Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Isaiah, Susan UnPC

gopattackmachine

Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "GOP Attack Machine" went up Monday. Rebecca's "talking post" just went up and she phoned to talk about that and some other things. Mike and I had just finished watching The Maltese Falcon. He's run out to grab some ice cream and I'm doing a very brief post.

Isaiah's comic is wonderful as always. I think the right-wing's perfectly captured and that reality is as well. Mike was thinking about blogging earlier so let me pull up what he wanted to note so we can just eat ice cream and hit the bed when he gets back. (We're both taking Tuesday off but will be blogging at our regular times.)

Susan UnPC's "Craig Crawford on Obama & Substance" (No Quarter) was what he wanted to highlight when he was toying with blogging tonight. I don't know how to excerpt that. She's addressing Obama's lack of substance and how he loves to steal lines from others. She's linking and quoting in that and I think it's better to just suggest you read it instead of my attempting to pull an excerpt from.

Yes, Bambi's stealing like crazy. His 'inspirational lines' are not his own and you can't argue: "Speechwriters work for all candidates!" His theft includes June Jordan, Alice Walker, John Edwards and assorted others thus far. For me, it goes to the heart of how empty he is that he has to repeatedly swipe from others and claim it as his own. He does not give credit, he steals. To give credit would mean to suggest that he is not all that his cult wants him to be.

So he passes off the original lines and interpretations of others off as his own and not only basks in the poetry (of others) but is seen as 'deep' and 'thoughtful.'

He's stealing.

Does Susan UnPC ever sleep? She has another post that just went up entitled "Obama’s Books: Composite Characters, False Memories." I'm writing something on that topic tomorrow. (Not what she's written, this goes to endorsements. It will probably be only a paragraph or two.) So read her post and enjoy it. She's hitting on the inaccuracies. Here, Susan's quoting The Chicago Tribune on one of Bambi's books:

In his best-selling autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama describes having heated conversations about racism with another black student, "Ray." The real Ray, Keith Kakugawa, is half black and half Japanese. In an interview with the Tribune on Saturday, Kakugawa said he always considered himself mixed race, like so many of his friends in Hawaii, and was not an angry young black man.
He said he does recall long, soulful talks with the young Obama and that his friend confided his longing and loneliness. But those talks, Kakugawa said, were not about race. "Not even close," he said, adding that Obama was dealing with "some inner turmoil" in those days. "But it wasn't a race thing," he said. "Barry’s biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment. The idea that his biggest struggle was race is [bull]."

Then there's the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don't exist, say the magazine's own historians.

That's important and fits into what I plan to write about tomorrow (later tonight, actually).

Mike's back so that's it. Read C.I.'s "Selling the illegal war is news . . . in England" -- a must read.