Barack Obama

Obama Is Ready to Lead

Bob Fertik — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:53:43 -0400

The eyes of the nation were on Barack Obama last night, wondering whether he had the strength, knowledge, and conviction to lead us.

By the end, he left no doubt in anyone's mind: he's ready.

Ready to lead the United States at a very difficult time.

And ready to beat John McCain and the vicious Republican Party.

Best parts of Obama's speech:

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. Passions fly on immigration, but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This, too, is part of America's promise -- the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.

I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.

You make a big election about small things.

Exactly.

Update 1: The Oscar for Best Supporting Actor goes to former Republican Barney Smith:

Republicans talk about putting “country first,” but tell that to Marion, Indiana. They sent my job overseas.

America can’t afford more of the same. We need a president who puts the Barney Smiths before the Smith Barneys.

ROTFL!

Barack Obama

Bob Fertik — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:29:18 -0500

Display this full page for our collections of important facts about Barack Obama.

For ongoing stories in the news, check our blog:
http://democrats.com/barack-obama

Biden Wants Prosecutions for Bush's Crimes

Bob Fertik — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:17:10 -0400

At a town-hall meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida, Joe Biden promised investigations - and possible prosecutions - of Bush's crimes.

Looking to the future but with one eye on the past, Biden also promised that an Obama-Biden government would go through Bush administration data with "a fine-toothed comb" and pursue criminal charges if necessary.

"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation," he said, "they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution - out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law."

How long will it take for the Republican Party and the Corporate Media to unleash a vicious counterattack on Biden and Obama?

Lieberman Lies About Obama

Bob Fertik — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:18:09 -0400

Joe Lieberman only mentioned Barack Obama twice in his speech to the Republican convention and the world, and the second time he flat-out lied:

when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground

The Senate never held a vote to abandon our troops in Iraq without funds, because that would get them killed. Instead Russ Feingold and Harry Reid proposed carefully-written amendments to set deadlines for Bush to remove troops safely, with a funding cutoff for combat troops only after those troops were removed to enforced the deadlines that George Bush (and John McCain) adamantly opposed.

"To provide for a transition of the Iraq mission" (5/16/07)
"To safely redeploy United States troops from Iraq" (9/20/07)
"To safely redeploy United States troops from Iraq." (10/3/07)
12/18/07

At a time when 2/3 of Americans wanted to bring our troops safely home, the Feingold-Reid amendments were the only serious attempts by the Senate to do so.

Will the Corporate Media call Lieberman out for being the liar that he is?

Update 1: Jane Hamsher reminds us that Lieberman also lied about lying about Obama:

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” earlier this month, Mr. Lieberman indicated that he would attend the Republican Convention, but that he was not going there to “spend my time attacking Barack Obama.”

Young Barack v. Old John

Bob Fertik — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:24:33 -0400

Tremayne compiled very interesting data on Presidential age. There have been 4 Presidents younger than Obama, and they were pretty good:

Obama would take office when he is about 47.5 years old which is only about 7 years less than average. Here are the Presidents that were younger than Obama (alternatively, they had less life experience):

Theodore Roosevelt, 42

John Kennedy, 43

Bill Clinton, 46

Ulysses S. Grant, 46

Of course McCain would be the oldest first-term President at 72, and the five next oldest Presidents were pretty bad:

On the other end of the spectrum is Ronald Reagan who was elected at 69. Most experts agree he was showing signs of Altzheimers while still in office. Outside of Reagan, there have only been 4 other Presidents who took office within TEN years of McCain's current age (72 tomorrow):

William Henry Harrison, 68

Zachary Taylor, 64

James Buchanan, 65

George HW Bush, 64

Quite a distinguished crew there. Two who died not long into office and another routinely on the list of worst presidents. Somewhere in here is the makings of a good response to the age charge.

This Is Our Last Time

Bob Fertik — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:12:00 -0400

Last night the Democratic Party made history by nominating the first major-party African-American candidate for President, Barack Obama.

Tonight, Barack Obama will accept our nomination. It is fitting that a 20,000 seat arena isn't remotely large enough to mark this moment. Even a 75,000 seat stadium will be too small and many will be turned away.

Rightwingers will mock the white columns. Everyone else in America and the world will marvel at the black man who stands before them.

Incredibly, it was the first viable feminist candidate, Hillary Clinton, who put him over the top. In that single act, the parallel lines of the civil rights and feminist movements met to transform American history.

And we did it through the oldest and largest political party in the world - the party that once fought civil rights - our party, the Democratic Party.

Barack Obama will stand firmly on the ground, but really he stands on the shoulders of giants. Traveling back in time we must recognize those who made his candidacy possible: presidential candidates Rev. Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm, who broke the race and sex barriers to the presidency; presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, who put powerful blacks and women in their cabinets; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vivid dream (45 years ago today, also in front of Greek columns) we are finally trying to realize; Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Marion Anderson (who sang in front of Greek columns); presidents Lyndon Johnson (born 100 years ago today), John Kennedy, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt, who dismantled American apartheid; Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who struggled for 72 years so women could vote; Harriett Tubman (quoted by Hillary Clinton) and Frederick Douglass, who were born into slavery and freed America's slaves; and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, the Democratic Party, and lots of beautiful Greek columns.

Of course none of those giants stood alone. Each rose to fame and power with popular movements, who fought in the streets and the battlefields, the voter registration offices and the voting booths for their controversial causes.

And to elect Barack Obama as our first African-American President, we who are alive today must do the same.

We Democrats were never really divided. But the Corporate Media wanted to make us look divided, and they had the power to project their Bie Lie into every American home. America's shared "reality" is nothing more than the image projected by the Wizards of Oz, the scheming profiteers at who hide behind their corporate curtains with the logos of FOX, NBC, and CNN.

Our truth-sniffing Toto's work in progressive media and blogs. They can pull back the curtains to expose the fraudulent Wizards, but it takes Dorothy's with brains, heart, and courage to find our way home. That means us - all of us.

So Barack Obama is our nominee, but this is our campaign. And we must understand the opposition we face.

We are up against the Republican Party, their corporate allies, and the Bush-Cheney-Rove White House, who will stop at nothing to keep progressive Democrats out of power, and hold them accountable for the crimes they committed over the past 8 years, including war crimes.

And we are up against the enduring emotional power of racism, which will stop at nothing to keep an African-American family out of the Master Bedroom in the All-White House.

Like the suffragists and civil rights leaders, we must lock arms and march forward, and urge our fellow citizens to support us and even join us in our historic cause. They will be inundated with lies, but we must clearly repeat the truth.

The Republican plan is more disastrous war with Iran or Russia; less health care, education, justice and jobs; and environmental catastrophe. The Democratic plan is the opposite: ending war, more health care, education, justice and jobs; and saving the planet before it is too late. That is our choice, and it leaves us no choice.

In Berlin Barack Obama declared, "This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one."

He concluded, "People of the world, this is our moment. This is our time."

But in reality, it may be our last time. So from now until the last vote is counted and re-counted by hand if need be, we must keep our eyes on the prize and do everything we can to win.

Joe Biden Accepts VP Nomination

Bob Fertik — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:45:12 -0400

What an incredible introduction by Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden!

Joe Biden excerpts:

As we gather here tonight, our country is less secure and more isolated than at any time in recent history. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has dug us into a very deep hole, with very few friends to help us climb out.

Should we trust John McCain's judgment when he says there can be no timelines to drawdown our troops from Iraq - that we must stay indefinitely?

Or should we listen to Barack Obama, who says shift responsibility to the Iraqis - and set a time to bring our combat troops home?

Now, after six long years, the Bush administration and the Iraqi government are on the verge of setting a date to bring our troops home.

John McCain was wrong. Barack Obama was right.

Hillary and Bill Clinton Rock for Obama!

Bob Fertik — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:22:25 -0400

Hillary: "With eyes firmly fixed on the future, and in the spirit of unity with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and our country, let's declare together with one voice right here, right now that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president. I move that Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by this convention by acclamation as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States."

And with that, Barack Obama became the first African American in American history to be chosen as the nominee of a major party. It's impossible to find the words to describe how amazing that is. Watch the video:

Bill: "Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world. Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States."

What a night!!!

Foreign Policy and National Security Are Not the Same Thing

dlindorff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:27:10 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

One of the sorrier legacies of eight years of Bush and Cheney in the White House has been the conflation of the terms “National Security” and “Foreign Policy” by both Republicans and Democrats.

Granted that the history of US foreign policy in the world has been heavily larded with wars, many of them at America’s instigation. It is nonetheless true that foreign policy is much bigger and more far reaching than just what has come to be known as “national security” issues.

In Bush-speak, national security come to mean having big guns, lots of heavily armed troops, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, naval armadas and a bully’s willingness to use these weapons on a whim, with no thought of consequences.

The term is kind of oxymoronic, since it is clear that by resorting to war and to threats of war, and by squandering unprecedented sums of money on the military, eight years of bellicosity has not made the nation more secure. Quite the opposite: The military has been run into the ground, the economy has been bankrupted, education, healthcare and other critical national services have been shortchanged, and the country has become a pariah state, viewed around the world as a loose cannon and a terror nation—hardly a comforting position to be in.

Foreign policy, meanwhile, has ceased to have any meaning at all, beyond the making of war or threats of war, making it virtually synonymous with the term national security.

When I was a Fulbright professor in China, back in 1991, at a mid-year conference in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, we grantees were addressed by the head of the Fulbright Program in China, a cultural affairs director from the US embassy in Beijing. He informed us that as teachers (I was teaching journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai), we Fulbrighters were the frontline of American foreign policy in China. Most of us were kind of repulsed by his semi-military allusion to a battle line and by implication to us as soldiers, and we chose instead to see our role as something different: emissaries from the American people to the Chinese people. In fact, given that most of the 21 of us were hardly superpatriots or cold warriors (the academics, journalists, lawyers and other professionals who serve in the Fulbright Program tend demographically to be among the most liberal and left-leaning group in the American workforce), we would have made a pretty bad defense line. Rather, what we were doing in China, by teaching and building relationships with young Chinese college students, was the essence of real foreign policy—building bridges at the grass roots level between the people of China and the people of the US.

Foreign policy can be reduced to a strategic chess game—the kind of “real politik” practiced by Klemens von Metternich in the 19th Century, or espoused by Henry Kissinger in the Nixon years—but it is actually, or at least ought to be, much broader than that kind of cold and calculating manipulation and pursuit of narrow self-interest.

Real foreign policy should be about winning friends, building trust, establishing relationships between countries and peoples, negotiating treaties designed to achieve mutual advantage and to deter aggression. It is about aiding countries that are in need of assistance, and at its best, should also be about making the world a safer, better place for all, which in the end is the best way to guard against war and the threats of war.

Now it would be naïve to imagine a foreign policy that ignored national self-interest. Much as I or others might wish for a world without borders and a common humanity, in a world of nation states, it is inevitable that foreign policy as practiced by any nation, including the United States, will be focused on achieving the maximum benefit for that nation, and US foreign policy has always been about just that, and unfortunately probably always will be. But even granted this selfish parochialism, it is incredibly shortsighted and ignorant to treat foreign policy as simply an America-first process of bullying others into submission to our dictates. Thousands of American teachers and Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers do much more to advance America’s position in the world and to enhance the nation’s security than do hundreds of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs and missiles.

For Republicans, there is no difference between national security, which is defined as a powerful and assertive military, and foreign policy. But Democrats, who at times have had a more nuanced view, have more recently bought into this too. At the current Democratic Convention, anxious to look as tough as Republicans, Democratic speakers have used the terms national security and foreign policy interchangeably.

Afghanistan and Iraq provide excellent cases in point. Clearly, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ostensibly aimed initially at hunting down Al Qaeda fighters and leaders, quickly devolved into an all-out assault on that nation, which has been reduced to the same rubble and state of chaos and civil war as has Iraq. Now, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is talking about expanding the war there, and increasing the killing and destruction in that country. In Iraq, where the US has been involved in an orgy of killing and destruction now for over five years, Obama and fellow Democrats are calling for a “responsible exit” from that conflict over the course of another 16 months. A truly responsible exit would be an immediate withdrawal, a national apology to Iraqis and to the world community, and a massive program of reparations to help rebuild that nation.

What Obama and the Democrats are touting is not foreign policy. It is a continuation of national security run amok.

No amount of American force, no level of mayhem and slaughter, will bring about a secure and tranquil Afghanistan. In fact, every time Americans kill Afghanis, as American bombers recently did, slaughtering 60 children and 30 other adults, women and men, in an aerial bombardment reminiscent of the German Luftwaffe’s attack on the Basque village of Guernica, they produce not peace and submission, but rather hatred and a desire for vengeance.

It will take perhaps a generation of good works for the US to undo the evil done to American foreign relations by eight years of Bush/Cheney obsession with national security, but it doesn’t even look like the Democrats “get it.” In Congress, they have vied with Republicans to look tough, supporting both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, they have supported the continued funding of those wars and increased funding for the already bloated US war machine, and they are now backing Obama’s call for more combat troops in Afghanistan.

Real foreign policy would be looking at ways to work with other nations to bring down the level of combat, and to bring peace to Afghanistan and to other war-torn regions of the world.

Meanwhile, the concept of national security needs to be broadened. As Genghis Khan, conqueror of China, is reputed to have said as a frightened Chinese empire, at extraordinary financial and human cost, constructed the Great Wall to fend him off, “A wall is only as strong as the people behind it.”

One need only drive through any American city today and view the bombed-out neighborhoods, the crack dens, the pot-holed streets, the decrepit transit systems, the shamefully overcrowded and prison-like schools where any teaching and learning that goes on is an accident, one need only visit ignored and forgotten rural areas of America where unemployment is the norm and healthcare is half a day’s drive and half a year’s income away, one need only drive through a suburban neighborhood and look at all the “For Sale” and even more pathetic “For Sale: Reduced Price!” signs in front of houses, to see that what lies behind America’s walls, like the ridiculous one being built now along parts of the border with Mexico, is incredible weakness. (At the rate things are going here, it won’t be long before Americans will be scaling that wall to find jobs in Mexico!)

The folly of conflating national security and foreign policy, and of imagining that a mindless willingness to resort to force and bullying is the sine qua non for being “presidential,” has been made painfully clear not only in the screams of wounded children in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the cries of hungry children in America. The United States does not need a man of war in the White House. It needs a wise advocate of peace.
________________
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 edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/35736'; digg_title = "Foreign Policy and National Security Are Not the Same Thing"; digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n One of the sorrier legacies of eight years of Bush and Cheney in the White House has been the conflation of the terms “National Security” and “Foreign Policy” by both Republicans and Democrats.\r\n\r\n Granted that the history of US foreign policy in the world has been heavily larded with wars, many of them at America’s instigation. It is nonetheless true that foreign policy is much bigger and more far reaching than just what has come to be known as “national security” issues.\r\n\r\n In Bush-speak, national security come to mean having big guns, lots of heavily armed troops, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, naval armadas and a bully’s willingness to use these weapons on a whim, with no thought of consequences.\r\n\r"; digg_skin = 'standard';

Michelle Obama Keynote

Bob Fertik — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:43:35 -0400

Michelle Obama's film was introduced by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). The moving biopic covered her family, her upbringing, her career, her meeting Barack, her childrearing. Her older brother Craig Robinson, who could be her twin, followed with a personal introduction.

He also drew on his professional skill as a college basketball coach to describe Obama's game: confident but not cocky, a team player who improves his teammates, he'll take the open shot, and he's not afraid of any challenge. Now there's a description every sports fan can relate to!

Michelle came to the podium; as the delegates shared their love, Michelle shared her warm, winning smile, and returned her brother's love. She paid moving tributes to her deceased father and her mother in the hall, whose eyes teared with pride and joy. She described her "improbable journey" to the convention, and paid tribute to the women who paved the way, from the suffragists to Hillary Clinton. She smacked down her rightwing haters by declaring, "that's why I love America!"

Then she moved on to Barack Obama's life, his message, and his mission. Her words were passionate and glowing. By the end, there wasn't a dry eye in the hall.

Afterwards, Chris Matthews was choking up. Even FOX's Juan Williams teared up and called it awesome.

As a human being, as an African-American, it’s unbelievable. And then to have a family situation, given all the tension in Black America over families, and to see that positive image there for everybody to see. … Man, that’s just awesome.