Friday, 5/30/14, Public Square

Barack Obama as the 2nd Bill Clinton…

E.J. Dionne, Jr.

E.J. Dionne is one of my favorite editorial writers and I like hearing him on NPR.  In the WashPo he wrote an editorial about how much Obama could learn from Bill, commented on their similarities, and the challenges they have respectively faced.

On the shared challenges, Dionne says:  “And they share a major weakness: Both believe so devoutly in their capacity to convert adversaries and to get lions and lambs to lie down together that they spend more energy trying to win over their enemies than rallying their friends. This leaves them helpless when the lions continue to devour the lambs.”

I can’t recall where I read it, but my understanding is that the Obama group has been loathe to accept Bill into their camp because they don’t trust him and fear he will have an undue influence.  Hillary they trust implicitly and she is one of theirs.

If what I’ve read is true, it is unrealistic to think  that Obama will accept, or get, any tutoring from Bill Clinton.

iggydonnelly

The Most Influential Person of the Decade???

The Washington Post has offered up this group of names for nomination of the most influential person of the decade.  Who among these nominees had the greatest influence on shaping the decade? – is the criteria… The WashPo  will announce their results today.  The Choices:

George W. Bush, Timothy Giethner, Lance Armstrong, Paris Hilton, Dick Cheney, Ben Bernanke, L. Page & S. Brin, Hillary Clinton, Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, Hu Jintao, Jon Stewart, Mark Zuckerman, or Al Gore.

Prairie Pops, who wins your vote and why?  Is anyone else embarrassed to confess they don’t recognize all of the names on the list?  Do you have someone else to nominate – tell us who and why?

Glenn Beck and left-right confusion

A fascinating article by Glenn Greenwald, at Salon.com, not only attempts to categorize (not an easy endeavor) Glenn Beck. Along the way, Greenwald has much to say about the political climate in the states today. To say the bulk of the protesters (teabaggers, etc.) don’t have a clue about what exactly they’re protesting is oversimplification.
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Last night during his CBS interview with Katie Couric, Glenn Beck said he may have voted for Hillary Clinton and that “John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama.”  This comment predictably spawned confusion among some liberals and anger among some conservatives.  But even prior to that, there had been a palpable increase in the right-wing attacks on Beck — some motivated by professional competition for the incredibly lucrative industry of right-wing opinion-making, some due to understandable discomfort with his crazed and irresponsible rhetoric, but much of it the result of Beck’s growing deviation from GOP (and neoconservative) dogma.  Increasingly, there is great difficulty in understanding not only Beck’s political orientation but, even more so, the movement that has sprung up around him.  Within that confusion lies several important observations about our political culture, particularly the inability to process anything that does not fall comfortably into the conventional “left-right” dichotomy through which everything is understood.

Some of this confusion is attributable to the fact that Beck himself doesn’t really appear to have any actual, identifiable political beliefs; he just mutates into whatever is likely to draw the most attention for himself and whatever satisfies his emotional cravings of the moment.  Although he now parades around under a rhetorical banner of small-government liberty, anti-imperialism, and opposition to the merger of corporations and government (as exemplified by the Bush-sponsored Wall Street bailout), it wasn’t all that long ago that he was advocating exactly the opposite:  paying homage to the Patriot Act, defending the Wall Street bailout and arguing it should have been larger, and spouting standard neoconservative cartoon propaganda about The Global Islamo-Nazi Jihadists and all that it justifies.  Even the quasi-demented desire for a return to 9/12 — as though the country should be stuck permanently in a state of terrorism-induced trauma and righteous, nationalistic fury over an allegedly existential Enemy — is the precise antithesis of the war-opposing, neocon-hating views held by many libertarian and paleoconservative factions with which Beck has now associated himself.  Still other aspects of his ranting are obviously grounded in highly familiar, right-wing paranoia

Continued here:

jammer5

New Meaning for the term “Dumb Cracker”

The Honorable Joe Wilson yelled out “You lie!” when POTUS Barack Obama was assuring the audience that his health care reform would not pay for the health care of illegal aliens.

I was moved to write the congressman an email.  It is as foll0ws:

Congratulations, you did a great job of completely discrediting yourself and your state by yelling “You Lie!” to the President of the United States when he was giving his speech tonight.

You owe him an apology.  I doubt if you are man enough to give him one, but none-the-less you owe him one and one to the people of South Carolina.

You have managed in one night to give a whole new meaning to the term “Dumb Cracker”.  Good Job.

Signed Mortimer S. Snerd.  My email address was AshamedinSC@yahoo.com

Rep. Wilson’s site loads real slowly, so I suspect that means he is getting a lot of traffic tonight.  If you want to share some of your compliments with the congressman, his email page is http://www.house.gov/formwilson/IMA/issue.htm .

Becoming Barack

In 1993, a 32-year-old Barack Obama was midway through writing Dreams of My Father when aspiring filmmaker Zeke Gonzalez interviewed him for a documentary on black role models.  Did he know he would some day be president? “My general view about politics and running for office is that if you end up being fortunate enough to have the opportunity to serve, it is because you got a track record of service in the community and I think right now, I am still building up that track record. … I might think about it, but that time is certainly in the future.”