Just last week, shortly after Bill Richardson endorsed Barack Obama, Clinton supporter and close friend called him a Judas. Chris Matthews pointed out on Morning Joe that the Clintons have put the country through a “sitcom” for the past twenty odd years, and they’re continuing to make it about them instead of about America. Here’s Chris in his own words:
Archive for March, 2008
Leahy to Hillary: Drop Out
Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, one of the most senior Democratic members of the Senate, is urging Hillary Clinton to get out of the race for president.
In an interview on Vermont Public Radio, said “There is no way that Senator Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination. She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama. Now, obviously that’s a decision that only she can make frankly I feel that she would have a tremendous career in the Senate.”
Leahy said he was fretting about the impact of the protracted Democratic race.
“I am very concerned,” he said. “John McCain, who has been making one gaffe after another, is getting a free ride on it because Senator Obama and Senator Clinton have to fight with each other. I think that her criticism is hurting him more than anything John McCain has said. I think that’s unfortunate.”
Obama Opening 10 Offices in Indiana
This Saturday the Obama campaign is opening offices across the state of Indiana in an effort to register voters before the May 6 primary. The deadline for registering is April 7, 2008. If you live in South Bend (or any of the other 9 Indiana cities below), you can attend the office opening event at 10 a.m. For more information go to http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/INofficeopenings.
Indianapolis, 407 Fulton St., Suite 2
Anderson, 2101 East 8th St.
Bloomington, 200 E 3rd St.
Evansville, 330 Main St.
Fort Wayne, 122 W. Columbia Street
Gary, 4405 W. 5th St.
Lafayette, 216 N. 4th St., Suite 207
Michigan City, 618 Franklin St.
Muncie, 1609 W. University Ave
South Bend, 205 W. Jefferson Blvd., Suite 110
Terre Haute, 425 Wabash Ave.
Finally, Obama gave an interview with WSBT-TV today. You can watch it on the South Bend Tribune website.
Hillary and Her Sore Loser Friends
Barack Obama has seen a remarkable rise as an American politician. After being in the Illinois Senate between 1998 and 2004, he won his Senate seat in 2004 and has since served as Illinois’ junior senator. He delivered the 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address. He managed to win the Iowa caucuses in Iowa, despite being behind in the polls there for a significant length in 2007.
Since then he has won over 30 contests, a majority of the popular vote (beating Hillary by nearly a million), and leads her in the delegate count by roughly 150, of which she will be unable to come back from. Despite all of this, the Clintons are still fighting on as if things are neck-and-neck, too close to call, a virtual tie. The fact is, Barack Obama will be our party nominee. To continue to attack him and put John McCain on a mantel of integrity and experience only weakens our chances for victory in November.
I would like to make two points. In recent weeks the Clintons (both Bill and Hillary) have gone out of their way to praise John McCain and demean Barack Obama. First Hillary raised the issue of experience, saying she and McCain were experienced enough to become commander-in-chief, but as for Obama, you would have to ask his campaign (I’ve addressed this issue in another post).
Just last week Bill said that John McCain and Hillary running against each other would mean two people running against each other who love this country and who will run on issues, implying that Obama was not patriotic.
On Friday Bill Richardson endorsed Barack Obama, saying that the negative campaigning of the Clintons needs to end and that Democrats should come together to face John McCain in the fall.. He did so despite serving twice in the Clinton administration, as an ambassador and as a Secretary of Energy. Over the weekend he was compared to Judas by James Carville, who engineered the Clinton 1992 victory over the first President Bush. Richardson’s endorsement “came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out [Jesus] for 30 pieces of silver.” On Monday, Carville defended his comments on CNN, saying, “I doubt if Governor Richardson and I will be terribly close in the future.”
What’s happening is that Hillary, Bill and the Clinton’s closest advisers understand the reality they face. They are losing and are going to lose this race. Barack Obama will be the nominee, meaning that Democratic voters have and will reject them, thus ending their reign as the de facto national leaders of the Democratic Party. For nearly two decades they have called the shots, and with every Congressional and presidential election that we have lost since 2000, it has become more and more clear that the Democratic Party was more harmed than helped by the Clinton administration.
All of this rancor in the media and in private is nothing more than a final gasp of air. The Clinton machine, having been defeated from Iowa to South Carolina, Washington state to Virginia, Colorado to Wisconsin, and every place in between, is tired, frustrated, angry and bitter. A young junior senator, who just four years ago was serving in Springfield, has replaced them as the leaders of the party, and soon as the leader of the free world.
Hillary Clinton Lies about Bosnian Trip
The Washington Post’s online blog is running a story about how Hillary Clinton is repeatedly lying about a story involving a trip she took to Bosnia in 1996. According to her account she came under sniper fire and had to run for her safety. The only problem is that isn’t true, and video has surfaced to prove it. Not only has the former First Lady exaggerated about her involvement in the Clinton administration, she’s now making up stories.
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
–Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Clinton, could not go because they were “too dangerous.” When her account was challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about “landing under sniper fire” and running for safety with “our heads down.”
There are numerous problems with Clinton’s version of events.
As a reporter who visited Bosnia soon after the December 1995 Dayton Peace agreement, I can attest that the physical risks were minimal during this period, particularly at a heavily fortified U.S. Air Force base, such as Tuzla. Contrary to the claims of Hillary Clinton and former Army secretary Togo West, Bosnia was not “too dangerous” a place for President Clinton to visit in early 1996. In fact, the first Clinton to visit the Tuzla Air Force base was not Hillary, but Bill, on January 13, 1996.
Had Hillary Clinton’s plane come “under sniper fire” in March 1996, we would certainly have heard about it long before now. Numerous reporters, including the Washington Post’s John Pomfret, covered her trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the First Lady. “As a former AP wire service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened,” said Pomfret.
According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was “one of the safest places in Bosnia” in March 1996, and “firmly under the control” of the 1st Armored Division.
Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.
“There is peace now,” Emina told Clinton, according to Pomfret’s report in the Washington Post the following day, “because Mr. Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it.”
The First Lady’s schedule, released on Wednesday and available here, confirms that she arrived in Tuzla at 8.45 a.m. and was greeted by various dignitaries, including Emina Bicakcic, (whose name has mysteriously been redacted from the document.)
You can see CBS News footage of the arrival ceremony here (below). The footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi Meets with Dalai Lama
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Tibet to meet with the Dalai Lama, where protests have broken out as Chinese troops kill and injure hundreds.
Chris Wallace Takes Fox to Task for Obama Bashing
Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace took his own network to task on Friday for what has been unrelentingly negative coverage of Barack Obama. On the morning program Fox & Friends, they continuously played clips of Obama using the term “typical white person” when referring to his grandmother. This was somehow meant to show that Obama was using racist statements against white people – his own grandmother, in fact. If that wasn’t absurd enough, the hosts played dumb when Chris Wallace called them out on it. Talk about spineless little wimps. Can’t back up your own attacks?
Later in the day, on Special Report with Brit Hume, Mort Kondracke said that, “I think some of us on the panel have sympathized with taxi drivers who won’t pick up a black person because they’re afraid of the neighborhood that they might be going to.” Whoa, whoa whoa. If this network is going to run a day long stint of Obama bashing, calling him a racist for rightly pointing out in his speech that many white people psychologically look differently at black people than whites on the street, why is it alright for their own guests to say that they sympathize with racial profiling? It’s hard to argue with a network that has so many double standards.
This is exactly what Fox News, Hillary Clinton and the Republicans want us to be talking about. Instead of talking about how they got us into Iraq, how the economy is in the tank, how we are having record foreclosures, how the dollar is sinking at an alarming pace, how we are spending more money than we can print and how tens of millions are without health insurance, we’re talking about whether Barack Obama meant something sinister by calling his grandmother a “typical white person”, without even putting his quote in context.
I’ll let Obama speak for himself, though. He told a radio host that, “The point I was making was not that grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”
All of this, is quite frankly, fucking stupid. Everyone knows – and I mean everyone – that white people have a fear of black people that is not present with non-blacks. It is a fact of life. Through our culture, family and media, blacks have been portrayed in a stereotypically negative way. It is ingrained in our psyche. It may not be conscious, yet it is there. Walking down the street at night, seeing a black person may raise suspicions that a white person would not.
Similarly, our reaction to a black person (that we do not know) interacting with us is often different, even in the most subtle ways, than when it is someone of our own race. How is it racist to point that out? It IS racist, however, to say you sympathize with taxi drivers who refuse to pick up a black person out of fear of either being robbed or going to a bad neighborhood. That’s part of their job! You can’t racially profile people and determine what neighborhood they live in based on skin color. It’s clear who the real racists are.
Fox News Attacks Obama
The second part of “Fox Attacks! Obama” is up on YouTube. It shows how Fox News has a track record of attacking Barack Obama’s patriotism, religion, race, name and even comparisons to Hitler. Yep, the “Fair and Balanced” channel is engaging in character assassination.
That video goes to show why Fox News is not a source that many college professors will allow you to use for a paper. Anyone who works for Fox News should never be employed by another news network. You cannot hire a tabloid journalist and expect them to become a professional.