Mar 16, 2008 at 9:40 PM by Political Chase
Barack Obama’s home church in Chicago fought back today over the criticism levied against their former pastor, Rev Jeremiah Wright.
The church attended by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) fought back Sunday against mounting criticism of its pastor, accusing the media of character assassination and “crucifixion.”
Otis Moss II, the current pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, used his pulpit to defend his congregation and its past minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., from a wave of controversy stemming from inflammatory statements made by Wright.
“We have listened and watched as the wonderful work of our church has been vilified this week,” he told about 3,000 congregants on Palm Sunday morning. “This week should be special for us because I guess we know a little something about crucifixion.”
I thought most Americans believed George Bush had done such an outstanding job ripping Articles I - IV and Amendments I, V - VIII, X, XI - XII, XII, and XIV, out of the Constitution that they might be inclined not to destroy the residual elements, but I was wrong.
Based on what has transpired with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney this year, Article VI must now be stricken. It says:
“…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
And the Preamble? It states:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Well, those are just words, so rip it out because words are not applicable, nor have substance or power.
For the record, Rev. Moss was presumably referring to these or other contextually similar passages from the New Testament in the Bible. But that doesn’t matter either according to the Righteous and Powerful, because they are just words as well.
13 Pilate summoned the chief priests and the rulers and the people, 14 and said to them, “You brought this man to me as one who incites the people to rebellion, and behold, having examined Him before you, I have found no guilt in this man regarding the charges which you make against Him….16 “Therefore I will punish Him and release Him.”…18 But they cried out all together, saying, “Away with this man, and release for us Barabbas!”… 20 Pilate, wanting to release Jesus, addressed them again, 21 but they kept on calling out, saying, “Crucify, crucify Him!” 22 And he said to them the third time, “Why, what evil has this man done? I have found in Him no guilt demanding death; therefore I will punish Him and release Him.” 23 But they were insistent, with loud voices asking that He be crucified. And their voices began to prevail. 24 And Pilate pronounced sentence that their demand be granted.
Luke 23:13-15,16,18,20-24
I am truly saddened by what is taking place in our country.
Mar 16, 2008 at 5:58 PM by Political Chase
Cheney’s trip to the Middle East is indeed a big deal. Around the globe, there is considerable speculation, and angst, all accompanied by theories adaptable to the posit-of-the-moment.
Regardless of whatever spin may be generated by a given faction or the countless milestones that could be associated with Darth Vader’s trip, there are a few key elements that are central to any view considered or stated.
March 3, 2008 - During an historic visit to Iraq, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tells the U.S. to quit Iraq.
March 10, 2008 - Dick Cheney announces trip to Middle East.
March 11, 2008 - Centcom Commander Admiral Fallon abruptly resigns and Iran is widely viewed as dominating issue.
Iran wasn’t the only point of contention between Fallon and the rest of the Bush administration….But, it was Fallon’s words on Iran policy that riled neoconservative White House and Beltway hawks. The Esquire article describes the conflict over Iran policy as a Manichaean fight between a Bush administration hellbent on confrontation and a Fallon equally determined to cool down tensions.
March 11, 2008 - Dick Cheney delivers fiery remarks about Iran to Heritage Foundation
“Given all we know about the Iranian regime’s hatred of America, its vow to destroy Israel, and its ongoing efforts to develop the technology that could be used for a nuclear weapon, that is a danger every one of us must take seriously.”
March 14, 2008 - UPI editor on Fallon’s departure:
“If orders to attack came from the commander in chief in the White House, the attack would be under Fallon’s orders. So Fallon did what he felt senior military commanders opposed to the invasion of Iraq should have done in early-2003.
The UPI editor’s commentary and analysis is indicative of many views expressed about Admiral Fallon’s recent resignation (Bush-Cheney water-carriers excepted). I did not reference his comments because they were extraordinary, per se, however, the editor succinctly related Cheney’s actions over time to substantial and consequential global events such as the Iraq war.
November 2006 was the last time I remember Cheney making an extended trip to the Middle East, and it was indeed surrounded in controversy. Looking back to that time, all one can see is an administration caught up in an inferno, but amidst all that was transpiring at the time, it is easy to see an administration increasing its focus and war rhetoric on Iran. The focus and rhetoric continued to alarmingly increase until Bush became aware of the findings in the National Intelligence Estimate that was publicly released in December 2007.
And now, one could suggest, based on facts, that the rhetoric, focus, and questionable activities are upon us again.
Mar 16, 2008 at 1:37 PM by Political Chase
Barack Obama formally addresses in this newly released video, the kerfuffle that arose over remarks made by his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama published a blog post Friday at Huffington that closely parallels the video.
I have not watched the regularly scheduled Sunday-bloviating yet, but I’m sure this scandal was enriched today.
Mar 16, 2008 at 1:07 PM by Political Chase
(Update I and II below)
Cheney spending nine days in the Middle East, with a “rich” agenda?
Vice President Dick Cheney left on Sunday for the Middle East to raise concerns about high oil prices, push Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and seek support for Iraq, where war began five years ago this week.
Cheney, who has strong ties with leaders in the Middle East, will visit Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jerusalem, the Palestinian territories, and Turkey during a nine-day trip to the region.
“Clearly, our ongoing efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan will be discussed,” John Hannah, national security adviser to Cheney, told reporters. “Middle East peace, Iran, the situation in Syria, Lebanon, the violence in Gaza, energy — it’s a very long list and rich agenda.”
Cheney will reinforce the message from visits by President George W. Bush in January and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month, in a stepped-up diplomatic push for Israelis and Palestinians to move forward on peace efforts dealt a blow by violence in Gaza and Israel.
“The mood has deteriorated incredibly in the last six weeks since the president was there,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.
Don’t you just love the way we now have five branches of government: the President, the Congress, the Courts, the Fourth Estate, and now the neocon think tanks, who now writes the country’s foreign policy, verbatim.
Ironic at minimum that Cheney takes an extended tour of the Middle East on the fifth anniversary of invading Iraq, which he bears more responsibility for than anyone else in the Bush administration. Even C-Plus Augustus.
Cheney doesn’t go on diplomacy missions. He goes on strong-arm missions, or self-serving missions. Need to reflect on this a bit, but I can think of only two reasons why Darth Vader has scuttled off for nine days to the chaotic region he has coveted for so many years: (1) working on his plan to ensure riches still flow to his pockets after he leaves in 2009; or (2) activities that will somehow be interwoven into the GOP’s 2008 campaign strategy — especially considering John McCain’s surprise appearance in Iraq today.
Update I: Let’s add strategic planning for an attack on Iran to that list. I don’t know why I failed to list it. Brain dead.
It’s the most obvious and speculated scenario, especially considering Admiral Fallon’s demise and the circumstances surrounding it.
Update II: More on Cheney’s trip here.
Mar 16, 2008 at 4:54 AM by Political Chase
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| Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton |
Yesterday I wrote about how the Democratic presidential candidates are not focusing on the issues that matter. Instead, the two candidates are fully engaged in a mudslinging fight. Hillary Clinton is a master at slinging mud and Barack Obama leads a well-organized fire brigade around the country hosing himself and everything around him off. And if Hillary doesn’t formally initiate it, she is equally masterful at franchised mudslinging. She has digressed from the politics of personal destruction that Bill Clinton made famous, to Lee Atwater’s notorious and despicable strategy of demonizing the opponent.
Lee Atwater was Karl Rove’s mentor and the politics of the current administration are just a few examples of the destruction Atwater left in his wake. If elected, Will Hillary be as destructive as president as she is a candidate?
Atwater also taught Geraldine Ferraro how to play the dirtiest politics humanely possible, but she had to learn the hard way as an opponent. The country was recently reintroduced to Ms. Ferraro and her well executed strategy of demonizing Barack Obama and his campaign.
I realize focusing on Atwater’s tactics may seem instructional, but I believe it will help put things in the proper perspective and provide some critical insight.
This is how Wiki describes Atwater.
He was a campaign consultant to Republican candidate Floyd Spence in his campaign for Congress against Democratic nominee Tom Turnipseed. Atwater’s tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by “independent pollsters” to “inform” white suburbanites that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP. He also sent out last-minute letters from Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) telling voters that Turnipseed would disarm America and turn it over to liberals and Communists. At a press briefing, Atwater planted a “reporter” who rose and said, “We understand Turnipseed has had psychotic treatment.” Atwater later told the reporters off the record that Turnipseed “got hooked up to jumper cables” - a reference to electroconvulsive therapy that Turnipseed underwent as a teenager…
… Atwater ran a dirty-tricks operation in 1984 against vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. This included the allegation that Ferraro’s parents had been indicted for numbers running in the 1940s. Ferraro disappeared for a few days to ‘recover’ from the accusation.
Atwater’s disgraceful tactics skyrocketed him to the top in 1988 when he successfully ran George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Former Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis was Bush 41’s opponent and unfortunately the object of Atwater’s notorious Willie Horton ad. (See video here; Horton info here).The ad and tactics Atwater orchestrated like these, literally knocked Dukakis out of a 17-point lead over Bush and destroyed his political career and seriously damaging his personal life.
During the election, a number of false rumors were reported in the media about Dukakis, including the claim… that Dukakis’s wife Kitty had burned an American flag to protest the Vietnam War, as well as the claim that Dukakis himself had been treated for a mental illness. Although Atwater was accused of having initiated these rumors, there is no proof that he did so.
Sound familiar? Need a reminder? Last week Team Hillary sent out a statement to reporters and bloggers titled “Keystone Test: Obama Losing Ground.” Hillary isn’t debating the issues, she’s debating her opponent. Knock Obama off, lie to the people about her experience and plans – when she might talk about them – ignore the rest, and get the Lincoln Bedroom back. This is a despicable tactic, however it did give Obama’s team a great opportunity to thoroughly run Clinton through the blender.
Hillary’s campaign has all the bells and whistles of Atwater’s and the constant micro-explosions (viz. Mark Penn) that discombobulates and causes dissembling. When combined, the Clinton campaign has a very calculated strategy to achieve a complex objective – divide and conquer. A simple-three-word strategy that can be hard to discern, control, and its long-term effectiveness can be easily underestimated.
Hillary’s purveyors of racism, scandal, fear, and personal destruction, are not merely playing hardball politics. They are literally fighting a war. A psychological war. It’s hearts and minds, but they’re not overly concerned about winning hearts and minds. They just want to instill doubt in many and crush a few. Winning them ultimately will take care of itself if their conquer and divide strategy is successful.
Team Clinton is effectively generating a national conflict and disturbance that has negative global media exposure and changes rapidly, which insures continuous high-profile coverage in news cycles. the appropriate. Just consider how many news cycles were dedicated to thoroughly analyzing which Hillary show up at the last debate? Manic Hillary? New voice Hillary?
Each racist remark, each negative innuendo, each association with fear, is not any different than dropping relatively small bombs from 40,000 feet. They cause relative damage, generate a loud boom, but do not create, by and within themselves, mass destruction. However, if repeated frequently over time, they create, for all practical purposes, mass destruction.
Ask Winston Churchill or Colin Powell. It is no different from Europe in World War II or Vietnam.
The objective is to inflict damage on every Obama “front” possible, so that it will: (1) stop or seriously impede the masses from flowing to Obama; (2) cause just enough existing supporters to abandon ship - it doesn’t have to be a high volume — just enough to disillusion others whether coming or staying; and (3) wound enough current Obama supporters that won’t exit regardless of the circumstances, but become disaffected — “boil all the hope out them.”
Obama’s opponents hope (how ironic) they can inflict enough systemic psychological damage on his campaign, and over time be able to convince pledged and superdelegates, directly or indirectly, that Obama will not survive a general election.
The Clinton campaign started their strategy long ago and put it in overdrive last week when Mark Penn conveniently announced, but did not announce to the world that Obama could not win Pennsylvania, and thereby absolutely could not win the general election.
Think about how Hillary maneuvered through the debates. When there were eight candidates, she floated around like a social butterfly and just wore her inevitability façade. However, from the very moment when the candidates began challenging her legitimately, and fairly, over N.Y. drivers’ licenses, she and Bill Clinton cried foul across the universe.
The “boys were ganging up on her”, treating her unfairly and mean because she was a woman and the former president’s wife. After that, she turned her “unfair, rude, and dirty old men” switch on and off whenever she needed it. As other Dems dropped out of the race, and the scrutiny and challenge became more intense, she progressively increased the volume and added switches. Ganging up on the gentle lady morphed into racist slurs, native-attire photos, eight years of White House experience that have proven to be misleading at best, just words, endorsed John McCain, etc.
Sending Atwater-trained Geraldine Ferraro out to exploit race and generate widespread division among Obama’s supporters (existing and potential) across the country was classic and executed perfectly. As I said earlier, inflict systemic damage, which is exactly how others have characterized it as well.
Georgetown law professor Emma Coleman Jordan, an Obama supporter who sat on the fence for a long time because she so admired Hillary Clinton, sees the Ferraro episode as “part of a systematic project” to raise Obama’s negatives. “It is so sad that we’ve come to this,” she said, “that a Democratic Party liberal [Clinton] has chosen to pick up the dirtiest tool in the political box to win. I’m sad. You can put that in a quote. But it’s no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that this string of events is not an accident.”
This is where the nexus of constantly dropping small bombs – create the systemic damage – and not having to win hearts and minds today, becomes so important. Damage the tens of millions of voters and it doesn’t matter. All that must be done is ensure delegates, and superdelegates perceive disaffected constituents. More importantly are how supedelegates are led to perceive the environment, because they instinctively have loyalty to Party first and country second. The most important thing superdelegates are going to consider is, who can put the Party in the White House? And they’ll nominate Mike Gravel if they think he is the only person who can and will win the White House.
For weeks, Hillary’s campaign hasn’t given winning the nomination legitimately a moment’s thought. The question is how can she get it, not how can she win it. Break the Party apart, tear it down, literally destroy Barack Obama in the process, and have superdelegates do what they have always done best – take care of the well-established Washington political machine.
Since Clinton repeatedly claims she is basing the foundation of her presidency on profound change and a new order, why does she base her campaign on the Lee Atwater’s incredibly destructive strategy, which ultimately did nothing but cause great heartache for Atwater.
In March 1990 – one year and one month after Bush 41 was inaugurated – Atwater was diagnosed with a brain tumor. One year later he died. He was 40 years old.
A few months before he died, a repentant Atwater wrote to Tom Turnipseed:
“It is very important to me that I let you know that out of everything that has happened in my career, one of the low points remains the so called ‘jumper cable’ episode,” adding, “my illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.”
And in an interview with Life magazine just days before he died, Atwater said:
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
