2008 Primaries Thread 3: The Rejecting and Denouncening

poll time

Shiiiiiiiiiiiit.

http://media.gallup.com/poll/graphs/040208DailyUpdateGraph1_clob_dkww08.gif

people still say "colored"?

they think it's polite

A couple tables over, Jean Fetterman, a foster grandparent, said of Clinton: "Oh, I love her. She's a very intelligent person, and she has her husband who went through this."

She scoffs at the idea of voting for Obama: "I don't want to be a Muslim!" She looks dubious when told Obama is Christian. "Then why did he go see what's-his-name over in Iraq, that Lama?"

okay (a) what the fuck is wrong with this lady, (b) "that Lama"? omg tibet = iraq? and (c) what the hell is a "foster-grandparent"?

A foster grandparent is either some mean old hoser who takes in foster kids for the state funds it provides (and plus de funds if the child is on Ritalin or other meds) so she doesn't have to work, or a nice lady who wants to fill her empty nest in a good cause.

so basically, she is a post-menopausal foster-mom? i wasn't clear if she was that or if her daughter was a foster-mother or something.

old people be out of it

In the evolution of euphemisms for race "colored" was a fairly polite term in the 1940s and 1950s. As usual with euphemisms, it became identified with the racism it sought to evade.

When for a time in the 1980s and 1990s "people of color" became a fairly polite euphemism for race, it was a kind of milepost in the USA running out of wiggle room in cranking out new euphemisms.

"African-American" had better show some legs for the long run or we'll be harking back to "negro" before you can bat an eye. As for me, I favor "Abbysinian" as the next new term. Classy stuff.

if by 'classy' you mean 'fetishizing the exotic' then sure

Abyssinian, even!

hey how about 'nubian'? that's not loaded with outmoded connotations at all

ppl from idaho = abbottsinians

I love how the press has to go out of its way to avoid the implication that Hillary's remaining support is largely due to racist and/or ignorant people ("older whites"/"whites lacking a college education") like our dear foster grandparent quoted above.

dearabbysinians

I like that she equates voting for a candidate with converting to their religion.

hey, I don't wanna be a Methodist!

depends on what you mean by 'the press.' mcclatchy isn't shying away from making clinton's pennsylvania from looking stupid. and there was moderate pickup of those polls that showed that democrats who have negative impressions of obama also believe 'civil rights have gone too far' etc.

but yeah it fits into a pattern of media schizophrenia and just cowardice about race: racism still exists but there are no actual racists anywhere to be found

hey thats a good point!

JEAN M FETTERMAN Born 1932
320 MINE ST
HAZLETON, PA 18201 (570) 454-5494

JEAN M FETTERMAN Born May 1932
34 JAMES ST
HAZLETON, PA 18201 (570) 454-5494

JEAN M FETTERMAN Born 1932
618 LINCOLN ST
HAZLETON, PA 18201 (570) 454-5494

Tell her "The Lama" sent you.

HELLO I AM THE IRAQI LAMA IN CHARGE OF MUSLIMISM CAN I SPEAK TO U FOR A MOMENT MAAM

I'm just referring specifically to the innocuous but coded demographic descriptions I cited above - this is how poll results are reported and described by CNN, AP, whoever. But whenever you get someone who digs into it a bit, like McClatchy, its pretty clear what dynamic is in effect and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that its driven primarily by the aforementioned combo of racism and ignorance

http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2008/04/obama-takes-lead-in-pennsylvania.html

-- deej, Wednesday, April 2, 2008 11:44 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

undecided 13% o_O

-- deej, Wednesday, April 2, 2008 11:45 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

"i'm not prejudiced, but my aunt was mugged by a hawaiian law professor once"

http://www.billybear4kids.com/animal/whose-toes/llama2.jpg

Hahahaha, *my* mom says, wryly, that Obama never held up HER store at gunpoint...

Isn't there some comic monologue by someone about how despite people's prejudices, most people are in fact robbed/cheated/hosed by *white guys*?

wanda sykes has a bit about being nervous walking through the enron campus. "when i've been mugged in the projects, i only lost what i had on me that day..."

09:04:42 04/02/2008
DanielC
Collapse

I would suggest that the folks in PA and this town look at the other Republican Candidate that is on the top of the ballot.

We need to get the economy working again. Obama, Clinton and McCain don't have any clue how to get this done. You need to look into the Taxpayer's best friend that has never voted for a tax increase or unbalanced budget in 10 terms in the House, Ron Paul.

Learn, review, and then decide... www.RonPaul2008.com
Yes he is still running.

J0hn stop picking on morbs

http://thedomesticdiva.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/shrimpbaby.jpg

hahahahaha awesome

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqWgSKgIDR4

from Cockburn's current Nation column (beghind subscription wall):

The junior senator from Illinois is a master at drowning the floundering swimmer he purports to rescue while earning credit for extending a manly hand in solidarity. I noticed this the first time I wrote about Obama, back in the spring of 2006, when Ned Lamont was trying to make the disgusting political conduct of Senator Joseph Lieberman part of the national conversation, at least among Democrats. Obama hastened to a big political dinner in Connecticut to cut the conversation off and denounce any deviations from support of his mentor Lieberman.

Obama repeated his fake-rescue technique when Illinois's senior senator, Dick Durbin, got into trouble for likening conditions at Guantánamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era camp. This was one of Durbin's finer moments, as he read an FBI man's account of how he had entered an interview room "to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more."

"If I read this to you," Durbin told his fellow senators, "and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course."

The right wing jumped all over Durbin, and he paid the penalty of having to eat crow on the Senate floor. His colleague the junior senator from Illinois duly rose to speak. Now the topic here, remember, was not the candidacy-endangering one of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a man eager to grasp every nettle, tug it up by the roots and lash at the face of Empire with it. This was Senator Dick Durbin, who had quite properly denounced insupportable conduct by US government personnel. Courage should have required Obama to support Durbin.

But Obama is careful, far more than he is courageous. In this instance he lent a supportive hand to his beleaguered colleague Durbin by shoving Durbin's head under the waves with the thrice-repeated use of the word "mistake." "We have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle, and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while...and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we've operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make."

With Wright, Obama began by excluding him from the national conversation: "The remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country--a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

A "perceived injustice" isn't really an injustice at all. It's a figment--if you will--of the paranoid black imagination. Israel is stalwart, and the perceived horror--if you will--of its siege of Gaza is not even to be mentioned, as against the perversities of Islam. Then comes anathema, as pronounced by any conversationalist: divisiveness. "Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems."

Our tragedy is that we have three neoliberals left in the presidential race, at a time when neoliberalism has collapsed and life-giving divisiveness is on top of the Wanted list. I suppose, out of the three of them, I prefer Obama. McCain is an idiot and HRC wants Volcker, Rubin and Greenspan to lead a "high-level emergency working group" to recommend ways to restructure at-risk mortgages to help avert more foreclosures. But I don't think Obama is a real fighter. He's too pretty, and he doesn't want to get his looks messed up.

mad args @ hil upswing

lol cockburn

Anonymous said...

chris hrc is a loser so is hussein obama and the rest of all democrates

zzz @ morbius

lolz i really dug counterpunch in high school

"hey guys we need to go on the secret board to talk about all this controversial stuff, we don't want our accounts being traced to it"

that article is suggesting that juvenile for-against posturing >>> actual results and uhhhh obviously obama's whole campaign has been arguing against that

which "actual results" has the Saint achieved in the Senate? (not the ones he's "misspoken" about)

HOOS, you, blount and eth can always go back to HS.

I'm glad you think condemning torture/murder of prisoner's is "posturing," deej; your country needs you!

I'd read Counterpunch if:

a) Cockburn wasn't so fucking tedious
b) Cockburn wasn't an anti-semite (yes i've read Politics of Anti-Semitism)
c) I was actually back in HS and got to relive life inna Josef Kavalier style

yes comparing george bush to hitler for four years did a lot of good for the dems in the '04 election morbius

lol morbs has a nation sub

so do i. you guys know there's killfile right? use it already.

Morbs I'm genuinely curious: do you think we're unaware of the compromises we're making? Do you continue to post about the various candidate's nefarious votes in hopes that we'll take our fingers out of our ears and abstain or vote Nader or something? I don't really understand your motivation, and I'd like to.

candidates' i suppose?

Morbs' motivation is not really any different from everyone else's, it's just more blatant.

(said motivation = "LOOKIT I'M SMART AND SPECIAL")

Cockburn getting indignant about something on Durbin's behalf kinda silly when Durbin's endorsed and repeatedly defended Obama.