Is Anybody paying Attention?
And so the drip, drip, drip of Dem infighting goes on and on, in the meanwhile has it occurred to anyone that all those independents and Rethugs who crossed-over and voted for Obama last night in Wisconsin were instructed to do so by someone, at least, resembling Karl Rove and that, perhaps, that has happened in other open-primary states?
Why not. The Gooper primary is effectively over and has been for awhile, even before what's-his-name dropped out. No need to vote for McCrack-pot when he's already won.
I'm not saying that that's really happening, but if it is, this nation is sunk for good, because the Dem-bulbs, who are all we have at the moment, may win by just enough for the Goopers to steal the damn thing again in swing states, and for all of you who don't want Hillary and can't wait for Bush and Cheney to leave, be arrested, drop dead, whatever, McCain is, from what my sources in D.C. tell me, a nightmarish mixture of all of the things people can't stand and/or fear about Hillary and George Bush.So before, anyone starts slinging crap they had better think first.
Besides, I thought Dave was writing about the lousy job the corporate media is doing again, so why all the Hillary defending? She can't tape everyone's mouths shut, though I'm sure she wishes she could, at times.
By the way, something could be seriously wrong with Bill. Could well be his heart medication that's making him do and say such off-the-wall things. Someone should check into it.
Dave Lindorff: Just When You Thought the Corporate Media Couldn't Get any Worse........
Actually, Dave, that thought has not occurred to me in years. Of course it can get worse. It will get worse unless, we, the consumers, intervene.I would not have thought that the coverage of the U.S. presidential campaign could get more shallow and meaningless, and then, along comes the plagiarism story.
OMG! Barack Obama, the silver-tongued front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, lifted a couple of lines and an idea from the black governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Patrick, himself something of a wordsmith, had been hit with the same attack by a wooden opponent, and responded by saying that words matter, and citing Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" line and the Declaration of Independence's ringing "all men are created equal."
Obama, whose oratorical skills have left the robotic and monotonous Hillary Clinton sounding like a pull-string Barbie on the stump (remember "Math is hard!"?), has had the Clinton campaign frantically casting around for a rejoinder, and the best they could come up with to date was a charge that he's "all hat and no cattle" (itself a line lifted, uncredited, from Texas populist Jim Hightower, if I recall, though I think it has an older lineage among Texans, and has been appropriately applied to President Bush on numerous occasions). Obama decided to respond using some of Patrick's lines.
Now, one could argue that Obama would have been better advised to give fair attribution to Gov. Patrick, but since when have politicians gone around putting footnotes on their public speeches? Most political speeches are exercises in cut and paste, full of regurgitated pablum, and lifted quotes. If plagiarism were a political crime, 90 percent of members of Congress would be out on their ears. (For that matter, if plagiarism were a crime, Hillary Clinton herself would be behind bars. Her book, "It Takes a Village," was largely written by Barbara Feinman, a Georgetown University journalism prof who was reportedly offered $120,000 for the job, but her name appeared nowhere in the volume, which Clinton still claims as her own work.)
Besides, come on now! We're not nominating an English professor, god knows. If we were, how in hell would we have had Bush for president for the last what seems like eternity, with his maddening use of the word "nukular," his drunken "sh" slurs all over the place, his grammatical atrocities, and his mangled quotes (remember "if you fool me once...")?
Excuse me, but we have a criminal $1-trillion war raging in Iraq that is sucking the lifeblood out of the American economy, killing American troops by the day and slaughtering innocent Iraqis by the hundred thousands, we have an economy that is racing for the toilet like a party goer who ate too many bad shrimps, we have bridges collapsing, we have the North Pole ice vanishing faster than Bush's credibility, and the media are focussed laser-like on what? The momentous question of whether Obama lifted a quote from Gov. Patrick without acknowledgement?
We have Democrats trying to decide whether to select a woman senator who used insider information to make a killing in cattle futures, who has accepted massive donations from the healthcare industry and military contractors, who voted enthusiastically if cynically for George Bush's Iraq War, and whose husband wants nothing more than a new shot at some eager White House interns, or a black senator who spoke out against that war before it happened, when to do so was to risk being called a traitor by the Commander in Chief and his minions, and the best our vaunted "independent" media pundits can do is what? Accuse Obama of plagiarism?
We could use some reporting on Clinton's and Obama's corporate backing, on the key people advising them on foreign affairs and domestic economic policy, some serious challenges on how each candidate will actually address climate change issues, and on how they can do anything without attacking the out-of-control military budget. Instead we get this "big" plagiarism story as the main event of the Wisconsin primary.
Amen!!!!
Thank you, Fourth Estate, for making us a well-informed citizenry, even though we are, in fact, some of the most ill-informed people on earth.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
OMG! Barack Obama, the silver-tongued front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, lifted a couple of lines and an idea from the black governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Patrick, himself something of a wordsmith, had been hit with the same attack by a wooden opponent, and responded by saying that words matter, and citing Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" line and the Declaration of Independence's ringing "all men are created equal."
Obama, whose oratorical skills have left the robotic and monotonous Hillary Clinton sounding like a pull-string Barbie on the stump (remember "Math is hard!"?), has had the Clinton campaign frantically casting around for a rejoinder, and the best they could come up with to date was a charge that he's "all hat and no cattle" (itself a line lifted, uncredited, from Texas populist Jim Hightower, if I recall, though I think it has an older lineage among Texans, and has been appropriately applied to President Bush on numerous occasions). Obama decided to respond using some of Patrick's lines.
Now, one could argue that Obama would have been better advised to give fair attribution to Gov. Patrick, but since when have politicians gone around putting footnotes on their public speeches? Most political speeches are exercises in cut and paste, full of regurgitated pablum, and lifted quotes. If plagiarism were a political crime, 90 percent of members of Congress would be out on their ears. (For that matter, if plagiarism were a crime, Hillary Clinton herself would be behind bars. Her book, "It Takes a Village," was largely written by Barbara Feinman, a Georgetown University journalism prof who was reportedly offered $120,000 for the job, but her name appeared nowhere in the volume, which Clinton still claims as her own work.)
Besides, come on now! We're not nominating an English professor, god knows. If we were, how in hell would we have had Bush for president for the last what seems like eternity, with his maddening use of the word "nukular," his drunken "sh" slurs all over the place, his grammatical atrocities, and his mangled quotes (remember "if you fool me once...")?
Excuse me, but we have a criminal $1-trillion war raging in Iraq that is sucking the lifeblood out of the American economy, killing American troops by the day and slaughtering innocent Iraqis by the hundred thousands, we have an economy that is racing for the toilet like a party goer who ate too many bad shrimps, we have bridges collapsing, we have the North Pole ice vanishing faster than Bush's credibility, and the media are focussed laser-like on what? The momentous question of whether Obama lifted a quote from Gov. Patrick without acknowledgement?
We have Democrats trying to decide whether to select a woman senator who used insider information to make a killing in cattle futures, who has accepted massive donations from the healthcare industry and military contractors, who voted enthusiastically if cynically for George Bush's Iraq War, and whose husband wants nothing more than a new shot at some eager White House interns, or a black senator who spoke out against that war before it happened, when to do so was to risk being called a traitor by the Commander in Chief and his minions, and the best our vaunted "independent" media pundits can do is what? Accuse Obama of plagiarism?
We could use some reporting on Clinton's and Obama's corporate backing, on the key people advising them on foreign affairs and domestic economic policy, some serious challenges on how each candidate will actually address climate change issues, and on how they can do anything without attacking the out-of-control military budget. Instead we get this "big" plagiarism story as the main event of the Wisconsin primary.
Amen!!!!
Thank you, Fourth Estate, for making us a well-informed citizenry, even though we are, in fact, some of the most ill-informed people on earth.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
Remember Grandpa Warmonger McCain?Mean
Submitted by chanceny on Tue, 02/19/2008 - 5:40pm.
Why is it that such passionate progressives use their rhetorical skills to eviscerate Hillary Clinton? If she does become the democratic nominee, will you be prideful when McCain plagerizes your words to condemn and humiliate her? To bring up her using illegal 'inside info' to make a killing in the market back in the divisive, disgusting Whitewater days, even though, after thousands of our taxpayer dollars were wasted only to find there was no There there, is to pick up where the vast right wing conspiracy left off. Unless you believe she made that up as well. Obama may be your favored candidate, he actually is mine, but Hillary would work her butt off to reverse the direction of bushite ruin whereas McCain would continue warfare, ensure those regressive tax cuts are made permanent, and nominate Supreme Court justices that Scalia would be proud of. I wish you would pick your fights with the proven enemies of democracy - the regressive bigoted warmongers - and allow the nominating process to proceed without giving hateful ammunition to McCain's inevitable swiftboat patrols.
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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