Day: September 26, 2008

What happened at the White House?

Obama screwed it up yesterday at the White House, says Rush Limbaugh.  All four Democrat leaders handed him the ball at meeting start, and he took off after the House Republicans in quite obstreperous manner.  That’s when meeting blew up.

More later . . .  

Later: Rush cited American Spectator, which is so busy a site it was hard to get to it.  It has this:

When Sen. Barack Obama was given the floor to speak during White House negotiations, according to White House aides, he did so raising concerns about a House Republican alternative to the Paulson/Bernanke $700 billion bailout. But those concerns weren’t necessarily his, as he was not aware of the GOP plan before reviewing notes provided him by Paulson loyalists in Treasury prior to entering the meeting.

How else does AmSpec (it’s Prowler blog) know this?

According to an Obama campaign source, the notes were passed to Obama via senior aides traveling with him, who had been emailed the document via a current Goldman Sachs employee and Wall Street fundraiser for the Obama campaign. “It was made clear that the memo was from ‘friends’ and was reliable,” says the campaign source.

And what the effect of this impromptu blast across the aisle?

The memo allowed Obama and his fellow Democrats to box in Republican attendees and essentially took what President Bush had billed as a negotiating meeting off the rails.

And where does Paulson come in?

“Paulson and his team have not acted in good faith for this President or the administration for which they serve,” says a House Republican leader who was not present at the White House meeting, but who instead is part of the team hammering out the House GOP alternative.

He suspects skullduggery:

“We keep hearing about how Secretary Paulson is working with Democrats on this or that, yet he never seems to consider working with the party that essentially hired him. Perhaps he’s auditioning for a Democratic administration job. Our proposal didn’t just spring forth fully formed; we’ve been working on this for several days, and Treasury staff has known about it.”

And O. had a chance to do away with politics as usual.  This be what he does without a TelePrompter?

Other points by Rush:

* Dems have votes for this but want House Repubs to repudiate their principles and want cover if it doesn’t work out.  (Pelosi has specified the need for 100 Repubs in favor of this bill.) 

* Dems including O. have known where House Repubs stand but act surprised and indignant.

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Time warp, warped outlook

“Blame deep-seated racism if Obama loses,” argues Sun-Times woman Deborah Douglas, who seems stuck in a pre-civil-rights movement past.

Pssst! I have a not-so-secret to tell you: America is no place for uppity black folks. At least that’s what I’ve been finding out lately.

Does she really think a white guy could have beat Hillary in the primary?  Or, for that matter, that she’d be where she is if she were white? 

The question arises, inevitably, in our race-preferential society, which has raised victimhood to an art form and laid guilt on non-black people — the younger, the more susceptible.

For more on this, see Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan, a 2001 book.

In this piece, Douglas refers to “grass-chewing Southerners” who call blacks “uppity” and to herself as “a nappy-headed black woman.” 

O. would be “way ahead if 40 percent of white Americans didn’t have negative views of African Americans,” she writes.  “The Great American Gut Check won’t give Obama a break,” however, citing the recent

AP-Stanford University poll that validates what [she has] suspected: If Barack Obama doesn’t win in November, we can blame racism.

Yes, the poll:

“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.

That might be so, by why did the study only address how the prejudices of whites are impacting the campaign while totally ignoring how racist feelings by blacks are entering the equation?

asked Noel Sheppard at News Busters.

My point exactly.  What white candidate could count on 78% of the black vote in S. Carolina, for instance, as he did in the recent primary?  Works both ways.

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See Dennis Byrne for comments on same subject, including:

The poll finds that nine percent of all respondents said that Obama being the first black president would make them less likely to vote for him. Yes, this is wrong. But if you bother to read the survey’s next line, you find that another nine percent said that Obama being the first black president would make them more likely to vote for him.

The lady missed that point.

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