DontEatTheFigs
Rookie
- Jan 29, 2009
- 5
- 1
- 0
- Banned
- #1
FALLACIES ABOUT OBAMA
Obama has no executive experience like Palin!....Wrong! From scratch he assembled a brilliant, innovative campaign involving almost a billion dollars and 13 million people, winning two underdog insurgencies against the invincible Hillary and then the war hero. Palin, meanwhile was making hash of a gubernatorial position which only involved doling out federal pork and oil money to 600,000 people. The funny part is that when Rudy Giuliani was screeching in September that Obama had no executive experience, he was using exactly the same pitch he had used against McCain in the primaries only a few months before-- he figured no one would catch him doing it. Nice try!
Obama is a socialist!...Nope. Socialism means government ownership of the means of economic production. It does not mean any government action that Rush Limbaugh doesnt approve of. I think we should charge these guys a dollar every time they misuse the word socialist. Obama is a centrist. He voted with Bush half the time and has conservative views on taxes, FISA, the Patriot Act, ramping up in Afghanistan and hunting bin Laden, free-market economics, merit pay to root out bad teachers, nuclear power, faith-based programs and evangelical outreach, cutting government waste, Israel, Iran, guns, and the death penalty. He listens to Scowcroft, Rubin, Geithner, Emanuel, Clinton and Gates.
Obama is a Muslim!...Um, yeah. The only name in presidential politics with an issue like this is actually a Republican, Piyush Jindal, who was a Hindu until he was a teenager. And the GOP team has a couple of Mormons too. Somehow the Republicans dont care about any of that.
Obamas not loyal to the US!...The only people in the last campaign who have any suspicions of disloyalty were Palin, who supports an Alaskan secessionist party, and McCain, who was born in another country and recorded anti-American propaganda while in Hanoi.
Obamas birth certificate -- yeah, weve pretty much done that one.
Obama promised change, but he is hiring people who worked for Clinton !....Nice try. Obama promised change from the crimes and follies of the Bush gang. He didnt promise to ostracize anyone who had ever been inside the Washington beltway. Just about every competent Democrat over the age of 40 worked for Clinton at some point ---Obama wasnt going to reject them all. And why should he? They performed superbly on a hundred fronts.
Obama was just a community organizer when Palin was an executive!....Wrong. Obama was an organizer when he was a kid, before even going to law school. At that time Palin was busy flunking out of one of her five cow colleges.
Obama, by closing Guantanamo, will put terrorists on our streets!...Nope. The Pentagon claimed that, but it has already been debunked. And we cant keep grabbing people off the street and holding them forever without trial, particularly since there is no evidence against some of them, and for others there is evidence that they are innocent --evidence which Bush tried to conceal.
Obama will take your guns!...Nope. He and his Attorney General both said exactly the opposite.
Obama will try to silence Rush with the Fairness Doctrine!...Nope. The Democrats said repeatedly that they want no such thing.
FALLACIES ABOUT THE 2008 ELECTION
Obama underperformed in the election!...Garbage. He showed his executive leadership in assembling a 13-million-man-army led by one of the best no-drama, no-leak campaign teams in history: he built a Democratic machine unprecedented in history, with groundbreaking innovations in fundraising and the exploitation of the internet; he was the first Democrat in memory to outspend his opponent. Obamas popular-vote total was the highest in history -- even more than Reagan in 1984. Obama won by 9 million votes and by 7 percent, better than any Republican has done in two decades; his 9-million vote margin is the largest ever for a non-incumbent. He got more electoral votes than any Republican has done in two decades. His share of the popular vote was better than Reagan did against Carter. Obama won the mens vote, the first time a Democrat has done that in a long time. Obama won voters making over $200,000 despite promising to increase their taxes. He won every education group. He won the largest share of white support of any Democrat in a two-man race since 1976. Obama competed in red states that havent even seen a Democrat in years -- the black guy. He beat McCain by 10 points among young white voters, which means that in the years down the road as these kids get older, Democratic candidates will be able to win both whites and blacks.
Obama should have won by 20 points -- he choked!...Hogwash. Where does this nonsense come from? Or more specifically, how often does a presidential candidate win by 10, let alone 20, unless he's an incumbent, or his opponents split into factions, or something? Three times in the 19th century, then the two Roosevelts, Harding and Hoover. Thats it, for more than two centuries. And thats ten points, let alone twenty.
Obama should have won by a mile, since Bush was so unpopular!....Wrong. Bush 41 was unpopular but Clinton only won by 5. Carter was unpopular but Reagan only won by 9. Nixon and Ford were incredibly unpopular but Carter only won by an inch. LBJ, unpopular -- Nixon won by less than a point. Truman, all-time unpopular -- Ike only won by 10, and he was IKE. You have to go all the way back to Hoover to see the incumbent team lose by even 18, not even 20, and that was because of the Depression.
Obama doesnt have a mandate to lead!....Nonsense. The Constitution doesn't say a damn thing about a mandate; if you get 51 percent of the electoral college, you get 100 percent of the White House. Truman jumped into Korea with less of a mandate than Obama will have. Bush had a mandate consisting of one Supreme Court justice, and he proceeded to reign with all of the hyper-partisan letat-cest-moi arrogance of a guy with a 45-state blowout. Obama's win was much larger than Bush's, but he's going to go into the gig with significantly more humility.
Because Obama didnt win a big enough portion of the vote, he must rule in coalition with the Republicans!....Wrong. Nobody warned 51-percent Reagan to reach out to Democrats or govern from the center, did they? Even with a Democratic House in 1981? Did Bush reach out to Democrats, after winning a squeaker election of dubious legality? Um, no. He promised it, but he didnt do it.
The media had a liberal bias!....Nope. They have a bias against lies, not against Republicans. In fact, the media has been run by Republicans and corporations for a century. They cranked up popular opinion to attack Spain in 1898, they fought FDR bitterly, they aided and abetted McCarthy, the endorsed Nixon 3 to 1 even while Agnew was whining about the liberal media, they ran away from Watergate for almost a year, they gave Reagan a free pass in a way they never did for Clinton, and they were Bushs cheerleaders in the War On Terror. And thats the real media, before you add all the new crazy stuff like Fox, the Washington Times, Rush, Drudge etc.
The media gave Obama a free pass!....Nope. It was McCain who got a free pass regarding his crooked deals with Paxson and Ruskin, the Boeing mess, the Keating mess, the earmarks, the lies, the flipflops. And there is a whole lot that Palin wasnt asked about, regarding her shenanigans in Alaska .
And lets look at what Obama had to overcome, to do all this.
Obama overcame the brutal beating from the allegedly invincible Clinton machine, which seemingly had the race so locked up that everyone thought he was crazy to try; he devised a strategy that destroyed Clinton in a matter of weeks.
He overcame his inexperience and outsmarted McCain, a war hero representing the incumbent party fighting a war from the White House, a guy who had months to set up his general election campaign while Obama was battling Hillary. He blew away the experience argument by making McCain look foolish on foreign policy, setting the example on Iraq policy which even Bush followed, and on domestic policy, staying cool while McCain hopped around like a donkey with a bee up its butt during the early days of the fiscal crisis. He overcame McCain without attacking him on all his crooked deals, his flipflops, his many medical and psychological problems, the way McCain would have, if their positions had been reversed He didnt just beat McCain, he made him irrelevant. He overcame politics as usual by ignoring all the attacks and McCains double dog dares on everything from town meetings to denouncing pastors; Obama simply addressed the needs of the people and they responded.
He overcame the deep-pocketed GOP fundraisers, the GOP culture warriors and white power people. He made fools out of the neocons who warned of a surrender in Iraq-- when he said we must talk to our enemies, even Bush agreed. He overcame the fiscal conservatives who lied about his tax plan and claimed that deficit spending and deregulation were the secret to prosperity.
He overcame the dirtiest Karl Rove kitchen-sink campaign in the history of politics, dishonest smear ads, hundreds of speeches dishonestly smearing him, robo-call smears, daily internet smears, illegal vote suppression, fake emails, fake phone calls, fake flyers, Wright and Rezko and Ayers and taxation and socialism, all lying to voters to get them to stay home.
He overcame the wave of Palin-mania, staying cool when the hysteria temporarily looked like it would sweep him away.
He overcame two centuries of racism, hate, and fear; he made his bones in ultra-white Iowa and actually went south to capture new territory for his party. A guy with Hussein as his middle name won during a global war on guys with names like Hussein.
FALLACIES ABOUT THE NEXT TWO ELECTIONS
2008 was a fluke, because of Obama, because of Palin, because Bush and McCain strayed from the party line!...Nope. Neither Obama, nor Palin, nor McCain was running for national office in 2006, when the Democrats crushed the GOP and took both houses of Congress. In fact, the Republicans have failed to get more than 285 electoral votes in 20 years -- the last five elections consisted of two illegal Bush squeakers and three Democratic blowouts -- with a fourth to come in 2012, since Obama will be running as a successful incumbent rather than as the scary Muslim Marxist guy.
America is still a center-right country which wants the GOP platform!...Um, no. America s center went for Obama by a staggering 20 points: they like the Democrats on almost all issues and values. Obama, like America, is centrist; the GOP is extremist. By moving to the center while the GOP is abandoning the center, Obama will nail down the moderates and centrists who pick all the presidents, and he will win comfortably next time.
The GOP came back from Watergate!....Only because you had Reagan, the greatest con artist in U.S. history. Hes dead now.
The GOP came back in 1994!...Only because Clinton was clumsy and didnt have the stomach for a fight. Neither of which applies to Obama.
Well be back in 2010 and 2012!...Will you, now? In many house districts the Republicans couldnt even field a competitive candidate, and they are already having trouble recruiting candidates for 2010 and 2012. Their evangelical base is falling apart. They lost Hispanics with the immigration issue. And in 2016 they wont even have the advantage of running against a scary black socialist -- it will be some good ol white boy like Mark Warner. So goodbye, South. The GOP is being driven into a political enclave consisting of old white people in the rural south and west. In other words, the GOP, which planned a few short years ago to establish a permanent, dominant majority (or perhaps a thousand-year Reich), has shrunk to .the cast of Hee Haw. The GOP, population 42. Saaaaaa-lute!
Well campaign against the Democratic Congress, which has a low rating!....Nope. Because it aint a Democratic Congress. Its half Republican, and its the GOP half that is causing all the trouble. The Republicans set an all-time record for actual and threatened vetoes and filibusters, all with the aim of making the Democrats look bad. They felt it was more important to attack America s Democrats, than to attack America s problems. Guys like McConnell and LaHood openly admitted what they were doing.
Obama has no executive experience like Palin!....Wrong! From scratch he assembled a brilliant, innovative campaign involving almost a billion dollars and 13 million people, winning two underdog insurgencies against the invincible Hillary and then the war hero. Palin, meanwhile was making hash of a gubernatorial position which only involved doling out federal pork and oil money to 600,000 people. The funny part is that when Rudy Giuliani was screeching in September that Obama had no executive experience, he was using exactly the same pitch he had used against McCain in the primaries only a few months before-- he figured no one would catch him doing it. Nice try!
Obama is a socialist!...Nope. Socialism means government ownership of the means of economic production. It does not mean any government action that Rush Limbaugh doesnt approve of. I think we should charge these guys a dollar every time they misuse the word socialist. Obama is a centrist. He voted with Bush half the time and has conservative views on taxes, FISA, the Patriot Act, ramping up in Afghanistan and hunting bin Laden, free-market economics, merit pay to root out bad teachers, nuclear power, faith-based programs and evangelical outreach, cutting government waste, Israel, Iran, guns, and the death penalty. He listens to Scowcroft, Rubin, Geithner, Emanuel, Clinton and Gates.
Obama is a Muslim!...Um, yeah. The only name in presidential politics with an issue like this is actually a Republican, Piyush Jindal, who was a Hindu until he was a teenager. And the GOP team has a couple of Mormons too. Somehow the Republicans dont care about any of that.
Obamas not loyal to the US!...The only people in the last campaign who have any suspicions of disloyalty were Palin, who supports an Alaskan secessionist party, and McCain, who was born in another country and recorded anti-American propaganda while in Hanoi.
Obamas birth certificate -- yeah, weve pretty much done that one.
Obama promised change, but he is hiring people who worked for Clinton !....Nice try. Obama promised change from the crimes and follies of the Bush gang. He didnt promise to ostracize anyone who had ever been inside the Washington beltway. Just about every competent Democrat over the age of 40 worked for Clinton at some point ---Obama wasnt going to reject them all. And why should he? They performed superbly on a hundred fronts.
Obama was just a community organizer when Palin was an executive!....Wrong. Obama was an organizer when he was a kid, before even going to law school. At that time Palin was busy flunking out of one of her five cow colleges.
Obama, by closing Guantanamo, will put terrorists on our streets!...Nope. The Pentagon claimed that, but it has already been debunked. And we cant keep grabbing people off the street and holding them forever without trial, particularly since there is no evidence against some of them, and for others there is evidence that they are innocent --evidence which Bush tried to conceal.
Obama will take your guns!...Nope. He and his Attorney General both said exactly the opposite.
Obama will try to silence Rush with the Fairness Doctrine!...Nope. The Democrats said repeatedly that they want no such thing.
FALLACIES ABOUT THE 2008 ELECTION
Obama underperformed in the election!...Garbage. He showed his executive leadership in assembling a 13-million-man-army led by one of the best no-drama, no-leak campaign teams in history: he built a Democratic machine unprecedented in history, with groundbreaking innovations in fundraising and the exploitation of the internet; he was the first Democrat in memory to outspend his opponent. Obamas popular-vote total was the highest in history -- even more than Reagan in 1984. Obama won by 9 million votes and by 7 percent, better than any Republican has done in two decades; his 9-million vote margin is the largest ever for a non-incumbent. He got more electoral votes than any Republican has done in two decades. His share of the popular vote was better than Reagan did against Carter. Obama won the mens vote, the first time a Democrat has done that in a long time. Obama won voters making over $200,000 despite promising to increase their taxes. He won every education group. He won the largest share of white support of any Democrat in a two-man race since 1976. Obama competed in red states that havent even seen a Democrat in years -- the black guy. He beat McCain by 10 points among young white voters, which means that in the years down the road as these kids get older, Democratic candidates will be able to win both whites and blacks.
Obama should have won by 20 points -- he choked!...Hogwash. Where does this nonsense come from? Or more specifically, how often does a presidential candidate win by 10, let alone 20, unless he's an incumbent, or his opponents split into factions, or something? Three times in the 19th century, then the two Roosevelts, Harding and Hoover. Thats it, for more than two centuries. And thats ten points, let alone twenty.
Obama should have won by a mile, since Bush was so unpopular!....Wrong. Bush 41 was unpopular but Clinton only won by 5. Carter was unpopular but Reagan only won by 9. Nixon and Ford were incredibly unpopular but Carter only won by an inch. LBJ, unpopular -- Nixon won by less than a point. Truman, all-time unpopular -- Ike only won by 10, and he was IKE. You have to go all the way back to Hoover to see the incumbent team lose by even 18, not even 20, and that was because of the Depression.
Obama doesnt have a mandate to lead!....Nonsense. The Constitution doesn't say a damn thing about a mandate; if you get 51 percent of the electoral college, you get 100 percent of the White House. Truman jumped into Korea with less of a mandate than Obama will have. Bush had a mandate consisting of one Supreme Court justice, and he proceeded to reign with all of the hyper-partisan letat-cest-moi arrogance of a guy with a 45-state blowout. Obama's win was much larger than Bush's, but he's going to go into the gig with significantly more humility.
Because Obama didnt win a big enough portion of the vote, he must rule in coalition with the Republicans!....Wrong. Nobody warned 51-percent Reagan to reach out to Democrats or govern from the center, did they? Even with a Democratic House in 1981? Did Bush reach out to Democrats, after winning a squeaker election of dubious legality? Um, no. He promised it, but he didnt do it.
The media had a liberal bias!....Nope. They have a bias against lies, not against Republicans. In fact, the media has been run by Republicans and corporations for a century. They cranked up popular opinion to attack Spain in 1898, they fought FDR bitterly, they aided and abetted McCarthy, the endorsed Nixon 3 to 1 even while Agnew was whining about the liberal media, they ran away from Watergate for almost a year, they gave Reagan a free pass in a way they never did for Clinton, and they were Bushs cheerleaders in the War On Terror. And thats the real media, before you add all the new crazy stuff like Fox, the Washington Times, Rush, Drudge etc.
The media gave Obama a free pass!....Nope. It was McCain who got a free pass regarding his crooked deals with Paxson and Ruskin, the Boeing mess, the Keating mess, the earmarks, the lies, the flipflops. And there is a whole lot that Palin wasnt asked about, regarding her shenanigans in Alaska .
And lets look at what Obama had to overcome, to do all this.
Obama overcame the brutal beating from the allegedly invincible Clinton machine, which seemingly had the race so locked up that everyone thought he was crazy to try; he devised a strategy that destroyed Clinton in a matter of weeks.
He overcame his inexperience and outsmarted McCain, a war hero representing the incumbent party fighting a war from the White House, a guy who had months to set up his general election campaign while Obama was battling Hillary. He blew away the experience argument by making McCain look foolish on foreign policy, setting the example on Iraq policy which even Bush followed, and on domestic policy, staying cool while McCain hopped around like a donkey with a bee up its butt during the early days of the fiscal crisis. He overcame McCain without attacking him on all his crooked deals, his flipflops, his many medical and psychological problems, the way McCain would have, if their positions had been reversed He didnt just beat McCain, he made him irrelevant. He overcame politics as usual by ignoring all the attacks and McCains double dog dares on everything from town meetings to denouncing pastors; Obama simply addressed the needs of the people and they responded.
He overcame the deep-pocketed GOP fundraisers, the GOP culture warriors and white power people. He made fools out of the neocons who warned of a surrender in Iraq-- when he said we must talk to our enemies, even Bush agreed. He overcame the fiscal conservatives who lied about his tax plan and claimed that deficit spending and deregulation were the secret to prosperity.
He overcame the dirtiest Karl Rove kitchen-sink campaign in the history of politics, dishonest smear ads, hundreds of speeches dishonestly smearing him, robo-call smears, daily internet smears, illegal vote suppression, fake emails, fake phone calls, fake flyers, Wright and Rezko and Ayers and taxation and socialism, all lying to voters to get them to stay home.
He overcame the wave of Palin-mania, staying cool when the hysteria temporarily looked like it would sweep him away.
He overcame two centuries of racism, hate, and fear; he made his bones in ultra-white Iowa and actually went south to capture new territory for his party. A guy with Hussein as his middle name won during a global war on guys with names like Hussein.
FALLACIES ABOUT THE NEXT TWO ELECTIONS
2008 was a fluke, because of Obama, because of Palin, because Bush and McCain strayed from the party line!...Nope. Neither Obama, nor Palin, nor McCain was running for national office in 2006, when the Democrats crushed the GOP and took both houses of Congress. In fact, the Republicans have failed to get more than 285 electoral votes in 20 years -- the last five elections consisted of two illegal Bush squeakers and three Democratic blowouts -- with a fourth to come in 2012, since Obama will be running as a successful incumbent rather than as the scary Muslim Marxist guy.
America is still a center-right country which wants the GOP platform!...Um, no. America s center went for Obama by a staggering 20 points: they like the Democrats on almost all issues and values. Obama, like America, is centrist; the GOP is extremist. By moving to the center while the GOP is abandoning the center, Obama will nail down the moderates and centrists who pick all the presidents, and he will win comfortably next time.
The GOP came back from Watergate!....Only because you had Reagan, the greatest con artist in U.S. history. Hes dead now.
The GOP came back in 1994!...Only because Clinton was clumsy and didnt have the stomach for a fight. Neither of which applies to Obama.
Well be back in 2010 and 2012!...Will you, now? In many house districts the Republicans couldnt even field a competitive candidate, and they are already having trouble recruiting candidates for 2010 and 2012. Their evangelical base is falling apart. They lost Hispanics with the immigration issue. And in 2016 they wont even have the advantage of running against a scary black socialist -- it will be some good ol white boy like Mark Warner. So goodbye, South. The GOP is being driven into a political enclave consisting of old white people in the rural south and west. In other words, the GOP, which planned a few short years ago to establish a permanent, dominant majority (or perhaps a thousand-year Reich), has shrunk to .the cast of Hee Haw. The GOP, population 42. Saaaaaa-lute!
Well campaign against the Democratic Congress, which has a low rating!....Nope. Because it aint a Democratic Congress. Its half Republican, and its the GOP half that is causing all the trouble. The Republicans set an all-time record for actual and threatened vetoes and filibusters, all with the aim of making the Democrats look bad. They felt it was more important to attack America s Democrats, than to attack America s problems. Guys like McConnell and LaHood openly admitted what they were doing.
