Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by nlanza
fuck off.....
Look, man, if you're going to whine about how immature P&R is in other forums here, the least you could do is try to act like an adult.
"But other people do it toooooo!!!!!" isn't even a good excuse for a five year old.
Grow the hell up.
fuck off.....
Why on earth would I do that? He's established pretty clear boundaries on what he will and won't do, and unlike the rest of the candidates he's been surprisingly pander free. For example, after his dustup over Muslim comments he backed down and made nice with the Muslim community, something I can't picture the rest of them doing. Same deal on his not-my-business comments about religion; his libertarian leanings show.
I do, however, think he knows next to nothing about government or how real-world politics works, and it shows; like Clark in 2004 he's making a series of comical amateur mistakes. He apparently hasn't really thought through what a real campaign in the 2012 GOP primary with the current quasi-racist crazytown base is going to look like. See the backlash to his comments on Perry's ranch.
Welcome to the real world, where people ask touchy questions instead of deferring to you all the time, Mr. CEO guy. Like the Vietnam war, people expect a good answer to the question of what you were doing back then. For right or wrong, the President isn't supposed to be like other people.
To be fair, his crime is that he hasn't learned to be a good politician. Good politicians know how to duck and weave and avoid answering the question a reporter asks by answering the question they wished he'd asked. Clark is a good example of someone else who had not mastered the art of being a politician.
In some ways I almost prefer these guys, on either side, who haven't mastered the politician ninja waltz, as you sometimes hear a lot more of their actual, unvarnished thoughts and thought processes than the politicians who know how to provide the amorphous non-answer.
I dunno, it's kind of unpleasant to in these kinds of cases whether they're any good at it or not. "I focused on getting into a good school and staying out of trouble" isn't going to make you look good when MLK graduated from the same school.
Or "I got where i am with no help from any one else" is going to sound ridiculous when he excused himself from one of the seminal movements of American history.
Sure, but it's honest. And the majority of black kids his age did the same. To add a bit, even if you hate his politics, this is a guy who was born into a very poor black family, his dad worked 3 jobs, his mother was a cleaning woman in the old south. In those days, for him to be able to work his way into college and get a degree was a huge thing for the family, and by all accounts his parents sacrificed to help him get into school. I'm not at all surprised that he wanted to do well and graduate, as did most of his black peers. Take a look at most African Americans in Congress that are about his age, and most of them have the same type of story as him: worked hard in a tough system for a young black person to do well in school. It's nothing to be ashamed of, and certainly easy for us white folks sitting in 2011 typing on our computers in our nice homes to tell a guy like that what he should have done back then.
Last edited by JeffL; 10-10-2011 at 08:41 PM.
The GOP haaaates angry blacks and civil rights is synonymous with angry blacks for a lot of white folks. Cain has the right idea, but he needs to be a bit slicker.
Scuzz, this is pretty crappy. Edit it out, man, you're not doing yourself any favours.
It's not that he didn't participate, or there's something wrong with not participating. It's that his biography (up from his bootstraps, elite college, rich black CEO with a mainstream business) is a two-edged sword - it'd be impossible for a black man to be a CEO of anything but a business catering to blacks, or a Presidential candidate, without the civil rights movement. That he didn't participate in, and was a completely enormous intervention that benefitted him and all other minorities, and is exactly the sort of thing he apparently doesn't think the government should be doing. And said famous extremely talkative guy with an opinion on everything has no more comment than "dad told me to stay out of it" and can't respond to how it impacted him? No one but his most diehard supporters is going to make sense of that.
I have no idea what we could say that'd be a remotely decent response to both his GOP supporters (who are still upset about the civil rights movement and blame blacks for most things) and the rest of the public. Colin Powell could answer this, but that's because Colin Powell didn't have to toe the wingnut line.
Last edited by Jason McCullough; 10-10-2011 at 08:56 PM.
What I would imagine he could say is that out of respect for his parents, who had sacrificed so much to get him into college and keep him there (I imagine) he promised to keep out of trouble and make his mark through graduating well and doing well and proving college was something all black men and women could achieve. Etc.
Possibly despite himself, he's making a perfectly reasonable series of objections to the metacommentary here about this particular Cain statement. It's a stupid question, as there are honest ways to ask about the cognitive dissonance of the GOP in terms of race without implying that a black politician needs to establish his civil rights movements bonafides before being taken seriously. It really doesn't matter what you as not Herman Cain would have said in Herman Cain's shoes, as you can't switch off basic liberal precepts about racial empathy for political convenience.
Also, last I checked Cain didn't help cover up My Lai or cover up for a dishonest administration about Iraq WMD evidence, so he's still got several tiers of easily quantifiable moral superiority over Colin Powell. I mean, if all of a sudden backing Obama amounts to a leftist indulgence program I imagine more people would have considered it.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd have a hell of a lot more respect for Cain if he'd said, "Look, my family was poor as hell and my parents put up with a whole lot of misery so that I could have the opportunity to go to college. I didn't feel at the time like I could put all that on the line for something that blah blah blah..."
I'd have more respect* for him if he'd said "you are a complete shit for criticizing me for not risking my life as a teenager during the civil rights movement." It's seriously an asinine question that that guy had no right to ask.
*from zero to .001, roughly.
I don't see the Rosa Parks question that way at all. He's not really being asked about himself there, he's being asked whether the Civil Rights movement was valuable to the country. He completely flubbed it by personalizing it.
But the question went beyond Rosa Parks.......
As stated above I am not about to judge what any "person of color" did during the civil rights era. Especially in the south. Everyone would like to think that they could do the right, the brave thing but real life isn't that easy. Hind sight makes things damn simple sometimes.
Christie to endorse Romney.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g.html?hpid=z1
Looking more and more like the Pubs are going to swallow their medicine and nominate Romney.
Of course they are. Look what happened with Dems in 08. All but the hardest core Hillary supporters immediately went over to Obama when he got the nomination and forgot all the terrible things they said about him during the previous six months.
Romney knows this and is playing the long game.
What a surprise.
The next question is, which loony will be selected as Romney's running mate?
This will be interesting. Will Romney go for the Tea Party pickup by going with Bachman as VP? Perry would never take a VP slot, but what about Cain?
Apparently Rubio is the likeliest VP candidate, based on reading the tea leaves.
Romney would only pick Bachmann if he wanted to lose. Americans rejected the first Tea Party moron, remember? :) Also I don't know how much traction Bachmann actually has with tea party people anyway. She's not getting great turnout where she goes.
Rubio would be the smartest choice which means that Romney will probably pick Perry.
I didn't know that Cain had a masters in computer science.
Looks like Palin's the ch*&*&X$&&$^^^
NO CARRIER
Cain is a bigger asshole than I thought.
Boortz, at the tail end of the interview, asks Cain how he’d do in a debate against Obama:
“It would almost be no contest.”
Ticking off ways he could compete with Obama, Boortz says that Cain would be able to talk about the black experience in America.
Cain’s response: “[Obama’s] never been a part of the black experience in America.”Of course, this isn’t the first time that Cain has attacked Obama for his blackness, or lack thereof. At the beginning of this year, he told a group of Republicans that “they”—the liberal media—are “scared” that a “real black man might run against Barack Obama.” Likewise, in an interview with New York Magazine this summer, Cain doubled-down on his remarks, telling the magazine that Obama is not a “strong black man” in terms that he identifies with. That Cain presents himself as more blackity-black than Barack Obama is just part of his persona.
What’s striking about it all is his choice of audience. With the exception of his interview with New York Magazine, Cain saves these remarks for white, Republican audiences. I’d be shocked if this wasn’t deliberate. Conservatives hate accusations of racism and are more vocal about those than they are actual instances of discrimination against racial minorities. With his upbringing in the segregated South and an accent that shows it, Herman Cain stands as the perfect weapon against anyone who questions the racial egalitarianism of conservatives. To borrow a line I used yesterday, Cain offers “absolution from racial guilt and a unique chance to turn the tables on liberals who accuse the right of racism.”
God, if Cain is the GOP nominee it will be really zany to see the antics of Sharpton et al. And by "zany" I mean "grim and somewhat bizarre."
If Romney gets the nomination - and let's not forget the predictions at this point are extremely unreliable, otherwise we'd have had Guiliani vs. Clinton last time - I would suspect he's smart enough to not put a Tea Party candidate on the ticket. He knows he'll get the extreme right vote just as a way to vote against Obama. I'm guessing he'd try to pick someone to help him with independents.
Of course, the VP pick is often about getting a state that is able to go for either party, such as Florida. (Damned Electoral College. LOL!)
Everyone says that Rubio is the perfect VP candidate. I wonder about Jeb Bush though.
Jeb is not running.
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