CNN Nails 0bama on Ayers

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2008
CNN Nails 0bama on Ayers
122
Tue, 10-07-2008 - 3:26pm

Well, I guess CNN does stand for the Clinton News Network..but they did report that 0bama's and Ayers relationship was more than what 0bama has stated.

Pages

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 11:05am
If Osama Bin Laden was captured 30 years from now, would you say, we should forget about it because he hasn't bombed lately

Stranger things have happened:


You bet your life, they have. Heck, here's perhaps even a better example: this picture was taken AFTER the whole "gassing his own people" thing happened: we knew what Saddam was....and we tried to sell him weapons and prop him up anyway, because he was a reliable authoritarian partner who was amenable to our interests in the region and a bulwark against Iran:

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2001
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 11:09am
I agree.
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 11:11am
Yep....we DO know. Come back soon. Only four more weeks to go.
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 11:19am
Are you saying that factcheck.org isn't printing the truth?


Weeeelllll....I can't claim to speak for freedom09, but if that IS what (s)he's saying, (s)he wouldn't be the first here to do it. Only, to hear that poster - and the one to whom she was responding tell it, factcheck MUST be in the tank for Obama....because they disagreed with the Republican take on something, I guess.

Heh. In the tank:


Yeah, baby!

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-07-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 12:34pm
You obviously haven't been watching the news. LOL!
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 2:14pm
His relationship with Ayers is neither important or relevant to Obama's candidacy.

it's important to some voters b/c he lied ... they wonder WHY.


Well, you know what they say - sometimes, the cover-up is worse than the event itself.

I haven't followed the ins and outs of Obama's every comment on either Wright or Ayers, but it's been my general impression that the comments that have people worried tend to be more matters of interpretation or exaggeration than stark, outright lies. For example, Obama referred, when asked in a debate in February, to Ayers as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and I think he said something about serving on one board with him. Turns out it's two boards. And there was the fundraiser at Ayers' house. While Obama's comment clearly wasn't a full and complete accounting of each and every contact he'd had with Ayers up to that time, I don't put it in the same category of "I did not have sex with that woman." The latter is an unambiguous (and unambiguously untrue) response to a direct question. The former seems to me more of a genuine attempt to describe the overall nature of a relationship with someone else, rather than an attempt to flat-out lie, like Clinton's was.

Now, it's likely that Obama knew this was an "explosive" subject (pun intended). And it's certainly possible that Obama was intentionally trying to minimize the associations by carefully downplaying or omitting some facts. In a worst-case scenario, he might very well have been lying by omission. But I think that it may be even more likely that Obama had taken stock of his relationship with Ayers long before the primary debates began (because he knew it might become an issue, or a weapon to be used against him), and decided that since the association wasn't in any way subversive or what have you, that it would be far easier to simply say "he lives near me, we're not close friends, we worked on a board together." Because one other thing Obama's said throughout this campaign when the Ayers issue has been raised is that it's more than a little ridiculous to try to associate him with what he's publicly described as the "detestable" acts of a man with whom he's had such limited involvement, when those "detestable" acts were forty years ago, when Obama was a child.

I dont say this to excuse Obama, necessarily, because I'm not sure there's anything to excuse; no one knows the exact nature of their relationship, or of what went through Obama's head when he considered what he might say publicly regarding the connection, in the context of his Presidential campaign. I just think it's entirely possible that Obama - rightly - saw this as a not-particularly-significant fact about his past which could be easily fashioned into an effective - however trivial - club with which the opposition could attempt to beat him. So, rather than dwell upon it, and effectively hand the opposition the club himself, he gave an answer that is true in essence (that they've worked together occasionally on education issues, and crossed paths, but not much else), but lacking in every detail. Nothing I've seen from even the most feverish of wingnuts who've dug as deep as they can on the Ayers/Obama connection leads me to believe that Obama's "covering up" anything sinister or nefarious in his dealings with Ayers. Indeed, by all accounts, Ayers is a tepid academic these days, a man who - while he may still, in interviews, endorse his own anti-war past - hasn't raised a fist, or a bomb, in anger since the early '70s, and who has in the intervening years, been enough of a positive force in his community that Chicago awarded him it's "Citizen of the Year" award in 1997.
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 2:28pm

Well....I agree: strike one!

But you've got the pitcher and batter's roles reversed: that was just strike one that went whizzing by the collective wingnut community, in the form of the Ayers/Obama connection.

What's been fascinating about the slow-mo implosion of the McCain campaign over the past couple of weeks since the disastrous repetition of the "fundamentals of our economy are strong" line on the very morning that the Wall Street meltdown really became horribly visible, is that while the McCain strategists have obviously opted to go with the "kitchen sink" strategy, even going so far as to tell the press that they planned to step up the negative attacks on Obama.....the stuff they're actually using is stuff that's already been used - and disposed of - before.

You'd think, if McCain had an October surprise waiting in his back pocket regarding Obama, now would have been the time to use it; sometime in the last two weeks, we'd have all started to hear about some supposedly terrible thing Obama once did, or what have you. But instead, we're hearing stuff that's been out there on the campaign trail for literally MONTHS: Wright? Hillary Clinton tried - unsuccessfully - to use that. Not only did it not work (though it did throw Obama into defense mode for a couple of weeks), it actually gave the Obama campaign a ready narrative and tried-and-true defense against it. It's literally like a vaccination: he's survived that particular attack before, and without something related to it which is both truly new and genuinely shocking, Obama and his campaign already know very well how to deal with it, successfully. Ditto Ayers, ditto Rezko. It's just not anything that anyone paying attention doesn't already know. The ONLY possible benefit to it at this point is that there may be people who are just sort of starting to tune in to the political process, low-information voters who weren't really paying attention the first time this stuff was brought up and dealt with during the primaries. But even with THOSE people, Obama has the advantage of having been through the fire with these specific issues before: he's seen what works and what doesn't in responding to them, and his campaign's response will be much better coordinated and focused even than it was the first time.

I'm thinking McCain's campaign has basically shot its wad: if they had any really big guns we hadn't already seen, they'd be using them right now. The rule in politics, with negative stuff, is that you don't want to put it out too early, because it gives your opponent time to adapt to it and for his/her replies to make their way out into the public domain. But if you wait until TOO late - only a week or two before election day - there's the opposite problem: people may not hear about it in enough numbers to swing the election away from your opponent. Right about now is the sweet spot: 30 days is plenty of time, especially in our media-soaked, instant-communication world, for an attack to really penetrate and a meme to take hold. Less time, it might not be able to; more time, it might be stale and dealt with by election day. I honestly think the McSame campaign is simply out of ammunition.

Time to ditch, Johnny Mac -- you remember how to do that, don't you? ;o)

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-08-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 2:33pm
Actually, there's nothing on the AIP website that advocates secession. What it seems they really want is to vote on the status of Alaska.


And there's nothing on stormfront.org or any of the KKK websites advocating the lynching of blacks, either. Even the most vicious of redneck groups have gotten somewhat media savvy. Doesn't mean they don't want those things, though. Here's an interview with Joe Vogler, founder of the Alaska Independence Party. Some of the juicier quotes:

The founder of the Alaska Independence Party -- a group that has been courted over the years by Sarah Palin, and one her husband was a member of for roughly seven years -- once professed his "hatred for the American government" and cursed the American flag as a "damn flag."

The AIP founder, Joe Vogler, made the comments in 1991, in an interview that's now housed at the Oral History Program in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

"The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government," Vogler said in the interview, in which he talked extensively about his desire for Alaskan secession, the key goal of the AIP.

"And I won't be buried under their damn flag," Vogler continued in the interview, which also touched on his disappointment with the American judicial system. "I'll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home."

At another point, Volger advocated renouncing allegiance to the United States. In the course of denouncing Federal regulation over land, he said:

"And then you get mad. And you say, the hell with them. And you renounce allegiance, and you pledge your efforts, your effects, your honor, your life to Alaska."


They are secessionist, make no mistake about it.
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-26-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 5:07pm
nah...but here comes Rev Wright, chuggin' 'round the bend
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-26-2008
Wed, 10-08-2008 - 5:12pm
Aah...when you can't find facts to back up your propaganda you just make them up...and then "prove it" with "because I say so." Almost as convincing as Obama. LOL!

Pages