Posted on 05/04/2008 10:30:33 PM PDT by Nipfan
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
Obama is an empty suit.
You're giving Leisure Suits all across America a bum rap.
Minimal accomplishments, double talk.
Actually, they are being kind to him. I would add, radical affilliations, corrupt associates, formally violent friends, racial radicalism, extreme political record and documented extremist views.
What is remarkable, is how far being well spoken has taken him so far. The nation must truly be starved for a leader to speaks well. BHO offers us an illusion of unity and tolerance, while delivering anything but.
Thanks for posting this. The article brilliantly sums up why Obama should never be elected president. Unfortunately for all of us, I fear that he will be.
Empty? No, not quite.
The contents of a b.hussein.o suit would make a great fertilizer after composting...
“This is my first attempt at starting a thread”
And it’s goin’ great!
BTTT!
Empty? No, not quite.
The contents of a b.hussein.o suit would make a great fertilizer after composting...
—
I stand corrected. :-)
That is my great fear too. Most of this is so self-evident that I simply don’t know how anyone (apart from his core admirers can continue to vote for him. Yet this is what is happening. He even seems to be recovering from the Wright factor.
yitbos
lol I am not afraid of him getting elected so much as Hillary.
I think the anti-black vote would be there in droves.
The thing is, Obama presents himself as a new kind of politician. He’s not a new kind of politician at all, he’s just new. He merely pretends to be different.
Yes Obama is an empty suit but he is actually more than that, he is a candidate who is African American and this racial reality entirely disguises the fact that the suit is empty. In fact, it was always better for Obama's campaign for the suit to be empty.
The American left, indeed the international left, is a hodgepodge of mutually inconsistent plans and programs which history has demonstrated cannot work. Leftists persist in their leftism because they believe that they are smarter than everybody else. Which really means," I am smarter than all the leftists who've come before and failed with this idea." The glue which holds leftism together when it should splinter apart because of its mutually inconsistent precepts, because it has shopped the entire country to ravening special-interest groups, is their idea that Republicans/conservatives are racists and they are not.
As long as we are racists and they are not, the left need not face up to its own looniness. This is why the left reacts so vehemently to politically incorrect racist remarks. This is why the left goes so far as to force employees to undergo reeducation camps so that their anti-racism can be justified. This is why Imus was forced off the air and why even posters on this forum object to my avatar. The coin of this political race card is white guilt.
Now comes Obama. As one black writer has pointed out, he is made a tacit deal with white liberal America: you support me blindly and I will in turn refrain from rubbing America's nose in its history of slavery and segregation. You can expiate your white guilt by voting for me. But Obama has to hold up his end of the deal, he must not rub our noses in our sins like Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al. As long as he was seen to be an empty suit-offering no reproach to America-we were comfortable with him.
Now comes The Right Reverend Wright. He has broken the deal. This is why Obama had to disown him. Wright rubs our noses in racism. To a conservative his crazy allegations are so bizarre that it makes not much sense and doesn't change the equation. We don't buy into this AIDS in Africa business, for example. But for a liberal, Reverend Wright's allegations are not bizarre but actually within the realm of intellectual respectability. We can dismiss them, the left cannot because much of it comes right out of their own catechism.
What about the great mass in the middle? The moderates, the undecideds, the people who don't follow politics until after Labor Day, the folks who permit the likes of Barbara Walters or Oprah Winfrey to persuade them, what about them, the people who actually decide our elections? Until now, these decent folks don't want to be racists. They are always looking for a savior because they will tell you, "I always vote for the man." They shrink from the very idea of voting based on ideology. So an empty suit is no problem as long as he is also a savior. Obama was a savior. More, he was an empty vessel into which we could pour all of our yearnings and simplistic hopes about the political process.
Now this illusion has been shattered by the right Reverend Wright and it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media can put Humpty Dumpty's pieces back together again.
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“Now this illusion has been shattered by the right Reverend Wright and it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media can put Humpty Dumpty’s pieces back together again.”
If you aren’t a professional writer you should be. I enjoyed your post very much.
This is the best critique I’ve read about obama.
You are very kind.
Thank you.
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