gunslnga wrote:Tom Darch,
First, that whole thing about insecure white males worrying about a black president shit is weak, weak, weak!!!! In fact as stated before I accept the fact that Jesus could be and probably is blacker than me and hes my saviour.
tomdarch wrote:I think when you look at the posts above, you'll see that a lot of the intensity of reaction is a bunch of white people who don't have a lot of contact with black people having a visceral reaction to a black man standing up for himself forcefully and pointing out the racist structures that are prevalent in America.
First off - Gunny, it's great to have you back in the scrum!
OK - you'll see that I wasn't even talking about how a lot of "white" Americans are going to have a serious problem with having a "black" president. I was talking about the reaction so many people here had to Rev. Wright - in video/audio form. Somewhere on the first page of this thread there's a post written out in mocking dialect. No one here can actually quote more than a few of Rev. Wright's words and no one can provide an explanation of what it is they object to in what he is saying.
Assuming that Obama gets the nomination, we're going to see a lot more hysterical, vague bullshit thrown around to play on white folks subliminal prejudices and fears. It's going to take a lot of writing things out and parsing them to get people to understand how these attacks work. So far, this bullshit "attack" seems to be sticking, and that's not a good sign for America.
gunslnga wrote:I dont know who Hagee is and I watch more Liberal press than I do anything, so obviosly you are the only one who cares.
Here's some coverage in the commercial media:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/us/po ... epubs.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS9F7O2lhWg (CNN coverage)
And here's some coverage in the Liberal/Progressive media:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/ ... index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/2 ... 89189.html
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaign ... pid=292862
Hagee is a very hot potato for the commercial media. He's so nutty that it's tough to put his quotes up in an evening news context. Also, he's tied up with both the Israel lobby and the lunatic fringe of Christianity in America, so any sane reporter isn't going to want to get into the "death threat zone." Seriously - either of these topics generate a stream of death threats for any reporter who touches on them. If you have a family, do you want to go there?
It should not be a race issue at all, but a qualifacations issue, and I'm sorry, Mccain is the more qualified, its a proven fact, neither Hillary or Obam have the time on the trigger. I dont like any of them personnaly, but if I want to remain free and keep some of my money and my good insurance, I have to vote those issues and Mccain. I expect a lot more from you Tom......
So - we're on to the "experience" vs. "judgment" issue. I'm sitting here in the office, and through the next wall sits a man (my boss) who has about 40 years of "experience as an architect." He's a walking, talking argument in favor of saying that judgment is more important. You can do things over and over and fuck them up over and over. Maybe, the McCain of 10 years ago had both the experience and showed good judgment in trying to speak honestly and do the right thing regardless of party affiliation. But we've seen in the last year that he's so desperate to become president, that he'll do all sorts of stupid shit. In other words, he isn't learning from his experience and he has bad judgment. I'm skeptical that if he becomes president that the "old McCain" will come back.
There's also the problem of being trapped by your experiences. Are we really sure that McCain isn't a "general fighting the last war"? Of all people, I thought that he would have stood up with Gen. Shalikashvili and others with nation building and post-conflict experience when they (quite rightly) pointed out that the rushed and underresourced Cheney/Rumsfeld invasion wasn't going to work. Where was McCain in all of that? Also, if McCain is smart and experienced, shouldn't he have stood up and said that, as a lot of us knew, Sadam wasn't in league with al Qaeda and that either Sadam didn't have WMDs or that whatever WMDs he did have wern't a threat to the US. Or was he suckered by al Chalabi and the neo cons like so many others? Either way, all his experience with international issues didn't amount to much. The fact that he won't say that invading/attacking Iran would be a bigger disaster makes him look even more like an idiot.
Today, McCain seems to be with the crowd who say "Stay in Iraq until the job is done." In the abstract, I'm willing to go along with that. The problem is: what the fuck is "the Job"? There's a civil war going on there. What's our mission? How do we objectively determine that it's complete?
