Been away. Decided to go and take in "The Speech" on YouTube before reading anyone else's opinions about it. Straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. It was a lot like listening to a Bill Clinton speech back in the day. Both men are gifted orators who can make you believe whatever they say while they're saying it. It's only afterward when you start thinking...wait a minute!
In this case, it really does take some audacity to liken a preacher claiming AIDS is a white conspiracy from the pulpit to one's own grandmother expressing her quite rational apprehension of passing black men on the street.
Obama showcased his considerable oratorical skills. He's great at framing a problem or relating a touching anecdote. What's less clear is how his candidacy really does anything about these age-old divisions of race, other than making the old brothers in the barber shop feel good. The subliminal suggestion is, "Elect me, and America's troubles with race will come to an end." Really?
All I could think as I watched him was, "I really like this guy. It's too bad he's wrong about everything. It's such a shame that he's never given a moment's thought as to what we should actually do about failing schools. He's right. Failing inner city schools are a great scandal in this country. And what party has been carrying the water of the teacher's unions for sixty years?
Who fights tooth and nail against any innovation that might help poor kids? At the end of the day, what does Obama propose other than pouring more money into the same failed system?
George W. Bush, of all people, actually proposed actual legislation that has brought real money into education and imposed accountability on educators. W actually thought more about the real problems and solutions in education than the great and mighty Obama. What about vouchers? Where's reform?
As for race, I think the simple fact is simply that there is nothing more government can do about the subject, other than enforcing existing laws, and getting rid of affirmative action. It's just going to take time.
More hackneyed, class warfare rhetoric about "corporations", and "outsourcing". Why not be honest? You want to make it in America? Get hired by a big corporation. Don't look to Barack Obama or the Rev. Wright to help you out. Go flip hamburgers at McDonald's. In ten years, if you work hard, you can easily be making $100,000 as a store manager.
Let's face facts. There's no shortage of opportunity in America. There's a shortage of people willing to do what it takes to succeed. We've got free education in America, yet today I see that 67% of high school students in big cities drop out.
Why? I don't know. Maybe too many of them have listened to hate-mongers like Jeremiah Wright, who want to fill their heads with reasons why they can't make it. It's the United Sates of KKKA. The government invented AIDS to kill black men.
Here's a truism about Americans. We're all a little tribal. Italians root for Italians. Irish guys root for fellow Micks. Jews stick together. Blacks stick together. Want to know the most successful integrated organization in the world? It's the US military. Want to know why it works? Simple. No special treatment for anyone. Everyone has a job to do and everyone is expected to do it. America will be over race when we stop paying attention to race.
Show up every day, do your part and you'll be treated fairly.
The Democrat system of assembling various greivance groups (women, minorities) into a coalition has the effect of causing people to jockey for preferences based on race or gender, rather than by competing on merit. Hence, you get the utterly predictable outcome of a Democratic race completely polarized by race and gender.
Create a level playing field and take race and gender out of it. Voila! The best people will rise to the top.
In this case, it really does take some audacity to liken a preacher claiming AIDS is a white conspiracy from the pulpit to one's own grandmother expressing her quite rational apprehension of passing black men on the street.
Obama showcased his considerable oratorical skills. He's great at framing a problem or relating a touching anecdote. What's less clear is how his candidacy really does anything about these age-old divisions of race, other than making the old brothers in the barber shop feel good. The subliminal suggestion is, "Elect me, and America's troubles with race will come to an end." Really?
All I could think as I watched him was, "I really like this guy. It's too bad he's wrong about everything. It's such a shame that he's never given a moment's thought as to what we should actually do about failing schools. He's right. Failing inner city schools are a great scandal in this country. And what party has been carrying the water of the teacher's unions for sixty years?
Who fights tooth and nail against any innovation that might help poor kids? At the end of the day, what does Obama propose other than pouring more money into the same failed system?
George W. Bush, of all people, actually proposed actual legislation that has brought real money into education and imposed accountability on educators. W actually thought more about the real problems and solutions in education than the great and mighty Obama. What about vouchers? Where's reform?
As for race, I think the simple fact is simply that there is nothing more government can do about the subject, other than enforcing existing laws, and getting rid of affirmative action. It's just going to take time.
More hackneyed, class warfare rhetoric about "corporations", and "outsourcing". Why not be honest? You want to make it in America? Get hired by a big corporation. Don't look to Barack Obama or the Rev. Wright to help you out. Go flip hamburgers at McDonald's. In ten years, if you work hard, you can easily be making $100,000 as a store manager.
Let's face facts. There's no shortage of opportunity in America. There's a shortage of people willing to do what it takes to succeed. We've got free education in America, yet today I see that 67% of high school students in big cities drop out.
Why? I don't know. Maybe too many of them have listened to hate-mongers like Jeremiah Wright, who want to fill their heads with reasons why they can't make it. It's the United Sates of KKKA. The government invented AIDS to kill black men.
Here's a truism about Americans. We're all a little tribal. Italians root for Italians. Irish guys root for fellow Micks. Jews stick together. Blacks stick together. Want to know the most successful integrated organization in the world? It's the US military. Want to know why it works? Simple. No special treatment for anyone. Everyone has a job to do and everyone is expected to do it. America will be over race when we stop paying attention to race.
Show up every day, do your part and you'll be treated fairly.
The Democrat system of assembling various greivance groups (women, minorities) into a coalition has the effect of causing people to jockey for preferences based on race or gender, rather than by competing on merit. Hence, you get the utterly predictable outcome of a Democratic race completely polarized by race and gender.
Create a level playing field and take race and gender out of it. Voila! The best people will rise to the top.
posted by alwaysright at
5:03 PM
6 Comments:
Don't Ask, Don't Tell, very integrated... Haven't seen many black generals on the podiums of late. I wonder what the ratio is for minority representation in the officer corp. I'll have to look that up, after all you are practically always wrong when it comes to such stuff, in fact just about all the time.
Let's count the ways: Our incredibly successful war in Iraq, that's going so well aint it. Now at least we know the real power in Iraq, yes... Iran.
The Bush economic miracle, just cruising along there... you had me for a while, but if there is something to fuck up in this world the Bushies will find it.
Obama is finished, that old chestnut, where do you get your material?
The teachers union is responsible for our failing public schools? That's quite a bit of reverse engineering there...
The Dems will cave on FISA - not so!
You should look at your own crazy pastors before you start accusing Jeremiah Wright of inciting class warfare, I think Robertson, Dobson, Hagee, Parsley etc etc etc are a lot more inflammatory and bigoted than Mr. Wright. I guess 'cause they are white they're above such guttersnipe inspection as the media has served up on Jeremiah. There are many skeletons hidden in the Republican closet that will be exposed this cycle, gloves are off and the Dems have their own war machine this time.
I could go on but it's tiresome...
I think Don't Ask, Don't Tell, a Clinton policy, by the way, is a pretty reasonable compromise. Homosexuality is not a race, it's a behavior, and one about which the military has understandable reservations. As for black generals, I give you Colin Powell, who occupied the very top slot in the corporation. How many other American institutions can make the same claim?
I don't think I've ever made extravagant claims of success in Iraq. I've only said that it is vital that we do so. It is a long, slow grind. We've had mixed success til now. And, yes, it's unlikely that we will succeed there until we deal with Iran. The war on terror is a global conflict, of which Iraq is but one piece. It's the biggest piece right now, and one we can't afford to screw up.
Iran and Al Qaeda were at war with us before George Bush took office, and will be at war with us after he's out of office. Do you want to win or lose?
Bush inherited an economic downturn, then 9/11, then had to deal with the corporate scandals. The subsequent recovery was pretty remarkable, although not perfect. Because of the war, I think the Fed overshot on creating liquidity, which helped to fuel the real estate bubble, and the weak dollar.
Yet, if this is a recession, it's a different one. I think the global boom may skate us out of this without too much damage.
With Rezko and Wright, Obama should be finished, just as Clinton should have been finished with Gennifer Flowers (if only she'd been the only one!). I misunderestimated just how low the standards of the typical Democrat voter have fallen. After Alan Hevesi and Eliot Spitzer, I should have known better.
Now, it's possible there may be some kind of historic realignment going on. It could be that America is making a big lurch to the left. Bush fatigue may be so severe that the country is willing to try a very unwise experiment. But I doubt it. I think Obama has been sufficiently vague to conceal that he is a bg "L" Liberal. Maybe it's about to change, but up till now, once someone is identified as a liberal, they don't get elected.
Following the Bill Clinton model, he may be skillful enough to tell everyone what they want to hear without talking too much about how he intends to govern.
The problem with getting elected that way, and you can get elected that way, is that it's difficult to lead that way. It's a general problem with politics today that politicians just say whatever they need to say to get elected. Once they get into office, they have no mandate because no one knows what they stand for. Change? Hope? What the fuck does that mean?
John McCain may well lose. I have major disagreements with him. But I think we should all cherish a politician who was willing to take a very unpopular stand a year ago, with his political future on the line, and ride his principles all the way to the nomination. We may never see his kind again.
It is, of course ludicrous to equate Robertson, et al with Wright for two reasons. First, Wright is a bigot AND a traitor. Robertson and the boys are just bigots.
Second McCain didn't sit in their pews for twenty years, nor donate $22000 to those pastors.
Obama has consorted with terrorists (Ayers), criminals (Rezko), traitors and bigots (Wright). What would it take for you to not support him? Have you no decency, sir?
"Do you want to win or lose?"
Neither option has been sufficiently explained, described or rationalized.
Succeeding, winning, victory, it's all just useless, empty rhetoric. We got into a war without any planning, not knowing what the reaction would be, how many troops we would need or how much the damn thing would cost and now five years later it's down to semantics or a stupid heartless question, do you want to win or lose. Win or lose to who? It appears this administration, the military and the presumptive heir to this clusterfuck still has problems with whom we are at war with. Is it the Sunnis - the original insurgents we now pay as security guards? Is it the less pro-Iran shiites of the Mahdi Army? Or the more pro-Iran shiites of the Badr Corps lead by ISCI which forms the majority in the Iraqi parliament and installed Al Maliki? Or is it the Kurds we should be fearful of with their Peshmerga and tacit support for the PKK and there upcoming coup of the oil fields of Kirkuk? Or is it Al Qaeda in Iraq a band of self styled freedom fighters of less than 5,000 who seem to still operate with impunity in and outside of Baghdad. It is this kind of slavish adherence to ideological orthodoxy that got us into this terrible mess in the first place. The militias did not attack us on 9/11, in fact they didn't exist in Iraq prior to the invasion, Al Qaeda in Iraq did not exist until 2004. So why the fuck did we attack Iraq?
I know you're not a blithering idiot, so don't treat everyone else like they are... winning and losing, we are way past that stage and it is shear pigheadedness that keeps us in Iraq. Because all the fucking cheerleaders, who thought we would be greeted with flowers and the war would pay for itself and we would just install a pliant government and we're fighting over there blah blah blah and freedom is on the march were fucking wrong but it takes a big man to accept your own idiocy so they remain complicit in this fucking debacle because apologizing for being a complete fucking moron is too difficult for them.
Get a fucking grip man!
We liberated Iraq to complete a piece of unfinished business from 1991. After leaving Saddam in power, he became one of the world's foremost impresarios of terror, funding and nurturing myriad groups, including forerunners of Al Qaeda. He either possessed, or created the impression that he possessed weapons of mass destruction, after at one time actually using them on his own people.
The nightmare scenario--WMD in the hands of terrorists--post 9/11, was perhaps too dangerous to contemplate. Not to mention that to leave him in power would have given the green light to every other WMD proliferator out there.
Maybe the world was a lot less dangerous immediately after 9/11 than the administration thought, but how many potential attacks might have occurred had they not gone on the offensive. I think they needed to act not just on who directly attacked us, but on the entire web of terror networks of which Saddam was an integral part.
You can, as you have, characterize it all as a hopeless jumble, and I admit it can seem that way. Another waay to look at it is that this action, if successful, will accomplish a lot of strategic aims. Saddam is gone. Message sent to other rogue regimes. Now, admittedly, the antiwar crowd has diluted that impact and has emboldened Iran all over again, but that's not Bush's fault.
We lured Al Qaeda into a fight they have lost. In the battle for the hearts and minds of the Mideast, we are the liberators, Al Qaeda just another bunch of vicious thugs.
We developed an alternative oil supply to Saudi Arabia, ostensibly an ally, but for how much longer?
Had the rest of the world played along, this would have gone much better and faster. You can judge for yourself how effective negotiations with Iran and North Korea have gone. Had the civilized world presented a united front, we probably could have dealt with those rogues by now and be done with the whole filthy business. Instead, we're left trying to hold onto a tenuous victory in Iraq while Iran and North Korea arm up. Stupid!
Negotiations with these regimes will be fruitless. The only "diplomacy" that has ever worked in that part of the world has been of the military sort. The irony is, we've worked the bugs out in Iraq. Iran would be a cakewalk. Instead, we'll stand by with our heads up our asses and in about three more years, tops, Iran will be nuclear and will make Pakistan look like Belgium. Sigh...
"We liberated Iraq to complete a piece of unfinished business from 1991."
That's not what we were told or sold...
From that point on your argument is lost.
Actually, that's exactly what we were told. The primary casus belli was Saddam's violation of sixteen UN resolutions. Resolutions that came about as a result of the terms of his surrender in 1991. Terms that he never honored.
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