One thing to note about Hillary Clinton's Florida and Michigan strategy is the utter selfishness of it. Her best shot at getting her way on this issue is to keep observing, in a meta kind of way, that if the DNC disses Florida and Michigan by not seating their delegates, that this could hurt Democratic fortunes in Florida and Michigan in November.
Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget--is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
"The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan, and it is George Bush that's been naive and it's people like John McCain and, unfortunately, some Democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world," he said. Read below the fold...
Throughout this campaign, Barack Obama supporters have advised skeptics like me to read his book, The Audacity of Hope (along with every policy paper on his website).
While those supporters have done a yeoman-like job in illustrating Obama's vision of unity, I wanted to get it straight from the source, given the very real possibility that he will be my candidate in November. Read below the fold...
Mike Finnigan alerted me to this clip, specifically the section between 3:15 and 5:40.
Seems to me that Fox News and ABC have some 'splaining to do about why they left out a noteworthy context: that Wright's citation of America's "chickens coming home to roost" on 9/11 began with his attribution of the phrase to a white ambassador named "Peck," whom he says — in the original, now controversial sermon — made that statement on a Fox News show.
Especially for Fox, putting aside that network's "forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" exemption, stripping out this context is the kind of thing that used to be called unacceptable journalism.
As for Wright, however, I don't find this additional context exculpatory. Regardless of how much his "roost" rant is a quote, paraphrase, riff, or whatever, he is still enthusiastically rationalizing the wanton murder of 3,000 innocent civilians. For some inexplicable reason, that doesn't sit well with me.
Now, one has to wonder... did Obama know about this fuller context when he wrote his legendary speech of last week? It's hard to believe that his staff didn't comb over the "offending" source material, that they didn't talk with Wright about the controversial sermons — and that no one brought the "white ambassador" context to his attention.
Why, then, didn't he bring it up?
Even though I've been critical of Wright, I felt honor-bound to share this additional information as soon as I heard about it. Yet Obama didn't, and
I am seriously puzzled about that. Read below the fold...
Noonan lurved the big speech (with a couple of muted reservations) because, in part, it didn't contain "silly, boring" lines like: "And families in Michigan matter!" or "What I stand for is affordable quality health care!"
Yes, yes, Michigan voters and health care are pretty trivial matters, as opposed to, say, "Morning in America." Read below the fold...
To begin with, there are such 3 a.m. calls. During my long career as a diplomat, including crises and military actions in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, I have been on the receiving end, the sending end, and the development of options that led to some of those late night calls. The president's role in crisis management is direct, critical and reflects the exercise of leadership in its most fundamental and powerful form. That capability is not intuitive; rather, it comes from years of experience, training and exposure to the complexities that are in inherent in international relations.
Two links in today's Make Them Accountable e-mail round-up show that a man who has appeared alongside Hillary Clinton in every presidential debate has said scurrilous, disparaging, and racially charged things about Sen. Barack Obama.
From a Chicago Tribune article, which Clinton staffers must have planted on Obama's official Senate website:
Obama acknowledges, with no small irony, that he benefits from his race.
1. Rules are rules. Florida and Michigan primary votes should be ignored, because those states broke DNC rules and held primaries on forbidden dates. If we must pretend to the respect voters of those states, their votes should be allocated equally to the remaining candidates, thus rendering the votes meaningless. Why? Because rules transcend the will of the voters. Read below the fold...
