Obama is sounding like Kerry
Ok, I've exceeded my post quota for the week and you wouldn't see much of me fora few a days, but I couldn't let this pass.
Obama is sounding like Kerry's I voted for the funds for war and then I voted against them comment now. The problem for Democrats is they can't figure out what they're about and say so!
Please Senator Obama, start making the better case and consider Rove may very will be right when he said Democrats are fine patriots, but just have got it deeply, profoundly and consistently wrong.
Sen. Barack Obama said he would vote Monday to filibuster Judge Samuel Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court, but he conceded the effort would be futile and criticized Democrats for failing to persuade Americans to take notice of the court's changing ideological face."Cross Posted at Bill Baar's West Side
The Democrats have to do a much better job in making their case on these issues," Obama (D-Ill.) said Sunday on ABC News' "This Week." "These last-minute efforts--using procedural maneuvers inside the Beltway--I think has been the wrong way of going about it."
Despite his criticism, Obama announced his intention to support the maneuver designed to block--or delay--Alito's confirmation this week. The movement, which was launched by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), appeared to lack the 41 senators needed to be successful.
26 comments:
Bill, your argument holds water as long as one doesn't bother to look past the soundbite.
Kerry did vote for the war funds before he voted against them. He voted for his amendment to take the money of the top of the tax cut for the rich. Republicans would have none of it. They preferred to add to the deficit. Kery didn't want to fund the war that way so he voted no that time.
Obama agrees that Alito should not sit on the Supreme Court. His vote should not be affected by how many others will vote with him.
Why let the facts get in the way of another right wing post. Either Bill knows he's misrepresenting the Kerry position, in which case he's a shameless hack, or he doesn't know it, in which case he's not real bright.
He reports, you decide.
"It is the right thing to do but it will be futile."
You have a problem with that?
What do you think on Obama's comment on making the better case?
I like Obama because I think deep down inside he knows the Democrat's problem is bigger then just framing the message.
I think there can be a liberal opposition that's not Republican lite and doesn't succumb to the America's the world's biggest problem voiced by Moore and others. (I'll google quotes for you or scan SoapBlog Chicago..it's not hard to find this philosophy.)
I just Obama would get to the task at hand of redefining as sensible Liberalism and stop the Kerry sounding sound bites.
Skeeter: Paul Douglas repeatedly lead the charge in the Senate for for Civil Rights Bills that everyone knew would lose.
Never once did he say the effort was futile, or that the problem was in the delivery of the message.
Douglas know the cause was right; the lost battle always worth something --never futile. Because someday the American People would understand.
I don't hear the same passion here and I think it's because Obama knows the problem's the substance of Democrat's message, and not its format.
Maybe I'm reading too much into him, but that's what I hear.
Wow, so Obama is saying even though he thinks it won't fly he's going to do the pricipled thing based on his views and join the filibuster. What a brewing scandal you've uncovered.
Imagine if a nominee for the Supreme Court said "yeah I wrote those briefs, but it doesn't mean I really mean that, I just wanted a job." You'd be all over that. Oh, wait, you're not all over that because he's a Republican nominee.
Being the minority party sucks...looks like after the Alito hearing, the Democrats finally figured that out.
Osama Obama is swahili for flip-flop.
I really dislike Obama, but give him credit for not jumping on the silly filibuster bandwagon.
Lame. Nice try, though.
How much mileage did you and other Repubs get out of that John Kerry line? People love that like they love their kids. What would you do without it?
Take a seat on the bench.
That's the benefit they get from being Bush-backing Republicans. Principles are not even part of the discussion, because that requires things like context, subtlety and thought.
How come none of you Obama supporters comment on his point about Democrats failing with the message?
He's wrong, right? ...or am I missing the context, subtlety, and thought with that seemingly straight forward observation?
Yes, he's right that they've done a bad job on message. That's how we managed to re-elect an administration that makes the Nixon White House look like the Von Trapp family. That's because Democrats disagree on the direction of their own party. That's what takes context, subtlety and thought. This differs from the Republicans who post here and defend illegal wiretaps, cause Rush told them it's ok. Or claim that somehow Bush really might never have met the most powerful lobbyist in DC during his administration, a guy who was involved in policy decisions made the Bush Administration.
So there's nothing strange about an honorable decision to disagree with an appointment, but that having been said realizing that your party did not do a good job explaining why he's a bad appointment.
anon 1:28 Bad job on message meaing the Democrats and Liberalism are fundamentally split?
Nick Cohen is a Brit who wrote about the strange alliance between Britian's anti-war movement and the worst sorts of reactionary Islamists.
Here's a quote from his column. It was about the Iranian dissident Marim Namazie. It does explain the kind of indifference we see now on left to fundamental struggles for human rights.
Namazie is on the right side of the great intellectual struggle of our time between incompatible versions of liberalism. One follows the fine and necessary principle of tolerance, but ends up having to tolerate the oppression of women, say, or gays in foreign cultures while opposing misogyny and homophobia in its own. (Or 'liberalism for the liberals and cannibalism for the cannibals!' as philosopher Martin Hollis elegantly described the hypocrisy of the manoeuvre.) The alternative is to support universal human rights and believe that if the oppression of women is wrong, it is wrong everywhere.
The gulf between the two is unbridgeable. Although the argument is rarely put as baldly as I made it above, you can see it breaking out everywhere across the liberal-left. Trade union leaders stormed out of the anti-war movement when they discovered its leadership had nothing to say about the trade unionists who were demanding workers' rights in Iraq and being tortured and murdered by the 'insurgents' for their presumption.
Former supporters of Ken Livingstone reacted first with bewilderment and then steady contempt when he betrayed Arab liberals and embraced the Islamic religious right. The government's plans to ban the incitement of religious hatred have created an opposition which spans left and right and whose members have found they have more in common with each other than with people on 'their side'.
As Namazie knows, the dispute can't stay in the background for much longer. There's an almighty smash-up coming and not before time.
I think the crack up in the US will come at the Democrats convention to nominate a candidate for 2008. It will be worse than 1968. No violence but just as destructive. I think we're getting a preview with Duckworth and Cegelis. I think it's the end of the Party.
I think the crack up in the US will come at the Democrats convention to nominate a candidate for 2008. It will be worse than 1968. No violence but just as destructive. I think we're getting a preview with Duckworth and Cegelis. I think it's the end of the Party.
Sheer fantasy, but as most of your posts are completely disconnected from reality, hardly anything new.
Bill: The sky is falling!!! No the '08 convention is not going to be the end of the Democratic Party (your wishing it won't make it come true). The problem is that Democrats have to begin suspending disbelief the way Republican's do. No WMD's? That's ok, we'll support you anyway. The K-Street project, Abramoff et al, no sweat, we'll just say the peanuts the Dems took from his clients is just as bad. DeLay up to his eyeballs in corruption, that's fine just appoint all the mopes who contributed to his defense fund to the ethics panel.
What you're failing to realize is that all this overreaching by the right has virtually guaranteed the health of the Democratic Party. The mid-terms will make too many people realize that there is a good chance to clean house and the possibility to remove the say-we’re-for-small-government-unless-it-involves-looking-in-your-bedroom-or-exploding-the-deficit-right-wing is too attractive to revisit ’68.
In 2004, the Democrats had a net gain nationwide in state legislative seats. The Democrats came within a few votes in Ohio of defeating a President during a war. To go from strong local and national support to being abolished would be a pretty sharp decline in the next two years.
But maybe we should listen to Bill. After all, Bill Baar knows all about sharp declines. He is an Illinois Republican. He probably remembers way back when they the ILGOP was not the weakest Republican Party in America. It seems so long ago. If you ask him nicely, he might tell us of the time before the ILGOP became a national joke.
My Dad took me downtown in 68. The sky didn't fall but plenty of glass did. The party really self destructed and HHH was the sacrifice. I don't think they've ever really recoverd and I'm betting 2008 will show the end in sight...
...the Republicans will change and maybe split too...
We're in a time of great realignment unlike anything in my life time.
ILGOP became a joke with Allen Keyes.
You didn't have to wait for me to tell you that.
Whether it recovers, I don't know... I have a lot of hope for something like Joseph Bottum's New Fusionism,
The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight—the fundamental moral cause of our time—may revitalize belief in the great American experiment.
The Suntimes neglected to report that Obama was voting to filibuster, even though he did not think it was appropriate or probable. The Tribune reported that Obama was against the filibuster and voting for it, which is accurate (but go figure his logic).
It makes me wonder what mutton headed statement Obama would have to make before the press reported on him rather than his stellar personality.
JBP
JBP:
Can you read? This is what he said:
"I will be supporting the filibuster because I think Judge Alito, in fact, is somebody who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values," Obama said. "When you look at his decisions--in particular, during times of war--we need a court that is independent and is going to provide some check on the executive branch."
Just because he concedes that the Democrats did not do enough to get this point across and because he knows the filibuster will fail doesn't mean he shouldn't vote on principle. I know from your posts that's a foreign concept.
The strangest thing is how any Republican in Illinois could be unfamilar with voting one way even when you know it's a lost cause.
Anon 6:00PM,
So why didn't the Sun Times report that Obama was voting to support the filibuster, rather than giving a whole column over to describing why Sen Obama thought filibustering was a bad idea?
JBP
I don't work for the Sun-Times, so I don't know. That's why I read several different sources so I don't draw half-assed, uninformed opinions like you do.
Geez JBP, you really can't read. Quoting from the S-T article "Alito Filibuster won't work, Obama says" (actually an AP piece): "Obama, who would support a filibuster..." (First sentence, 6th graph).
So the article do include it, so much for your fantasy S-T covering for Obama theory. But like Baar, why let the facts get in the way of anything?
replace does with do in above post
Anon 9:32
In this article
http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/alito29.html
the phrase you quote is not found. It is posted the day before the article you quote, but by the same author.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws-obama30.html
One might think that the author provided a tad bit more information the second time around.
JBP
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