"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
Regarding Obama and the flag pin, here's something from the corporate media that repeats exactly what he said. You have to admit, he's right. The Republicans DO use the flag as a weapon.
Media Matters (a good site to watch) weighs in on the talking points your online friends have been listening to:
...and points out how Sean Hannity doesn't wear one either:
...and this blog from the NY Times shows most of the other candidates, including John McCain, don't wear one either.
Had enough?
On to the "salute the flag" controversy...
I assume that the photo here was sent to you.
Did you know that you do NOT have to put your hand over your heart when the national anthem is played? The Code for the National Anthem of the United States says:
"On all occasions, in singing the National Anthem, the audience will stand facing the flag, or the leader in an attitude of respectful attention. Outdoors, the men will remove hats."
Do your friends like those shrieking versions of the National Anthem played by American Idol pop divas before baseball games? Those are a lot more of a violation of the flag code than Barack Obama standing respectfully. The code also says:
"It is inappropriate to make or use sophisticated "concert" versions of the National Anthem."
That should take care of that one.
How about the madrassa issue?
Here you go, courtesy of CNN:
Allegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a "madrassa" are not accurate, according to CNN reporting.
Insight Magazine, which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times, reported on its Web site last week that associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, had unearthed information the Illinois Democrat and likely presidential candidate attended a Muslim religious school known for teaching the most fundamentalist form of Islam.
Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa.
Insight attributed the information in its article to an unnamed source, who said it was discovered by "researchers connected to Senator Clinton." A spokesman for Clinton, who is also weighing a White House bid, denied that the campaign was the source of the Obama claim.
He called the story "an obvious right-wing hit job."
Insight stood by its story in a response posted on its Web site Monday afternoon.
[snip]
But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.
He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.
"This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."
Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.
"I came here to Barack Obama's elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa ... like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan," Vause said on the "Situation Room" Monday. "I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan ... this school is nothing like that."
Vause also interviewed one of Obama's Basuki classmates, Bandug Winadijanto, who claims that not a lot has changed at the school since the two men were pupils. Insight reported that Obama's political opponents believed the school promoted Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Islam, "and are seeking to prove it."
"It's not (an) Islamic school. It's general," Winadijanto said. "There is a lot of Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian. ... So that's a mixed school."
The Obama aide described Fox News' broadcasting of the Insight story "appallingly irresponsible."
Fox News executive Bill Shine told CNN "Reliable Sources" anchor Howard Kurtz that some of the network's hosts were simply expressing their opinions and repeatedly cited Insight as the source of the allegations.
That last paragraph is important, because it's a window into how these wingnut memes get into the general consciousness. Thanks to Fox News, "fair and balanced" means that when you have two sides to a story, and one is factual and the other is completely and demonstrably utter horsepuckey, they both have to be given equal credibility as two sides to the story. Sort of like the evolution/creationism battle. A lie repeated often enough becomes conventional wisdom and eventually truth.
It was Joseph Goebbels who said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
And that's where these wingnuts get their inspiration from -- Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister.
Now for the issue of Obama's church:
I'll bet this e-mail at Snopes.com is the one you got from your friend. Am I right?
If you're interested in another perspective on any of these issues, please tell me what you're hearing and I'll look it up for you. Don't forward me this stuff, because it makes me nuts. But if there's a specific issue that you want a perspective on, let me know. It may very well be that people are uncomfortable with Obama's international heritage and history, but after eight years of George W. Bush, don't you think that having someone who HAS not only visited but lived in other countries and seen other cultures might be an ASSET in trying to undo the damage this president has done?
Labels: Barack Obama, wingnuttia
They asked me, before the IL primary, who I intended to vote for. I answered "Obama."
To a man, all three of them told me that they *knew* or had heard or been told that he was a closet Muslim who was "trained" at a madrasa in Asia.
I explained to them that the GOP loves nothing so much as uninformed voters.
Of the three, one lives in PA, one lives in MO, and the other lives in FL. As I said, all three are exclusively GOP voters.
The GOP has a stranglehold hold on the uninformed among us.
And that scares me, in a nation where less that half of school age children can identify Canada on a map.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/orl-bk-vote020508,0,2829516.story
She shrugged it off. "That's what I heard," she said. End of discussion.
Live Earth just picked up this topic and put out an article ( http://www.liveearth.org/news.php ) live earth is also asking why the presidential candidates are not being solicited for their stance on the issue of the climate change. I just saw a poll on www.EarthLab.com that says people care a lot about what their next leader thinks of global warming. Does anyone know of another poll or other results about this subject?
Here is the page where I saw the EarthLab poll: http://www.earthlab.com/life.aspx. This is a pretty legit website; they are endorsed by Al Gore and the alliance for climate protection and they have a carbon footprint calculator. Does anyone have a strong opinion about this like I do? No matter what your political affiliation is or who you vote for this is an important issue for our environment, our economy and for homeland security.
I wrote about this last week, and it seems there is plenty information available to debunk this stuff...but still...I continue to hear these same rumors from family and friends???
So far, it at least doesn't seem to be affecting his ability to get votes.
You know how a blog commenter immediately loses credibility if he calls the former Vice President "Algore"? Like that.
Many of the liberal and progressive bloggers seem to have so internalized their own habit of name-calling ("Chimpy", "wingnuts") that they lose sight of how that sounds to those outside the choir.
Alexander's Law:
You can not simultaneously influence and antagonize.
I write in a complete and utter vacuum. And I'm getting tired of it.
Aimed at me? I can't tell. I will assume so.
I sympathize; I have only one person, a brother-in-law who lives two thousand miles away, with whom I usefully discuss politcs. No one else in my Real Life seems to occupy the same space of engagement and information overload that I do. (Though I can tell you that the non-citizen foreign nationals I work with seem far better informed than most of the American citizens I know.)
Bush and Cheney are unabashed fascists; we must not say so, though the great sea flashes and yearns, and we ourselves flash and yearn.
But.
What we should want to do is to change the voting behavior of people like your friend, people like my Mom, who cannot see what we see. We will never influence them by calling the politicians that they have supported insulting names.
Believe me, I've tried. I've called Bush a deserter (which he is) and delusory (which he is). I've called Reagan a fool (which he was). I've called Nixon a paranoid and a megalomaniac (which he was).
None of these strategies seemed to convince my audience. I note that I seldom find "Hitlary Clinton" or "Barack Osama"
very convincing.
The conclusion is left as an exercise for the student.
2/17/08 2:20 AM