Sunday, August 03, 2008
A winning coalition
"When you combine an energized African-American voter base and effective coalition-building with other progressive sectors of the population, we think we have a recipe for victory." Obama consciously constructed his election strategy on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial bloc voting. The pillars of Planet Pepe.
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Testifying at the trial of a young felon he'd been tutoring, Ayers calls him "nervous, a little shy . . . eager to please." The prosecutor responds: "Would you call shooting someone eight times at close range 'eager to please?'" Actually, Ayers effectively does do this, opening his book with the claim that a young murderer had "slavishly followed the orders" of his gang leader, rather than acting of his own free will.
Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he'd like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper "structural problems of the system." Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the "normal" and the "deviant." The unfortunate result, says Ayers, is to leave the bulk of us feeling smugly superior to society's prisoners. Home detention, Ayers believes, might someday be able to replace the prison.
This from Obama's buddy, the Weatherman (and Foucault disciple). And what does Obama say?
...what the New York Times called Obama's "rave review" (not actually a full review, but a warm endorsement) of Ayers's book on juvenile justice, which Obama dubbed "a searing and timely account" in the Chicago Tribune.
Yes, we can!
Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago panel about Bill Ayers's crime book in November 1997, just as the battle over the juvenile justice bill was heating up. That panel featured appearances by some of the key figures discussed in Ayers's book, along with Obama himself, who was identified in the press release as "working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system." In effect, then, this public event was a joint Obama-Ayers effort to sink the juvenile justice bill-Obama's decision to plug Ayers's book in the Chicago Tribune the following month was part of the same political effort.
In short, when it comes to the issue of crime, Obama is on the far left of the political spectrum and very much in synch with his active political allies Ayers and Dohrn.
Post-partisan healing, at its very best.
Obama's fondest hope is to lead America into another war on poverty. ... Yet, as a devastating Boston Globe report on Obama's Illinois housing policy recently showed, the results of Obama's new war on poverty are just as counterproductive as those of the old war on poverty. Neighborhoods supposedly renovated now lie deserted by the private developers who took Obama's government handouts and ran-quickly building or renovating housing units, but failing to maintain them.
But of course. But now, if Pepe has his way, Obama can double the federal tax burden, and play with our money as if it were Monopoly money, to satisfy the pinko-lefty dreams. How touching.
In a 2007 speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), Obama touted his Illinois legislative experience and challenged members of Sharpton's group to find a candidate with a better record of supporting the issues they cared about. ... Intrigued by Obama's challenge to Sharpton's group, Randolph Burnside, a professor of political science, and Kami Whitehurst, a doctoral candidate, both at the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, decided to put Obama's Illinois record to the test. ... In the chart depicting bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, the bar for "social welfare" legislation towers over every other category. In the chart of Obama's cosponsored bills, social welfare legislation continues to far exceed all other categories, although now crime-related bills are visibly present in second place, with regulation and tax bills close behind.
Conventional wisdom has it that John McCain holds a political advantage over Obama on war and foreign policy issues, while Obama is favored to handle the economy. Yet Obama's economic experience is largely limited to social welfare spending.
Precisely. What do pinko-lefties do, besides raising taxes, in order to spend like drunken sailors on their pet projects (and to buy votes in the process)?
The Illinois state budget has been in an ever-widening crisis since 2001. In an April 2007 report, a committee of top Chicago business leaders warned that the state was "headed toward fiscal implosion." Illinois's unfunded pension debt is the highest in the nation, while Illinois is sixth in the nation in per capita tax-supported debt. Yet the Illinois General Assembly-now controlled by Obama's Democratic allies-churns out at will exactly the sort of spending programs Obama pushed for, with only partial success, under the Republicans. The result is a fast-growing gap between revenues and expenditures (unimpeded by the statutory requirement of a balanced budget), rising fears of fiscal meltdown, finger-pointing, and political gridlock.
Vision of things to come.
SOunds like america after clinton.
A profound Pepean observation, as usual. Hey, Pepe, you said you wanted to elevate the debate, and talk more in-depth about issues. Here is a rather in-depth look at Obama's record -- with quotes and all -- and that's all you can come up with? Wonders of French pinko public education.
Look, at this point, I care little about anything else than getting the republicans out of the wh. So as long as (to reuse an Edwards line) Barack isn't caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, I'm all for using any Rovian tactics that'll get him there. And you can bet that his opponent will do the same.
"Rovian tactics"? What's that? In my book, it's simply pinko paranoia, and a lefty strawman, with no basis in fact. At any rate, I was not talking about tactics here -- if you actually took the time to skim through the article (or simply, through the excerpts above), we're talking about the politics of your favorite politico: he's all for tribal politics, class-warfare, envy, soak-the-rich, anti-free-market, marxist mumbo-jumbo --the works. If this was France, maybe I'd understand -- after all, the French lap up this kind of baloney, most of the time (though not always). But hey, this is the US of A. How come we have such a fringe candidate (connected to characters such as Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Ayers, and Dohrn) representing a major party in the Presidential election?
I mean, this guy is more pinkish than Ralph Nader, and far more out of the mainstream of the Western political spectrum than, say, Tony Blair or Romano Prodi or Segolene Royal. Just for comparison, I don't think he'd stand a prayer of a chance in France if he were to run against Sarkozy. Of course, the French are rooting for Obama (by a margin of >50%) -- but that's because they suffer from BDS, and they don't really care who runs the US as long as it's not W. I bet you a crooked nickel they wouldn't vote for him if he was French, and running for office right there.
they don't really care who runs the US as long as it's not W.
or his new clone. dubbyah's a goner no matter what.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyone to the right of Che Guevara is a clone of W in the fever swamps of pinkoland. Speak of nuance and balance. Not!
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