Benghazi Will Screw Obama, Which He Deserves

[DinoDoc]

HOWEVER, I do think ... that he is winking at racial animus against the President.

How so?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Jesus tap dancing Christ, kentonio.

DinoDoc and I agree on almost nothing when it comes to politics. But do I think he is a racist? Not for a ****ing second.

Get a grip, man.

All aboard! Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa!

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay

Crazy, but that's how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not too late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate

Mental wounds not healing
Life's a bitter shame
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

Let's Go!

I've listened to preachers
I've listened to fools
I've watched all the dropouts
Who make their own rules
One person conditioned to rule and control
The media sells it and you live the role

Mental wounds still screaming
Driving me insane
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

I know that things are going wrong for me
You gotta listen to my words
Yeah

Heirs of a cold war
That's what we've become
Inheriting troubles I'm mentally numb
Crazy, I just cannot bear
I'm living with something' that just isn't fair

Mental wounds not healing
Who and what's to blame
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

[Imran Siddiqui]

I think you know better that:

that policy difference account for most of the so-called hate

simply isn't true.

Especially when you have a decent % of GOP folk thinking birther stuff.

[DinoDoc]

Especially when you have a decent % of GOP folk thinking birther stuff.

More than half of Democrats believed Bush knew

[Jon Miller]

Bad poll, it isn't clear whether they are saying 'Bush had been warned (but didn't believe it/etc)' or 'Bush knew and purposefully did nothing so that the US would get attacked'.

The first is arguable, the second not really.

JM

[DinoDoc]

Bad poll, it isn't clear whether they are saying 'Bush had been warned (but didn't believe it/etc)' or 'Bush knew and purposefully did nothing so that the US would get attacked'.

The first is arguable, the second not really.

JM

Additional information:

Democrats and Trutherism

Last week, in one of the latest failed attempts to close the loop on political conspiracies, Ben Smith blogged one of the internals from the definitive 2006 Scripps poll on "9/11 Trutherism."

"How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?" the poll asked.

A full 22.6% of Democrats said it was "very likely." Another 28.2% called it "somewhat likely."

This question is open to just a little misinterpretation. After all, it's well known, and true, that there were unspecific warnings about a mounting terrorist attack and they were not followed up on. But I've now seen the other questions and crosstabs from the poll. There were more specific conspiracy scenarios, and Democrats disproportionately agreed with them.

How likely is it that the Pentagon was not struck by an airliner captured by terrorists but instead was hit by a cruise missile fired by the United States military?

Only 11.9 percent of all voters believed that this was "somewhat" or "very" likely, but 21.1 percent of Democrats did.

How likely is it that the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the building?

A full 15.9 percent of all voters bought that; the number rose to 24.8 percent among Democrats.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Furthermore, if you want to use those poll results to state that Democrats irrationally hated Bush because they thought he valued oil profits over American lives, feel free.... as long as one can say that Republicans irrationally hate Obama because he's black (why else try to claim he was born somewhere else?)

[Elok]

I'm opposed to warfare in general, but okay with it if it involves super-intelligent robots. Maybe someday we can have drone politicians as well.

I'd say "drone" is a fair descriptor for a good number of our politicians already.

(I oppose drones mostly because they make it possible to prolong the stupid WoT virtually forever)

[Elok]

Also, given the frothing-at-the-mouth hatred directed at the last two presidents--and the toxicity of U.S. politics in general--it's totally unnecessary to assume racism.

[Dinner]

Yeah, it can't possibly be the fact that he's liberal and doesn't share any of their values.

If only he was a liberal.

[PLATO]

The most interesting part of the birther thing to me was that it was John McCain that really had the questionable birth credentials to be President.

[Zevico]

Barry Rubin and Bryan Preston, respectively, have two articles on this issue. They make for interesting reading.
Ironic that Hillary's "phone call at 2am" commercial became more a how-to-guide than a warning.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/05/08/seven-things-we-learned-from-the-benghazi-whistleblower-hearing/

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/05/09/why-the-benghazi-issue-is-overwhelmingly-important/

[SlowwHand]

She might as well blow off presidential aspirations, too. I didn't hate her. Now, well, now I don't care for her.

[Sava]

Additional information:

They key difference between the two camps is that Democrats shout down the truthers for being retarded. Republicans encourage the birther movement.

[kentonio]

Personally I don't think that the overall culture of unpatriotic strife is race-related, at least not primarily.

The seeds were sown in the party as far back as the Southern Strategy and have repeatedly risen their ugly heads ever since. They deliberately sought out the racists, they got the racists and they've done very little since to get rid of the racists. Society has moved on since sure, but those old poisonous elements are still there because they constitute a voting block the party doesn't want to sacrifice.

Could the endless hate towards Obama just be purely based on a democratic president coming into office? Well let's consider that for a second, Obama followed eight years of Bush, a President that wasn't much loved by either side, and despite McCain being popular, by the end of that campaign he wasn't exactly a shining banner for Republicanism. So why this very deep and very open hate towards the president from absolutely day one?

He's a centre right politician who spent a ton of his political capital trying to compromise with the Republican party (and lost an awful lot of friends on his own side doing it) to the point of abject weakness. He brought in a healthcare plan which is straight out of Republican idealism, he supported the troops, killed OBL, helped topple Ghaddafi, maintained (and expanded in some cases) the strong US domestic security policies. In many ways Obama could have been a Republican from a decade ago and you'd barely have told the difference.

Yet they hate him. They don't just dislike or mistrust or disagree with him, they hate him. They hate him so much that the very idea of him being American is too much to damn well stomach for them. A party that screamed about respecting the office now talks about the President in the same condescending sneering tones that southerners used to use towards every black person. Every damn racial code word from the south's past has reared it's head again in this presidency and yet we're told 'Oh no, we're not racist!'. The Tea Party wave banners with the president made to look like a monkey and we're told 'Oh no, we're not racist! You're racist for thinking we are!'. A southern congressman shouts 'You lie!' directly at the President in congress and a governor says she 'felt a little bit threatened' the President (terrifying as erudite Harvard Law graduates obviously are to a career politician) but no no no there's definitely no racist overtones to any of this.

Seriously, how many times are an openly racist party going to have to be openly racist before people stop just taking their word for it that they're ok? As for DD, I'll always keep the door open that he might just be have been drinking the party Koolaid on Obama, but defending racists is not exactly a huge improvement over just being a racist yourself anyway. In some ways it's worse, because it provides it with legitimacy.