Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'

[Kulindahr]

I have looked over Rush's response, and not surprised I see it in your post.

Ditto.
It was creepy reading Rush and then coming here and finding Democrats spouting his words. Maybe they're not so far apart after all....

obama actually referenced ferrero in his speech not by name - and not kindly - thought that was lame

Um, he mentioned her by name, and what he said was kindly -- he quietly disputed the charge of her being racist.

Obama chose Wright as his mentor, chose to return for 20 years, his entire adult life, to hear him preach, chose to be married by him, have his daughters baptized by him and influenced by Wright's preaching, to title a book after his words. Obama could have chosen another church, another pastor, another message to be influenced by -- but Wright is the one he chose. That's what this is about, not McCain's choices, not Romney's, not anybody else's.

I've figured it out: you're a Hillary fan, and as her running mate you've already selected a guy called Lying Ignorance.
I don't know whether to admire your ability to keep chanting your little song over and over and over without ever looking at what's really going on, or not. I've been listening to bits from blacks around the country, and what they're hearing from the words you're spouting is that you and others like you want them to betray their culture, denounce their faith, turn their backs on their heritage. It's not Wright's racism they're talking about, either, it's things you remain ignorant of despite a wealth of information available. You insist on treating church like it's less important than a sports team, more like it was a restaurant. But let's take that restaurant analogy: you're saying someone should quit his favorite restaurant if the menu changes; what people are trying to explain is that if it's like church, you only switch favorite restaurants if it becomes evident that the head cook is deliberately adding spoiled fish and fowl to every dish.

Get it this time?

 

[Kulindahr]

Obama supporters want unity among those who already agree. What an accomplishment.

You want change as long as it's easy.

Race issues in this nation will never be improved if people who yearn for change talk only to those who agree with them. Change happens when people who don't agree find a way to understand each other and work togther.

I see you admit you're a foe of change: you refuse to try to understand others; your standard of "change" so far has been "you have to be like us".

An' all de black folk, dey say, Yes, massah.

But you illustrated my point perfectly, and the truth is Obama supporters are ultimately divisive and have a warped sense of loyalty. That's the reason Obama supporters have no problem with Obama throwing his grandmother under the train in his speech, equating her with the hateful speech of Reverend Wright. She --older and with a different thought process-- is expendable no matter how much she's sacrificed and given to Obama.

So, you don't want Obama to criticize his grandmother when she's wrong, but you want him to throw his pastor, church, and community under the train.

Got it.

'Corse we-uns gots two stannards, massah -- is what you taughts us.

 

[naked gent]

Here, from FackCheck.org:

OK Nick I'll go with Factcheck.org cause I really like that site.

Although we usually spell it with a t.

 

[iman]

It was positive, it was a compliment to lancelva, even if his tactics still fail to convert people to his side, he at least tries something new. Centexfarmer pretty much asked for that post, where I otherwise would not have done, just sniped like you did with this post to which I'm responding. It is easy to promote a candidate's positive aspects, by the way; it is the George Wallaces blocking the door to 'hope and change' that is the problem.

One can't learn much about a book, a play or a movie if the only acceptable criticism must be positive. Criticism is by it's very nature critical, that's how we learn (some of us, anyway).

We know all about the positive attributes of the candidates, they have incessantly told us about how wonderful they are. But, what they say and what they have done and are likely to do deserves to be scutinized.

What I do not understand about the Obama folks is their constant personal attacks on the people asking questions and expressing differing opinions. It certainly does not reflect well on Obama that his supporters are reduced to the most childish and inane defenses of their candidate.

 

[Backlum-Chaam]

Do you think racism will change in this country if people who see it differently DON'T explain to one another how they see it?

Your question is turnspeak, so the answer is irrelevant.

You would have been better off simply dismissing the story you quoted as anecdotal, with a reminder that there are plenty of racist blacks voting for Obama.

Instead, it was more important for you to be right - So you tried to back into your premise with a "blame the victim" strawman, which killed your credibility by forcing you to claim - oddly enough - that it's better to be racist than it is to refrain from engaging with racists. As if racism were the acceptable "default mode" that non-racists are responsible for "fixing" in others. Are we to assume that this elderly woman has never been exposed to ideas that counter her racism? That the only reason she's racist is because she has absolutely no idea why others aren't? At what point does the elderly woman become responsible for her own racism?

 

[snapcat]

Of course, the Clintons were FOR the Rev. White before they were AGAINST them.

 

[Sammie13]

Interesting that Mike Huckabee, a man so many at JUB hold with such disdain, defended Obama about as well as any Democrat I've heard. He did point out the hypocracy of liberals slamming Falwell and his "right" hate, but Wright's "left" hate is okay. Hate is hate.

I like Mike. Still the only pol in this election who seemed authentic.

Thans ICO7 for posting the video.

 

[kneelin]

I know this is an old thread but there was an very interesting analysis on the editorial page in the NYSun today that I thought may interest some of you.
http://www.nysun.com/news/spell-broken-0

The Spell Is Broken
By MARK STEYN | May 5, 2008
Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if like Garry Wills in The New York Review Of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the Senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’ Apology, etc: it’s history. He said, apropos the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week he did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.


Scott OlsonClick to enlarge>It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in

The New York Times

; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in

Time — which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection. Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem — the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years — and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Senator Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

That’s an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician … He does what politicians do.”

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the Senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaeda and the government inventing Aids to kill black people. In his belated “disowning” of Wright, Obama said, “What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that — that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the — the commonality in all people.”

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it’s suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the Senator couldn’t find his groove and couldn’t prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: “If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s — that’s a show of disrespect to me.”

And we can’t have that, can we? In a shrewd analysis of Obama’s peculiarly petty objections to Rev. Wright, Scott Johnson of the Powerline website remarked on the Senator’s “adolescent grandiosity.” There’s always been a whiff of that. When he tells his doting fans, “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he means, of course,

he is the change we’ve been waiting for.

. . . there is more but it is mostly a criticism of Mrs. O

 

[NickCole]

Spot-on.

Yes there is more.

And it's just as insightful.

I wondered exactly the same thing about Mrs. Obama's response to Vieira's question, that the conversation about Wright "doesn't help my kids."

Emphasis added by me.

"Do you personally feel that the Reverend betrayed your husband?" asked Meredith Vieira on "The Today Show."

"You know what I think, Meredith?" replied Michelle Obama. "We've got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn't help my kids."

Hang on. "My" kids? You're supposed to say "It's about the future of all our children," not "It's about the future of my children" — whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million bucks a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign's self-absorption: Talking about Obama's pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama's kids.

By the way, the best response to Michelle's "this conversation doesn't help my kids" would be: "But entrusting their religious upbringing to Jeremiah Wright does?" Ah but, happily, Meredith Vieira isn't that kind of interviewer.

Mrs. O is becoming a challenge for satirists. My radio pal Hugh Hewitt played a clip on his show of the putative First Lady identifying the real problem facing America:

"Like many young people coming out of college, with their MAs and BAs and PhDs and MPhs coming out so mired in debt that they have to forego the careers of their dreams, see, because when you're mired in debt, you can't afford to be a teacher or a nurse or social worker, or a pastor of a church, or to run a small non-profit organization, or to do research for a small community group, or to be a community organizer because the salaries that you'll earn in those jobs won't cover the cost of the degree that it took to get the job."

I'm not sure why Michelle would stick "pastor of a Church" in that list of downscale occupations: her pastor drives a Merc and lives in a gated community. But, insofar as I understand Mrs. O, she feels that many Harvard and Princeton graduates have to give up their life's dream of being a minimum-wage "community organizer" (whatever that is) and are forced to become corporate lawyers, investment bankers and multinational CEOs just to pay off their college loans. I'm sure the waitresses and checkout clerks nodded sympathetically.

Michelle Obama is a bizarre mix of condescension and grievance — like Teresa Heinz Kerry with a chip on her shoulder. But the common thread to her rhetoric is its antipathy to what she calls "corporate America." Perhaps for his next Gettysburg Address the Senator will be saying, "I could no more disown my wife than I could disown my own pastor. Oh, wait ..."

Whatever one thinks of Senators Clinton and McCain, they're as familiar as any public figures can be. Obama, on the other hand, is running explicitly on a transcendent "magic." It doesn't help when the cute girl in spangled tights keeps whining about how awful everything is and the guy you sawed in half sticks himself together and starts rampaging around the stage. The magician has lost control of the show.

 

[kneelin]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I've always found her a bit scarier than Obama; with answers like these, I'm surprised she hasn't gotten as much attention as Bill Clinton.