NY POST ENDORSES BARACK OBAMA
Rupert Murdoch seems to have released his inner cynic. The NY Post has many readers who are Democrats. The owner of the paper is ready to give them his considered opinion.
But he's also the owner of the Wall Street Journal and I doubt he thinks Journal readers should jump on to the Obama band wagon. He's not out to create the Obama-nation.
He's out to defeat Hillary, which means he's setting the stage for November, when Hillary will fact the Republican candidate, who is likely to be John McCain.
By the way, is there a potential vice presidential candidate to run with Hillary? That person -- undoubtedly a man -- will suffer as no previous candidate has suffered. His symbolic dismemberment will induce cringes during the race and whenever anyone recalls it.
POST ENDORSES BARACK OBAMA
January 30, 2008 -- Democrats in 22 states across America go to the polls next Tuesday to pick between two presidential prospects: Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
We urge them to choose Obama - an untried candidate, to be sure, but preferable to the junior senator from New York.
Obama represents a fresh start.
His opponent, and her husband, stand for déjà vu all over again - a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.
Does America really want to go through all that once again?
It will - if Sen. Clinton becomes president. That much has become painfully apparent.
Bill Clinton's thuggishly self-centered campaign antics conjure so many bad, sad memories that it's hard to know where to begin.
Suffice it to say that his Peck's-Bad-Boy smirk - the Clinton trademark - wore thin a very long time ago.
Far more to the point, Sen. Clinton could have reined him in at any time. But she chose not to - which tells the nation all it needs to know about what a Clinton II presidency would be like. Now, Obama is not without flaws.
For all his charisma and his eloquence, the rookie senator sorely lacks seasoning: Regarding national security, his worldview is beyond naive; America must defend itself against those sworn to destroy the nation.
His all-things-to-all-people approach to complicated domestic issues also arouses scant confidence. "Change!" for the sake of change does not a credible campaign platform make. But he remains a highly intelligent man, with a strong record as a conciliator.
And, again, he is not Team Clinton.
That counts for a very great deal.
A return to Sen. Clinton's cattle-futures deal, Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate, the Lincoln Bedroom Fire Sale, Pardongate - and the inevitable replay of the Monica Mess?
No, thank you.
And don't forget the Clintons' trademark political cynicism. How else to explain Sen. Clinton's oft-contradictory policy stands: She voted for the war in Iraq, but now says it was a bad idea. She'd end it yesterday - but refuses to say how.
It's called "triangulation" - the Clintonian tactic by which the ends are played against the middle.
Once, it was effective - almost brilliant. Today, it is tired and tattered - and it reeks of cynicism and opportunism.
Finally, Sen. Clinton stands philosophically far to the left of her husband, and is much more disciplined in pursuit of her agenda.
At least Obama has the ability to inspire.
Again, we don't agree much with Obama on substantive issues.
But many Democrats will.
He should be their choice on Tuesday.
But he's also the owner of the Wall Street Journal and I doubt he thinks Journal readers should jump on to the Obama band wagon. He's not out to create the Obama-nation.
He's out to defeat Hillary, which means he's setting the stage for November, when Hillary will fact the Republican candidate, who is likely to be John McCain.
By the way, is there a potential vice presidential candidate to run with Hillary? That person -- undoubtedly a man -- will suffer as no previous candidate has suffered. His symbolic dismemberment will induce cringes during the race and whenever anyone recalls it.
POST ENDORSES BARACK OBAMA
January 30, 2008 -- Democrats in 22 states across America go to the polls next Tuesday to pick between two presidential prospects: Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
We urge them to choose Obama - an untried candidate, to be sure, but preferable to the junior senator from New York.
Obama represents a fresh start.
His opponent, and her husband, stand for déjà vu all over again - a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.
Does America really want to go through all that once again?
It will - if Sen. Clinton becomes president. That much has become painfully apparent.
Bill Clinton's thuggishly self-centered campaign antics conjure so many bad, sad memories that it's hard to know where to begin.
Suffice it to say that his Peck's-Bad-Boy smirk - the Clinton trademark - wore thin a very long time ago.
Far more to the point, Sen. Clinton could have reined him in at any time. But she chose not to - which tells the nation all it needs to know about what a Clinton II presidency would be like. Now, Obama is not without flaws.
For all his charisma and his eloquence, the rookie senator sorely lacks seasoning: Regarding national security, his worldview is beyond naive; America must defend itself against those sworn to destroy the nation.
His all-things-to-all-people approach to complicated domestic issues also arouses scant confidence. "Change!" for the sake of change does not a credible campaign platform make. But he remains a highly intelligent man, with a strong record as a conciliator.
And, again, he is not Team Clinton.
That counts for a very great deal.
A return to Sen. Clinton's cattle-futures deal, Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate, the Lincoln Bedroom Fire Sale, Pardongate - and the inevitable replay of the Monica Mess?
No, thank you.
And don't forget the Clintons' trademark political cynicism. How else to explain Sen. Clinton's oft-contradictory policy stands: She voted for the war in Iraq, but now says it was a bad idea. She'd end it yesterday - but refuses to say how.
It's called "triangulation" - the Clintonian tactic by which the ends are played against the middle.
Once, it was effective - almost brilliant. Today, it is tired and tattered - and it reeks of cynicism and opportunism.
Finally, Sen. Clinton stands philosophically far to the left of her husband, and is much more disciplined in pursuit of her agenda.
At least Obama has the ability to inspire.
Again, we don't agree much with Obama on substantive issues.
But many Democrats will.
He should be their choice on Tuesday.
posted by no_slappz at 6:00 PM
10 Comments:
Eight years of Bill was enough. Putting Hill in the White House is getting too close for comfort.
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
Eric Hoffer
And,sir. There again is nothing here.
and you and your commentary minded friends are bigots and racists.
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage -- the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical forces beyond his control. This is the caveman's version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of anmials, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to "protect the family name" (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) -- the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third-cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) -- the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law -- the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history -- all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today's so-called "newly-emerging nations."
The theory that holds "good blood" and "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.
Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race -- is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.
Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements -- and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
Even if it were proved -- which it is not -- that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one's judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race -- and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as inferior because his race has "produced" some brutes -- or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has "produced" Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.
These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own inferiority.
Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowlege -- for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment -- and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).
To ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a "tribal self-esteem" by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.
Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism.
The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power. And -- since there is no rational justification for such rule, since none has ever been or can ever be offered -- the mystique of racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are the natural prey for the men of another -- and establishes its own internal sub-categories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man's birth, such as inherited titles of nobility or inherited serfdom.
The racism of Nazi Germany -- where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their "Aryan" descent -- has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their "proletarian" descent. The Soviet ideology rest on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically -- that is, that a few generations conditioned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to the racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-semitism is particularly prevalent -- only the official pogroms are now called "political purges."
There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.
rand mcnally, myron and anonymous, the three faces of whomever you are, probably dancy, let's be clear on racism.
It's okay to identify differences among races and ethnicities. They exist. That's not racism. It's sociology, its anthropology.
Since you love these topics, why not explain the backwardness of black societies everywhere on Earth?
Explain black underachievement in academics. Explain black overrepresentation in violent crime.
Give it a shot.
I'm flattered...you are always welcome at ------------.
Your actions, in print subtly belie your obsolete social observations.(ascribing all three characters in your comment section..i do not have that much time on my hands)
The sooner you overcome your reliance on statistical data pertaining to race. You will be appreciated for encyclopeadic knowledge of No Slappz. Stats get real fuzzy when you are dealng people and designations econimc status race age , family history.
In other, words I am less interested in what you think you know and am fully intrigued as to why you are driven.
Either of the dem candidates would be a hell of a sight better than four more years of bush, which is what we'll get with McCain.
I voted for Obama in our primary last tuesday. I feel good about my decision and my vote. Hopefully I'll get to do it again in November.
anonymous, et. al., like most people who question the questioner, you do it to avoid answering some simple questions that deserve answers.
Your tactic is the tactic of someone afraid of the truth he senses within himself.
You should snswer the following:
What explains the backwardness of black societies everywhere on Earth?
What explains black underachievement in academics?
What explains black overrepresentation in violent crime?
What explains black overrepresentation in sports?
Why are you afraid to answer these questions?
pissed off patricia, you wrote:
"Either of the dem candidates would be a hell of a sight better than four more years of bush, which is what we'll get with McCain."
McCain is not Bush, whether you care to admit it or not. Meanwhile, you are kidding yourself if you think that presidents have vast powers to take the country where it does not want to go.
Yesterday there was a suicide bombing in Israel, the first in about a year.
Why did it happen? It happened because the suicide bombers were able to leave Gaza for Egypt where they were then able to slip across the Sinai Desert and sneak into Israel where they were able to detonate a bomb that killed one person and injured 11.
There are millions of muslims who hate the US as much as they hate Israel and they are determined to see the US struck again.
The next president cannot pretend that withdrawing from Iraq and/or Afghanistan would change the attitudes and intentions of the muslims who hate this country.
Hence, no matter which candidate you support, you will see the paths ahead are all close together.
Meanwhile, Hillary will get the Democratic nomination. She might offer Obama the VP slot.
But this country is not ready to elect a black president, and, if by some miracle Obama were nominated, he'd lose the general election in a landslide.
McCain would beat him because McCain is an acknowledged one-term president and he has a far better understood record. Obama is a blank slate. Sorry. No blank slates for president.
HOwever, I will vote for Obama in Tuesday's NY primary because I do not support Hillary.
rand mcnally, based on your response, which was to reiterate the questions I asked, it's obvious you agree that the conditions I mentioned exist.
In addition to the questions I asked, I have a few more.
Why is there no black Einstein? Or even one black physicist of Nobel Prize quality?
Why are there virtually no blacks earning Ph.Ds in math?
Why are there so few black Jeopardy contestants?
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Those last two lines sound like a refrain from a poorly written song.
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