We need leadership. We need change. We need diplomacy. We need unity. We need a President of the US who actually respects Americans. We need a President who wants the American people to have a voice. We need a people's President, not a politician's President. We don't merely want..we need Barack Obama. The Democratic Party has a past, but is in dire need of a future. The Democratic Party needs Barack Obama.
All men may be created equal, but in America, they are not all educated equally. So, what we don't need is the MSM hijacking this election by failing the American people as poorly as the outgoing administration has.
Every few weeks, I think Hillary's idea of campaigning couldn't sink (no wonder she calls it the kitchen sink) any lower. But miraculously, with a talent that must make her momma proud, she liberally applies the old bait and switch and manages to sink to new depths. By now, I'm feeling the same anger, the same outrage that previously, only the Bush regime inspired in me. And it's impossible not to compare that type of inspiration to the inspiration I get from Barack Obama. Inspiration does make a difference or as I once heard someone put it, "There are two kinds of teachers in this world. Those who teach you what to do and those who teach you what NOT to do. And they are BOTH equally important."
It's no longer about experience vs hope. Unfortunately for her, the release of her White House records offers a truthful account of her experience, something she seems so embarrassingly incapable of doing. Neither hope nor unity nor change (apart from gender) is a message anything about Hillary conveys. It is so painfully clear by now that you are either with her or 'agin' her, like some petty political version of Hatfield v McCoy. Only to Hillary, 'agin her' equals 'you don't count'...unless she wins the nomination in which case, no worries...you will begin to matter in the fall.
It's no surprise to me that seniors have turned out to be her most consistent supporters. Her strength among that demographic reminds me of what was termed the 'graying' of baseball. Once the national pastime and perhaps the most intelligent sport of all, it has been completely usurped, for anyone under a certain age, by both basketball and football...with the sole exception being corporate sponsors, another coincidental parallel. Reaching a younger demographic with the 'Do you know how smart you have to be...how many details are involved and how deep your knowledge has to run to make the calls that win the game?' (yawn) That brand of 'know how' just doesn't pull them in like it used to. With politicians like her, the 'politics as usual' stereotype (gender being her sole distinction and no more of a reason to vote for someone than race), it's also no surprise that the under 35 crowd turns out to vote in trickles...Until this year and mainly thanks to Obama.
Obama is, ironically, more like basketball. It's a completely different game and one that speaks to all ages, all races and all genders. It's a pace that seems so refreshing to anyone who doesn't understand the myriad of intellectual intricacies involved in baseball. And let's face it...if Americans, as a group, had IQ levels that high, Bush would never have been elected. I could recount endless stories of stupidity, but I'll only bore you with one so indicative of many.
Before we bombed Iraq, while traveling, I stopped at a diner in the mountains of Virginia and asked the waitress whether she thought we should bomb Iraq or not. Her response (in a heavy mountain drawl), "I think they deserve it for what they done to us." I asked her what they did. "For killing millions of Americans in the World Trade Center." Iraq killed millions by bombing the World Trade Center. Yes, Mr. Rove knew his target demographic well. And so, apparently, does Hillary. As obvious as Hillary's appeal to seniors is Obama's appeal to the more educated among us.
He invites even the repulsive, even the opposition to engage. No, he doesn't have the 'I'll kick your ass' mentality. What he has is called diplomacy, in case recent history has caused people to forget the concept ever existed. He challenges us to rise above what has been to pave a path, not only to what could be, but what we WANT it to be. He dares us not to settle for second best. He reminds us that the good is often the enemy of the best. Sure, it involves risk given his limited time on the national stage therefore limited TVQ rendering him somewhat of a question mark to some and especially to those who vote based more on name recognition than on knowledge. And back to the 'graying of' combined with the 'merits' of TVQ analogy, back in the day, who didn't wish network TV would rise above a level of pap? And who in their right mind wishes HBO had never come along? It wasn't that long ago that cable tv was a risk.
Americans are all about risk. It is our legacy. It is our heritage. It is what drove us to a position of world leadership. Our country's founders worried about pioneering issues like survival and people now are worried about the risk of a pioneering politician? You don't get there with complacency. You don't get there by doing the same things over and over, aka politics as usual, which, in some circles, conclude that phrase with 'and expecting different results' thus it becomes the very definition of insanity. Have we gone insane to think that this woman, who is only different because she is a female politician, not because she is different as a politician, is going to bring about any of the vital changes necessary in this country? Isn't her Republican brand of campaigning enough to slap us into sanity? PS..if you haven't read this blog yet, read it. I had even forgotten some previous nadirs of her campaign.
This primary election seems so blatantly a choice between, in short, a self-serving President vs a People's President. Hillary represents the Democratic Party's past. Obama is its future. The Democratic Party is not on any clear path to the Presidency. It is at a crossroads and the choices are whether or not to live in past glories or have a future. The time is now. Yes we are what we've been waiting for. If the super delegates are party leaders instead of followers, surely to God they see this. Obama would never have had even a ground swell if people weren't dying to see the change he represents, weren't desperate for the kind of leadership so exemplified by his speech on race. In the face of what could have been tragic, he gave us a reason to think, to communicate, to rise above our limitations and to believe in his brand of leadership all the more. He asked us to stretch for compassion, for understanding and how is Hillary responding? By 'leading' us to invest in our divides, to believe in what separates us, to dig up her type of outrage because she, in retrospect...always in retrospect... is 'right' about Wright and Obama is wrong.
Hillary portends that only the ultimate Washington insider equals the necessary qualifications. Only because I did not yet know that it was her campaign circulating the 'Obama is a Muslim' emails in Iowa, she began to lose me back in New Hampshire,. MLK gave nice speeches, but it took LBJ to get the civil rights bill passed. Hello? You think that people all over the country...black, blue and white collar...demanding change had nothing to do with it? How insulting that the voice of millions is reduced to irrelevant relative to politicians and pretty far-fetched to suggest that anything other than the collective voice was what made it happen. Bill insulting Obama in South Carolina clearly did her a lot of good, but now it sure seems they think the same strategy will play better in Pennsylvania.
Next came the 'insult 40 states strategy' where the states who didn't vote for Hillary 'didn't matter.' And just to fast forward, when all else failed, it was time to pick up the Bible of how to cheat, lie and maliciously influence voters...the Karl Rove playbook updated and renamed 'the kitchen sink strategy.' Oooh yeah. That's leadership I can believe in. Not.
There are several points I wish to make that I cannot understand the MSM ignoring...unless indeed, they are biased...TOWARDS Hillary. I've seen CNN referred to as the Clinton News Network. Politico I no longer bother to read as they seem more like an extension of her campaign than anything resembling real media. As some noted after Obama winning 11 in a row, if that had been him instead of Hillary, he would have been portrayed as the loser already. Not true with Hillary.
MSM is a failure and the very failure that may determine the outcome of this Primary as it is the exclusive means by which so many people, like that waitress in Virginia, form their opinions and those opinions determine how they pull that lever in the voting booth. So far, I'm sure whatever my thoughts are could be perceived merely as subjective, but what I truly fail to understand is how they, the MSM, continue to ignore a list like the following:
Hillary trying to exploit the Wright controversy...I'm sorry, but this is stupid on several fronts beyond the prep work she is in the process of doing on behalf of Republicans for the General in the fall.
- It's bait and switch in a transparent attempt to steer the conversation away from her own credibility issues, justifiably raised by her lies around the Irish peace talks and her trip to Bosnia, et al. Somehow, her contradictory 'truth' about her lack of support for NAFTA barely made a dent relative to the wreck it caused for Obama, in spite of the lie that was based on, the source of which sure seems to have been the Clinton campaign itself. Is it that she felt comfortable lying because she really did not expect her White House records to be released before the Primary given the years they had already been 'on hold?'
- While both Ferraro's well-timed comments and now her own attempts at minimizing Obama by attempting to resurrect the Wright controversy obviously serve her well in the upcoming do or die Pennsylvania Primary, I would like to know why the MSM isn't offering up an opportunity for the voters to be fully informed in that state, but instead, seemingly collaborate.
Would it not matter to blue collar voters that she actually did promote NAFTA to help with its passage? Does it not matter that she made a campaign promise of creating 200,000 jobs in her bid for the Senate and six years later, still has not delivered anything approaching that? Do her excuses...again, in retrospect...not matter? She couldn't create those jobs because of a Republican dominated legislature. Later in a debate, she couldn't create those jobs because she thought Al Gore was going to be elected and wasn't. Hello? Isn't that a bit like buying a house in hopes of getting a job? I promise was not qualified with, "if Al wins." It was, "I promise." (And ps, who doesn't see things clearly in retrospect? I think we'll look back with the benefit of hindsight and view Obama's argument of judgment as prophetic, if we're not already there.)
Does it not matter that, in her own peculiar method of damage control, she called Gennifer Flowers "trailer trash?" Isn't 'trailer trash' stereotypically at least a sub-culture of the very blue collar vote she is after...her base?
- "He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."...You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."
Right. Literally. Hillary belongs to the Fellowship..aka the Family...aka an ultra-conservative Christian 'mafia' who think Hitler, Lenin and Mao are leadership examples to follow, a 'church' that uses their members to influence legislation and election outcomes to the benefit of the Republican agenda. Along with the National Endowment for Democracy,(but that's another story), this IS the 'vast right wing conspiracy.' Why is no one all over Hillary's spiritual mentor, Doug Coe?
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"As one senior Pentagon official said, "the Fellowship has nothing to do with God or Jesus, it is a capitalist cult...
After McCain beat Bush in New Hampshire, the right-wing evangelicals pulled out all the stops to nail McCain on their home turf – South Carolina. Christian operatives associated with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and South Carolina’s Bob Jones University began spreading rumors – through "push polls," e-mail, sermons, and word-of-mouth that McCain fathered an illegitimate "black girl" out of wed lock (a reference to his adopted Bangladeshi daughter), that he was a traitor while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, that his wife Cindy was a druggie, and that he was gay. The gambit paid off. McCain was trounced by Bush in South Carolina and Bush went on to win the Republican nomination. For the Christian mafia, Bush was their best hope for total control since the founding of the United States...
Other important women members of the Fellowship are Interior Secretary Gale Norton, former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Eileen Bakke, the wife of former Advanced Energy Systems (AES) CEO Dennis Bakke. Dennis Bakke, who was succeeded at AES by former George H. W. Bush Budget director and current Carlyle Group official Richard Darman, resigned after allegations that Bakke funneled AES revenues into the Fellowship. AES became infamous when it took over the Republic of Georgia’s electrical distribution system and began cutting off electricity to those who never paid for it under Soviet rule. Affected were elderly people on fixed pensions, young couples, and even the Tbilisi airport and an important military base. "
http://www.insider-magazine.com/...
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Rev. Wright is a single bullet in the air relative to the bomb this story could be. Will the MSM be all over it once Jeff Shartlet's book,The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, is out in May? When it's potentially too late to be responsible and certainly too late to have any kind of scoop? Didn't MSM journalists used to break stories, not sit on them, not trail the blogosphere like they do now?
And to come full circle, is it that the MSM is afraid to be truthful in the event truth does irreparable damage to Hillary Clinton? Cannot they, like the Democratic Party, see the writing on the wall? The time is now. Transparency, honesty, responsibility and after the lies that have defined our policies with such drastic impacts on the well being of Americans, doesn't anyone in the MSM want to follow Obama's lead and speak up and out with honor, dignity and honesty?
And back to the subjective, I cannot help but hear how HRC acts as "If you have major money, I'm your candidate. If you don't, you are inferior. If you are inferior, but voted for me, you count as long as I need you to count. If you are a Democratic politician, you owe me. If you exercise judgment against me, that is a betrayal and you will never work in this town again once I'm President. Everyone else I deem unworthy." On the razor's edge with alienating black votes and blue collar votes and never having garned any youth support, if she did win the battle for the nomination, isn't she also leaving a paper trail that will cost her the election by alienating the very votes she would need?
Obama is the only hope we have for a people's President, not a politician's President. The choice has grown simple. Now if only the MSM would break free of their inner Katherine Harris and report honestly so all Americans have the truth at their disposal, and not just those intelligent enough to dive in and dig it up for themselves, then perhaps the US MSM won't end up duplicitous through their failure.