Pronoun aside, that's the question I used to ask myself every time I heard George Bush speak. I never really decided on the answer and eventually just stopped listening to him. With Sarah Palin, however, the question has taken on new importance because yesterday she escalated the attacks on Obama with a series of remarks that are not merely wrong, not merely slanderous, but dangerously delusional. As ABC News is reporting this morning:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin went beyond her running mate's recent attack on Sen. Barack Obama -- inaccurately claiming that Obama called the lack of "redistributive change" during the civil rights movement a "tragedy" -- and used Obama's 2001 interview to insinuate that he wants to re-write the U.S. Constitution and appoint radical Supreme Court justices and judges who would confiscate the property of American citizens.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/10/palin-suggests.html
Just ponder the absurdity of that for a moment.
There is no question of misinterpretation. Here is what Palin actually said:
“Sen. Obama said that he regretted that the Supreme Court hadn't been more radical. And he described the Court's refusal to take up the issues of redistribution of wealth as a tragedy. And he said he also regretted that the Supreme Court didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers there in the Constitution. . . . So you have to ask, is this a suggestion that's he’d want to re-write the founding document of our great nation to accomplish his goals. And what does that say about his ideas on future Supreme Court justices? Let me remind Barack Obama of something else. When judges don’t confiscate your property and your hard-earned -- all of your hard-earned money and then re-distribute that, he may call that a tragedy. But I call it fairness and adherence to our U.S. Constitution."
As ABC News also reported, none of this is true:
Obama had in fact argued the opposite in the 2001 interview, saying that the civil rights movement had become too focused on making change through the judicial system, rather than from the ground up through community organizations.
Here's a newsflash for you Sarah, Barack Obama does NOT want to rewrite the Constitution, and if you had ever bothered to read it yourself you might have realized that the president doesn't have the power to do that anyway. Nor is he proposing that ANYONE, let alone judges, to take away our hard-earned money. What he has proposed, rather modestly, is that the highest marginal income tax rate be returned to what it was during the Clinton Administration, which it is currently scheduled to do anyway in 2010 and which is only 1% higher than the tax level John McCain fought for in 2001. Here's what McCain said then:
"Mr. President, I rise to oppose the Conference Report on the Reconciliation bill. I do so after having expressed hope that the progress we made in the Senate bill to scale back the benefits going to the taop rate taxpayers to make room for more tax relief to lower income Americans would prevail in the final bill. . . . . While I regret that my amendment to cut the top rate by one percent to 38.6 percent so that millions more middle class Americans would fall into the 15 percent tax bracket failed on a tie vote, Senator Grassley did move in that direction in the Senate bill by insisting that the top rate should be cut to only 36 percent. . . . . I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle class Americans who most need tax relief."
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2001_record&page=S5789&position=a
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By the way, that speech, which reads almost exactly as if it were written by Barack Obama, has been deleted and replaced with a fictional one on John McCain's official Senate website. The original speech was there at least as of this summer, because i read it myself, but now it has been replaced with this: http://mccain.senate.gov/...
So let's see. Obama proposes to increase tax rates 1% above what McCain himself proposed, a fact which McCain is apparently trying to conceal, and that makes Obama a Marxist who wants to rewrite the Constitution and use the courts to forcibly seize all of our property. Am I missing something here? Are there no limits to the depths of depravity to which these people will stoop in order to win this election? Have they no shame?