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Sen. Obama has always been against the Iraqi war, did NOT vote for the Kyle-Liebermann bill, and voted in favor of banning landmines in civilian areas. 98% of victims of landmines are civilians and 1/3 are children who often think they are picking up a toy.
Its a no brainer for me....H. Clinton's political calculations vs. Sen. Obama's moral judgment.
If you're honest with yourself you'll say that Sen.Obama didn't vote for the Kyle-Liebermann bill because he didn't show up to vote for it period.
Where's the moral judgment in not showing up to vote for something like the bill?
Please.
The facts are that since going into the Senate he has voted to fund the war just like everyone else.
Just today, Obama has been accused of plagiarizing a good friend and now misleading folks about the removal of Anti-Iraq speeches from his website...let's say that it's all true...I voted for him on Feb 5th and in spite of this information, fully intend to do the same damn thing on the first Tuesday in NOVEMBER. Long live the Next President of the United States Barack Obama!
Yeah @anon, I agree with you about the "funding" votes, but it's not just *O*'s fault...that belongs to the whole democratic party who continues to allow republicans to define "what a democrat is."
This talking point has been debunked. The vote took place over two days -- a Tuesday and a Wednesday, I think. On the Tuesday, Obama was at the Senate prepared to vote against the amendment. At the end of the day, however, no vote had been taken, and Harry Reid announced he would table the bill and that there would be no vote on it "in the near future".
Obama took this to mean he could keep a campaign appointment the next day in New Hampshire so he flew out of Washington that night.
The next day, at 10am, Reid announced that there would indeed be a vote on the amendment, and Senators were given just 2 hours to show up and vote! There was no way Obama was going to make it back to Washington in time to vote, so he did the next best thing and released a statement reiterating his opposition to the amendment.
As always with these things, the false talking point is easy to remember, while the truth takes longer to get out.
I will say that even though I don't think he had to, he admitted that he probably ought to have credited Patrick. If he made a mistake, he admitted it. That's integrity.
Too bad there's so little of it in politics.
I am an Obama supporter, but I do find the concern with consistency or lack thereof around the war rather odd. After all, isn't our criticism of President Bush precisely around his stubborn inability to change direction despite ample facts to the contrary? (It's Hillary's inability to call her support of the war a mistake -- what critics, I'm sure, would call a "flip flop" -- that, for me, undermines her credibility on that issue).
On the Speech: I can't think of what he would have gained by removing the speech from his website. The position had already been taken and was well known. I can't see him folding to the accusations of the DLC.
Once again, we're all busy responding to false accusations made by the Clinton campaign. Aren't you all just sick of it?
Sen. Clinton owns that choice.
Even if people just followed my postings online from Nov. 2001 leading on up to the illegal invasion, I kept pounding on how wrong all this was.
Sen. Clinton owns that choice.
And every time Sen. Obama voted to fund the war and when he voted AGAINST John F Kerry's bill to cut funding and withdraw troops He cased "thousands of soldiers and civilians to lose their lives and limbs in an illegal war," too.
You Obama fans are such hypocrites.
All this stuff happened when Barack was campaigning for the US Senate in 2002-2004 (that's how long these campaigns last, y'know). After Barack answered two of our three questions more or less correctly, dodging one about single payer health care, and explicitly renounced the formal DLC connection, we printed an endorsement. A week or two letter I took a few vacation days to drive from the ATL back home to shake Barack's hand and work Sunday, Monday and election day in the campaign. Don't think it will end that way this time around. We at BAR won't be endorsing Obama or Hillary (and certainly not a Repub).
We think our job is to give Obama or whoever the Democratic nominee is something to respond to. As Amiri Baraka will say in a speech we will print next week, the less we demand, the less he will have to do, the less we do, the less we can expect from him. I think there are vast areas in which Obama could do better. But he won't unless there is sustained, even impolite pressure on him to do so. So our job is not to follow him, or to excuse his inaction or inattention or downright lapses. That is the job of people he is paying on his campaign, the job of those who expect to get jobs and contracts from an Obama administration, and others who just volunteer to look the other way.
We at BAR are journalists, and we were active in the movement long before we became journalists. Our job is to bring the heat to him and keep the heat on him, not to trust him to do better, but to make him do it. It ain't personal. I know the brother personally, and he's a good fellow, but this ain't about that. But this is business, the people's business. We concentrate our scrutiny more on Obama than on Hillary because we are black journalists writing for a black audience about black affairs, and we treat the opinions of our people as if they really matter.
The illogic that says Obama should not be expected to address the demands of Black people just so he can get elected is self-effacing, self-defeating, self-contradicting nonsense. Someone who ignores your demands in order to get into office is not going to turn around and go your way once they're in. That is purest delusion, but it's an excuse many of our people are offering for the candidate of their choice. If you want to get something in politics, you demand it. If you shut up or back down, it's off the table. We have come too far to back down just for the sake of one guy's career.
To name just two serious demands we ought to be confronting Obama with, the US policy toward Africa ought to be about demilitarizing the continent, not establishing military HQ (AFRICOM) not providing military aid, assistance or training to anybody in Africa. Listen to the Ravaging of Africa, a four part documentary posted on our site (can't link to it, that's not permitted here but you can google it). It says that the US is giving arms and military aid to 52 out of 54 African countries, arming both sides in 7 wars over the last 20 years, and one side in three wars, and four or five or more sides in the Congo. We have turned Africa into a war-torn hell on earth for the profits of US and Western corporations, the easier to extract the diamonds, the coltan, the cocoa, the gold and uranium, etc. It's time to close AFRICOM, to stop our military incursions and air sorties over Somalia which we fly every day, (wonder why you don't hear that on the media?) and withdraw all US troops and military aid from Africa. See where Obama is on that, and demand that he get right.
Another thing is that on Obama's “Plan to Change Washington” he does not mention the massive privatization of government functions across the board which actually began during the Clinton administration but ramped up to a fever pitch during the Bush regime. Homeland Security is nothing but a contracting agency. The Pentagon depends on private firms to do intelligence, to torture, to spy on civilians, and we have somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 armed mercenaries in Iraq. I do not see Obama educating the public about this pernicious trend or even acknowledging it, let alone proposing to reverse it. I could go on and on, of course, but I gotta go pay the mortgage, it's 8AM.
Massive respect again, Baratunde. Let's talk sometime soon.
We need to make that an uncomfortable position for him, and oblige him to change it.
Since I'm the chief reseearcher that does the leg work for CBC Monitor, I take exception to your remark that we use some speculation in holding CBC members accountable to their constituencies.
Where is the speculation in their voting records, which is what we use when we grade their legislative performance?
It is precisely because we based our assessments of their performance on how they voted on legislation that should be beneficial to their communities, that we publish that information to,in many instances, an unsuspecting public, just how their elected official, who is their VOICE on the Hill, is representing their interests.
We don't have time to speculate about what is directly in front of our very eyes. People didn't just wake up to Al Wynn being a corporate lackey and a piss-poor congressman because we speculated about his legislative performance.
It's because we did the research and provided the evidence to prove our pronouncement. No more and no less.
And remember, Bruce and Glen have dealt with Obama on a personal level, so anything they write about him is not speculation or hateration; they go on the evidence they find and draw conclusions from where that evidence takes them. They adhhere to the highest stardards of journalistic ethics, which they have taught to me as well.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear.
You wrote
Since I'm the chief reseearcher that does the leg work for CBC Monitor, I take exception to your remark that we use some speculation in holding CBC members accountable to their constituencies.
I wasn't saying your CBC monitor specifically used speculation though when I read it again, that IS what it looks like. Apologies
Here's what I wrote:
I've tried to address the specifics of this Clinton charge fairly and incorporated new information brought to my attention (thanks Bruce, seriously). Bruce and the folks over at BAG pride themselves on holding black leadership accountable. Just look at their no-holds-barred CBC Monitor. I respect their tenacity. Someone should do it, and they do it in a way that is grounded in information (and yeah, some speculation), but generally lacking in the unfounded, ugly and assinine charges coming out of the Clinton campaign (today's word is: plagiarism!). We should hold all politicians accountable with such ferocity.
I was actually making a more general remark (overwhelmingly positive) that BAR's work is very good. Where I DID see some speculation was in the pieces about Obama's ties to the DLC.
In BAR's reply to Obama's letter, you insist that he has "joined" the DLC despite his own claim that he had nothing to do with being listed in the 100 To Watch list. There seems to be no real way for you to know just how "in" with the DLC he is.
I also found this passage a little speculative...
His passion evaporated, a leading black candidate for the US Senate mouths bland generalities on war, peace and the US role in the world. Barack Obama, professor of constitutional law, is mum on the Patriot Act, silent about increased surveillance of US citizens, secret searches, and detentions without trial. His campaign literature and speeches ignore Patriot Act 2, which would detain US citizens without trial, strip them of their nationality and deport them to - wherever, citizens of no nation.
While he did remove the Oct 2002 speech, he did not cease speaking out against the war or Patriot Acts 1 & 2 in his speeches. At least he claims he continued to speak on it, and BAR offers no evidence to the contrary.
Overall, I find BAR's work informative, aggressive and heavily fact-based, but claims that Obama's "passion" has evaporated because he removed a speech from his site seem overblown in this case.
Thanks
They worked with the man.
And, at one point, until then-Black Commentator called out Obama on his DLC ties, he was pretty content to be listed as one of their "100 Top Elected Officials to Watch", and he did nothing about removing himself from the list until Glen and Bruce pointed it out to him.
While we don't grade Obama, we do review his voting record; at this point, until some more brothas show up in the Senate, or until we find a methodology upon which to evaluate him along with his CBC bretheren, we just keep track of his legislative performance since he got to DC.
I'm for holding this brotha accountable, to US and to the Americans he'll be representing in the White House, if he gets the job. He needs to realize that having the label of "First Black President" comes with tremendous responsibility, and very little margin for error, cause YOU KNOW that we, as African-Americans, are ALWAYS evaluated on a different set of standards than Bill Clinton or his wife will ever be. I can't speak for Bruce or Glen, but I think I'm safe in saying if this brotha f---s up the office of POTUS, race perspectives in this country will be reversed back to pre-Jim Crow and since I didn't live in that time period (but my parents and grandparents did and their stories weren't pretty), I don't that's a place any of us want to return to.
So, there's attempts to impress this upon Obama, and demanding accountability from him does not mean any of us at BAR or CBC Monitor are hating on him. Our work has served our public well - the CBC has their diapers in a bunch because Al Wynn got sent packing and BAR had a lot to do with it, plus in the form of Donna Edwards, we had a viable candidate to challenge him.
And we're looking forward, with your help, to targeting others in the CBC who think they get to stay in the club by virtue of skin color and nothing more.
Glad we could clear the air.