Barack H. Obama: What's In A Name?

The latest distraction is whether or not Obama's critics are baiting by using Obama's middle name, Hussein.

Get real. Some words DON'T matter.

The name isn't important. The problem Obama is having is he is late to realizing when something is important. With Rezko, he gives the money to charity but only after the press notices. With Farrakhan and his minister, he denounces and rejects but only after the press notices. With Al Qaeda in Iraq, surely he noticed? With the chair of the sub-committee, he should have held hearings but said nothing until the press noticed. He knows there is a puppet government in Russia but doesn't know any details until the press notices and Clinton explains it to him.

What this buttresses is the charges that he is long on rhetoric and short on real experience because all of these are the kinds of details a leader absolutely must be aware of at all times. It's no good to be in California when a hurricane roars into New Orleans as Bush was.

Why will moderate Democrats vote for McCain? At the age of a lot of us, we've been watching "movements' all of our lives. Most failed to deliver so we are very cynical about that and not just a little creeped out by Obamamania. We know by experience this kind of thing doesn't deliver. We don't want 'a dream'. We want a plan. We know Obama may someday be a good leader but these gaffes in judgement are too frequent and too noticeable.

At voting time, we vote for real change, and we do what Obama says we should do: we cross the party lines to get leadership and a practical approach to government based on our perception of the person best qualified to lead. If the Democratic Party has decided it is more important to make a statement than it is to lead effectively, then the Democratic Party has abandoned us to its feel-good politics which we know don't work when the choices are hard and unpopular but ultimately the right choices.

I'm a Democrat and I support Hillary Clinton, but if I have to choose between party loyalty and loyalty to the country, I choose the country. Had the Republican Party done that, the last eight years would not have happened. I didn't make that mistake last time and I won't this time. It isn't that Obama is the same thing as Bush; it is that a choice for Obama is a choice for the same kind of thing: feel good over experience.

It comes down to doing the right thing and if we lose doing that, we lose doing it right. If we win, we won for the right reasons.

Last Night's Debate: The F Word

Looking at the CNN political ticker, the Farrakhan question caught fire as I thought it might.

In the South, if a minister espouses a position a person of conscience can’t abide, the person works with the church to get a new minister or goes to another church. Bifurcating churches are a reason the landscape and real estate market here is flooded with church buildings. This is the danger because those looking the Trinity pages now understand that it is a bigger deal than Louis F., that this is Obama's base and it is a separatist base. So now the moderate Democrats have more in common with McCain given an Obama v.s. McCain bid. Meanwhile, the separatists get pushed to the front of the debate and unless Obama clearly puts some distance between him and them really fast, at the end of this, we still get a Republican president and set back race relations in America fifty years.

On the other hand, the loser of last night's debate was Tim Russert. Mean little man.

For John Cowan: Which Words Matter?

So to be for Hillary is to be against the JPL, John? In other words, Obama is all inclusive and somehow her opponent is all divisive?

Ok. Here is the web page for Senator Obama's church in Illinois. Read it.

http://www.tucc.org/about.htm

I've seen this sort of stuff in the papers the guys who stand in suits on the corner sell here. Not new news. For people who don't live in heavily mixed neighborhoods, the words may be a bit of a surprise. So here are the typical positions taken by those who encounter this stuff.

Pro:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_11_124/ai_n19328537

Anti:

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/barack-obamas-church-ultra-left-and-afrocentric

The problem about the hard positions is it is tough to sort the words that matter from the words that don't, which means effectively, no one knows what Obama is about if that is his professed beliefs as a member of Trinity. It may be that that church is his political base and the means to get elected. Ok, politics as usual, but it means that only some words matter to him and his political base. Or it means his congregation has been duped by his membership. Not possible?

Then it means he believes all of that.

So John, which words matter?

Pro or anti, the message that church is espousing is political dynamite. This is what the Republicans will go after him with because they can get this message to their base without having to go through the Big Media outlets, and when it does, it will go through without traceability. That is how Obama will be Swift boated, except not with third party assertions, but with his own. Get ready for it.

It seems to me that for too many this is about some kind of Great Get Even. Some want to get even with the rich, some to get even with the Baby Boomers, some to get even with whoever. But that is exactly how the right elected Bush twice.

I won't vote for that. I vote for real change, a change of leadership that actually is inclusive and actually has a real plan to get our economy out of the dumps and our troops out of the desert. Not a cause, a movement, or a "people's liberation". If we need liberation, it is from those self-serving whining delusions that somehow a grand conspiracy got us in this trouble.

We did it to ourselves. Twice. What does it say if we do it a third time and call that liberation? Which words matter?