I was enjoying an all-too-rare hour of listening to Jason Lewis the other day.
Years ago, when I ran an annual “State of Twin Cities Talk Radio” feature, a solid year before the Northern Alliance Radio Network went on the air (I discontinued the series when the show started, due to my obvious bias); in it, I noted at least once that “Jason Lewis is the host I’d like to be when I grow up”. And that day was one of the broadcasts where I realized exactly why.
I’m not one of those people who bays “politics is the worst it’s ever been”; it’s not. 1928 was bad; 1828 was worse (albeit for many of the same reasons it’s bad today, only on steroids). But it is getting pretty bad these days.
And not because people aren’t “bipartisan”. “Bipartisanship” is a chimera; taken to an illogical extreme, it is antidemocratic.
And in a multipolar political world, people are going to disagree – on issues, and on lesser things.
To paraphrase Lewis, we need to avoid bagging on the lesser things – especially personalities and personal attacks.
Conservatives: Barack Obama was born a US Citizens. Even if he wasn’t, it’s really too late to do anything about it; but it’s a moot point, because he is. Get a grip. And he’s not a Marxist or a communist, and won’t be until he opens re-education camps somewhere in Utah. He’s a cut-rate Richard Daley, not Josef Stalin. He’s a fabian statist, all right – and he got elected President. He’s doing the job that 52% of your most gullible neighbors sent him to Washington to do, for now. Let’s see if we can fix that in 2012.
And yeah, the left is doing it, too. Unable to fight the Tea Party and the resurgent grassroots right on the issues, they’re going for the ad-homina, the name-calling, the fearmongering and slander, and the yellow hackery – all standard drills for people who are running on intellectual empty, and need to count on their opponents to react to an ofay provocation to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve dug.
Americans need to be smarter. Conservatives, in particular, need to be smarter than the opposition; we’re fighting against a full-court media press that is at present fully in the bag for the President.
And this president is so easy to attack on the issues; he’s really been an incompetent disaster, so far, except inasmuch as he’s copied Bush’s policies that worked. There is no need to barber on about his birth certificate, his religion or his labels; he is so weak on the issues that there’s no excuse for it.
Because when he’s essentially destroying, in the long run, everything that ever made this nation great, who really cares where he worshipped as a child?
Because when he’s essentially destroying, in the long run, everything that ever made this nation great, who really cares where he worshipped as a child?
Obama is merely sowing the field plowed by Bush.
Basically out of curiosity I looked into the “birther” claims. The “loophole” if you want to call it that, concerned the provision that a single woman, 18 or younger must reside “CONTINUALLY” in the US for the previous four years for the child to be a US citizen.
At the time the US had a three mile territorial limit and a twelve mile defense limit. If you look at a map of the Hawaiian Island claim the distance between these islands exceeds this. If Obama’s mother went to another island in the chain anytime between age 14 and age 18 she had technically left the US.
That is my “loophole”. Several reasons not to go there. First off, Obama’s mother, in good faith married a man she thought was single/divorced. She was “single” because he deceived her. If Obama’s mother did visit another Island she would have been unaware that she was leaving the US for something like a high school field trip.
Like it or not, Obama was elected. If he was removed from office because his mother took a high school field trip a few years before he was born Obama would become a “living martyr”. Martyrs don’t make mistakes, enough said.
Add to that the racial component. This reminds me of an old movie about two southern belle half sisters where someone determined that one was one-eight black so she became a slave. Enough said.
Very well put, Sol.
The only basis for the birther claim is Obama’s birth certificate. The only one I’ve seen has the registration number redacted. Now why would they do that?
The only one I’ve seen has the registration number redacted. Now why would they do that?
The number is 666, Kermit, so it’s kinda awkward.
Good humor, D.