You're so adorable, you remind me of my grandfather before he became senile.

He reminds me of my grandfather AFTER he became senile.

By senile, I would mean after he lost the ability to speak. Different definitions, same point.

As is so often the case, BKB starts off with a promising premise, and then decapitates his point in a manner that makes even raving lunatics look bad.

However, his point is still a good one. As much as I believe that change is a good thing, the fervor with which the corporate media has gotten behind Obama sets off loud clanging alarm bells to me.

Did anyone else see the opening skit on last night's new episode of SNL on this very topic?

In my mind, the unquestioning groupthink being created in so many media-susceptible young people is even more frightening than even another four years of Dubya (better the devil you know...) - - Obama may turn out to be a great president, but ya can't forget to keep asking questions...

Why are people so in awe of this guy asks BKB?

I'm not even a democrat and I can tell you why. People want real change and are sick and tired of a republican running the presidency. They want the troops to leave Iraq. They want healthcare coverage to be available for everyone. It's all about having something truly new and different in that office. While Hillary would be unique being a female president, she's still a damn f'ing Clinton where almost half the population has a negative opinion of her. Plus, good ole Bill would be living in the White House again (in his own separate room, I'm sure). If you still have questions about what "Changes" he will try to attempt as President go to his dumb website and read for yourself.

BKB, did your drink-driving offense nix your ability to vote in the upcoming election?

It nixed his ability to procreate too. Owwie.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opini ... ref=slogin

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

Frank Rich

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.

As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.

The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.

If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.

... continued

I think the clanging alarm bells are simply the interference caused by your tin foil hat. The idea that the media as a whole is competent or organized enough to unanimously get behind a single candidate is ignorant and absurd. And it is even more specious to suggest that their coverage of Obama means that he is already bought and paid for, as you stated in another thread.

What it would look like if millions of voters, tired of the mud-slinging and trash politics and tired of the sham Bush administration threw their support behind a candidate that they believed would at least try to change the tone of politics and bring some level of competence to the White House. And what might it look like if the media, oh I don't know, decided to cover that campaign - which has shown remarkable resiliency and effectiveness. It would probably look an awful lot like the current media coverage of this campaign - no conspiracy theories necessary.

Your innocence is charming - - incredibly naive, but charming.

For once, the media is telling us the truth. Imagine... the first truly altruistic politician the world has ever seen - - it's a miracle. We're saved!

(Hint: Once you use the phrase "tin foil hat" in a discussion your point is neutered. Next time try using reasoned argument and referenced counterpoints. )



{BTW, the SNL Hillary/Obama Debate skit I mentioned earlier, is now up on the NBC website. Also, you might want to check out Tina Fey's editorial comment on the subject on Weekend Update at the same site.}

Is this the same media who's been calling him a plagiarist and the modern day equivalent of the Reverand Jim Jones?

...and now brought to you through the easy to access magic of YouTube:

...and Tina Fey's Weekend Update editorial...



"Bitches get things done!"

Why don't you actually pay attention before making idiotic assumptions? Obama keeps saying that he will begin pulling 1 to 2 brigades per month and will have them out within 16 months. That is not an immediate withdrawal of all our troops. And Hillary's health care plan is the one that will garnish wages. Obama wants people to have a choice to buy it or not.

Don't tell BKB not to make idiotic assumptions, that's his trademark. It's practically patented.

I'm not holding my baby up for him to bless. I have my reservations about Obama, but all in all he's pretty much the best candidate you guys have had for a leader in years. I've read his policy proposals, I've looked at the bills he put forward during his time in the senate, and I've done it all with a clear head - and I think he's the best option you guys have.

I'm not American, so I'm not privy to a lot of the crap you watch on the news about the political candidates. You, on the other hand, seem to lap it up, BKB. I particularly like how you spout off this Jim Jones comparison as though it was your own original opinion, when a cursory google search of "obama jim jones" brings up a million results of other 'sheep', as you call them, who've clearly bought into what's clearly a media story inexplicably linking Obama's fans to that of a suicidal cult.

No, you're right. Every single journalist in the media has collectively joined together under the auspices of their corporate feeders and appointed Barack Obama the front-runner. That makes much more sense.



Blah blah blah. As you didn't really offer up anything to counter-point except conveniently blaming the media for everything, I didn't really see any reason to wasty my time on it.

BKB, I said I wasn't a democrat I was just telling you why democrats are gaga over him. I'm against "universal health care" personally but would like to see us out of Iraq at this time and that's one position where I think Obama actually will come through on whereas McCain will continue the policy of unending war.

How can you possibly be against universal health care?

because I am from Canada and I say its not possible...


Well I mean the wholly public kind.

...for the same reasons one is against universal firefighting - - only the wealthy deserve to have their fires put out. C'mon, it's page seven of the right-wing handbook!

I'm from the UK and I call it completely possible.

And if you think that's too small a sample, then I'm from the EU, and I call it completely possible.

It's embarrassing that a country as large and powerful as yours still requires its citizens to pay for it's own land and health care.

????????????????????


The health care in Canada is prehaps the most social and public in the world my friend...

We already have universal health care. However, the system is failing and falling fast and it is a massive tax burden.

THE EU at least has some sort of a private sector involved. Very few countries have an 100% public system. In the EU they treat patients as customers, and that what I would like to see in Canada.

Also, what up with the fact you have to buy land???