either one?
I would have loved to have seen Condi on the ticket. However, as I posted a long time ago, I knew it was never an option. She’s just too smart to put up with dictators and political thugs for more than her time demands. In order to run for office, she’d have to knock her IQ down another notch or two. I just don’t see her ever doing that, or having a need to. Think I’m stretching the sarcasm a bit? Check out the comments on Cooper’s post. Check out how many of those people think Alaska has a population of 8,500. Check out how many of those people are basing their “informed” decision based on the fact she has never done anything but be a mayor of a small town. Check out how many think she’s never been out of the country before. Then, check this out:
Palin in Kuwait
That’s not Alaska, that’s Kuwait. Finding that pic took about five seconds. When people make up their mind, they’re not going to spend that five seconds to validate their opinion. It’s just made up and that’s that. In their mind, she has never been to Kuwait, the pictures don’t mean a thing. In their mind, either Alaska has 8,000 or so citizens, or she’s never been governor. Facts are irrelevent. They’ve made up their mind.
Alaska has 300,000 or so citizens, state employees, and a budget that makes most states look simple. Senators have small staffs, no real budget to manage, and are directly responsible for no one citizen. So yeah, the comments on Cooper’s post are sad. Real sad. Really about the only “support” most gave was she was not Joe Biden.
Condi’s too smart for politics. That is the ugly side of democracy. And, given her abilities, I don’t blame her.
Just a personal note to Anderson Cooper. I make it a point to challenge all statements made on my blog. If I get overwhelmed with comments, I close them until I can catch up. Sure, I’m biased, but not in what either party is usually offering me today. I can not understand how a “professional” like Cooper and others can honestly look at the tripe being thrown into their domain and just let it sit there. There are some incredibly stupid comments that are there for eternity testifying the level of intellect that is the Anderson Cooper reader. I couldn’t live with that. I don’t live with that. Someone says something wrong here, I correct it. If it’s right, I acknowledge it. If it’s intentionally inflamatory, I delete it. But, what I am not going to do is make the other readers here feel stupid by letting the quality level drop to sub-zero. You better think here. If not, CNN’s more than happy to accept it.
28
Aug
I have never really figured Dick Morris out. I like that. I like that a lot. A lot of people have been scratching their heads over Obama’s campaign so far. To the average guy who doesn’t get caught up in hysteria or hype, it’s been very puzzling. It’s not to me. And, apparently it’s not to Dick Morris either:
……This pattern of shooting at the decoy, not the duck, gives McCain a bold strategic opportunity. He can nullify the impact of the entire Democratic convention simply by distancing himself from Bush.
Now, Dick goes on to list a LONG list of MAJOR differences between McCain and Bush. That’s not even the whole list. You can’t get much different within the same party as Bush and McCain right now. That’s where the deception is occurring. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary, and now Obama have based their current political position on trashing Bush mercilessly.
As I’ve noted here before, what are they going to do next? Bush is not running for anything. The more they trash Bush, the easier the ride is for McCain. The logic is simple: Republicans know the difference between Bush and McCain. Nothing Obama or Biden says will mean anyhing to about half the people that will vote. Now, the real shocker will come when they realize that a good majority of Obama’s core already know this as well. They were cheering McCcain when he trashed Bush in 2000. They were cheering McCain when he bucked Bush very visibly on several key issues. They cheered McCain when he teamed up with Russ Feingold to clean up campaign finance in DC. Now, they are being hammered to death that the man they cheered for being so different from Bush over the last eight years, is, in their candidates’ minds, the same thing as Bush. And, the man more likely to agree with and priase Bush on many key issues, Joe Biden, is the “change” they’ve been promised.
Go figure that one.
Better yet, go try to sell it.
Best advice for Obama, attack McCain, not the windmill.
Best advice for whoever might read this, read the rest of Dick Morris’s piece, it’s spot-on.
I’ve seen this a couple of times:
Sure, they’ve been spotted together a few times, but the bottom line is no. Obama doesn’t appeal to the rational, middle of the road Democrats who would think it would be swell to sell out his party. He also doesn’t appeal to the rabid Republicans who would jump ship to support a Democrat candidate just to help out a Republican who has traditionally shown little loyalty to his fellow party members. In addition, Hagel’s voting record would make it impossible for the two to consistently stump together and speak as one voice on a LOT of issues.
I’m getting really tired of media “speculating” that every person Obama, and McCain as well, appears in public with is “a potential running mate”.
Obama will pick who Obama picks. I’m sure that is probably what’s going on in Hawaii right now. He’ll weigh the impact of his short list, how they get along together ( read agree on issues ), and whether or not that person will bring something to the campaign table ( read votes and contributions ). What I do not see is Obama, or McCain for that matter, picking someone that will either distract their core voters, or upstage the candidate. For that reason, Hagel doesn’t have a chance.
