New ‘reality show:’ Beat on Obama

Hillary_hits_obama

Have y’all been watching this debate out of Myrtle Beach? I don’t believe I’ve seen the like of it before, without a certain key supporter of Mike Huckabee being involved. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have a tag-team thing going on the guy in the middle.

Personally, I don’t think Barack Obama’s health care plan goes far enough — but I don’t think theirs are anything to write home about, either.

As for that snarl-a-thon on the economy, I’m not sure I got anything out of it.

Now they’re competing to see who can sound least responsible on Iraq, but Edwards always wins that contest — it’s hard to top a guy who wouldn’t even leave anybody to keep training Iraqis. The sad thing is that if you get them off the stage, either of the other two can make a certain amount of sense on the issue. But all this I-was-against-the-war-first-oh-no-you-weren’t stuff isn’t exactly moving us closer to a political solution in Baghdad. And I have to wonder, do even the antiwar folks they’re trying to appeal to with that like this nyah-nyah stuff?

Anyway, I’ll keep paying the best attention to this I can under the circumstances. My two-week old twin granddaughters are visiting, and they’re more entertaining, and more in touch with basic, everyday economic issues — they keep competing to be the one to nurse first.

Anyway, I invite y’all to weigh in on this slapfest from the Grand Strand.

Edwards_hits_obama

18 thoughts on “New ‘reality show:’ Beat on Obama

  1. Lynne

    Nope. Not watching. I’m listening to Huckabee at a conference in Florida. Wow. He just said that a good coach doesn’t lower the net so the entire team can slam dunk. We train and coach and condition the players to play better. Same with moral standards. We don’t lower standards so everyone can meet them, we keep standards high, and then work to meet them. Awesome. And true.

  2. Lynne

    OK, the conference just ended. Now let me watch the debate fireworks. Hope it’s as good as you say.

  3. Doug Ross

    > and they’re more entertaining, and more
    > in touch with economic issues
    What are the economic issues you reference?
    Wasn’t it only six months ago that everything was great? Dow was at 14,000; no subprime mortgage mess;
    Now we’ve got George Bush making his last ditch effort to try and raise his approval rating above 30% bu paying $800 back to every taxpayer to try and keep the economy from tanking before he leaves office in 13 months. Hey, George, why bother giving us back $800 of OUR OWN MONEY when the country is already spending more than it takes in? How about doing something that isn’t just a pure political pandering ploy? Like cutting SPENDING!!
    And now the Democrats are rushing to get into the game in an even worse way — by suggesting that tax “rebates” be paid to people who don’t even earn enough to pay taxes in the first place!! I don’t know who is dumber – the politicians who make up these bribe-the-fools ideas or the idiots who think better of a politician for giving back money they shouldn’t have taken in the first place.
    America deserves the government it gets.
    Corruption from top to bottom lording over a bunch of apathetic moochers.

  4. Randy Ewart

    Doug, don’t forget W’s sudden interest in learning about the Middle East years AFTER his “war”.
    Billary wins any mudslinging contest because she/he is accustomed to dirty politics and they have such a high disapproval rating as it is. They are running an effective negative campaign – congrats to them.

  5. Karen McLeod

    Brad, If you don’t like any of their solutions to Iraq, What’s yours. At least Obama will talk to people. My worst problem is not what Mrs. Clinton is saying; its what her husband is saying. He’s beginning to lead me to the point where I’ll have to vote for McCain if she leads the democratic ticket. He needs to back off, and she needs to condemn attacks on him that are absurd (he’s Muslim; he turns his back during the pledge of Allegience sort of thing). I will not vote for anyone who engages in that dirty a politics. And if it keeps on, it will be the first time I don’t vote since I was old enough to cast a ballot! And I was born in ’46.

  6. weldon VII

    Here’s my problem with the Democrats said about Iraq tonight, Karen.
    When we leave, they said no American base there, not no way, not no how.
    If we don’t maintain a presence there, what was the point?

  7. alison weil

    Brad:
    that person who calls themself OBAMA SUPPORTER posted that same trash e mail all over the web (I saw it on Politico and elsewhere) – most of the sites have removed it —
    maybe if you get rid of the link – so he’ll stick to other sites for his poison
    This week in SC is too impt for that baloney to distrsct anyone

  8. Gordon Hirsch

    I’ll say it again — Obama is the target from now until Super Tuesday. Hillary can’t survive any other way, and Bill will gladly give up his honorary black standing to take Obama out — he’s already been chastised for lying about Obama and for his “unpresidential-like conduct,” but that’s never bothered him before.
    Tonight was just another salvo. The coming weeks will be an absolute mudslide of trash raining down against Obama — or is it truly just a coincidence that “for the first time” a breathless Chicago Sun-Times links Obama to corruption, as web-wide links to photos of Obama the “muslim” pop up everywhere we turn?
    It’s official, folks. Obama is the threat, and they’re going to do whatever it takes to stop him.
    But … If folks get smart, it could all backfire, and Hillary will be finished by this time next month.

  9. Gordon Hirsch

    There’s one other possible outcome (for Brad to scoff at :).
    Hillary and Obama both stoop so low in the next month that Edwards is the last man standing, the only “electable” challenger to McCain in a return to all-white-guys presidential elections, after so much time spent on who would have been the first minority to break the glass ceiling.
    If that happens, it’ll be a one-plank platform choice between the pro-war McCain and a get-us-out Edwards.

  10. Sam D

    Weldon VII: you say
    “When we leave, they said no American base there, not no way, not no how.
    If we don’t maintain a presence there, what was the point?”
    The point, dear Weldon, is the oil, all that lovely sweet crude in known and unknown reserves. And that’s what the “oil sharing law” that the Iraqis won’t pass– that’s all about making the Iraqis contract with OUR mega-oil companies and give them large profit sharing agreements such that for the next 30-40 years: about 70% of the profits will go to those oil companies.
    Plus war is always good for the defense industry and companies like Haliburton (and Blackwater and its kin).
    Maintaining bases over there means our guys are the sitting pigeons in a horribly well armed and angry country.
    Makes no sense. I mean WE WON THE WAR. Now we are just an occupying force who are getting bled to death. Even if we kill 100 Iraqis for every one of ours, they can keep going longer than we can. There are still more than 20 million left in Iraq.
    Yeah, we have long standing bases in a lot of other countries, but they aren’t shooting at us there; not in South Korea, Japan, Germany, nor in Kosovo or Serbia. So there is a big difference.
    Ya know, it’s weird. Some of you seem irritated in the idea of getting some money into the hands of the poorest who will spend it the fastest. But they need to get these funds into circulation quick before the whole economy collapses. Wealthier folks won’t be very well off if no one can buy their goods, but if they get a tax break they are just likely to but stock or put in the bank. So putting a billion or so into our OWN economy makes sense.
    Brad, why does that bother you when we are spending $9-10 billion EACH Month in Iraq? Let’s spend some money on our own country’s maintenance for a while.

  11. weldon VII

    OK, Sam, fine. We spend $2 trillion and sacrifice our soldiers’ lives for nothing, when our transportation system runs on oil and we need all the leverage over crude that we can manage.
    Fine, let’s cut and run, and let’s also make sure our big, bad oil companies don’t make any money on the deal.
    Then let’s apologize for doing the world a favor.
    Sounds like the Democratic prescription for prosecuting a war to me. When Hillary spoke about Iraq tonight, she made it sound as if Iraq deserves the sympathy and we are the enemy.
    So I’m thinking Hillary’s the new Jane Fonda. Maybe Hanoi Jane could run for vice president and Ted Turner could put that billion into our economy for you.

  12. notverybright

    I’m surprised you’d leave that first comment up. It’s a common Clinton-supporter strategy on blogs to say “I am (or was) an Obama supporter” and then post fictitious pictures or statements. It happened on my blog too until I stoppped it. And it’s gone on nationally.
    Seems like a member of the mainstream media would be particularly inclined to set facts straight or delete the lies. Guess not.

  13. Lee Muller

    Watching what debate?
    All I saw was personal invective.
    These candidates dare not discuss the issues and lay out their socialist agenda in front of the voters.
    Thanks to the media, which consists of partisans for various candidates, they need not worry about probing questions or detailed analysis.

  14. Karen McLeod

    Weldon, I understand your point of view about the Iraq war. But, the stated reason for going in was to save us from the possibility of being hit by (non-existent) WMD’s. If oil/and or war-profiteering were the actual motivations, then the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and our own troops were strictly for the purpose of fattening a few already very obese cats. So, we don’t have, and apparently aren’t going to get, the oil. Our military is running out of people. We are so in debt to China, that they may own our country and our military by now. But we will have to borrow more from them if we’re going to continue the war. Meanwhile, we’re gonna lose in Afghanistan as well, if we keep letting them drift. Hey! I have an idea! Why don’t we fund a project, like the space project, to reduce our dependency on oil. That way we wouldn’t be subsidizing our enemies every time we fill up, we might get out from under this killer debt, and might be able to turn around an economy that’s tanked thanks to a collection of very greedy, overly chubby felines. Sending good money after bad, and live troops to join the dead over there does not seem to be getting us anywhere.

  15. bud

    The GOP has had it pretty much it’s own way for the past 7 years now and where has it gotten us? The DOW was down below 12,000 in the morning session today and is currently about where it was in January 2000. Great job with the economy GOP! All this talk about growing the economy and how the tax breaks for the super wealthy have floated all the boats up is simply hard to stomach any more.
    Here’s the real analogy when it comes to the GOP approach to our economy. Lets think of our national economy as a swimming pool. It has a deep end, occupied by the wealthy, a middle depth end and a shallow end for the poor. During hard times the shallow end is high and dry and the middle part becomes very shallow. The GOP prescription for this is to drill a huge hole in the deep end to make that end a bit deeper. Even if this somehow causes more water to flow into the pool it merely serves to fill the deep end a bit deeper. A few in the middle may rise up a bit but the poorest remain high and dry. This strategy is defended by saying the pool has considerably more water than it did before. But for those on the shallow end the reality is very harsh.
    I would suggest that we should fill in part of the deep end to help those in the other parts of the pool. The super rich CEOs would have a bit less water to frolick in but could still take a deep plunge without too much trouble. Ultimately the super rich do not serve any real good in our economy any more than a small, very deep hole helps the swimming pool.
    It is time to stop all the giveaways to the super rich and focus on the rest of the people by improving our health care system, providing relief for high energy and food costs and giving folks some hope of affording college. That bit of hope doesn’t seem to be too much to ask; but we won’t get there with the GOP in charge.

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