Clinton says rival raising race issue

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested Sunday that Barack Obama's campaign had injected racial tension into the presidential contest, saying her comments about Martin Luther King's role in the civil rights movement had been "distorted" by Obama's supporters.

"This is an unfortunate story line the Obama campaign has pushed very successfully," the former first lady said in a spirited appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I don't think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it's not about race."

Clinton taped the show before campaign appearances in South Carolina, whose Jan. 26 primary will be the first to include a significant representation of black voters. Blacks were 50 percent of primary voters in the state in 2004 and the number is expected to swell this time.

Both New York Sen. Clinton and her husband, the former president, have engaged in damage control this week after black leaders criticized them for comments they made shortly before the New Hampshire primary last Tuesday.

The senator was quoted as saying King's dream of racial equality was realized only when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while Bill Clinton said Illinois Sen. Obama was telling a "fairly tale" about his opposition to the Iraq war.

The former president since has appeared on several black radio programs to say he was referring to Obama's record on the Iraq war, not on his effort to become the nation's first black president.

Hillary Clinton praised Obama's historic candidacy when she appeared later at a Columbia, S.C., church.

"It's easy to forget with all the noise and chatter that we stand in the midst of an extraordinary moment, a historic moment for South Carolina and America. This is a moment worthy of celebration," she said from the pulpit of Northminster Presbyterian Church, USA. "Many of our parents and our grandparents — I dare say, probably even many of us — never thought we would see the day when an African American and a woman were competing for the presidency of the United States of America."

During the televised interview, Hillary Clinton praised King as one of the people she "admired most in the world," and suggested his record of activism stood in stark contrast to Obama's.

"Dr. King didn't just give speeches. He marched, he organized, he protested, he was gassed, he was beaten, he was jailed," she said, noting King had campaigned for Johnson because he recognized the need to elect a president who could enact civil rights into law.

"The notion that this is somehow our doing is ludicrous," he told reporters on a conference call to announce the endorsement of Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill. "What we saw this morning was why the American people are tired of Washington politicians and the games they play."

As evidence, Clinton aides pointed to a memo from an Obama press aide, leaked to a handful of political Web sites, compiling remarks by Clinton and some of her surrogates that appeared to be racially insensitive.

While Clinton praised Obama's eloquence and ability to deliver a soaring speech, she also stepped up her contention that his record did not match his rhetoric.

She noted that while he had spoken out eloquently against the war in 2002 before coming to the Senate, he voted repeatedly to fund the war once in office.

"If you are part of American political history, you know that speeches are essential to frame an issue, to inspire, and lift up," Clinton said. "But when the cameras are gone and when the lights are out, what happens next?"

Clinton, who voted in favor of a 2002 Senate resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq, tangled with moderator Tim Russert over why she voted as she did.

She reiterated her contention that she had not voted for "pre-emptive war," even though the resolution clearly gave President Bush that authority.

When asked whether she or Obama had exercised better judgment about the outcome of such an invasion, Clinton bristled.

"Judgment is not a single snapshot. Judgment is what you do across the course of your life," she said.

Clinton also said she would oppose any effort to maintain a heightened troop presence in Iraq, saying any improvements to the security situation there came because the Iraqi government is anticipating a change in administration.

"Part of the reason that the Iraqis are doing anything is because they see this election happening and they know that they don't have much time," she said. "They know the blank check George Bush gave them is about to be torn up."

If elected president, she said would call on her military advisers to draw up plans to begin removing U.S. troops from Iraq within 60 days of taking office.

Actually, Obama, his supporters and his campaign need to tread lightly on playing the Race Card - - it is quite easy to document the fact that Obama is, himself, a racist.

Obama would describe his grandparents, the people who raised him, as "white folk."

From adolescence onward, Obama wanted a race to belong to, a team whose accomplishments would reflect well upon him. Of course, it was unthinkable in his liberal white family to take pride in the achievements of his mother’s race, so Obama gloried in being part of his absent father’s race.

From the age of ten onward, though, Obama desperately wants to be black: “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Honolulu’s paucity of African-Americans means he has to learn to be black from the media: “TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.”

He cherishes every cause for complaint he can discern against white folks. He is constantly distressed at being half-white. Obama says he "ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."

When his grandmother wants a ride to work because the day before, while awaiting the bus, she was threatened by a black panhandler, he is outraged -- at his grandparents.

Later, when he moves to the South Side of Chicago in 1984, he eventually discovers that, like his grandmother, he’s sometimes scared of black males on the street, too.

In his first memoir, "Dreams," Obama included 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.

In the period from high school in Hawaii, to Columbia University and then to the streets of Chicago as a community organizer, Obama is the classic angry young black man, describing his world thusly:

"We were always playing on the white man's court -- by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn't. The only thing you could choose was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage."

Obama’s once described the white race as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”

“That hate hadn't gone away,” he wrote, blaming “white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

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.

Obama’s book is primarily about his rejection of his supportive white maternal extended family in favor of his unknown black paternal extended family.

At age 33, he wrote in "Dreams from My Father, that " he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.

Obama vowed that he would “never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.”

In his memoir, "Dreams of My Father," Obama writes of a story in Life magazine that influenced him -- about a black man trying to bleach his skin white. No such article could be found in Life or Ebony.

The Obama File

Clinton's MLK comment was NOT taken out of context at all. It diminished MLK's role in winning civil rights for Blacks. Civil rights should not have even been an issue at that time because our consitution says *all men are created equally.* Therefore, Blacks already had those rights. BUT MLK played the biggest role in calling that fact to America's attention.

If JFK and RFK were alive today, they would be putting Hildabeast in her place about this issue. Where's that freak Ted Kennedy on this?

And, the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson should be all over Hildabeast for the above BS.

Those of us who are old enough to have been teenagers on up in the 60s know that MLK did all the work on civil rights.

Bubba's comments about Obama being a kid and his campaign being a fairytale were not taken out of context either.

Those of us who have been living through the politically correct BS for the last 20 years know that the Democrats are bigots, e.g. Howard Dean campaign fundraiser for the 2004 primaries... put downs of Blacks and Jews were rampant at that party according to Boston gossip hounds.

So what do the freaky Clintons expect when their mouths are on overload. Can imagine what they've been saying behind closed doors...!!!!

Go Fred/Duncan... save us from the freakazoids!!!

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