I Thought It Was About Hope and Change, But It looks Like Fear and Whining

Don summed it up best:

Poor dear.

Does anyone recall Laura Bush whining because they called her husband chimp? A drunk? Bushitler?

What’s Mrs. Obama going to do when Ahmadinejad calls him names?

Or Hugo Chavez?

Or Vladimir Putin?

In West Virginia they say if you cannot run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.

Mrs. Obama should go inside the house.

Barack talks a good game about hope and change but what he offers is much of the same, he is using his oratorical powers to prey on people’s fears.

FOR a man who has placed “hope” at the centre of his campaign, Barack Obama can sound pretty darned depressing. As the battle for the Democratic nomination reaches a climax in Texas and Ohio, the front-runner’s speeches have begun to paint a world in which laid-off parents compete with their children for minimum-wage jobs while corporate fat-cats mis-sell dodgy mortgages and ship jobs off to Mexico. The man who claims to be a “post-partisan” centrist seems to be channelling the spirit of William Jennings Bryan, the original American populist, who thunderously demanded to know “Upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight—upon the side of ‘the idle holders of idle capital’ or upon the side of ‘the struggling masses’?”
There is no denying that for some middle-class Americans, the past few years have indeed been a struggle. What is missing from Mr Obama’s speeches is any hint that this is not the whole story: that globalisation brings down prices and increases consumer choice; that unemployment is low by historical standards; that American companies are still the world’s most dynamic and creative; and that Americans still, on the whole, live lives of astonishing affluence. …

If he were elected president, backed by a Democratic Congress with enhanced majorities, Mr Obama might well feel obliged to deliver on some of his promises. At the very least, the prospects for freer trade would then be dim.

The sad thing is that one might reasonably have expected better from Mr Obama. He wants to improve America’s international reputation yet campaigns against NAFTA. He trumpets “the audacity of hope” yet proposes more government intervention. He might have chosen to use his silver tongue to address America’s problems in imaginative ways—for example, by making the case for reforming the distorting tax code. Instead, he wants to throw money at social problems and slap more taxes on the rich, and he is using his oratorical powers to prey on people’s fears.

Ed:

Many people have compared Obama to Ronald Reagan in his ability to promise “morning in America,” but they have focused only on the most superficial part of the Reagan revolution. Reagan didn’t cast himself as the agent of hope, but appealed to the hope within Americans that they could lift up the country, and not the other way around. He focused on the hope of the individual as the true agent of change, and not the despair of the collective that required government intervention.

Now if this isn’t bad enough, the WaPo has this insane article denouncing SNL for a skit they ran last Saturday where a non-black man portrayed Obama!

“Casting a black actor wouldn’t have guaranteed the quality of the sketch, but it would have made the whole thing a lot less shoddy,” Pool wrote. “Let’s get one thing straight. The moment anyone starts reaching for ‘blackface,’ they are on extremely dodgy territory. Anyone who thinks it’s either necessary or, for that matter, remotely funny to black-up needs to have the gauge on their moral compass reset.”

and

“Clearly, we’re in racial Rorschach territory again: Where you stand might be a reflection of where you came from.”

No, I don’t think we are in Rorschach territory. I think that the author clearly has too much time on their hands. It was a comedy skit and most people don’t tune in and count the number of blacks vs whites on a show. They watch the show to be entertained.

Obviously the author has a problem with anyone that dare take on Obama:

Nobody much cared about Armisen’s racial background (he is of white and Asian heritage) when he played Prince and Steve Jobs during seasons past of the NBC show. Nor did it seem to matter that “SNL’s” Darrell Hammond, who is white, has impersonated the Rev. Jesse Jackson for years. Or that decades ago on “SNL,” Billy Crystal played Sammy Davis Jr.

But in 2008, Obama isn’t just any politician or celebrity. Which is why Armisen’s DNA became something of an issue when he became “Fauxbama” in “SNL’s” first show back since the writers’ strike ended this month.

Yes, he is just another politician that is being used in a comedy sketch. Nothing more, nothing less.

Bookmark to: