This is the first installment of a periodic series in which I post about events from the past.
One year ago today during a segment of Morning Joe, the hosts and their guests discussed the then-upcoming Republican National Convention and what candidate Mitt Romney could do to turn things around. At about the 2:35 mark of the clip below, the fireworks start when Chris Matthews takes RNC Chairman Reince Priebus to task for what he felt were the GOP's underhanded attacks against President Obama. Chris is like a pitbull because once he gets his teeth in an opponent's ass, he isn't going to let go easily. Because I rarely see Priebus get called on his BS when he's on news programs, it was nice to see him get challenged. Damn I love live TV!
In the latest polls, President Obama has been increasing his lead over Mitt Romney in the race for the White House. Although anything can happen between now and November 6th, members of the right-wing noise machine are clearly getting nervous.
In the video below, TYT host Cenk Uygur presents clips featuring Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, and Rush Limbaugh in which they discuss strategy, vent their frustration, and unwittingly admit their plan to throw Romney under the proverbial Greyhound if he loses. Like I alluded to in the last paragraph, it's still early yet. However, I am enjoying watching the righties sweat over the prospect of a 2nd term for President Obama!
In the poll where I asked readers if President Obama's stance on same-sex marriage will affect him politically, nearly half of you thought it would have a negative impact. Here are the final results:
It will hurt him- 46%
It will help him/It won't matter- 26% each
On the 5/12 edition of the Fox "News" program America's News Headquarters, one of their legal analysts openly wished that gas prices stay close to $5.00 a gallon in November. I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't hear it myself, but here she is:
I suspected that some on the right secretly wished economic woes would hit the U.S. and as a result, turn voters against President Obama. However, I didn't expect any of them to admit it on camera. This legal analyst probably considers herself a patriot, yet she wishes for Americans to take a hit financially. Her comments are revealing for a couple of reasons. For one, this just shows you she doesn't give a damn about the regular people. Republicans regaining power is her top priority. Secondly, if this analyst is wishing gas prices stay around $5.00 a gallon in November, she's basically saying any sitting president has no control over gas prices. I wonder if the Foxbots will be able to connect the dots on that one.
I'd like to think most would consider this woman's comments fucked up regardless of their political viewpoint. However, if anyone wants to defend what she said, I'm listening.
Note: I don't know the name of this analyst so if anyone does, please feel free to share it with me.
In an interview with GMA's Robin Roberts, President Obama confirmed something many of us believed for awhile: that he supports same-sex marriage. The announcement was historic because it marked the first time a sitting U.S. president ever publicly supported same-sex marriage.
In light of President Obama's announcement, the debate has begun regarding how his stance on same-sex marriage will affect him politically. Will it help him, hurt him, or not even matter? In addition to voting in the poll, please feel free to share your thoughts on why you voted the way you did in the comments section of this post.
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death (5/2/11). To coincide with this historic event, President Obama's campaign released the following ad featuring Bill Clinton:
In the latest round of IOKIYAR, many on the right have hypocritically accused President Obama of "spiking the football", politicizing the death of bin Laden, etc. Because the raid which killed bin Laden happened under President Obama's watch, he effectively took away one of the GOP's biggest talking points against Democrats: their alleged softness on terror. Outside of the fact they weren't able to do it, I don't see why the right is upset with President Obama for touting this accomplishment. If a Republican president had ordered the raid which took out bin Laden, do you think the right would have been low-key about it? Please!
In the clip below from Hardball with Chris Matthews, he discusses the GOP's phony outrage over the ad with David Corn of Mother Jones magazine and Ron Reagan.
The ad also drew criticism from the left, including Dana Milbank and Arianna Huffington. Their beef was with the portion of the ad which asked if Mitt Romney would have done the same thing if he were president. While I think the criticism is valid, I also feel the question posed in the ad is fair as well. After all, the ad did use Romney's own words.Speaking of Romney, I think he lost any sympathy points the ad may have generated for him by taking a cheap shot at one of the Right's favorite punching bags, Jimmy Carter.
What are your thoughts on the Obama campaign's bin Laden ad?
On the evening of April 28, 2012, the 93rd annual White House Correspondents' Dinner took place. The highlights of these events are the monologues by the sitting president and the featured entertainer. Both President Obama and Jimmy Kimmel were in fine form. I thought the jokes they delivered were edgy without being mean-spirited. Also, neither side of the political spectrum was spared.
One of the dumbest GOP criticisms of President Obama is his use of a teleprompter. If you were to believe the GOP, you'd think President Obama was the first politician to use teleprompters. Even if he does rely on teleprompters when giving a speech, is it any worse than reading a speech that's on paper or index cards?!
One of the main critics of President Obama's teleprompter use is Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). In the clip below, Sam Seder (host of the Majority Report) talks about Rubio's teleprompter cracks directed at the president and Rubio's mishap during a speech he gave on foreign policy at Brookings Institution on Wednesday.
Republican opposition to The Buffett Rule has Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks fired up! As you may know, the Buffett Rule (which failed Monday in the Senate) is the tax plan proposed by President Obama that would apply a minimum tax of 30 percent to individuals making more than a million dollars a year. The clip below features Cenk discussing the Republican's stance on The Buffett Rule interspersed with comments made by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) on Fox.
Damn, Fox "News" is predictable! Just the other day at a family get together, me and some of my relatives were talking politics as we often do. I was telling them about one of Fox's favorite tricks in their worn out playbook: have black guests come on to spout "fear of a black planet" type rhetoric in order to give it some credibility. Almost on cue, GOP waterboy Sean Hannity has on Deneen Borelli and David Webb to whip up fear over President Obama's "ties" to the New Black Panthers. These two should be ashamed of themselves. But hey, as long as those Fox checks keep rollin' in, why worry about such minor things as honor and integrity.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks breaks down the silliness that is Fox "News" in the clip below:
On 2/22, E.J. Dionne wrote the following article about the right's inaccurate portrayal of President Obama. Following the article is my commentary (in bold type).
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: February 22
They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.
Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.
Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.
True, some of this is driven by cable television (a venue in which I acknowledge regularly participating). Attacks designed to gin up the conservative base are quickly recycled to gin up outrage within Obama’s own base. Moreover, Obama is not the first president caught up in the rank unpleasantness of this particularly unforgiving political moment. A quick Google search will unearth references to George W. Bush as a “Nazi,” and Bill Clinton’s Republican opponents went so far as to impeach him in a shameful episode of extreme partisanship.
On those Hitler metaphors: Can we please agree to a voluntary cross-party ban on invoking the Fuhrer in the context of American politics? Only dictators who commit genocide against millions qualify for this odious comparison. It trivializes Hitler’s crimes to use Nazi references as everyday epithets.
But there is something especially rancid about the never-ending efforts to turn Obama into a stranger, an alien, a Manchurian Candidate with a diabolical hidden agenda. Are we trying to undo all the good it did us with the rest of the world when we elected an African American with a middle name popular among Muslims?
In my experience, even Americans who voted against Obama were proud that our nation showed friend and foe alike that we are a special place. We know it’s wrong to judge people by their race or lineage, and we so value religious freedom and openness that we elected a Christian convert who is the son of a Muslim father and an agnostic mother to lead us at one of our most difficult moments.
Yet many in the anti-Obama camp just can’t stop themselves from playing on fears that electing a man who defies old stereotypes was a terrible mistake. Thus did the Rev. Franklin Graham assert Tuesday on MSNBC not only that Muslims regard Obama as “a son of Islam” (because his father was Muslim) but also that “under President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries.” Graham slightly softened his comments on CNN Wednesday, but it remains troubling that he chose to turn a legitimate concern about the persecution of Christians into a slander.
In the meantime, Republican presidential candidates want to take a disagreement over whether and how contraception should be covered in plans issued under the new health-care law and turn it into a war against religion itself. “Unfortunately, possibly because of the people the president hangs around with, and their agenda, their secular agenda — they have fought against religion,” declared Mitt Romney, who pursued a similar line of attack in Wednesday night’s debate.
It’s another breathtaking slander to label Obama’s choice as an attack on religion altogether — and I say this as someone who strongly opposed the president’s initial decision not to offer any accommodation to religiously affiliated institutions on contraception. And how strange it is that Obama’s critics imply that he’s a Muslim and also condemn him as a secularist. He must be terribly clever — maybe it’s that fancy education of his — to be both.
As for Obama as a socialist, ponder two numbers: 13,005, which the Dow Jones average hit this week, up from a low point of 6,547 in March 2009. Some socialist.
We are blessed with the freedom to say whatever we want about our president. But those who cast Obama as something other than one of us don’t understand him and don’t understand what it means to be American.
E.J. is absolutely right. In an effort to downplay the heated rhetoric directed at President Obama, I've heard people on the right say that some of our previous presidents (namely Clinton and Bush 43) also faced fierce attacks. Although that's true, comparing what they endured with what President Obama has faced is an example of false equivalency. Here's why:
Prior presidents didn't have their U.S. citizenship scrutinized.
They never had their patriotism questioned on a continued basis, if at all.
Their religious faith wasn't called into question
Also, we aren't just talking about the garden variety kook hammering away at a computer keyboard or a blowhard pundit shouting into a radio microphone/TV screen. No, a lot of these attacks are coming from prominent GOP politicians. People who actually have a shot at becoming the next POTUS!
If anyone still wants to say the attacks against President Obama aren't any worse than what previous presidents have faced, I'd love to hear your arguments.
On the 2/24 installment of Politics Nation with Al Sharpton, E.J. Dionne and former RNC chairman Michael Steele discuss these continued attacks on President Obama.
Last night, Betty White's 90th Birthday: A Tribute to America's Golden Girl aired on NBC. As part of the telecast, there was a pre-taped segment featuring President Obama. In the segment, the president killed two birds with one stone. In addition to to wishing Betty a happy birthday, he also had a little fun with the birther controversy.
Rachel Maddow is at it again! Hitting the GOP with those pesky little things known as facts. On her show Friday night, Rachel did a segment in which she dismantled the GOP talking points about President Obama regarding big government, immigration, taxes, and the war on terror. You can read the accompanying article on PoliticusUSA.
Herman, Herman, Herman ... Why did you have to go here?
The video above shows that the man is in love with himself and delusional.
It seems that some of our friends to the right of the political middle feel as if they may have found their great black hope, and his name is Herman Cain. Frankly, I've largely tried to give this man Cain the benefit of the doubt as he has shoehorned his way into the media spotlight largely through his willingness to takes shots at President Barack Obama. In all honesty, one good way to find a place in the media spotlight is as a black politician or pundit who is willing to verbally attack President Obama (Lloyd Marcus, Jesse Lee Peterson, Michael Steele, etc.).
This all brings me to some comments that Cain made at a tea party (yes, there was at least one black man at a tea party) event in Florida.
"The liberal mainstream media, notice how they have tried to destroy Sarah Palin. Notice how the more popular Michele Bachmann gets, the more they try to destroy her. You want to know why they go after those two ladies more viciously? Because they know that Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin is going to draw a lot of the women vote away from the Democrat Party."
Bachmann and Palin have done (and continue to do) more to destroy themselves then the so-called mainstream media could ever do. I am not a woman, but I have a hard time seeing many independent or left-wing women gravitating to Bachmann or Palin ... just saying.
But, that is just the beginning of what Cain had to say. It is interesting to see how far we've come in society when some people are seeking out a great black hope.
More from Cain:
"They are scared to death of that, if they were to run and get the nomination. They are doubly scared that a real black man might run against Barack Obama."
Is he, of all people, trying to say Barack Obama is not a real black man? Negro, please.
Does Cain really think he is that real black man? As they say on ESPN, "Come on, man."
UPDATE:"Cain spokeswoman Ellen Carmichael told POLITICO that Cain's race remarks had nothing to do with him challenging Obama's racial origin. "'He was referring to himself in the first person,'" she said. "'He was saying that there could be a general election with two black men.'"
