Category: Barack Obama

Reading this MyDD analysis of Obama’s rhetorical flub about rural Pennsylvania voters, which would be 100% excellent if not for the writer’s insane devotion to ignoring the apostrophe whenever trying to condense ‘it is’ — which is a shame because otherwise the piece seems well written (for that it’s earned a mere 99% for its grammatical apathy), I couldn’t help but feel that the senator supposedly representing Illinois is facing a bit of Karmic justice.

LANCE SELFA explains that Corporate America is nonpartisan when it comes to protecting its interests.   Original article via Socialistworker.org.

For some strange reason, I’m not sure this is a good thing.

sort of cross posting from the GOS ..

Barack’s statement today about the anger of the people who are not even in his base of support, and more importantly his response to the fawning McCain and Clinton campaigns as they spun to the PA electorate convinced me.

Obama’s ready to stand and fight for what he believes in.

I might not always agree with exactly what it is, that which Barack Obama believes in, but I am sick to death of leaders who will not stand up for what they believe, especially Democrats. What I saw today shows me without a doubt this man has the self determination and pride to stand for what he thinks is right.

I’ve seen enough of the guy to realize he does offer a set of viewpoints that are closer to mine than John McCain’s, easily and he has eclipsed Hillary Clinton because he has cut through the BS, and has let truth speak.

I may not always agree with his viewpoints, it would be too much to ask. But as time has progressed, I have seen the candidate take on challenges and do so directly, and honestly. That’s a mark of a leader, a person who can be trusted to stay true to himself. There’s some sort of personal integrity aspect to Barack Obama I am beginning to like, more and more.

As I told our fellow rabble rousers over in Orangeville, that doesn’t mean I’m hopping on the Bash Hillary and Bill bus.  

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.  Yesterday MyDD reported that the Obama campaign had wiped over nine hundred delegates in California from its list of chosen representatives for the national convention in August.  Ostensibly, this was done to ensure only Obama loyalists would represent the senator from Illinois at the Democratic National Convention.  No big deal, right?  After all, Hillary Clinton’s campaign did a similar purge.

The problem is this: while Clinton trimmed only fifty or so delegates, down from an initial 950, Obama wiped roughly half of 1,700.  Furthermore, whereas Clinton appears to have carefully screened the delegates to be excluded, Obama’s purge list appeared random — activists with solid credentials and who worked tirelessly to campaign for their candidate were eliminated, while those who did little or nothing got to stay on the list to go to Denver.

But here’s where things get more ominous.  As MyDD points out, Obama campaigner Marcy Winograd — a woman with more than a few political credentials to her own name — seems to think the main targets were anti-war progressives.

By dusk on Wednesday, the California Obama campaign had purged almost all progressive anti-war activists from its delegate candidate lists. Names of candidates, people who had filed to run to represent Obama at the August Democratic Party National Convention, disappeared, not one by one, but hundreds at a time, from the Party web site listing the eligibles. The list of Obama delegate hopefuls in one northern California congressional district went from a robust 100 to an anemic 23, while in southern California, the list in Congressman Waxman’s district almost slipped out of sight, plunging from a high of 91 candidates to 17. Gone were strong women with independent political bases.

And the Huffington Post’s Nathaniel Bach wrote:

After completing the application process and finding my name on the official list of registered candidates, I received an email from the California Democratic Party today (Wednesday) at 4:48 p.m. informing me that the final approved lists of delegate candidates had been posted and that I should check the website. (I assume the same email went out to all the delegate candidates.) I clicked over to the website and found that, lo and behold, what had been a list of 90 candidates had been eviscerated down to only 17, and that my name was gone. I immediately checked the Obama candidate list for the 33rd District, where a friend and fellow Obama die-hard was also running for a delegate spot. His name was gone, too, and a list that formerly contained 83 names was down to a mere 20.

The ostensible rationale for the cutting of delegate candidates is to prevent “Trojan horse” delegates from making their way to the Convention floor and then switching allegiances. The vetting and removal of delegate candidates is expressly allowed by party rules. But could the 30th District really have had 73 such turncoats, and was I really one of them? I was a Precinct Captain for the Obama campaign for the California primary; I’ve donated several hundred dollars to Senator Obama’s campaign (the first politician I’ve ever supported financially); and I’ve boosted the campaign in numerous posts on this website…

It’s hard not to be cynical. Remaining on the list of approved candidates is the slate of candidates (longtime campaign volunteers) that the Obama campaign has officially endorsed, as well as several names recognizable from local politics. These delegate candidates aren’t to be faulted for being longtime political activists, but the cynic in me wonders why those names remained while the “nobodies” on the list disappeared. The Obama campaign owes those of us who were cut a fuller explanation of the decision process.

MyDD’s ‘campskunk’ clearly believes that this is not accidental, that the Obama campaign wants “people who will go to the convention and vote for Obama, no matter what.  It’s not about the issues, it’s about the candidate.  If these delegates have strong dedication to particular causes they might be persuadable, so none of those types are allowed.”

But the purge of California delegates, and the fear that anti-war activists among those sent to represent Obama in Denver come August might defect, may run even deeper than anyone suspects.  According to the New York Sun, Obama’s phony anti-occupation position stands a good chance of being exposed for the sham it is.

A key adviser to Senator Obama’s campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for a New American Security*. In “Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement,” Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations with the Iraqi government “the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground).”

Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign’s working group on Iraq. A shorter and less detailed version of this paper appeared on the center’s Web site as a policy brief.

If this is true, if Obama plans to back off from any and all public pledges to withdraw from the quagmire in Iraq by the end of his first term (assuming he gets a first term), then this cynical lack of faith in his own supporters exposes a far more serious crisis.  The senator from Illinois, in spite of his alleged initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq, really does support the policy of American imperialism.  And if he’s worried enough about his true position becoming widely known that it has driven him to purge half his California delegates — thus making the prospect of a brokered convention likelier, what does that say about the worth assigned to the anti-war movement by the Democratic Party?  Not much, apparently.

Fortunately, this latest outrage by the Obama campaign has a somewhat happy ending; all of the delegates purged from California’s bloc seem to have been reinstated.  But if Obama thought these devoted supporters might have harbored plans to defect to Hillary Clinton’s camp, he may have pushed his fear one step closer to realization.

According to MSNBC, McCain has erased Obama’s ten point lead over him.  If the senator from Illinois doesn’t start running like a Democrat, and stop acting like a fucking Republican, he’s going to find himself making one hell of a concession speech come November.  And that shall be bad in far more ways than one.

If Obama really wanted to win this thing, he could have distinguished himself by running to the left of Hillary Clinton — not to the right of her.  His failure to seal the deal, combined with his Republican-style attacks (not that Mrs. Clinton is innocent of following suit) and condescending dismissals of the challenges faced by minorities, indicates that he is fully prepared to blow it come November.  Consider this: Recent polls show that Ralph Nader may actually get up to five percent of the vote in November, and that a sizable number of Clinton supporters are likely to vote for McCain — twenty-eight percent, in fact.

That is how things stand at this point.  Can you imagine what shall happen if a bruised and battered Obama comes out of the Democratic National Convention, having alienated upwards of 33% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, and with the media attacking him at every turn having smelled blood in the water?  Imagine that pathetic creature going up against McCain.  We cannot allow overconfidence to cost us this time.  There really is far too much at stake.

UPDATED @ 9:34 PM EDT

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

I said: Well, there’s so much to live for!

He said: Like what?

I said: The Bush era is almost over! Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

He said: Democrat.

I said: Me too! Are you a liberal, a moderate, or a conservative?

He said: Liberal.

I said: Me too! Would you like a president like John McCain, who will talk about global warming, but offer only a weak industry friendly approach to dealing with it, or do you agree with the Democratic candidates that we need to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050?

He said: Reduce emissions by 80%!

I said: Me too! Would you like John McCain, who wouldn’t mind if the Iraq War lasted another 10,000 years, or would you prefer the approach of the Democratic candidates, who vow to start pulling us out next year??

He said: Out of Iraq!

Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher recalls a time when General David Petraeus was still capable of honesty. Referring to a New York Times Op-Ed by Boston University professor of history and international relations Andrew J. Bacevich, Mitchell writes:

What will end up being the most famous quote of the Iraq war? Remember, President Bush did not actually say “Mission Accomplished.” Perhaps Vice President Cheney’s “final throes” will take the prize. But increasingly, as the significance of Gen. David Petraeus grows (seemingly by the minute), it seems possible that it might up being his once-obscure 2003 remark to a well-known newspaper reporter: “Tell me how this ends.”

The quote was cited by Bacevich, who wrote:

The United States today finds itself with too much war for too few warriors. With the “surge” now giving way to a “pause,” the Iraq war has become an open-ended enterprise. American combat operations in Iraq could easily drag on for 10 more years, and a large-scale military presence might be required for decades, which may well break the Army while bankrupting the country. The pretense that there is a near-term solution to Iraq has become a pretext for ignoring the long-term disparity between military commitments and military capacity.

Bacevich wants an answer to Petraeus’s question. And no one else seems to be even asking it. Bacevich would also like Petraeus to explain approximately when the war ends, and how long our exhausted troops can continue to meet the demands being made of them, and how their strain will be alleviated.

But back to that old Petraeus quote, Mitchell writes:

 Let’s do the disclaimer first:  

I support Obama and want him to get the nomination over Hillary, and win the general election over McCain.

There.

That being said, I was mostly excoriated by the orange Obamabots when I posted this diary, back in February, to wit:  It Begins:  What Will Obama Do?.  They have a very “shoot the messenger” attitude over there, if it’s not blowing kisses at Obama.  I can’t abide such things.

At any rate, that now being “of record”, let’s turn to today’s Talking Points Memo and an article found there entitled:  Conservatives Planning New Attack Group for Election.  A’yup — it’s all about what’s already sort of started, but which hasn’t begun to really get going, yet:  an assault on Sen. Hopey Hope the likes of which will make mere Swiftboating look like a deluge of love letters.

The very first comment under the TPM article is the best one, too:

The issue is this…

                    Will the Democrats collectively wet their pants

                    at the sight of these attacks or will they

                    counter-attack?

                    JimboF

                   

And, no, I’m not “JimboF”.  

The answer to the question is, well, I don’t know.  When Ed Shultz called McCain a “warmonger” a couple of days ago, the Obama campaign attained light-speed in its rush to denounce Shultz.  So, I’m not sure what’s going to happen when the gloves really come off.  And the people at orange think that Hillary’s all diabolical and nasty.  She’s a piker compared to what the GOP’s going to do to Obama.  Brace yourselves . . .

Mu . . .

Another good idea undoubtedly doomed to fail, but worth the effort to try:

Military Families Speak Out is challenging U.S. Senators — starting with two named Obama and Clinton — to filibuster and stop President Bush’s request for more money for the Iraq war and occupation, another $102-billion.

Democrats aren’t even talking about saying no.

The Democrats’ plan appears to be to load up the bill with more domestic spending, rather than trying to stop the war spending. They want to add money for everything from storm-damaged national parks to local law enforcement grants to trying to use nuclear fusion to produce energy, CQ reports.

Instead of trying to stop the war, they’ve written Bush a letter, politely suggesting that he should change his strategy and plans.  Right. That’ll be happening any day now, no doubt.

Military Families Speak Out has a simple idea:  Stop the war by refusing to fund it.  That, you may recall, is how we finally got out of Vietnam.

They start by quoting Obama and Clinton, then ask them a simple question:

“Let me be clear: there is no military solution in Iraq, and there never was. The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year – now.” — Sen. Barack Obama, September 12, 2007

“Our message to the president is clear. It is time to begin ending this war — not next year, not next month — but today.” — Sen. Hillary Clinton, July 10, 2007

On the campaign trail, Senator Obama and Senator Clinton both say that the war in Iraq needs to end. Military Families Speak Out has one question for them: what are they doing now as sitting United States Senators, to bring our loved ones home from Iraq?

Over at Talk Left, BTD is arguing that if, as his supporters and surrogates say, Obama has locked this thing up, he should attempt to unify the party–that it is not Hillary who should do this (as Kos and Meteor Blades argue).  http://www.talkleft.com/story/…

I argue the opposite.  I believe if Obama gets the nomination, not only does he not try to gain the consent of Hillary supporters, and not only does he not request Hillary to help in his campaign (much less ask her to be his v-p), he throws Hillary under the bus.  

My prediction is that Hillary will become the token of what is characterized as “old school” politics, divisiveness, and the belt way.  I think Obama determines that Hillary supporters, in the end, will not vote for McSame no matter what he does and that he will run to the right (to the extent he cannot simply run on hope, change and unity) in the general election.

What do you think?

 Well, I’m disappointed in Obama.  Alas.  Cajones?  What Cajones?  Not that Hillary would be any better, mind you.

There’s a minor flap (which I wish would become a major one) over Ed Shultz calling McCain a “warmonger” at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Grand Forks, ND, which the Obama campaign  scrambled to repudiate, certainly out of a knee-knocking fear that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh would say mean things about Obama –  horrors! (and as opposed to the nice things they say about Obama, and, for that matter, Hillary, now).

Gad.