Obama once again resorted to the politics of racial divisivenes in his quest for the Presidency. In a speech in Missouri on Wednesday, Obama suggested McCain would try to scare voters into not voting for Obama. Here is the quote:

The Obama camp has tried to argue they were NOT referring to race when Obama mentioned looking "like all those other Presidents" but rather to being a Washington insider. I gotta call bullshit. Anyone who believes Obama meant anything other than race when he made that specific comment is lying to themselves.

Dick Cheney: "SO...?"

Nice to know where you stand, Helice. Interesting though...

It certainly was a stupid remark for Obama to make, and was certainly playing the race card, although one could argue that George W. Bush doesn't look much like the Presidents on money either.

She stands with Dick Cheney. Do you find something wrong with that?

My position is that, yes, Obama "played the race card", when he made the comment about not looking like former presidents that had appeared on currency.

A) He's right. He doesn't. Neither does Bush or McCain, ugly suckers the whole lot of them, not fit for money.

B) Why is the McCain camp mewling and peeing submissively to the press about this great big "race card" as though Obama had dealt them a mortal blow when he made the comment? Was it a mortal blow?

Was it a terribly unfair comment to make? Did the McCain campaign ever do anything that was overtly or covertly racist that would prompt such a "race card" to be thrown on the table?

I think it was definitely a race card. I am keen to know why the McCain camp seems to be fainting and weeping and holding perfumed hankies to their noses for the horror of it all. What kind of pansies are those guys? Why can't they just smile, say "We did/didn't mean what he thought we meant, and that thing does/doesn't describe how we feel", and walk away whistling, leaving the public thinking "Wow, McCain's really cool!"

This pathetic weeping on the shoulder of a disinterested rpess is hurting McCain more than helping him in the press, unless his big strategy is to go with "Elect helpless, feeble old man who can't fight for himself and crys when challenged!"

Sheesh. I hate politics. Sure it was a race card. Why would anyone even need to state it? The thing is, how is it being responded to? With strong, confident, vital energy? Or feeble sighs and pathetic groans of "No fair, I'm tellin' the teacher on you!"

Feh.

Here is the thing, Helice...McCain said nothing at all to motivate the Obama comments. Obama was telling his audience things he claimed the McCain camp would say in an effort to dissuade them from voting for Obama. In short, Obama was calling McCain a racist who would resort to racist rhetoric to get people not to vote for Obama.

McCain was quite right to call Obama on that attempt. As the McCain camp stated in its protest, an unrebutted lie takes on the ring of truth. Whats more worrisome to me is that the likes of you and Dax do not similarly call Obama on this blatant effort to sow racial discord and instead criticize McCain for taking offense. I compare this event to the outpouring of complaint about the satirical New Yorker cover. That sure riled the left up, didn't it...? Yet...not a peep about Obama's race baiting tactics. The double standard is glaring. I thought you leftists were against hypocrisy...I guess not.

He doesn't look like all the other Presidents on Mt. Rushmore either...

And he doesn't look like those other Americans who spoke in Berlin. How do I know? Because Obama went to great effort to mention to the Germans that HE didn't look like "those other Americans." And you know why, don't you? It's because he's black! No really.

Barrack Obama makes sure he reminds everyone he's black at every campaign opportunity. Even this last one when he made sure that everyone KNEW he thought John McCain's campaign would probably make an issue of Barrack Obama being black as a scare tactic. Black, black, black, black, black. NOT that he's running at THE "Black Candidate." It's just that he wants everyone to know that IF John McCain tries to make an issue of Obama's race, well, at least we'll know why. It's because Obama is black. 'Cause he says so.


...and says so.


...and says so.


P.S. Barrack Obama is black.

Pleeeese! You are joking, right? Guys like Obama and Halle Barry know they are halfrican because Rush told em! Did you really think Obama called himself "black"?

Yep! I'm pretty sure he did.

And did.

And did.

And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did. And did.

How dare him!

That must prove the 'rule,' say something often enough and it becomes meaningless.

The race card was played long ago. He is black so it is bound to come up. If he thinks that alone will get him elected he is a fool. If we don't think that will stop him from being elected, we may be the fools.

Wow, you really hate blacks, don't you?

Nope, I think Ray hates the hypocracy of the Left. The hypocracy that allows them to casually accept use of race baiting tactics by Obama but to loudly criticize McCain for fabricated charges of racism.

No, I think he hates blacks.

"Throw a stone over a fence and the dog that yelps the loudest is the one who got hit." --Ray



How's that for yelping?

Don't worry, folks! In real life Dax is an intelligent, well-read, pleasant individual. He isn't really a dunce; he just plays one on the Internet.

Once again, unresponsive.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Lawmage. We went from "play the race card" to "RACE-BAITING". Nice little bait and switch there. good job, but I caught you. Shame on you. The comment was given with a chuckle in response to a negative McCain campaign ad that depicted Obama with pictures of Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears.

McCain is going negative, using ads to bash his opponent is ridiculous ways, on one level appealing to old farts like himself who might have distaste for Hilton and Spears and their undeserved noteriety and putting Obama on their level in his campaign ad, and on another more sinister level waking up some people who might not like seeing images of an Afrcan American man flanked by scantily clad young white women. Negative and sleazy all the way, typical Republican campaigning.

Scream all you want about THAT, McCain is running his campaign like a typical sleazebag and no-one is surprised.

As for that New Yorker cover? It was stupid and everything that was said about it in criticism was true. Again... So What? The people that would be negatively impacted by that cover are identifiably the stupidest, meanest, most retarded, hopeless, and venal of our citizens already and they were never going to be Obama voters at any point. If those worm eaters saw the cover and thought "Yeppers, he's a Muslim all right," well, who cares really, they thought that before they saw the cover too. Leave them alone in the dark. The talk and protest about the cover was wasted hot air.

McCain has hired negative campaigners and dirty trickers to run his bid for the White House, he approves of it, and you'll see more rotten negative stuff as we march on towards the election and GOD it's all so predictable. And Obama, being (gasp!) a POLITICIAN, will fight back, the difference being that to keep his base he can't originate the dirty tricks the way his opponent can and still keep his base happy. The Democratic base won't sit still for that crap, but the Republican base will not only sit still, they'll sit up and beg.

Repubs can do no wrong, ever. Democrats are evil. Please consult Ray to confirm my statements. Or maybe I'll just ask YOU, since you've been made over in Ray's image.

Absolutely, Helice. It's not the Muslims, it's not al-Queda, it's not the terrorists, it's not bin-Laden, it's not Iran, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or Pakistan, it's the liberals.

That's about the quality and intelligence of the Republican campaign. But since it's being managed by former proteges of Karl Rove, can you expect anything else?

On the other hand, since they have nothing on the issues, and can't brag about the past 8 years, it's all the Republicans have. However I don't think the majority of the American people are being fooled any longer.

It took a long time to wake them, but I think they're up now.

I guess I will respectfully withdraw from this discussion then. The views you guys express are so distorted that I do not think we can have any further meaningful discussion.

The only thing America is waking up to is a reminder that sometimes you have to take out the old garbage to have room to replace it with more garbage. Politically America is stuck between two candidates who will still stink the place up when given the chance. And if you think the Democrats have woken up from anything you must be forgetting how close Hillary Clinton was/is to being their nominee.

Distorted? In what way?

My view is that the whole thing is "politics as usual", and that Obama is no Messiah, and McCain is no saint. You think that anyone could get to the point of running for the office of President of the United States without a certain fierceness and craving for power, a desire to bend others to his/her will and have things done their way, a willingness to say whatever needs to be said to attain the goal of power?

The ends that all that power-craving is put to may differ, and the means to the ends are certainly going to differ, but you can be sure that both of these candidates have that fire in the belly that brought them to this point, and caused them to hire teams of handlers and marketers to promote them to the electorate like cornflakes and shaving cream and cheesepuffs. Which one tastes great? Which one is less filling?

The nature of the campaigns they run are partially dependent on the candidates themselves, but are mostly given over to the people they have hired to sell them in the supermarket isles of the country, and after they make those initial decisions on who to hire, they lose a little control over their labeling and ad campaigns. They might find out after the fact that their ad teams have delivered up commercials or given out statements in their names that cause their sales to fall and their brand name to suffer (irregardless of whether the statements and commercials really reflect the candidate's positions). Remedies are to deny and repudiate, and lastly to fire those responsible, to try and repair your brand name in the consumer's eye. If you're hired the wrong people to handle you and run your media campaigns they're going to allow unpopular things slip into your press releases and media (whether or not they represent the candidate - that's irrelevant, it's just about selling the candidate).

Both of these candidates want power. A lot. That they are where they are at this point attests to the fierce craving they both have for it.

Both of these candidates think they know what's "good" for the country, arrogantly so. Their views on how to get this country to a "good" place and what methods to use differ, but they both want things to be "good", and they both perceive themselves to be "good".

They both have camp followers who are persuaded, for various reasons -- some sound, some foolish -- that the particular path to "good" their favorite candidate espouses is "the shit", and because they are callow, they make the assumption that this automatically makes the opposing candidate "evil".

The respective marketing teams take advantage of this callowness to produce media that plays upon the respective emotions of their camps to make those pre-existing tendencies to see "good" and "evil" flare up as much as possible, trying to make their own candidate seem like the embodiment of all the good Commander-in-Chief virtues and the opposer like a weak, foolish, cowardly, ineffectual, out-of-touch, inexperienced, calculating, spendthrift, indecisive liar who is trying to cheat his way into office against Good Ol' Honest Insert-Name-Here.

They are both just guys. They both crave the power of the office. They both think they know bettter than anyone else how to steer the US out of the morass it is currently in (no arguments from neo-cons, it *is* in a morass and sinking as we speak).

The best thing anyone could POSSIBLY do to help them decide who to vote for is to shut off the TV and radio, stop reading opinion columns completely, and confine one's political reading to descriptions of exactly what the andidates say they plan to do to fix various problems. Then use the brains you have left to figure out if the goals are possible and/or realistic, if the methods are humane, effective, and moral, and if the candidates are addressing what YOU perceive to be all the important problems, or if they are forgetting anything grossly important, or over-focusing on one thing to the detriment of others.

You forget about who loves their pets more, who kissed the most babies, who had more cups of coffee at rural diners and who had more tractor rallies or inner city rallies, you don't look to see which one is more photogenic or which one's skin matches yours.... you go which "Which set of solutions matches the set of problems I see as important?"

Then you vote, your guy loses because the majority of the public voted on stupid criteria, and you are bitter for another 4 or 8 years till next time.

There is nothing new under the sun, it's all bullshit. Of COURSE McCain runs a dirty campaign; that's what Republicans *do*. Of COURSE Obama played the race card to goad McCain who was running negative ads against him, that's what Democrats *do*. Any questions? My answer will be the same 8 years from now, so print it out and line your sock drawer with it.

You call *that* "distortion"?

I think I'm the only sane person here.

As a followup:



Aww, what a b*tch, huh? And he was only having some good, innocent fun, right?

Oh I know. It's getting so as a no-talent heiress who's based her celebrity upon being (or, at least pretending to be) an air-headed, ill-educated slut just can't get respect these days. Tsk, tsk, tsk. However, her mother's assertion that the ad was "a complete waste of the money John McCain's contributors have donated to his campaign" probably misses the mark. Whereas nobody wants to alienate any campaign supporters, still I'm guessing that ad brought in plenty of contributions as well as support from those on the fence who might be encouraged to see John McCain "grow a couple" and take the fight to Obama.

So in your opinion, until now, John McCain has been "lacking a couple"?

Does it take negative campaigning to manifest the presence of said couple? I thought he promised not to do that, especially since he suffered so at the hands of the Bush campaign which spread the nasty "McCain has a black baby" story about him in a previous campaign. He spoke a lot about keeping his hands clean.

Does growing a couple mean getting those hands as dirty as Bush's were under Rove's direction?

It's the McCain campaign with the bizarre double standard. According to it, the McCain ad showing Obama's face on a dollar bill with a voiceover essentially saying "who the hell does he think he is?" wasn't racist. But for Obama mention that ad was not only racist, but "shamefully, disgracefully" so.

Unlike Brittany Spears, who received a decent education, IS talented...and certainly not an airhead. She was the part of McCain's humor, why?