essaysfromtheedge

Foot-Shooting 101

Obama Just Lost The General Election

This from today's Ben Smith POLITICO Column, quoting Obama at an April 6, 2008 San Fransisco fundraiser:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Two things to keep in mind here:

1. Obama isn't saying how he will fix the problem of job-loss in mid-America. That's because he can't; only the states can (look at Indiana under Mitch Daniels to see how it's really done).


2. He has just alienated all of small-town America, and those are exactly the people a candidate needs in order to win an election. You can't slam the heart of the country with small-minded rhetoric and expect to get away with it. These thoughts might play well in the Hamptons, but out in West Chazy they will kill you.

John McCain is going to eat this guy alive.

The Lies Keep Coming



And they're THIS BIG!

In attempting to spin his wife's "Bosnian Sniper Fire" debacle into something palatable, Bill Clinton, speaking in Indiana yesterday, has firmly stepped in it.

Again.

How's this for a whopper:

"A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me," Bill Clinton said in Boonville, Ind. "But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995.

"Did y'all see all that? Oh, they blew it up," the former president continued. "Let me just tell you. The president of Bosnia and Gen. Wesley Clark - who was there making peace where we'd lost three peacekeepers who had to ride on a dangerous mountain road because it was too dangerous to go the regular, safe way - both defended her because they pointed out that when her plane landed in Bosnia, she had to go up to the bulletproof part of the plane, in the front. Everybody else had to put their flak jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went they were covered by Apache helicopters. So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony.

"Now I say that because what really has mattered is that even then she was interested in our troops," he said. "And I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you would of thought, you know, that she'd robbed a bank the way they all carried on about this. And some of them when they're 60 they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 o'clock at night, too."

The MyWay piece firmly rebuts a whole slew of lies contained therein:

His wife didn't make the sniper fire claim "one time late at night when she was exhausted." She actually told the story several times, including during prepared remarks on foreign policy delivered the morning of March 17.

It's also not true that she "immediately apologized for it." Clinton has never apologized for the comments and only acknowledged that she "misspoke" a week after the March 17 speech when video of her peaceful tarmac reception emerged.

It's also not true that she was the "first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone" - a claim that Hillary Clinton has also made when talking about the trip. Pat Nixon traveled to Saigon during the Vietnam war and Barbara Bush went to Saudi Arabia two months before the launching of Desert Storm.

The trip also was not in 1995, but 1996.

Hillary has told Bill to shut up.

Again.

Have you had enough, America? Do you really want these two lying, corrupt, impeached, perjuring, indicted scoundrels back in power?





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posted by Tomás @ 4/11/2008 06:10:00 PM