Yesterday in Oregon:
Finally, Clinton is still telling the “woman-turned’away-and-died” hospital story that she has been told is not true, and has been asked not to by Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System in Athens, Ohio. Get the facts of the story here.
Ultimately, while I gained some respect for Clinton and her supporters that I did not previously have, what I have confirmed for myself that remains true of Clinton is this type of behavior that anything goes, that she can do or say anything to opponents, that she can tell whatever stories she wants because it is all excused by the chase for power, that its part of the game, and that if you can’t take that, you oughtta not be in politics. That is, she defends old schools biznass as-is. In fact, she excuses too much with the same line (almost verbatim) we’ve been hearing from the current resident of the White House who also subscribes to “Ends justify the means” philosophy. Clinton tells us to “leave it to the history books” to decide right and wrong. But we don’t live in history books. We live here, now. I have to say when I hear Bush and Clinton say “leave it to the history books” it sounds to me a lot like “I can do what I want and maybe one day it will seem honorable, because now it sure doesn’t.” And I’m hard-pressed to think of how this thought ever came to be an acceptable defense for anything.
It just never stops.
Can’t anyone explain to her why lying and embellishing is a bad thing? Has she never heard of the 2000 election and a story about the internet? Does anyone in that campaign think? Or can she just not help herself?
*** Update ***
Apparently the popular vote math we ridiculed yesterday is a theme among Clinton and her supporters:
Hillary Clinton once again tries to pretend that she was more against the Iraq War than Obama was. It turns out that this is true if you ignore the events of 2002, and those of 2003, and those of 2004 and then misportray the events of 2005.
In other news, according to a Bush administration official, if you exclude all of the people who do not have jobs, currently the economy is humming along at full employment.
*** Update #2 ***
Via the comments, this piece (published last night at 5:30) which states that Clinton will stop telling the story as part of her standard speeches.
*** Update #3 ***
Is Hillary getting a raw deal on the health care story:
The Washington Post article said Clinton was told the story during a campaign stop by Meigs County Sheriff’s Deputy Bryan Holman, and identified the Pomeroy woman by name. (The Messenger elected not to use the woman’s name in this article.) The 35-year-old woman died Aug. 15, according to The Washington Post.
Seeing the article, O’Bleness Health Systems reviewed its patient records and found that the woman had been a patient of its affiliates, O’Bleness Memorial Hospital and River Rose Obstetrics and Gynecology, according to a press release it issued Friday.
“We reviewed the medical and patient account records of this patient,” Rick Castrop, CEO of O’Bleness Health Systems, said in the press release. “There is no indication that she was ever denied medical care at any time, for any reason. We clearly reject any perception that we ever denied any care to this young woman.”
Castrop asks in the news release that the Clinton campaign “immediately desist from repeating this story.”
An article about the health system’s allegation that Clinton told this false story without verifying its accuracy was published on The New York Times Web site Friday.
“Hospital administrators (at O’Bleness) said Friday that (name withheld) was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured,” that story said. Anti-Clinton blogs seized on the story, posting it under such banners as “Hillary Clinton caught in another lie” and “Clinton’s make-believe health care horror story.”
However, contacted by The Messenger, Holman claimed the hospital he was referring to when he spoke to Clinton wasn’t O’Bleness, nor an affiliate.
Holman said when he spoke to Clinton, he never mentioned the name of the hospital that allegedly denied the woman care, nor did he mention the woman by name.
More as it comes out.
smiley
She just doesn’t care. She and her people are betting that nobody in the audience knows she’s lying (probably true) and that a very small percentage of them ever will. I wouldn’t make that bet but there you go. I guess they also feel that if she’s the candidate in the general, they’ll deal with what the republicans say about it then. This is all about now and winning the the nomination.
Wilfred
Yeah, and if everyone says that they’ll vote for her against McCain no matter what then what does she have to lose? It was stupid, enabling positions like that that led her to knee-capping Obama.
Incertus
Remember the story about how she was broke before Super Tuesday, but she didn’t know because no one in the campaign wanted to tell her? Maybe that’s what’s happened here. I mean, when you’re the candidate, you’re so busy you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, so maybe no one has told her that the story is bogus. It’s not like she has time to hang out on blogs, after all.
I say this, not out of any particular love for Clinton, but because given the way her campaign staff has served her this last year, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had done just this.
srv
Have y’all learned nothing from GW and Dick?
It’s only a lie when the media reports it that way. You people, with your relative standards and everything. I’ll bookmark this for Obama’s next exaggeration.
cleek
really ? you don’t think a Machiavellian serial liar is exactly what this country needs right now ?
sheesh. you guys must be sexist or something.
Elvis Elvisberg
I have to admit, even as an Obama supporter who thinks Clinton should have left the campaign a month ago, that I think this is pretty unimportant.
McCain is lying about the impact of tax cuts, the impact of the surge, the plans of the Democrats, etc. This sort of thing that Clinton is doing just doesn’t mean anything.
Walker
Because we all know that minutia in job titles (for positions that have roughly the same level of responsibility and are regularly conflated by people outside of academia) is the same as recalling events that never happened.
As someone in academia, this whole Obama professor thing is bizarre. No one calls a “Senior Lecturer” an instructor. They are faculty and in many departments sit on tenure review committees. In many places they are more regarded than non-tenured assistant professors. Their contracts are written differently and they are evaluated slightly differently, but that is just inside baseball.
Jake
John, have you seen this one:
ttp://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/04/in-oregon-clint.html
She’s claiming that her opposition to the Iraq war is stronger than Obama’s, if you decide to begin keeping score on the day he entered the Senate. Only problem is, even that’s an exaggeration.
I think their strategy at this point is simply “let’s just make shit up!”
John Cole
Other than the fact that the media will ignore McCain’s lies and seize upon the old tried and true Clinton’s are untrustworthy narrative in the fall should she win the nomination and use stories like this to fuel a full on frenzy about her being a liar for 4 months, sure, you are exactly right. It doesn’t matter and is unimportant and this is not just throwing fuel onto a smoldering fire.
Have you all not been paying attention the past few years how this shit works? I did, and it was why I switched parties.
Walker
This is true enough. I think we can safely say
McCain Lies >> Clinton Lies >> Obama Lies
The Other Steve
Watching George Snuffalupagus this morning, I think McCain is in trouble. George Will and Dan Senor were both pretty down on him, and they ultimately seemed to think the only chance McCain had was to strap Iraq firmly on his back and run with it.
They said there is a big push now for Rice to be the VP for a variety of reasons.
I actually think that would be a great thing. Rice would be a terrific pick for McCain.
And it’d help Obama win the Presidency.
Alan
“Has she never heard of the 2000 election and a story about the internet?” I assume you mean Gore. Your comment shows just how effective a lie is, since 10 years later you are still propagating it. Read the original statement by Gore and tell us he lied about his involvement in internet research.
They guy who wrote the original article for Wired later went on to become a RepubliCON operative.
John Cole
I can only see Rice as the GOP VP choice if Hillary wins the nomination, because otherwise they will have to shelve their “He’s a negro” anti-Obama whisper campaigns.
The Other Steve
BTW, John. I’d like your opinion on Al Gore inventing the Internet.
Fair criticism? Or was this just words out of context for petty partisanship?
Cause, the wingnuts are all in a rage about taking McCain’s “100 years in Iraq” quote, claiming it was out of context and unfair… and so totally different from Gore’s inventing the internet.
The Other Steve
One would think so, but there are a large number of party elites who are uncomfortable with the racist stuff, and want Rice in order to prove that they aren’t racist.
These elites are from the Bush clan, so they do hold a great deal of influence.
Jake
Yeah, having Rice be his VP candidate would surely allow him to distinguish his presidency from that of Bush’s.
Wait a minute…actually, not so much.
John Cole
The latter. Even wrote about it here and here.
See above. My point is that they can take anything and turn it into a lie. Why actually, you know, lie and feed the machine?
mark
I think the elephant in the room is that the voters demand to hear certain lies (the actual lies vary with the demographic) and if you refuse to tell them you may as well forget about running for office. “Honest” politicians (and I think Obama is one) try to keep the lying to a minimum and have a line they refuse to cross. Clinton is trailing so she is risking specific, refutable lies.
Dennis - SGMM
Clinton’s campaign staff is doing her no favors. The Republicans will have field day with this one and the Tuzla airport bit. Remember “Al Gore says he invented the Internet,” or the Swiftboaters? The Repubs had far less to work with in both cases yet they managed to gin up damaging memes in both cases. With all of the money Clinton is spending she’d be wise to hire someone to do some fact checking before she opens her mouth. That Hugh Hewitt was willing to write a piece casting doubt on her relatively innocuous narrative about her feelings on the day that King was killed is just a preview of what would be thrown at her in the general.
The Republicans, as well as some portion of the electorate already associate the word ‘liar’ with the name of Clinton. She would be wise not hand them more ammunition.
The Other Steve
You know what’s funny about that grocery store Bush line? I talked to low-information voters in 2004, and they remembered the story as if it was GW Bush.
Anyway, this is politics. You either learn to respond to it, or you buy a boatload of Zantac.
What’s funny about the wingnuts and the McCain line, is they gripe about it being taken out of context, and then rant for three paragraphs about how it’d be ok for us to stay in Iraq for 100 years.
Incertus
Must suck for them that the racists provide the margin in victory for their party in so many southern states. Put Rice on the ticket, and watch the Libertarian or Constitution parties have turnout increases like never seen before in Dixie.
Dennis - SGMM
But, but, but, Rice has eight years of White House experience – and a security clearance.
srv
I don’t know what you’re talking about, but will add it to the list.
KC45s
Can’t anyone explain to her why lying and embellishing is a bad thing? Has she never heard of the 2000 election and a story about the internet?
My guess is, she’s using the Ronald Reagan playbook. He famously continued to use discredited whoppers not just on the campaign trail but while in office. Sure doesn’t seem to have hurt him any.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Elvis has a very good point here – jokes about truthiness aside, does this phony story really distort the debate about health care? It seems to me like Hillary is being treated to a Scott-Beauchamping over this. Does anyone seriously believe that an HMO driven system never produces horror stories like this?
On the other hand, I can also make an argument that it is important to pay attention to the little lies, not just the big ones, and then we can argue about where the Liar-In-Chief threshold is located and which candidates have crossed it already.
Big lies (e.g., lies about policy decisions that will affect the lives of many people) are far more important than lies regarding trivia. It would be ridiculous and impractical for us to expect that a politician will never lie, fib, shade the truth, hedge, or otherwise be less than totally honest with us on occasion, simply because they are human like the rest of us, and that is what people do.
The problem with trying to excuse the little lies and watch out for just the big ones is that big lies are not always things we can see ahead of time. Especially on issues of important policy, ambiguity and complexity are common and it is may be more difficult to detect a whopper beforehand than with the benefit of hindsight.
Look at how many otherwise sensible people were fooled by Bush on the eve of the Iraq war, including HRC (if she is to be believed regarding her AUMF vote). We don’t always have the chance to call a political figure on a big lie that matters before it happens.
So how do we protect ourselves from the big lie and its impact?
One way we can do this is to judge the performance of a candidate on the subject of small lies, and then extrapolate upwards. If someone is going to lie to us about little things that hardly matter, why should we expect them to be more truthful when more is at stake?
Here are some of the things that I ask myself when evaluating small lies:
How difficult would it have been for them to tell the truth rather than to lie?
How much did they have to gain by lying?
How plausible was the lie?
Where does it fall on the spectrum of bold faced lies, semi-lies, half-truths, and concealed information?
How risky was the lie, i.e., how likely was it that the person telling the lie knew they could be contradicted by evidence, in other words what does this lie tell me about this person’s attitude towards risk-reward (or cost-benefit) analysis?
What does this lie tell me about this person’s estimate of the level of intelligence amongst the audience being told the lie (i.e., do they think we’re stupid)?
Finally, how do they react when caught in the lie? Do they fess up and apologise, or dig in and hang on?
All of these things go into my evaluation of this person’s character. Even people with good character will lie on occasion, and there is a continuous spectrum of grays between little white lies and monstrously toxic lies. Part of the process of evaluating a potential president is figuring out not whether they will lies or not (they all will), but to what degree they are telling bad lies which are more destructive and dangerous.
Apply these questions to the lies being told by all 3 of these candidates and come to your own conclusions.
Quackers
McCain is lying about the impact of tax cuts, the impact of the surge, the plans of the Democrats, etc. This sort of thing that Clinton is doing just doesn’t mean anything.
Yes it does. It means Obama has to waste his time on Clinton instead of dissecting McCain and his stupidity.
tballou
The truth or falsity of Clinton’s statements notwithstanding, one thing that Bush and Co. have proven over the past 8 years is that the public and media either do not care or are unable to distinguish between the two.
Jake
It’s not so much as the lie that bothers me in this hospital story as the utter lack of groundwork/preparation. Surely they could have found, you know, an actual true story to tell that would be just as effective. Given that healthcare is one of Hillary’s main campaign issues, you’d like to think she’d make this kind of thing bulletproof. They have a huge staff and are spending millions. Get the personal stuff right, for Chrissakes.
The stuff with Iraq and Obama is a completely different story. That’s just distortion for the sake of it, and is pretty stupid IMO. Obama could easily bring something like that up in a debate and make her look bad.
“My opponent claims that if you only count our common time in the Senate, she opposed the war before I did. Not only is this a ridiculous place to start counting, but it doesn’t hold up against the facts. Americans are tired of politicians who bend the truth to make a case, and it’s time for us to move on.”
zack
the story as told to her by someone else.
But continuing to tell this false story just reminds every of Bill’s infamous parsing of the definition of the word “is.”
So there you go. We’ve come full circle. (Or, in this case, full circle-jerk.)
It’s sad that Team Clinton can’t see how self-defeating and self-destructive this behavior is to their campaign.
It’s obvious to everyone else.
smiley
I seriously doubt that Rice will get (or accept) the VP nod. Talk about the McSame ticket! Running on the “success” of the last 8 years would be political suicide. Besides, she wants to be commissioner of the NFL.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Dennis,
I think this is locking the barn door after all the horses are gone. It’s too late.
In fact the clumsy way that the Clinton campaign is dealing with this truthiness issue may in part be due to them having expected a coronation in the Democratic primary so they put together a team that was better suited for running against the GOP in November than running against Obama now.
I think they figured that close to half the electorate already had Hillary pegged as a liar anyway, so let’s concentrate on elevating turnout from the other half which is on her side and will avert their eyes when the truth is stretched in a good cause. They were planning on running a Rovian turn-out-the-base campaign, and have run up against something they aren’t well adapted for in Obama’s campaign.
Dennis - SGMM
Hell yes it does. So why not do the minimal legwork required to find them? The real damage is that, should Clinton become the nominee, the McCain campaign can say something to the effect of “Clinton couldn’t find any real flaws in our supafine health care system so she made stuff up.”
John Cole
This.
Why is this not obvious to everyone? Not to mention her general level of credibility, which most people have an issue with already.
mellowjohn
as atrios has said numerous times, anyone who was against the war before it started is a dirty fucking hippie, and not to be taken seriously by the chattering classes.
therefore, any opposition that barack obama expressed before the authorization to use military force vote DOESN’T COUNT when compared to hillary’s long opposition to the war since she began running for president.
vwcat
While Hillary just keeps lying, her surrogates are at the silly electoral math argument.
did anyone tell them that it doesn’t apply with primaries.
The desperation is making minds go very soft.
Jake
“Not to mention her general level of credibility, which most people have an issue with already.”
Right, and to point out the obvious, is likely an important consideration for many voters in PA. Who knows if this sort of stuff will get anywhere near the traction the Bosnia story did, but regardless, it can’t be helping her cause there.
Soylent Green
Not necessarily. One is Nice while the other is Angry. That’s how they could play it, making their core voters nostalgic for the good old days when blacks stayed in their place. Rice is “a credit to her race,” obedient and loyal to her boss, while uppity Obama is in our face insisting that we have a National Dialogue about racial conflict. In contrast to H. Rap Obama, Rice would be Condi Huxtable.
John Cole
Her whole campaign seems so far have been little more than a test to see how much bullshit people will swallow before they have the gag reflex. Here is another example:
Until she got her ass kicked in a few months back on Super Tuesday, her entire campaign was based on inevitability. how does she even say stuff like this with a straight face?
Soylent Green
A few weeks ago Obama drew crowds of 30,000 (with many overflowing thousands turned away) to convention centers here in Oregon. On Saturday, Clinton filled high school gyms with 5,000. What does that tell you about our upcoming primary?
PK
Hillary is an idiot. She could have, if she cared enough, found plenty of health care horror stories, but no she had to go with the outright lie, and to make matters worse repeat the stupid lie, even after being told to knock it off.
Now the media can spend its entire time telling everyone what a liar she is, how she cannot be trusted and democrats will have to waste their time trying to argue the opposite. Lost in all of this will be the real issues.
I don’t agree with the people who say this is a small lie compared to McCain’s lies. She has been caught lying three times within the last month (Bosnia sniper story, northern Ireland peace treaty and now this health care story) I can bet there is plenty more stuff out there.
Democrats do not need the republicans to screw them! They can do the job quite well themselves!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
HaHaHaaaaaaa!
We have always been at war with East Obamasia.
Jake
Beyond what gets picked up by the MSM, I’m not sure it’s going to matter what the heck she says in Oregon. What are the chances she wins that state? Maybe 1 in 5 right now? Maybe the strategy is to see how far a steaming pile of BS can impact the vote in another state they won’t count. Either that, or they have absolutely no fucking clue what they’re doing.
cbear
Elites???
I guess that must be the guys that don’t believe Jesus Christ rode into Dodge on a dinosaur, carrying an assualt rifle and a bloody cross festooned with aborted fetuses, and rallied the townspeople to kill all the Muslims and Messicans.
Scott H
“If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen” and “leave it to the history books” are ploys to avoid a current accounting – and good for them if they can convince people to let them get away with it, to back off just long enough. This is grifting. (By the way, what history will ask, as it does in every chapter, is how people could be so blind to such transparent infamy? We may be nowhere near the Krauts living under the greasy SS smokestacks, but is there anything in us to prevent it? We already live through the looking glass where the Constitution grants us our rights (and only conditionally), the government is allowed to do anything not specifically forbidden to it, excepting the state of war which supercedes the Constitution completely.)
I don’t accuse Senator Clinton of infamy, and not merely because she hasn’t had much of a chance for it. Hillary is the picture of ambition without confidence (contrast with any Roosevelt or Kennedy or one particular Obama). I believe she wants to be authentic, not to be this brittle creature of veneer with her boilerplate homilies, but she is too insecure. She can’t even borrow from her husband – all Bill has is a stubborn infantilism I doubt she wants and a charisma he can’t bestow. I believe she wants to do good and great things, would do them, and she could get there easily if she could play it straight. That, I don’t believe she can do.
Soylent Green
Only if Obama takes his name off the ballot.
Dennis - SGMM
More’s the pity then that she and her advisers prepared for the one and then were unable to deviate from that throughout the campaign. Lemme see, who else created a perfect plan and then when it failed, stubbornly stuck with it and strained reason beyond the breaking point to “prove” that it was succeeding?
jake
Bu-but, he gave us yummy barbecue! Laced with phenobarbital! Mmmmm … [drools]
/The Media
Also, he never told an outright lie about his smoking habits. [drools]
/Jake Tapper
Cara Prado
People are calling this “Hillary’s song”. Got to love that:
dlsxpatriate.blogspot.com
Brachiator
You have nailed it.
I told friends before the campaign that my concern about Senator Clinton was that she might lack her husband’s political instincts, and that she might believe — incorrectly — that longs years of being an advisor and behind-the-scenes-consellor to a leader automatically endows you with the ability to lead itself.
Her performance throughout the primary season has been even worse than I could have imagined. She has enthusiastically embraced the dubious advice of her staff that her lies, no matter how big or small, simply do not matter. She has carefully crafted the false persona that the wholly unofficial position of First Lady is magically in the constitutional line of presidential succession, and that fantasy “thresholds” that she has dreamed up are defining parameters for the job of commander-in-chief.
Clinton true believers will excuse or dismiss them, and the media will soft-pedal any refutation, and her opponents can be brushed off as sore losers (or even more bullying sore winners).
I agree with you that she may want to do good and great things. But the odd thing is that she has generally squandered every opportunity to demonstrate to the voters that she has the abilities to do the job, and instead has settled on the stubborn and sullen expectation that the nomination is hers by some inexplicable right.
This arrogance, along with the contempt that the Clintons have shown for anyone who dare cross them, might suggest that a Hillary Clinton presidency might be as big a disaster for the country as the Nixon presidency, in which a desire to do good things was fatally corrupted by a reliance on deception and dirty tricks.
Elvis Elvisberg
Look, of course you’re right, John, this was a dumb thing for Clinton to do, because the media loves to flip out about irrelevancies and hates to report the news.
But as stupid as Hillary’s comments are, let’s not lose sight of the hierarchy of evils here:
1) John McCain, who will say anything to anyone in order to get the presidency he believes he’s entitled to. Hell, he says that people who favor the exact same approach in Iraq that he favored in Somalia are advocates of “surrender,” an unconscionable, emotional attack on patriotism in lieu of a rational argument.
2) The media, which will praise McCain’s mavericky goodness to the high heavens without ever mentioning his absence of accomplishments in the Senate, his absence of plans for which policies he intends to implement as president, and his eagerness to flip-flop on every issue under the sun.
3) Hillary Clinton, who’s been mathematically eliminated, but continues to snipe at the Democratic nominee in her effort to implement the Tonya Harding strategy.
Her exaggeration was stupid, but let’s maintain a sense of proportion here.
Pb
Incertus,
You mean when she thought she was so flush with cash that she personally loaned her campaign $5 million dollars before Super Tuesday?
As far as I can tell, they’re incompetent and crooked from the top on down and all the way back up. But given the coordinated talking points that come out of all their mouths, and the number of people who haven’t been fired for such incompetence / mendacity, I’m sure that a) the candidate is in close coordination with her staff; b) she doesn’t care at all unless it becomes a problem for the campaign; c) even then, there won’t be an initially gracious response, but rather a snipe and a hope that it’ll blow over; and d) odds are, no one will get fired for such bungling. So, yeah, big fat liar, or merrily complicit spokeswoman and enabler of a crooked campaign of big fat liars who suffer no consequences from the top for their lies? What’s the difference again?
Helena Montana
The little lies sometimes tell you a lot more about a person than the big lies do.
Rarely Posts
The Clinton bashing? Agreed. It isn’t quite as the internets are making it out to be.
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003786286
jake
All very true, which is why I laugh real hard when Clintonistas pout and say they’ll vote for McCain if Hillary doesn’t get the nom. It’s like a little kid threatening to run away from home. (And if any Obamamaniacs are saying the same thing, they’re full of shit too.)
However, the bar for Republican presidential candidate is now so low that it goes without saying that anything with a pulse would make a better president.
Yeah it sucks that the Liberul Media keeps pretending that McCane isn’t Bush with military record because he gave them red meat and Butterfingers. But the fact that he’s a lying asshat doesn’t make Hillary more honest, it just makes him a bigger liar. (But we already knew that because he’s got an R after his name.)
Johnny Pez
I have no problem with this. As long as Hillary stops trying to damage Obama and sticks to damaging herself, she can stay in the race as long as she wants.
Notorious P.A.T.
Not only that, but in 2003 when people like me were suggesting that Bush wanted to conquer Iraq and turn it into a US protectorate, the wingnuts were shocked–shocked!–to hear such an idea. We’re going in to get Saddam, then we’ll get out, they said.
Is it just me or has she been a thoroughly undistinguished senator? I remember her sending in a flag-burning bill but that’s about it.
Notorious P.A.T.
She is basing her claims to experience on her supposed activities in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, etc. So if those tales turn out to be tall that undercuts her “experience” theme.
zack
Does anyone on Team Clinton read the New York Times or Time’s political blog? Hello?
This new Clinton “scandal” was up first thing in the morning at the New York Times. Karen Tumulty had her first blog post about it at Swampland at 7:34 am.
Yet, 5 hours later no one on Team Clinton had told Hillary that this hospital “story” was now scandal material and she shouldn’t re-tell it again?
That’s a bit slow on the uptake don’t you think? And how many media-savvy operatives does Team Hillary campaign pay for quick reactions to stuff like this?
Or did that genius Mark Penn tell them not to worry about it?
Justin
John, see here: http://www.athensmessenger.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=273&ArticleID=9511
I think your Hillary Hatred is starting to blind you in much the same way Andrew Sullivan’s hatred of the Dirty Fucking Hippies blinded him.
Rarely Posts
SIGH!
Or, More Truthiness.
/snark
dslak
I can’t believe that anyone would be critical of Clinton. Can you, Often Hacks?
Andrew J. Lazarus
why are we so sure that a cog of our crap health care system is telling the truth and hrc is wrong?
NewYorker
telling a young Obama supporter who asked whether she really wanted to help the Democratic party or was merely being “self serving” that the race “is not a coronation. It is a contest.”
Wow! It certainly was a coronation in New York when she ran for senator.
John Cole
Fuck off, Rarely Posts. I approach stories as fairly as possible, relying on published news stories. If they turn out to be inaccurate, I will post corrections. I don;t just cite wingnut Hillary hating cites, I used the NY fucking Times and CNN as my sources, unlike Clinton supporters, who scrape the bottom of the barrel and cite Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, and the Weekly Standard as models of accuracy. Additionally, your campaign is still backpedalling:
There are thousands of verifiable health care horror stories out there. Michael Moore managed to do it for Sicko. Is his staff more prepared to deal with accuracy than a potential President?
Am I obligated to note Michael Moore is fat?
Rarely Posts
Sure, she’s got plenty of things to criticize. I just get tired of things that the Obama supporters jump all over without even bothering to think, oh, hey! maybe I really am suffering from CDS and Drudge is FOS. Or whoever.
Thanks, JC, for the updates.
John Cole
You are just making things up then, because I didn’t cite Drudge. I used the NY Times. You know, the paper that ENDORSED HILLARY. Guess that is just my CDS kicking in.
dslak
It makes me sick, how often the Obama supporters here rely on Drudge. If only more people critical of Clinton would think to themselves “Maybe it’s not that Clinton is obviously lying; maybe it’s just that I have BDS!” she would probably be winning right now.
In fact, I blame people who rely on major news organisations for their information, when they should be relying on unbiased (i.e., pro-Hillary) sources like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
dslak
I believe Often Hacks’s point was made best here:
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Perhaps we need to institute a mandatory 5 day waiting period before believing anything printed or spoken in the news media these days, regardless of which candidate is being smeared and/or scrutinized.
Anyone who looks back at the last decade and concludes that we currently have a competent and trustworthy media deserves to be fish-slapped until they come to their senses.
Ted
Always. SA2SQ.
See, if Michael Moore really cared about this country’s health care system, he would lose some weight.
/wingnut
John S.
Perhaps you could tell us, Rarely Posts, what are some valid criticisms of Hillary’s campaign?
You know, the things Clinton supporters jump all over because they have bothered to think?
dslak
Does this also include waiting five days before believing a story that indicates a prior one to be false?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I’d have thought the 2nd story would get lumped in with the 1st one as part of the same issue and then we reset the clock and start the 5 day timer all over again
Whee – isn’t this fun!
Modern epistemology is hard work.
No wonder the authoritarians keep winning elections – they don’t have to dissipate their energy just trying to figure out WTF is going on.
Nikki
So somewhere out there in Meigs County, Ohio is another pregnant woman who worked at a pizza parlor. This woman (who, long with her stillborn baby, is now dead) is the uninsured one who was denied health care because of an inability to pay a $100 fee, but she wasn’t treated at O’Bleness Memorial Hospital.
dslak
We have always been at war with East Asia.
cleek
right-o.
they simply create their own reality and move on.
JackieBinAZ
Falsehoods like this story accomplish the same thing that the Bush National Guard memos did. They bring up something essentially true but the truth is lost in the debate over the falsehood that was the vehicle. Even as a tool to spur discussion, it fails.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Is anybody here willing to take a shot at my 2nd statement?
It used to be that some MSM news outlets (e.g., WaPo, NYT, CNN) were considered by most people to be more equal than others, so if you saw a story there rather than on say Drudge or Faux News, it meant something about the likelyhood of the story proving out in the end.
Post-Judith Miller, does anybody still think this? Or have all of our MSM outlets fallen down to the same level of teh suck as the local fishwrapper and the organs of partisan agitprop?
Also, has anybody else noticed that for some strange reason the New York and Chicago papers can usually be relied upon to put the best possible spin on for candidates who hail from NY and Illinois respectively? So who of the big name newspapers is left that hasn’t picked a side yet? The Atlanta Constitution? The LA Times? The San Jose Mercury News? Anybody?
Jake
Well, Penn’s gone:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/04/clinton-chief-s.html
p.lukasiak
Lets see….
Obama lies about his support for single payer after Clinton pointed out that he kept changing position on health care to make the point that Obama can’t even be relied upon to follow through on his own health care proposal, and is likely to “unity” away what little there is of value in it, and the media treats it as no big deal. Basically called Clinton a liar during a debate, and it was Obama who lied — but nobody gave a fuck.
Clinton repeats an anecdote that hadn’t been verified, and all hell breaks loose.
She’s accused of deliberately lying — based on the denial that a hospital she never mentioned said that they’d treated the woman who had died. And, as it turns out, the story that the Deputy told was about the denial of treatment at a different hospital.
But instead of checking with the Clinton to campaign to find out what the real story was, and trying to contact her original source the NEW YORK TIMES WENT WITH THE STORY.
…and of course, cole has been writing about it ever since.
Rarely Posts
I phrased that badly. I’m talking about the tendency of many bloggers to take anything printed about Hillary that is negative as gospel. This reminds me of the picture of Obama in the turban. Drudge said Hillary’s campaign gave it to him and though that turned out to be false, everyone repeated it so much that it seems like it’s the truth.
This is the kind of stuff Drudge always does and it bothers me that so many blogger that I’ve admired, and I don’t mean to blame you exclusively, are now doing. Too much hate amongst the Dems, and yeah, I know a lot of Hillary supporters are guilty as well. The drudgification of the left, so to speak.
TenguPhule
Is it fucking September *YET*?
ThymeZone
Clinton lies, and a campaign dies, to coin a phrase.
Her problem is that she looks and sounds like a liar, a person who will say and do anything for her own reasons. Her problem is that she is half of a couple that has been lying about themselves and the things they do for many years and have alienated a pretty good portion of the population. Even if that were undeserved, and it’s not, one would have to wonder why we’d want these awful people back in our White House again, back in the news every damn day, listening to those voices and looking at those faces. Good God, enough is enough.
Forget your annoying and pathetic and tiresome fucking defense of these godawful people, Paul. Think about how incapable they are of defending themselves any more. Every week that goes by, they seem to drive away more support.
Fuck them. People are sick of them, and rightly so. Make them go away.
Conservatively Liberal
Shorter John Cole: “Nail, meet hammer.”
There are tons of horror stories out there, and all she had was this unverified story to tell? How about her criticism of Edwards when he had Natalie’s family in the spotlight (you know, an actual tragedy)? Her campaign has been one disaster after another, and it shows no sign of letting up.
What I find interesting this election cycle is the fact that out of the three people left in the race, only one is working to earn the position. The other two think it is their turn at the helm, and they are running their campaigns accordingly.
I also heard that Penn was fired. Yup, finally! What? By the government of Columbia? They are offended at his remarks regarding his meeting with them? Gee, I wonder why…
That Penn was fired by Columbia and not Hillary sure says a lot to me…lol
Actually, I hope Hillary does not fire him. He has been an asset to Obama, and Hillary is paying for it!
In more ways than one… :D
Johnny Pez
Now that the Columbians have fired him, his top priority is finding a client who can actually pay him.
RC
Why would anyone select a president based on whether they can remember exact details like this? Reagan even forgot once whether a story he told was real or in a movie he was in. Dubya gets half the stories he tells all garbled up. McCain recently got Shiite and Sunni mixed up and got less criticism from so called Democrats than Hillary does. Everyone I know does the same thing, and I bet Obama would too if he didn’t avoid all specifics and just talk about hope and change. Lawyers know very well that everyone forgets some details of every event, it’s how the memory works in everyone and why eyewitnesses are usually unreliable.
This is really Obama supporters getting back to negative campaigning after Obama said (wink, wink) to stop doing it.
Obama is finished now, he is unelectable after the stories Coulter pointed out from his memoirs. All Fox news have to do now is go on and on about how Obama can’t understand how whites think (“easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.”), how he hates the white blood in his veins like Malcolm X, how he wants to be president for whites but hates living by white man’s rules, and so on.
Is this his campaign strategy they will ask? “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=25831
Fox and Friends spent 3 hours on morning going on and on about Wright, what do you think they will do with this kind of material? Obama’s strong point is how he is friendly and not angry. Now they will say he admitted it is all fake, and his strong point is neutralised, just like Kerry’s war record and Gore’s experience.
I must admit I thought Obama would at least make it to the nomination before being swiftboated but this is really over. Hillary is all you have left now, or McCain.
zack
If Clinton actually knew what the “real story” was then she would have immediately told the press that they had the wrong hospital. Instead, she said she “wouldn’t repeat the story.”
Obviously she didn’t know what the real story was and didn’t make much of an effort to find out either. Which underscores John Cole’s original point:
That holds up rather well, I think.
Mary
Right, Nikki. I’m trying to think of some way this could make sense — maybe the woman was previously turned away from another hospital before this one took her in? — but she had insurance when she was admitted to O’Bleness and they say there is no record of her being turned away from any other hospital.
How likely is it that two young women in one small county would have such similar stories? And even if they did, this kind of story is Snopes territory. With no names and no paper trail, how can this be verified? And if this young woman did exist, how does her family feel about Clinton bringing up this story over and over without their consent?
Mary
Oh, wait. Here’s the next few paragraphs from that story. Bolded parts are my emphasis.
Did you count the “thinks” and “understandings” and “believes” from this one source, reporting on another source’s beliefs? Look, if this young woman was yanked around by another hospital, and if delays led to her death and her baby’s death, that’s a tragedy.
But it’s one thing to go out and tell the story of a named person with the family’s consent, because that gives you the chance to back up your assertions with evidence. What we’re left with now is a near-classic FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) urban legends, although enough clues were dropped by the local paper that someone unscrupulous could easily identify her now.
But it appears that this woman did have insurance. She still may have been treated horribly (paging Michael Moore!), but even this amended story doesn’t make the points Clinton wanted to make.
p.lukasiak
Gross hypocrisy alert….
remember a couple of days ago, when Cole hated Jake Tapper because of his Obama/smoking story? Remember all the horrible things he said about Tapper?
Because, apparently he doesn’t —
guess who wrote this, which Cole just quoted approvingly…
that’s right. the horrible Jake Tapper. And this story is so full of anti-Clinton spin and bullshit that it makes the Obama story look like a pulitzer prize candidate. But because its anti-Clinton swill, Cole sucks it up uncritically….
Cole is stilla fucking wingnut, only he’s now a wingnut for Obama. He’s just as irrational, just as incapable of intelligent discourse, as he was when he was hating on those of us who opposed this war. He’s Christopher Hitchens without (I hope) having his medical records list his blood types as “Seagrams”
Mary
Wrong, p. luk. Tapper referred to speeches and press releases that were in the public record and checked his calendar. Her claims were weakass to begin with (start counting only in January 2005? Ho-kay …), and downright false when you checked the dates.
Clinton strains at shit that just weakens her. She didn’t have to tell tall tales of Tuzla, she didn’t have to make a genuine story sounds like an urban legend to support her health plan, and she didn’t have to set a ridiculous criterion for being an effective and early critic of Iraq when she didn’t even verify that she could meet it.
Clinton the senator is better than Clinton the campaigner of 2007-2008. It’s genuinely tragic that she has made decisions and errors that have undermined her even more than unfair and sexist media criticism she’s endured.
The Other Steve
In your heart, you know he’s right.
Chris Johnson
RC- you sound horrible, you sound like a pig. Or some hideous combination of swiftboatian idealist and Karl Rovian politico. You sound AWFUL.
Slime is only a good weapon when people aren’t drowning in it. Why should we believe you, because you’re telling us for our own good? ;)
p.lukasiak
the problem is that Obama isn’t being swiftboated — unlike Kerry, who was a genuine war hero, there a whole lot of truth in stories of Obama’s radical past.
The people running the right wing noise machine aren’t stupid — their audience is, but the people in charge aren’t. They’ve known about Wright forever — it was thing in Obama’s past like right that are one of the main reasons I support Clinton, because I know exactly what the right wing will do with that stuff.
Remember, there is a reason why the Wright story broke when it did…. Wright was about to retire, and it was released when it was because you can’t ask Obama “Why are you still in this church” once Wright was gone. So the right wing noise machine got Wright’s name out there in the way that it could do the most damage.
But the damage that the right is going to inflict upon Obama because of Wright hasn’t even begun. See, the real question isn’t “why did you stay in the church?”. After all, a church really is like an extended family for a lot of people, and you don’t desert your family because one member — even if he is the most important member — is a jerk.
The real question that the right-wing media is going to ask — the one that will do the real damage — is why did Obama join Wright’s church in the first place?. It isn’t as if Wright wasn’t a well known Chicago radical preacher bad in 1988.
Now, I don’t know the answer — but I suspect it had to do with political expediency. In 1988, Obama decided he wanted to do more “for the world”, and the best way for him to do that was enter politics, and the best way to get there was with a law degree. Wright ran one of the largest black churches — and one of the most activist churches — in Chicago. Getting in good with that congregation would be a big help when it came time to run for office, and I suspect that is why he joined Wright’s church.
But Obama can’t really admit something like that — I mean, there goes any credibility he might have with the conservative christian community, and they are one of the key factors that made Obama a “viable” candidate against McCain. (Obama won’t win any states because of christian conservatives, but he can force McCain to spend time and money in states that should be considered ‘safe’ for a Republican.)
Obama isn’t so much “cooked” as “pre-cooked”. You could stick a fork in him at any time, and find out hat he was done. And the GOP knows it, even if the MUPpets don’t.
p.lukasiak
Bullshit Mary. You obviously didn’t read what Tapper represents as Obama’s supposed “anti-war” statement. Its not an anti-war statement….he tiptoes around Rice, asking her whether the Iraqi’s have enough uniforms.
And the fact is that until what you do has consequences, everything else is bullshit. When push came to shove, and Obama had to make votes about the war, he voted just like Hillary. Neither of them had to — Senators and Congresscriters who have been genuinely opposed to the war from the very beginning had no problem voting against fund the war.
Obama voted the same way that Clinton did for the exact same reasons — three years ago, there was very little to be gained from voting against funding for Iraq in 2005, and in terms of running for President in 2008, a whole lot to lose potentially.
That’s why I have such a hard time with the MUPpets — they think he’s “different”, but he not — he’s the exact same kind of politician that Clinton is….
except that in political terms, Clinton clearly knows what she’s doing in the senate. I mean, she got on the Armed Services Committee after only being in the Senate for two years? Sure, maybe someone like Jim Webb, who the Democrats want as their poster boy on military matters can get on that committee…especially when the Dems take over the Senate, and there are extra seats to give out.
Clinton got a seat on the source of pork-barrel spending (nothing spells “pork” like ‘national defense spending’) while there weren’t that many seats for Dems to begin with. If you want evidence that Clinton really does know how to get things done in DC, all you need to do is look at her committee assignments.
EL
Because crappy as our health care system is, most hospitals are not going to risk the enormous fine that comes with a Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act violation, and this story (as told) is just such a violation. EMTALA requires screening to see if a condition requiring emergency treatment exists. If there is even a possibility such a condition exists after the initial exam, no doc wants to risk the individual fine, and no hospital wants to risk the fine for the institution.
I can’t tell you how many times I heard patients or family say that something would have turned out better if only the doctor had done x, y, or z right away, when medically that wasn’t true. I don’t blame them, often in their anger and grief, they want to blame someone or some thing.
I know from the inside lots of things wrong with health care, with hospitals, and with individual doctors, but this story doesn’t add up.
(I did see Sicko. I felt that in a few instances, Michael Moore misinterpreted a medical event, but mostly he was right about disgusting practices of the health insurance industry.)
p.lukasiak
good point… unfortunately, the MUPpets still don’t realize that they are acting exactly like the far-right scumbags that they spent years criticizing. This is a nothing story — the kind of thing that the media would ignore if it was anyone else (Clinton’s apparent crime is using the two words “back to” — and she made it clear when she talked about the story that it was “something she’d heard about”, and except for Hillary haters, who think that people should vet the truth of every statement anyone makes before repeating it, the phrase “something I’ve heard about” isn’t a claim of absolute truth.
Oh, btw. Obama bowls like a pussy.
Bob In Pacifica
I’ve been out of town and off the net. Did anyone mention the story (find a link at Truthdig) that healthcare “mandates” may be unconstitutional?
The government can tell you you have to have auto insurance if you drive a car, but it can’t force you to buy health insurance. Interesting. Of course, a single-payer would avoid all this.
Nikki
Actually, p. luk, Matt Yglesias said that, not Jake Tapper.
Soylent Green
Yeah, and so what? His motives are the same as most churchgoers, to be counted as members in good standing of their communities, and to make new business and social contacts. I doubt seriously if more than a fraction of church members actually believe the religious dogma they are peddled, although many probably come away with meaningful lessons (if the sermons are any good) and some sense of spiritual growth. Most are there to make an appearance and are bored silly the whole time. The exuberance of a black church is an exception to this rule.
Keep up the good work though advancing Hillary’s final pitch, that Obama is not electable because the right wing will savage him. I think enough people are sick of this shit not to go for it anymore, and are especially tired of cynics like you.
All I know is that the right would rather have Hillary to run against. That’s enough for me.
Phoebe
pluk- Obama wrote in detail about why he joined that church in his first book and it checks out to me, as being consistent with the rest of him. In fact, helping form the rest of him. It’ll all come out in due course, as this thing gets flogged and flogged and flogged to death, with lots of help from HRC supporters/fearmongers. Wheeeee! Good times ahead.
I actually like that it’s coming from her right now [though not exclusively]- makes her look like a weasel to undecided dems, and might make some in the vwrc, who hate her from the olden days, jump to his defense, almost reflexively, looking for ways for her to be wrong. She’s doing a lot of good this way.
p.lukasiak
Actually, p. luk, Matt Yglesias said that, not Jake Tapper….
right… it only links back to a Tapper story. So its okay if Big Media Matt (who is in the bad for Obama) writes approvingly of the reporting of the “worst reporter in the world?”
If Cole possessed an ounce of intellectual integrity, he would have read the Tapper piece, and realized it was worse that his Obama-smoking piece…. and started questioning the credibility of Yglesias.
But “Its Okay If Its an Attack On Hillary.” Charles Manson could link ot Osama bin Laden criticizing Hillary, and Cole would quote it approvingly….
Phoebe
Another thing that looks bad to undecided dems is the whole “professor/senior lecturer” thing. Nobody who isn’t inside the bunker thinks that is anything but nuts.
That’s the cherry on top – she justifies what she does under the “politics aint beanbag” all’s-fair doctrine, but that includes bellowing “SHAME ON YOU OBAMA!” – because all’s fair only for her.
p.lukasiak
Obama wrote in detail about why he joined that church in his first book and it checks out to me, as being consistent with the rest of him.
I’m sure it does, Phoebe. Obama is such a blank slate that he could skate around Rockefeller Center on Christmas morning in a Big Bird costuem while lighting his own farts masturbating, and singing “Its Raining Men”, and it would be “consistent with the rest of him.”
Because its not what Obama says, it what he meant to say. And its not what he does, its what he was meaning to do. And as long as Obama tells you that he had the best of intentions in everything he’s ever said and done, whatever he does is “consistent”.
Phoebe
ok pluk:
****
Obama is such a blank slate that he could skate around Rockefeller Center on Christmas morning in a Big Bird costuem while lighting his own farts masturbating, and singing “Its Raining Men”, and it would be “consistent with the rest of him.”
***
He’s not a blank slate, that would not be consistent, and you’re just making shit up now. One of the reasons the “angry black man” tag isn’t sticking so well is that he’s been consistently the opposite of that. The only people who want to believe that are people who just see “black man” and filled the “angry” part in already, becuase they’re angry at the angry black men.
I’m done with you.
John Cole
Pluk-
Are you so stupid that you can not tell the difference between a reporter getting huffy over a lie he imagined about a personal habit and a reporter presenting, point by point, why someone is lying about their past positions on the most important issue facinf us today?
Never mind, I know the answer.
Krista
Anybody who could multi-task like that would definitely earn my vote.
Rick Taylor
I don’t care much about the whole hospital incident, but trying to say that except for one speech, she opposed the war before Obama? Together with what’s in the rest of the thread “The Looking Glass” reminds me of how the term “The reality based community,” was coined. It was like we didn’t just disagree on principles with the Republican party, it’s that we were living in a different universe. They were living in a universe where things were going great in Iraq, a universe where you could raise revenues by cutting taxes, a universe where global climate change was a big myth. It was strange, and continues to be so. I’m starting to get that strange sense of disequilibrium once again.
Anyway, here’s a link to a video of Clinton making the above statement, together with a mix of Obama talking about the war.
Oh yeah, another thing I remember about that other universe; McCain described himself as Bush’s biggest critic on how the war was fought.
Rick Taylor
McCain opposed the war even before Hillary:
Mike G
Clinton is still telling the “woman-turned’away-and-died” hospital story
This is positively Reaganesque. And the Rethugs used to make all kinds of excuses whenever St. Ronald fantasised about old movies as if they were real, Cadillac-driving welfare queens, or claimed he filmed the death camps in 1945.
Maybe it’s her secret plan to lure Reagan Democrats back to the party.
ThymeZone
That’s pretty much your dream Christmas, isn’t it?
Tom in Texas
This in a thread where Clinton has been endlessly trying to explain what she meant to say, as opposed to what she… said.
Conservatively Liberal
That is because Clintonistas like p.luk never really cared about selling people on Hillary’s assets. The only way they can try to get us to accept Hillary the Inevitable is to tear Obama down. It sure says a lot about a supporter when they focus on the competitor instead of the competition.
We talk about a problem that Hillary has, and they come in saying ‘Obama is worse’ in the hopes of destroying the conversation. They can’t build her up to be as good as Obama, so why even try?
RC
“Chris Johnson Says:
“RC- you sound horrible, you sound like a pig. Or some hideous combination of swiftboatian idealist and Karl Rovian politico. You sound AWFUL.
Slime is only a good weapon when people aren’t drowning in it. Why should we believe you, because you’re telling us for our own good?”
Chris, I’m not happy at the thought of Obama being swiftboated. My point is that Democrats for some reason never seem to assume that their candidate will be attacked. We saw this happen with Gore and Kerry, both of them would have won the election, maybe they even did win, except for the Republican attacks. That doesn’t make these attacks fair, but it is naive to think that this time Rove and his cronies will give Obama a break. And the whole Obama supporter strategy for swiftboating is nothing more than hoping it won’t happen, or failing that hoping that their anger will somehow stop the swiftboating.
It won’t. In fact the madder the Republicans make the Democrats the more they win, because when they are mad they just look like worse candidates or their supporters look more shrill and radical. This frightens the moderates which is the whole idea. For some reason Bill Clinton survived it for two terms, but they tried everything they could to do the same to him.
If you have a constructive strategy for this swiftboating you should share it with others, because I haven’t heard anyone with any good ideas on this. I’m also sorry for what will happen to him. But the audacity of hope is not enough, because hope is not a plan. How about the audacity of a plan on how to counter this? I know people like Obama, I like him as well. I just don’t think he has any chance of surviving swiftboating based on quotes like that from his book, and by association with Wright.
Republican operatives are already smearing him as Barack Osama for not wearing the american flag. It makes no difference whether it is a real issue or not, it is a strawman argument that works. The other attack will be Barack X by his admiration of Malcolm X. Try googling “Barack X” and watch the number of links explode over time. By the way I read Malcolm X’s autobiography years ago and agree with a lot of his feelings and ideas. The point though is how do you get a Malcolm X sympathiser elected president. Read this again, in Obama’s own words, not mine:
“It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”
Now explain to me why you think Fox News will not be using quotes like these against Obama. Why quotes like this won’t be overlaid across Obama’s courteous smiling face in ads in the election. Why when Obama gets angry about it they won’t say it’s the angry black man inside he can’t hide any more.
Or how about an ad of white voters, asking why Obama hates the white blood in his veins and if he doesn’t understand the way white people think how can he govern them.
Rove read Obama’s book a long time ago, they are just waiting for Hillary to be drummed out of the race before all this comes out. No one likes this kind of politics, least of all me. But these swiftboat attacks are pretty predictable, and Rove doesn’t need help from commenters on a forum to work this stuff out. Look at what they did to Harold Ford and explain why they should be any easier on Obama.
It’s not my fault Chris, I’m just pointing out the blindingly obvious here.
dslak
Thank God that Hillary doesn’t get angry, and that she didn’t write a book. Otherwise, there’d be no way she could beat McCain.
D’oh!
ThymeZone
Works? With whom? Long-winded spoofass posters on obscure political blogs?
Ooooh, scary. The Republicans want us to be scared of that old meanie, Uncle Al Qaeda, and you want us to be askeered of that well known Mister Stranger Danger, Karl Rove.
Go away. If you do any more hand-flapping, you’ll have people worried that you are autistic. Your Chicken Little imitation has become irritating.
purpleOnion
The most important problem with regard to Dick Cheney’s “so” remark and Hillary Clinton’s false memories is the childishness of them. Neither of them bothered to think what they said before they said it. I do not want anyone in an executive position who cannot lie without plausible deniability or who does not take the time to verify stories one reads or hears.
If Hillary Clinton took the time to look up “insurance nightmares” on the internet she could have read about the nightmares until she found several that were useful and then have staffers verify the stories. If that means personal interviews, acquisition of documents and whatever other historical data exists to support the story, it gets done. Due diligence was absent in this case.
Dick Cheney’s “so” statement was equally childish. Now is not the time to declare victory for the plutocracy, by issuing edicts to the people that let them know that they are no longer relevant, and their government does not care about their opinions. It is only interested in what people will believe. Governance by public relations means that we are being sold a product, and the product has nothing to do with the real world.
Presumably, we cannot deal with the real world except with the most rudimentary of survival methods. Besides, what good can our thoughts on any subject be if the media and government have been consistently deceiving us? Who needs opinions of people whose only information on a subject has been misinformation?
In both cases their behavior revealed childishness in emotional development not professionalism. Professionalism is tough; childishness in our so-called public servants at the executive level is inexcusable. While the expectation that politicians will deceive others exits, that expectation includes the idea that they will do it professionally.
Cheney lets loose with an arrogant off-handed “so” that revealed more about what he and other insiders are thinking than any of his words prior to the interviewer’s question and following it. His “so” was the real news of the day. Clinton proved that she is either easily deceived or is not professional in here telling of tales. In the two situations these people revealed why they should not be in executives.
The most self-centered people in the world are infants. They insist that the world revolves around them. They are self-serving in the extreme. The behavior of our public servants on the executive level is exposing the weakness that exists in a materialist society. While there are many other examples of childishness from our leaders, the serious problem is that it does not bode well for our society.
purpleOnion
I thought that most people regardless of color have learned that the best way to get something done is to be courteous and respectful while having one’s own way. This is not a behavior that is isolated in Obama, it is the behavior of most if not all of our politicians.