2008 Presidential Election

[SuzySunshine]

Ok, instead of having a thread on every candidate (we'd crash the server) her is our official '08 election thread.

I thought this article was interesting today about Senator Hagel...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16841355/site/newsweek/

[DCJenn]

From the Post's political hour this morning:

"Washington: I've lost count. Between the Republicans and the Democrats, how many people are running for president now? Eleventy billion?

Shailagh Murray: I assume that everyone is running for president, unless they've declared otherwise. That makes it easier. You don't have to keep a running count."

Jenn

[Flynn]

While I'm worried about the "big picture" I think this election will be extremely interesting!!!

Good idea Cheri!!!

[PrincessFiona]

Did anyone see Hillary's Town meeting the other night? I wanted to jump into the tv and hug her.

[SuzySunshine]

I did, but it seems she's getting mixed reviews

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16861422/

[Vanquisher]

Wow, this guy has me excited!

http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?g=4 ... 00&fg=copy

[Rapunzel]

Wow. I remember when socialism was regarded as a danger to democracy and a refuge for tyrants. It's definitely not helped France, either.

Now we have no less than two avowed socialists officially running for the Democratic nomination.

[Rapunzel]

Wow, this guy has me excited!

http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?g=4 ... 00&fg=copy

He's very good at speaking - and saying absolutely nothing. As someone who bs'd her way through numerous debates I can recognize a fellow bs'er from miles away.

You have to do some serious digging to see what he stands for - and, basically, he's a socialist who supports a smorgasboard of highly unethical positions. And, given the lack of any sort of substantial political trackrecord from this guy one has to wonder if he wouldn't get as much attention were it not for hisown public, vocal references to his ethnic background.

[Meenah]

Did anyone see Hillary's Town meeting the other night? I wanted to jump into the tv and hug her.

She is mine!!!

[Vanquisher]

You have to do some serious digging to see what he stands for - and, basically, he's a socialist who supports a smorgasboard of highly unethical positions.

Like what? What does he support that is unethical?

I would take socialism over the dictatorship that we have had the past 8 years. Doesn't seem to matter to the current pres that most American's do not approve of the job he is doing. No, I don't think Bush is a Dictator, nor do I think that Obama can turn this into a Socialist nation.

I am all for a change in the health care system.
I am all for stem cell research.

A lot of his ideas, good public speaking rhetoric or not, sound better than the ideologies of the current administration to me.

[Rapunzel]

Socialism is not a political party - it is a political system and it's one that has failed time and time again.

As far as socialized medicine - I live that at the moment with a husband in military medicine - and it's a horrible, horrible idea. You would see a dramatic decrease in the quality of medical care in this country with socialized medicine - and your husband would see a dramatic decrease in salary as well.

As far as unethical platforms he supports (again, upon digging): affirmitive action, weakening healthcare via socialized medicine, non-medically neccessary abortion, etc. He is also typically socialist (again, incompatible with many aspects of true democracy) by wishing to destroy the liberties protected by the Second Ammendment.

Significantly, when everyone - including John Kerry supported the Iraq war based on the evidence this guy didn't. So, in the face of evidence everyone else saw as reasonable this guy took the opposite position from almost all of his Democrat comrades.

He's very much like Bush, Jr. in one way: Both are former coke-heads. If anyone had a problem with Bush, Jr. being a former cocaine user then they should also have a problem with Barack Obama's cocaine use.

[Rapunzel]

Here's a list of some socialist countries:

North Korea
Cuba
China
Venezuela
Syria (is regarded as socialist by US socialists although it doesn't define itself in that manner)

Real winners, all of them....

You'll find a ton of former socialist countries for a reason: Socialism didn't work out terribly well (ton as in upwards of four dozen countries recovering from socialism).

In the United States the Socialist movement is closely tied to the super-scary Anarchist movement.

[Vanquisher]

A girl apparently cannot kid in the debate forum. Holy crap. I am not advocating socialism. Furthermore I said, "nor do I think that Obama can turn this into a Socialist nation." Because he CAN'T. We are a democracy with a constitution.

As far as unethical platforms he supports (again, upon digging): affirmitive action, weakening healthcare via socialized medicine, non-medically neccessary abortion, etc.

We need a universal healthcare system. I am pro-choice. I do not agree with affirmative action, but I don't agree with any candidates on everything. Now, that would be something! However, I see none of these positions as unethical. They may not be supportive of what you believe, but they aren't unethical. I think it is reprehensible to deny a woman the right to choose, for example. I don't think that has a lot to do with ethics.

He is also typically socialist (again, incompatible with many aspects of true democracy) by wishing to destroy the liberties protected by the Second Ammendment.

Yeah, and Bush was so democratic in all his policies...(cough, cough Patriot Act). I also think the second ammendment is the worst one. It's 2007, and people aren't carrying one shot rifles anymore for the reasons that they carried them in 1776. Now criminals are carrying semi-automatic weapons, 13 year olds are bringing them into schools, and 8 year olds are getting into their parents gun closets. Hardly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind, I think

[Rapunzel]

Oh, and Obama wants to extend Social Security benefits to those who enter the country illegaly! We already are not going to be able to keep up with the social security needs of all of our nation's LEGAL citizens. I guess if we're going to have a failed system we might as well run it into the ground quickly and completely....

He also wants to outlaw the death penalty (as he apparently believes it's not the appropriate thing for, say, a serial rapist/killer like Jeffery Dalmer - sp?). Because, those serial killers can TOTALLY be rehabilitated....

He has no problem with desecration of the symbol of American freedom - the US flag.

There's also some question as to how racist he is. See: http://www.examiner.com/a-536474~_Trapp ... rlds_.html

Obama wrote that in high school, he and a black friend would sometimes speak disparagingly “about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother's smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false.”

As a result, he concluded that “certain whites could be excluded from the general category of our distrust.”

Donna Brazile, who managed former Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, said Obama's feelings of distrust toward most whites and doubts about himself are fairly typical for black Americans.

During college, Obama disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.

Such candid racial revelations abound in “Dreams,” which was first published in 1995, when Obama was 34 and not yet in politics. By the time he ran for his Senate seat in 2004, he observed of that first memoir: “Certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically.”

Thus, in his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” which was published last year, Obama adopted a more conciliatory, even upbeat tone when discussing race. Noting his multiracial family, he wrote in the new book: “I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.”

This appears to contradict certain passages in his first memoir, including a description of black student life at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

“There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”

He added: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”

Obama said he and other blacks were careful not to second-guess their own racial identity in front of whites.

“To admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred,” he wrote.

After his sophomore year, Obama transferred to Columbia University. Later, looking back on his years in New York City, he recalled: “I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicions between the races.”

His pessimism about race relations seemed to pervade his worldview.

“The emotion between the races could never be pure,” he laments in “Dreams.” “Even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

After graduating from college, Obama eventually went to Chicago to interview for a job as a community organizer. His racial attitudes came into play as he sized up the man who would become his boss.

“There was something about him that made me wary,” Obama wrote. “A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”

As the wife of someone from two different "worlds" (ethnically Mexican mestizo and European) I find the above passages to not be inline with healthy attitudes towards mixed heritage. In fact, if some of these ideas came from a "white" person and were directed towards "blacks" they would be written off as racist absolutely. Double standard?

[Rapunzel]

I know there was also talk about Barack Obama being accused of Muslim extremist ties. Those rumors were false and, so, here is an article that sets the record straight on the various religions in Obama's life:

http://www.examiner.com/a-534540~Can_a_ ... icle-obama

WASHINGTON - Although Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, his childhood and family connections to Islam are beginning to complicate his presidential ambitions.


The Illinois Democrat spent much of last week refuting unfounded reports that he had been educated in a madrassa, or radical Islamic school, when he lived in Indonesia as a boy.

“The Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa,” said a statement put out by the senator’s staff.

But the school did teach the Quran, Islam’s holy book, along with subjects such as math and science, according to Obama, who attended when he was 9 and 10.

“In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school,” he wrote in his first memoir, “Dreams from my Father.” “The teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.”

Obama — whose father, stepfather, brother and grandfather were Muslims — explained his own first name, Barack, in “Dreams”: “It means ‘Blessed.’ In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim.”

In his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama added: “Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist.”

Still, when his father, a black Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, “the family wanted a Muslim burial,” Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as saying in “Dreams.”

The statement put out by Obama’s office last week referred to his father simply as “an atheist,” without mentioning his Muslim upbringing.

But with pundits already making faith a major issue in this presidential campaign — as evidenced by questions about Republican Mitt Romney’s Mormonism — Obama’s religious background is likely to come under further scrutiny.

“He comes from a father who was a Muslim,” said civil rights author Juan Williams of National Public Radio. “I mean, I think that given we’re at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem.”

Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, for whom the senator was given his middle name, Hussein, was fiercely devoted to Islam, according to an account in “Dreams.” The grandfather, who died in 1979, was described by his widow when Obama visited Kenya in the late 1980s.

“What your grandfather respected was strength. Discipline,” Obama quoted his grandmother as telling him. “This is also why he rejected the Christian religion, I think.

“For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man’s sins.

“To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort women,” she added. “And so he converted to Islam — he thought its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs.”

When Obama was 2 years old, his parents divorced and his father moved away from the family’s home in Hawaii. Four years later, his mother married an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, who moved his new wife and stepson to Jakarta.

“During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominately Muslim school,” Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “In our household, the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf.”

Obama’s stepfather was a practicing Muslim.

“Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths,” Obama recalled. “He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

“It was to Lolo that I turned to for guidance and instruction,” Obama recalled. “He introduced me as his son.”

Although Obama wrote of “puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer,” he was not raised as a Muslim, according to the senator’s office. Nor was he raised as a Christian by his mother, a white American named Ann Dunham who was deeply skeptical of religion.

“Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones,” Obama wrote. “For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.”

As a result, he said, “I was not raised in a religious household.”

Later in life, however, he was drawn to the writings of an influential American Muslim who served as the spokesman for the militant Nation of Islam.

“Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different,” Obama wrote. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

He added: “Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation.”

While working as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago, Obama was repeatedly asked to join Christian congregations, but begged off.

“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote.

But after much soul searching, he eventually was baptized at Trinity United Church of Christ.

“It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear,” he explained. “But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”

Obama’s family connections to Islam would endure, however. For example, his brother Roy opted for Islam over Christianity, as Obama recounted when describing his 1992 wedding.

“The person who made me proudest of all,” Obama wrote, “was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol.”

Meanwhile, Obama remained sharply critical of what he called “the religious absolutism of the Christian right.”

In “Audacity,” the senator wrote that such believers insist “not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

As for the Democratic Party, Obama observed that “a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears — rightly, no doubt — that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices.”

Although the overwhelming majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, Obama does not believe that any one religion should define the United States.

“We are no longer just a Christian nation,” he argues in “Audacity,” which was published last year. “We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

Obama calls the Iraq war “a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country.” He is also protective of civil rights for Muslims in the U.S.

“In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans … have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging,” he laments. “I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”