1) The technical wizardry and knowledge of the young Obama workers far outstripped the more pedestrian team working for Romney, just as it overpowered the Clinton candidacy in 2008. (Look for Obama to “help” Hillary to run, should she gear up, in 2016, and that will be all it will take, even if we don’t “like” Hillary as well. She has proven herself competent and that Ryan runt will be all over the next nomination for the Republicans as will Christie and Rubio.)
Rubio has the charisma factor. Ryan, for me, does not.He failed to carry his home state and his own home town (Janesville, WI). Nor did Ryan “work” for the millions of baby-boomers who feared what he would do to what have been dubbed “entitlement programs.” Hillary’s choice of a VP will be crucial in 2016. It will have to be a man with singular experience in government and someone relatively young, in order to corral the youth vote. (If not Hillary, who?)
2) Sandy, the storm: Was there ever a luckier event in terms of politics, for showing across-the-aisle bi-partisan working together-ness? When the Republican Governor comes out and embraces the Democratic President, how sweet is that? Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, personifies the dug-in prejudices that have mired us in stasis for half of Obama’s first term. I look for him to find a way around this aggravation, as much as he can.
3) Obama is a once-in-a-generation figure. He has “it,” that indefinable charismatic cool. He is calm under pressure, smart, and he was voted as being more “in touch” by 53% of the nation (as opposed to 43% for Romney).
Dear Connie (from friend Pam), in response:
1) I do think that barring anything really unusual happening, Hilary has an excellent change to become president in 2016. I don’t think the Republicans will run anyone who can match her. They have good candidates, Chris Christie for one. However, I think he is too independent and moderate for the Republican hierarchy (Think of his recent praise for President Obama after super storm Sandy. What real conservative would have said one kind word about our president?)
I don’t think Paul Ryan has broad enough appeal to win a national election. His budget was a give-away to the rich and a complete take- away for the poor. There are more poor people in this country than there are rich people— WAY more. Will the Republicans really run a Hispanic candidate? An Indian? Maybe, but how would that play in the Deep South and the border states? (What would Rush say? Or do, he’d probably have a melt-down not unlike his poor treatment of the young woman who attempted to testify before Congress about a woman’s right to choose.
2) I agree that the choice of VP for Hillary is critical. It has to be someone with a lot going for him (definitely a man). However, he can’t overshadow Hillary. If he does, that would make her look weak. She certainly is not weak, but remember how the press pounced on her tearing up during the primary campaign in 2008? That hurt her a lot, I thought. (*Note: I thought it humanized her, but this is a good friend and fellow political junkie’s opinion)
People, especially men, are always ready to think a woman is weak or too emotional. Actually, I think she should find someone who is moderate and acceptable to many moderate Republicans. It’s too bad Huntsman is a Republican; I thought he was very credible. I think Huntsman would have been a far better candidate for the Republicans than Romney. (*On the Sunday morning news talk shows, Joe Scarborough, et. al., described Romney as “a flawed candidate.”)
3) President Obama definitely has the “it” factor. The future is hard to predict but if he has any luck at all, I think he will go down as one of our most important, transformational and influential presidents. It’s not just because he is African-American; he’s smart and he sticks to his principles. True, he gave in on the Bush tax cuts once, but not until he was backed into a nearly impossible corner. Obama’s health care bill is not perfect; the Republicans are responsible for watering it down and making it less effective than it could have been. Still, as Biden said at the time, “This is a big f***** deal.”
4)I am hoping that Mitch McConnell is beaten in a primary fight; I’m hoping that instead his district is represented by an Aiken or a Murdock. It would be fitting. What an &***&& McConnell is!
________________
(Me again, the Associated Content Content Producer of the Year 2008 for Politics, if you wondered where this woman gets off, I’ve followed the primaries, in particular, closely since 2004 and also reported from inside the DNC, RNC, Ron Paul Rally for the Republic, Belmont Town Hall Meeting, and Rudy’s race in Florida (which was more of a stroll, really,) in 2008:
5) Where was I? Oh, yes, the relatability factor: Who could EVER think that a rich millionaire was more like “us?” There was a HILARIOUS clip from Letterman that showed Mitt commenting and it was devastatingly funny and devastatingly on target. There was also a very funny skit on Jimmy Fallon where Obama says to Mitt (Fallon) something like, “At least you created one job, Mitt…for me.”
6) Let us also not forget that Mitt never did release all of his tax returns, despite his own FATHER saying you had to release at least 10 to 12 years of same. This is a man who doesn’t even support his country to the extent that his vast wealth would allow him to do, through taxation. Yet he wanted us to elect him President of that country. He gave a good concession speech, but claimed he had not even written one, prior to election night.
I do hope this stunning defeat for Karl Rove puts him out of politics forever. He was 1 for 10. Sheldon Adelman lost $60 mill on the election. I LOVED the tape where Obama thanked the Chicago workers and teared up. [I only wish I had had the stamina and youth and know-how to HAVE BEEN one of them.]
7) Women: as we have discussed. Women in America like Obama and, while they might also have liked Romney as a person, the things he wanted to do were not in the best interests of modern women. I read that women went for Obama by a wide margin of something like 11% points. I think that people who are right-thinking people just really “liked” Obama, when compared to Mitt.
8) Did you read the piece about Ted Kennedy’s game plan when he ran against Romney in Massachusetts being resurrected again in this race? Take Mitt’s so-called “strength” (i.e., his business expertise) and find the people whose jobs he outsourced and let THEM tell it like it was! [I heard they found eighteen of them and some of them were so vehement that they couldn’t use the remarks on the air in the TV spots. (lol… And so it goes.]
6) They are predicting that AZ, that bastion of nut cases, may well become a blue state as it becomes more Hispanic. [Get ready, AZ.] And get rid of that woman Governor! Who did she think she was, shaking her finger in the face of the President of the United States like a scolding schoolmarm.
7) I feel we have “saved” the Supreme Court and it will now (potentially) re-address this ridiculous ruling about pouring $ into races. In case people didn’t notice, it didn’t work…although I did shell out a standard amount of his contributions for Obama, when asked. Most of Obama’s donors were in the $50 range. Doesn’t sound like much compared to $60 million of the $1 billion Rove and the gang raised and spent, but it’s still money out of my pocket. I also have, framed, the very first Obamacare announcement he made in Iowa City, the declaration of this now “law of the land.” I’m going to get it out and hang it up somewhere, since Obamacare is now here to stay. Did you see the “Newsweek,” that declared Obama to be “this generation’s Lincoln?” I hope that does not extend to Lincoln’s demise. I fear it. Some nutty female employee of a Cold Stone Creamery posted a rant with the “n” word and a veiled threat and lost her job, as well she should, for articulating such threats, idle or no. Then there are the petitions to secede from the South. (Maybe they could have Texas, with “W” there?) Sounds like Lincoln’s “a nation divided cannot stand” Civil War years 1861-1865.
8)
Antonio Villaraigosa, the Mayor of Los Angeles since 2005 and Chairman of the Democratic Party.
I listened to a woman on a Sunday talk show describe being inside McCormick Place on election night and I felt so bad that I could not pull that off. (Started too late to request passes after the Film Festival). She said that when it went up on the board that Ohio had broken for Obama, the place just was electric. How I wish I had been there! It was history in the making.
Instead, I went out, camera in hand, and tried to capture a few images of people in the city and spoke to some of these people anonymously. (Shopgirls, cabbies, people in a bar). And then I went on my merry way, because I WAS merry and happy and watching the returns in Chicago.
I was relatively quiescent in politics for years, because I was completely disillusioned by the death of JFK ; Howard Dean brought me back into politics, so, ostensibly, that makes me a liberal and proud of it. BUT, I voted for 2 Republicans on the local ballot, so maybe I’m a raging Independent?
From My Friend, Pam:
Mitt was a very weak candidate for many reasons, not the least of which was that he was completely out of touch with ordinary Americans. He made many, many gaffes. (Olympics, anyone?) Having previously thought him smart, I began to wonder about his intelligence.
It’s incredible to me that the Republicans seemed to think that Mitt could completely change his thinking on big, basic issues and no one would care or remember. The Reps thought Mitt’s business smarts would trump everything but Mitt never gave any specifics about how he was going to put everybody back to work. He never gave any specifics about how his budget plan could give tax cuts and still reduce the deficit. I think a lot of people feared he would take away the mortgage deduction and he probably would have. [After all, that is probably not very important to an ultra rich person.]
I am also very glad that all the billions spent by the Republicans did not get them very much. I’m glad that Karl Rove failed. I hope “Turd Blossom” (“W’s” nickname for him) goes away and stays away. 1 for 10 is NOT a good average. So much for his much-vaunted expertise and the whining that Rush has done on the radio and the accusations that the pollsters were “oversampling” Democrats. The pollsters got it right. The Republican party got it wrong.
Women are over half of the population and they are in the ascendancy. I just read in the paper now that more women have driver’s licenses than men. Women demand safe, fuel efficient cars and that will be good for the environment.
The Republicans whom Obama reached out to on election night (Boehner and McConnell) would not even come to the phone. The message to the newly re-elected president was that “they were asleep,” despite the fact that the election was called for Obama fairly early in the evening (8:30-ish).
They were asleep, all right. Old and asleep.
As a party they did not even recognize that a freight train of change was bearing down on them until it ran over them. Women. Minorities. The regular guy. The changing face of America. Charisma of the candidate. Smart tactics. Superior strategical advantage(s). A nod to Hurricane Sandy.
There goes 2012. And I hope someone burns that piece-of-trash movie “Obama’s America” for the smear job it was.
Go see Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” instead. It’s closer to what Obama faces now.
“2016: Obama’s America” A Complete Hatchet Job- Read This And Learn the Truth!
By Connie Wilson
On August 26, 2012
In Editorial, Local, Movies, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics, Reviews
Mitt Romney spoke with “Time” magazine’s Rick Stengel and Michael Crowley in an interview on August 21st (September 3, 2012) and said, “I will not waste a campaign attacking him (President Obama) as an individual.”
Imagine my surprise, then, to see the movie “2016: Obama’s America,” supposedly a documentary (I use the term loosely), which was playing at my local Cineplex and rated a big notice in our right-leaning newspaper (The Small family which owns the paper, in decades past, contributed the most corrupt Republican Governor in Illinois history, eclipsing even the recent Rod Blagojovic).
That label goes double for D’Souza, who has written many books, served in Reagan’s White House, and had no less an authority than the “Washington Post” (5/1/2010) pronounce his book about 9/11 “The worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11.” (Whose fault was 9/11 according to Dinesh D’Souza? Why, liberals, of course! The “New York Times” in reviewing the book called it “a national disgrace.”)
So, how’s the movie/”documentary”?
Well, it’s about what you’d expect from this darling of shows like Hannity & Colmes on Fox News or Glenn Beck’s program. D’Souza has debated other intellectuals (among them the late Christopher Hitchens at Notre Dame) and admitted at the end of an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report” that he shares some of the same negative beliefs about liberal Americans as Islamic militants.
The film is a real hatchet job.
For instance, a segment is produced claiming to be an interview with a member of Obama’s distantly related relatives in Kenya (Sarah Obama), but the voice is that of Onekie Smallwood. You actually feel sorry for Obama’s distant relatives (his father was much-married and fathered many children by at least three different women, one of them, son George, not born until 6 months after his death). They obviously didn’t know what D’Souza was really up to when they spoke with the man.
What D’Souza was really up to was to try to use fear (cue the spooky music) and the Karl Rove-generated fear tactics used to elect “W” (“Love him or hate him, you don’t know him”—which can more accurately be claimed of their Republican nominee) technique that drove us into 2 disastrous wars under George W. Bush. This “make up any falsehood/ tell any lie” technique is used to blacken the reputation of the sitting president, who has been kept from helping the country pull out of the mess “W” left us in by what is dubbed “The Party of No” in another of the articles in this issue of “Time.”
As Mitch McConnell, the architect of this obstructionist tactic that would sacrifice the national interest of the United States at the altar of partisan politics designed the Republican tactic, “He wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory. (The words of Ohio Senator George Volnovich in the article, who further said, “If Obama was for it, we had to be against it”, p. 44, “Time,” September 3, 2012).
So, exactly what is D’Souza—whose reputation for fair play is not high—-up to with this “documentary”? (I use the term loosely.)With sweeping shots of Lady Liberty in New York City, D’Souza contrasts that with a journey to the most squalid places and people on earth, it would seem, dwelling on Obama’s trip to Kenya and trying to make the case that Obama “wears a mask” and making a big deal over Obama’s returning a bust of Winston Churchill to Great Britain.
Is the Churchill Bust Controversy a Total Bust? – ABC News abcnews.go.com/…/is-the-churchill-bust-controversy-a-total in an article written on July 27, 2012. There were at least 2 additional articles concerning this tempest-in-a-teapot, and it turned out that there were TWO busts of Churchill, one of which was returned, as previously scheduled, and one of which remains.
But is this really the most important issue this country faces in this day and age? [I didn’t think so.]
George Obama: Half-Brother of Barack Obama
D’Souza seems to think so, as he claims returning the statue shows that President Obama thought colonial countries who settled in far-flung empires like Indonesia or D’Souza’s native India, were simply there for the loot and that he is, therefore, “anti-colonial.” In an interview with Obama’s half-brother several times removed (a man over 21 named George), the obviously intelligent Kenya native expressed his opinion that colonialism was not responsible for Kenya’s bad luck, and that “Maybe if we’d let the whites stay a little while longer” the country would have done better, economically-speaking. George also expressed the opinion that he was “over age” and, when asked if Barack Obama should be helping support him, said, “Go ask him. I think he has a family of his own.” This remark was then shown with side-by-side shots of the White House and the hovel in which young George, [the half-brother who was born 6 months after their mutual father was killed in a car accident], now lives. The message for viewers was quite blatant: Obama doesn’t care about his own family members. D’Souza even made a reference to the Biblical story of Cain and Able. It’s ironic, considering that all articles on the Romney/Ryan ticket suggest (see “Time,” page 40) that the Republican duo’s “budget math is coldhearted towards the poor and the elderly.” It’s no News Flash that Paul Ryan is not Medicare’s friend.
DRINKING:
There were also repeated references to excessive drinking by Obama’s birth father and by Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soltoro. (“We drank with him”). More tribal music. More shots of squalor. Cue to old guy with bad teeth (Kogelio Oto). Kogelia tells us he had been drinking with Obama’s father “until 1:30 p.m.” before the senior Obama was killed in an auto accident on November 24, 1982. The narrator even works in lines like, “This father (Soltoro) is an abusive alcoholic. He kills a man in a car accident” and distorts the statements of a former professor of Stanley Ann Dunham’s (stressing that the couple met “in Russian class”). I felt sorry for Dr. Alice Dewey, Professor Emeritus of Hawaii, who obviously was “conned” into making statements that are twisted and misconstrued; it was like a bad version of “Borat.”
So, one message that the movie underhandedly attempts to convey is:
1) Obama doesn’t care about his relatives. Does anybody really believe this? And does anybody really believe he owes a family half a world away, whose relationship to him is tenuous at best (different mothers, never knew each other growing up, etc.) support and assistance when even the young man who is his half-brother says differently?
COLONIALISM:
2) Another message from D’Souza: “Colonialism was good.” (D’Souza is the author of an article with the title “Two Cheers for Colonialism”). We could debate this one for a long time. There certainly is a case to be made for some good things that came out of colonialism. But it is just as true that the colonial countries (England, Portugal, France, Spain, Italy, et. al.) journeyed to far-flung lands to bring back the wealth of those lands. Doesn’t anyone remember why the United States of America fought the Revolutionary War? (Hello?) Does the Boston Tea Party ring any bells? Colonialism may have helped educate and improve the standard of living of some countries (India comes to mind) but it certainly was NOT all “Days of wine and roses” for the countries being stripped of their riches and any high school history class in any classroom in this country touches on that salient fact. So, message number 2 from D’Souza, is that Obama—like his father(s) before him—is anti-colonialism, which seems like a fairly reasonable position in this day and age. [D’Souza uses as his most telling point the fact that Obama supposedly wants to give the Falkland Islands back to Argentina. (Does anybody really care about the Falkland Islands during this election season— except possibly the people who live there? And wasn’t that one-day wonder war fought when Reagan was in office? Sheesh. And is THAT statement even true, since so many of the other “truths” of this documentary are falsehoods? I’ll leave the research on that one to someone else. Let me know.)
3) With statements like this one: “Other presidents were known figures. Obama came out of nowhere,” and “What is Obama’s dream?” and “The son is realizing his father’s dream” D’Souza tries to connect Obama’s hopes/plans for our country to a man Barack Obama only met once in his life and never lived with. It is true that Barack had to deal with an absent father who was, as the movie puts it, “air brushed” in a positive way by his white mother, but it is more true that he never really knew the man. I do believe that Obama probably was driven to achieve so much because he wanted to prove his worth and, possibly, earn the love of his always-absent father, but that just makes me like him and feel empathy for him. It doesn’t make him a bad person, a Communist (implied), a person who hates whites (stated) or a person who wants our country to fail, as the Tea Party Congress seems willing to let happen. The words of Obama’s book about visiting his father’s grave in Kenya are used against him (DId Mitt ever write anything worth reading?). D’Souza quotes from Obama’s book “Dreams From My Father:” “Everything I was doing carried the full weight of my life. I sat between 2 graves and wept. The circle closed.”( Is there any person on the planet who is not a product of his or her parenting and upbringing, including D’Souza?)
Stanley Dunham, Obama’s Grandfather
4) Among other things that D’Souza suggests (without a shred of proof) is that Obama “hates whites,” that his plan is to spend the U.S. into oblivion (while cutting our nuclear arsenal), and that he’d like to see us reconcile more with Muslim countries (which, actually, sounds reasonable; do we HAVE to be the “most hated country in the world?”).
“The usual suspects” are trotted out to smear our sitting President, including Bill Ayers (the Weather Underground bomber who became an academic at the University of Chicago); the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (I think we all remember that flap, which ended in total repudiation of the pastor by the president); Frank Marshall Davis, who, because he was a Communist, obviously had to be his best friend (Here, D’Souza uses Paul Kengor to talk abut 22 references to Frank in “Dreams From My Father”), a little-known Brazilian economist and Edward Said of Columbia, who, claims D’Souza, is a leading critic of Israel. (D’Souza is trying very hard to lose Obama the Jewish vote and the votes of those who frown on drinking in any form, as Mormons do.—Mormons don’t even drink coffee or pop, so you can imagine how much support alcohol gets.)
GUANTANAMO
Another statement by D’Souza: Obama is “weirdly sympathetic” to those who want to close down Guantanamo. I’m sympathetic to closing down Guantanamo and it’s not “weird” at all. It would have been a great idea to bring those prisoners to the brand-new prison sitting idle in Illinois. The conditions in Guantanamo should not be visited upon another human being, and their suicide rate is extraordinarily high. (See “Mother Jones” issue for a more full description of the terrible living conditions there and many who were innocents detained for years without due process, from a variety of foreign countries. Apparently, the country from which they were taken used the sweep to get rid of many undesirables, including mental defectives and one person who was actually known as “Halfhead,” as I recall the article. A few were very young boys. Many were guilty and have been found guilty in courts, now, but many were not even involved in the war but were undesirables the country of origin wanted to deport.)
OUT OF CONTEXT
Brokaw at the DNC in Denver in 2008.
There is a brief shot of Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw talking at the familiar round table, where Charlie mentions, “We don’t really know what he stands for, do we?” and Brokaw agrees in a two-second clip. I saw that program. Complete misrepresentation of the entire content of the program. I couldn’t help but think of how little we know about Mitt Romney, who won’t even release his tax returns for any but ONE year. A Brian Williams piece this past Sunday on the Mormon Church certainly showed a denomination that has turned the clock back on equality for women and has some other odd ideas, including equating blacks with “the devil” until quite recently, as was pointed out by comedian Chris Rock when a guest on a late-night talk show. ( And they like to baptize you after you’re dead, as they did with Ann Romney’s atheist father.)
1. The sad thing about a “documentary” like this is that many people believe implicitly what they are told, if it is told skillfully enough, even though most of it is total hogwash. For one thing, the space program was being dismantled by Obama’s predecessor (“W”) before Obama was even elected, because it wasn’t the money-maker that George the second thought it would be. (See article here on NASA, from a visit there: President Obama Vows Support for a New, Improved NASA Space …
voices.yahoo.com/president-obama-vows-support-improved-nasa-58…Cached
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Apr 15, 2010 – “I Am 100% Committed to the Mission of NASA and Its Future…” Connie Wilson, Yahoo! Contributor Network Apr 16, 2010 “Share your voice on …
2. Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Challenger Explosion – Yahoo! Voices
voices.yahoo.com/twenty-fifth-anniversary-challenger-explosion-77…Cached
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Jan 26, 2011 – The next 5 years saw increases in budgeting for NASA. …. Connie Wilson has written for five newspapers and taught writing at six Iowa/Illinois …
At the end of this total hatchet job, which suggests without factual basis that Obama would cut our military superiority and WANTS to spend us into debt, as well as many other misrepresentations about him, this travesty ends with, “The future is in your hands.”
A rather large woman in the audience, as the lights went up, began chanting, “NObama!” I stood up and said, equally loudly, “Let’s not forget who got us into two totally unnecessary wars to spend us into this debt.” This caused the rather large—okay, fat—-woman to say, “Oh, come off it!” and I thought we were going to have an old-fashioned donnybrook right there in the aisle of the Great Escape Theater in Moline, Illinois.
This film is nothing but (more) Karl Rove fear-mongering (see previous article on how Rove has his finger in all Romney pies). It is a disgrace to have an interview statement from Romney in “Time” in which the candidate CLAIMS he is not going to go after Obama personally but then lets the campaign (or the PACS, with their $1.8 BILLION dollars collected!) paint Obama’s biological father (whom he barely knew) as a no-good-nik, and also slam his paternal grandfather, who really raised him, and declare the president (who had a white mother, after all) to be anti-white, anti-colonialism (good for him) and state that he wants to close down Guantanamo (so do I).
It is unfortunate that the REAL important issues are either glossed over or are presented in such a ridiculous and unfair and untruthful light (witness the Winston Churchill bust stupidity).
The final line (“The future is in your hands”) makes me want to point a finger on one of those hands at Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan and say, “Shame on BOTH of you!” (And that goes double for the fat Tea Party woman who wanted to hit me.)
I did a piece on “Influential Figures in the Life of Barack Obama” by request for Yahoo. Here is a link to it. It is far more accurate than this smear job. Read it if you want to know the truth about the real influences on Barack Obama’s life. (And, no, I didn’t do it for this election cycle, but I thoroughly researched it and it is the truth, not a smear job like “2016: Obama’s America.”
1. Influential People in Barack Obama’s Life – Yahoo! Voices – voices …
voices.yahoo.com/influential–people–barack–obamas–life-1539933.ht…Cached
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Jun 6, 2008 – Influential People in Barack Obama’s Life. Who Are Some of the People Who Helped Form Barack Obama’s Life and Career? Connie Wilson …