Web Letters: Obama and the Politics of 'Presumptuousness'

The Liberal Media

By Eric Alterman

This article appeared in the September 1, 2008 edition of The Nation.

August 13, 2008

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  • Good start here by Mr. Alterman on taking Dana Milbank to task for his biased coverage. But as usual, even "The Liberal Media" fails to dig deeper to find out what's really going on here. Dana Milbank is a member of Yale's Skull and Bones, just like George W. Bush and John Kerry. So it really should come as no surprise that he seeks to sink Obama at any cost.

    But as long as the "liberal media" (and "The Liberal Media") continues to ignore these connections, people like Milbank will continue to succeed in propping up the corrupt regime.

    Greg M. Schwartz

    San Francisco, CA

    08/20/2008 @ 1:42pm


  • I wonder if Mr. Alterman would like some cheese with his whine. He has no sense of reality and has to rewrite history in order to make his absurd points. In his first paragraph, he has mixed up the Clinton Administration with President Bush, and later the racist Democrats with the Republicans. Just to set the record straight, it was the Democratic Party that was founded on racist thought. Thomas Jefferson, who cofounded the Democratic Party with Andrew Jackson, said in 1781 that blacks "are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind." In 1865, to counter the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments which ended slavery, the Democrats founded the KKK, a party to which Senator Byrd used to belong.

    You can blame the Jim Crow laws on the Democrats, and it was Democrat Arkansas Gov. Faubus who used the National Guard to keep nine black teenagers from going to school with whites in Little Rock. But Republican President Eisenhower used US troops to reverse the situation.

    Democrats endangered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with strong opposition from Democrat Al Gore's father, who joined twenty other Democrats voting against the Act. Only four Republicans voted no. Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen pushed the bill through the Senate.

    Mr. Alterman is positioning the possible loss of Barack Obama on xenophobia and of course racism, instead of his lack of substance and his Marxist ideals. So according to Mr. Alterman’s logic, the only reason to vote for Mr. Obama is to prove that America is not xenophobic and racist, which are really stupid reasons to make any decision.

    To elect a President one has to consider the laws they may push, and the tone that they may govern by. The very fact the Obama shows a lack of pride in America should be reason enough not to elect him.

    Mr. Obama had to be embarrassed into putting on a flag pin, his wife said for the first time ever she is proud of her country, he picked a minister that preaches hate of America and Mr. Obama has told us what about America he is proud of.

    Finally, in the conflict with Russia Mr. Obama’s blames America first, and if he were President would first try talking then fold into giving Russia all they ask for, reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain.

    Robert Exton

    San Francisco , CA

    08/20/2008 @ 1:38pm


  • What? No complaints about the title of Milbank's piece: "President Obama Continues Hectic Victory Tour"?

    Cameron Jones

    Indiana, PA

    08/15/2008 @ 5:30pm


  • Thanks for saying the not-so obvious obvious reality out loud. Between Dana Milbank and Brit Hume, any pretense of color-blind, gender-free, religion-uncommitted, ideology-vacuumed line of thought can now be vacated.

    We have been dumbed down, and we have been dumbed down by the worst. Not only has George "won" two elections, he has begun and not finished two wars and threatened to start a few more with North Korea, with Syria, with Iraq, with China, with Russia; not only has he ruined the inhabitants of one city, he has ruined a whole country with foreclosures, looted pensions, oil dependency and Wall Street drunkenness. Now he has created the perfect storm for a Bush 3: McBush to be followed by a Bush rerun, the Jeb version.

    The thing is, though, does any of this matter any more? Once morality and immorality have become one and undistinguishable, why would anyone express any more concern? Why should we? Does it matter whether it's a white guy or a black guy, as long as both have been co-opted and can both claim to be the one to bring us change? Why does it matter that Johnny Mac is beholden to oil or that he is an adulterer who now wants to be a deciderer? As long as we can claim the Constitution will survive anything, we are home free. You know, the home of the free, where more than 1 percent of our citizenry is now incarcerated. The land of the brave, where both President and Vice President were AWOL, and one now can be macho by dressing up and the other one can be manly by shooting caged quails.

    At the rate we are going, we all need to be saved from ourselves. We all need to be born again, and hopefully not the way Nixon prays!

    Quan Cao

    Boca Raton, FL

    08/15/2008 @ 3:30pm


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