Doc_M, do you really think she's being unfairly criticized by a liberal media?

For example, do you think the other aspects of that interview were distorted, like her not knowing what the Bush doctrine was, or her "you can't blink" speech she gave when asked about whether she had doubts about accepting the nomination for VP?

Or the 4 times she said we shouldn't "second guess" Israel if they decide to attack Iran?

The religious stuff seems inconclusive to me, though there are some crazy stories about her pastor, and others associated with her church (a story about a literal witch hunt comes to mind).

I'd love to say it's not fair game, but since the supposedly liberal media beat the Jeremiah Wright horse to death, I'm not sure there's a leg for conservatives to stand on in saying Palin's church's past is off limits.

That said, there are many other more relevant topics for us to discuss about Palin's qualifications for the job, without sinking to that level.

Think of this as her version of the "are you a Muslim" question the press always asks Obama "just because there's talk about it on the Internet".

>> ^quantumushroom:
"Religious nutcase" here defined as anyone who isn't a "secular humanist".
I'd rather have an atheist president than a Muslim cough one.


At least Jeremiah Wright doesn't defend Agent Orange, Joe McCarthy, stealing land from Mexico, two dozen CIA-backed coups, and forced indian removal.

I wouldn't really call this arguing, this has been a delightfully civil exchange as far as these things go, and I appreciate your candor.

You have to admit though, this particular clip, even out of context, doesn't mean what you titled the video.

I don't think Obama is a political messiah -- as a matter of fact, that's one of the smears used against him is to purport that he sees himself as one, or that his supporters see him as one. It's true that I personally have pinned a lot of high hopes on him, but that's more about the Democratic platform moving into ascendancy than it is about him personally.

Videosift has its bias, but not all anti-McCain stuff sifts. For example, the clip of him saying he defines rich as $5 million/year or more probably wouldn't sift, because you'd have to edit it a healthy amount, and it's not particularly damning. Expect it to wind up in a video montage, though.

My main problem with all the anti-Obama stuff is that it's either a) made up, b) misrepresented, or c) about someone else with a weak tie to Obama. The Letterman clip was none of those things, and was entertaining to boot, so it sifted.

No one hits him for caving on FISA, or for talking tough about Iran, or even about the fact that he's said he does not expect to be able to balance the budget in his first term. They do hit him as being inexperienced, but they usually invalidate those arguments by lying about it (e.g. "He's never done anything bipartisan" or "He's never done anything significant"...both false!).

Instead it's mostly implying he's a Muslim, impugning his patriotism, Jeremiah Wright, calling his popularity "celebrity", lies about his tax policy, and lies about his energy policy.

The lowest class thing the left says about McCain is that he's old and angry...and lots of people who know him personally say the same (even his mom). The rest is just clips of things he's said which coincide with his stated policies.

The homegrown anti-Obama stuff often looks like this, or worse.

This includes the interview with the US ambassador whom Rev. Jeremiah Wright quoted when he said "America's chickens are coming home to roost".

Can you tell me what the context was when Jeremiah Wright said "God damn America"? How about when he said "America's chickens are coming home to roost?"


It was, of course, horribly out of context. That makes BOTH rants by the media despicable. I'd personally like to see Obama over McCain. But you are still just reinforcing the point that the above video is completely misrepresenting McCain's position to make it easier to bad mouth him. It is exactly what Fox is doing to Obama, and just because McCain is a Republican doesn't suddenly change it from unfair to helpful.

>> ^chiguy:
FOR ANYONE WHO IS STUPID ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THE OBVIOUS HACK JOB PUT TOGETHER IN THIS CLIP. For the record, here’s McCain’s full quote, IN CONTEXT, from back in January:
Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years…
McCain: Maybe a hundred. Make it one hundred. We’ve been in South Korea, we’ve been in Japan for sixty years. We’ve been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me. I would hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.


Can you tell me what the context was when Jeremiah Wright said "God damn America"? How about when he said "America's chickens are coming home to roost?"

How about when Obama said that people cling to guns and religion?

Tell me, how long is McCain willing to stay when people are being injured and killed? Americans are still being injured and killed every day. How many more days will he give it before he says it's not worth it?

All he says "until it's done". If he said 100 years, at least there'd be a finite timetable. "Until it's done" has no time limit.

If you ask me, the DNC is being kind by not putting McCain's true policy out there.

PS: Check this out

Some excerpts from his appearance today:

_ "I stand before you to open up this two-day symposium with the hope that this most recent attack on the black church is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright; it is an attack on the black church. ... The most recent attack on the black church, it is our hope that this just might mean that the reality of the African-American church will no longer be invisible."

_ On Obama's denunciation of some of his past remarks:

"Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever's doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they're pastors. They have a different person to whom they're accountable. As I said, whether he gets elected or not, I'm still going to have to be answerable to God November 5 and January 21. That's what I mean. I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do. I am not running for office. I am hoping to be vice president. ...

"He didn't distance himself. He had to distance himself because he's a politician. From what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American. He said I didn't offer any words of hope. How would he know? He never heard the rest of the sermon. You never heard it. I offered words of hope. I offered reconciliation, I offered restoration in that sermon, but nobody heard the sermon. They just heard this little sound bite of a sermon."

_ On whether he should apologize for shouting in a sermon "God damn America" for its treatment of minorities:

"God doesn't bless everything. God condemns some things. And dem, D-E-M, is where we get the word damn. God damns some practices and there's no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn't make me not like America or unpatriotic."

_ On anyone who says he's unpatriotic:

"I feel that those citizens who say that have never heard my sermons, nor do they know me. They are unfair accusations taken from sound bites and that which is looped over and over on certain channels. I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"

I dont care what washingtonpost says, but i expect others may:
from http://blog.washingtonpost.com/roughsketch/2008/04/obamas_pastor_reignites_race_c.html


The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explaining this morning why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from Proverbs: "It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Barack Obama's pastor would have been wise to continue to heed that wisdom.

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

Sorry moodonia, but this is a dupe:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Father-Pfleger-sets-FAUX-straight-on-Jeremiah-Wright

Irony? All those kids were fathered by Jeremiah Wright.

Here is a fun little experiment for you: The next time someone calls Jeremiah Wright a racist, ask them to explain why. Then sit back and enjoy the stuttering and stammering.

Why this is? Because the media hasn't really backed up it's claim, they've merely repeated it over and over and over and over until many believe it to be so. (They do this all the time and we are all subject to it's influence.)

This is a smart, forward thinking, compassionate man, who is miles ahead of media punditry when it comes to domestic policy, war and race. After watching this clip, it's easy to see why the media and political establishment fears him.

I guess at the very least it's nice to see establishment attempt to justify it's fears, which is an important prerequisite to eventually confronting them.

Lately, it seems like we live in bizzaro America, where concern about racism = racism and seeking to improve your country = anti-American.

>> ^quantumushroom:

How about this: an honest man has a better chance of landing a job than a convicted felon, even one who's been forthright.

Your assertion is demonstrably false, as appealing as it might be to believe it.

http://paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=50874&ei=AzrhR-mKBIjKhQTMgv25Dw&usg=AFQjCNGRrZyTqgfg6fFWpomP5Vm_mUQ3ig&sig2=DlvBJ-AZ6_aYrbq5wE
3oSQ

The chance a qualified black man with no criminal record has of getting a job is less than
the chance a qualified white man with a felony conviction has of getting that same job in the progressive city of New York, I doubt it's any better in the deep south. While we may both wish this was not the case, desire =/=> reality.

Excuses. And most American Blacks are middle class and do well. You just never hear about them because only crises buy votes.

That ignores the issue, impoverished communities are different things from individuals. While many individuals overcome hardships within a generation, communities do not.
When People move here from Ukraine, for instance, they take initiative to improve their lives, when people move out of the ghetto they do the same thing. If you want to compare middle class blacks to immigrants you will find no significant achievement disparity.

We don't count the people who stay behind in Ukraine, but we do count the people who stay behind in the ghetto, your claim is biased because you are not comparing like groups. If we add the population and average income of people in Ukraine to our statistics of the economic prosperity of Ukrainian immigrants they would do worse then the average black American, but you are not chastising all of Ukraine for not taking advantage of all the great breaks they have been given.

The question is not whether some individuals can overcome these hardships quickly, which is trivially provable, but whether entire communities do, in both of my examples the answer is no.

Oh boy, another atheist, who can't see into the infrared spectrum with naked eye or hear the same high notes as dogs, is going to lecture about how, "There's nothing out there."

I'm not the one who said that Dr. Wright, in his role as a preacher, should be "serving up rationality". If you don't want the irrationality of religion pointed out, don't bring rationality up in that context.

I didn't say I was a Marxist, only that you are using a label in an attempt to demonize someone when you don't appear to understand it's meaning. Marxist => Atheist =/=> Marxist.

The most prosperous societies are secular, even the US, despite it's cultural fetishization of Christianity, is a highly secular society composed mostly of unchurched Christians-in-name-only, who do very well without any real deference to their espoused god or religion.

Marxism fails because it is totalitarian, not because it is irreligious, just as Capitalist-Democracy succeeds to the extent that it avoids totalitarianism, religion(except as a political ploy) has nothing to do with it.

>> ^quantumushroom:
I think you're confusing "discomfort" with "sick-to-death" of discussions of race.

Living in a culture that is racist, and making a spectacle of race/racism, is not the same as discussing race, which is something Americans do very rarely.

They have also been offered more second-chances, breaks, excuses for failure and opportunities than any other minority on earth.

When an honest black man has a better chance of landing a job then an otherwise equally qualified white convicted felon, then you might be able to make such a claim. Until then your claim is full of shit.

Group after ethnic group, including Caribbean Blacks, who arrive in America and were never taught Victimhood 101 are up and running in 2 generations. What a difference a little optimism and effort makes.

Immigrants self select, so using them as the control sample is absurd. Historically oppressed non-immigrant communities recover very slowly, though it is happening.

Take a look at native people on reservations, or poor rural whites in the Appalachians (pejoratively called hillbillies). These groups gain social/economic parity very slowly. We can argue about why that is, but to claim that the dominant culture is not at all at fault, when they were clearly the cause of the disparity to begin with, will require some evidence beyond your hyperbole.

Wright is a crackpot but it doesn't matter, he's not serving up rationality.

Dr. Wright is a preacher who believes that a man who never existed has saved his soul, and will greet him in heaven after he dies, your statement is trivially true OF ALL CHRISTIAN PREACHERS.

that a would-be President shares his marxist philosophy is the cause for alarm.

Accusing a Christian preacher of being Marxist suggests you have no idea what you are talking about.

>> ^reyentexas:
P.S. if the five exclamation marks truly stand for insanity, then what does Jeremiah Wright's anger stand for? Would that be Peace and unification!!!!!


Either that should have been "That would be" or, it should be "?????".
you don't end a question with an exclamation mark.

P.S. if the five exclamation marks truly stand for insanity, then what does Jeremiah Wright's anger stand for? Would that be Peace and unification!!!!!
Please, again, 1 and 1 does not equal 9. Vote for Obama, that is your right. I am entitled to my vote and my opinion. Grow up and realize that we are still a free nation and name calling is for amateurs.