Not the sort of news Barack Obama wants to be making tonight.
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10 thoughts on “Double trouble”
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By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Not the sort of news Barack Obama wants to be making tonight.
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Little Green Footballs, the blog that helped bring down Dan Rather and C-BS, now has an open thread asking, “Should America Have a President Who Associates with America-Haters?” In just a few hours the response has been overwhelmingly, “No!”As a Republican, I give credit to Obama for finally denouncing his pastor’s outrageous words and in all honesty, I think this came out early enough for Obama to fully recover. Unless there is even more to come. Why doesn’t he wear the American flag pin again? The risk now is death by a thousand cuts. I mean with wife Michelle saying that the U.S. is, “Just downright mean” and this is “The first time in my adult life I am proud of America” plus, Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying “It’s not God Bless America, it’s God (expletive) America”…Houston, we have a problem.I’m no fan of Hillary, but Democrats may want to hearken to the old Irish saying, “Tis the olde dog for the long road, and the pup for the gutter.”
This was a clear case of getting the Rezko stuff out on a Friday night (best time to release ugly news) and in the midst of the Wright controversy. Let’s see if this has legs into next week — and LGF isn’t the measure of that.My gut tells me that the tour of talk shows he did last night helped, but he’ll need to do a Checkers speech or Gennifer Flowers-type interview sometime next week to put an end to this.A tiny bit of good news in all this (I think there is some): the Wright stuff sort of destroys the “Obama is Muslim” meme, doesn’t it? A “Checkers speech” on Wright would give Obama a chance to talk about faith in a way that people haven’t heard a Democratic presidential candidate talk about faith in the past.
DK – Heaven help him if he has a Gary Hart moment, and it turns out he WAS present at some of Rev. Wrights incendiary sermons after explicitly stating he had NEVER been. I’ve never been to a church where we’ve been videotaped, but it appears to be a routine practice at Trinity.
o-fish-l,If you posted a question a question on LGF asking if Obama were an America-hating girlie man, the answer would be a resounding yes. A poll with that targeted an audience is meaningless.
PP: As I said over at BMG, Obama is asking us to believe too much. Wright married the Obamas and baptized their daughters. Obama titled his second book after one of Wright’s sermons. I don’t believe for a moment that Obama buys into this crap. But I think it’s likely that he chose to go with the flow. I think it’s unlikely that he had no idea. And I think we’re going to get a more definitive answer soon.bostph: To bolster your point to Fish — I suspect that if you asked LGF readers if Obama were secretly a Muslim extremist involved in 9/11, the breakdown would be 72 percent “yes”; 20 percent “probably”; and 8 percent “he’s actually Osama bin Laden in disguise.”
Any comment that starts with “Little Green Footballs” can be automatically disregarded. As for the America hating, what Wright said is no different than anyone else who looks at events as signs of God’s displeasure. “God damn America”? Well, Falwell and his ilk seem to think God is damning America…so why do we treat Wright any differently? McCain actively seeks out the Hagees and Parsleys of the world, getting down on bended knee for their blessings because the support of the Christian right is essential to the GOP winning. Which is more distasteful? A whack job black nationalist? Or institutionalizing the Christian right throughout the US government?
You know, I am already getting very tired of political coverage. It’s marginalizing all the other news, and there’s a whole lot going on. This intensive, blow-by-blow coverage of a campaign that still has almost eight months to go, is like the most obsessive of Red Sox fans moaning about Francona making a pitching change in the sixth inning of a game in mid-April, as if it might cost the team a playoff spot. Unless there’s some kind of huge firestorm, all these controversies will be forgotten by the time we get to the conventions, let alone the fall campaign. In fact, I’d say that these stories actually work to Obama’s advantage, because they will all be old news by the time we get to the serious campaign. Better now than in September, certainly. It makes me long for the snap elections of a parliamentary system, let me tell ya.
While I totally understand why Obama felt the need to denounce his former pastor, I don’t agree with it at all. The pastor – and many others from Noam Chomsky to Gore Vidal – is correct: Our government’s foreign policy brought the events of 9-11 to America. It has nothing to do with being an “America-Hater.” I love my country. I love its people. I would use my own life to defend it in a heartbeat. But I fear my government, its entanglements, and the retributions of its actions.The fact that supporters of peace have been proved correct and yet we still have to defend ourselves is amazing. The fact that many conservatives and Christians no less still don’t understand that the words of Jesus Christ are so blatantly clear is astonishing. The fact that the despicable atrocities our government has brought to many nations of the world are so obvious, so vibrantly documented by the press and others that we can’t be critical of them in a supposedly free state for fear of being called “America-Haters” is mind-numbing.
To Dot: To their peril, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes shared your “automatically disregard Little Green Footballs” attitude. C-BS, Rather, Mapes et al were brought down in short order.To bostonph and Dan, I called it an open thread, not a scientific poll. I’m not here to advocate for or against what LGF is saying, just trying to inform you what’s on a blog that many of you are averse to, and I suspect don’t read. When Obama starts appearing on Fox News to save himself, things have expanded far beyond LGF. If nothing else, the petals are coming off the rose.
o-fish-l:The folks at LGF are like people standing in a trench filled with manure who then found a twenty dollar bill at the bottom of the trench. The presence of the twenty does nothing to validate their being in the manure in the first place and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re going to find another twenty. They will, however, still stink at the end of the day. But if you want to continue to overestimate the intelligence and influence of LGF, be my guest, because it is that type of delusional thinking that will continue to drive the conservative movement in this country into the ground.