I’ve written about this weasel before. I guess I find it amusingly ironic that someone with the name “Kristol” would see it as his duty to muddy issues — to make them anything but crystal clear.

Let’s look at the weasel’s latest spray of piss in the Times. Billy boy writes…

Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter…” Does that clause seem a little odd to you? What’s the “then” for? Ah, of course. Rule #1 in the mudslinger’s handbook: if you’re going to quote your target, be sure to take it out of context. So maybe we should look at the full quote:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

There’s your “then.” Whether you agree with the statement or not, at least you understand the history that Obama is blaming for the situation. I can see why his opponents and their supporters would jump all over this. It’s incredibly easy to grab that last sentence and claim it’s equivalent to something like, “I need to find a way to tell these simple-minded rednecks that I can help them.”

But you need to think about the source. If I had said this (if I were stupid enough to try to run for elective office), it would be pretty safe to conclude that I meant it the way people are describing it. But that’s because I’m an atheist, I would support an effort to rewrite the second amendment to make it clear that it’s not about private ownership of guns, I feel thoroughly alienated when I’m in the Midwest (and I felt that way for the year and a half that I lived there), and frankly, I’m not particularly patriotic. I don’t personally think of myself as an elitist, but that’s just my opinion. But if I were a politician and I said something like that, I think it’s fair to say that my opponents would be justified in saying about me what they’re saying about Obama.

I’m not Obama. I didn’t lose my father when I was a baby. I didn’t lose my mother when I was a teenager. I wasn’t raised by my grandparents. I didn’t go to school on scholarships. For the most part, my parents paid my way. And I’m not a Christian. He is.

When the weasel compares Obama to Marx, he knows that it’s not applicable.

…[I]t’s one thing for a German thinker to assert that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It’s another thing for an American presidential candidate to claim that we “cling to … religion” out of economic frustration.

And it’s a particularly odd claim for Barack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too, “worship an awesome God.”

What’s more, he’s written eloquently in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” of his own religious awakening upon hearing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “Audacity of Hope” sermon, and of the complexity of his religious commitment. You’d think he’d do other believers the courtesy of assuming they’ve also thought about their religious beliefs.

I agree. It doesn’t make sense. If I’d said it, no problem, because you’re not going to find a record of me saying the opposite. If Obama says it, considering his history, you can conclude that either his apparent respect for religion for the past twenty years has been an attempt to fool people, you can conclude that, for some reason, he wasn’t being honest to the people he was speaking with that day, or you can conclude that what Obama’s quoted as saying in California has some meaning other than the easily attacked “elitist” interpretation. See, weasel? More than one easy conclusion, and the one that you, your pals at Fox, McCain and Clinton have chosen, it seems to me, is the one that makes the least sense. Why would a religious person believe that religion is the opiate of the masses?

But whatever you choose to believe, don’t you have to wonder what Obama’s point was in making the statement in question? What does it mean that these people who didn’t experience much if any of the growth of the national economy during good times, and who’ve borne the brunt of bad economic periods more than most others happen to put a lot of reliance in (that is, “cling to”) the elements of their lives about which they feel most secure?

It’s pretty simple, if you ask me. They’re the Reagan Democrats. They’re a big part of the people who’ve been targeted for decades by operatives like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. And what strategy was used on those people? Take the aspects of their lives that these people rely on, and scare them into thinking that your political opponents plan to take them away. Make them believe they’re going to lose their guns, that there’s a plot to seriously weaken their religious freedoms, or that their bitterness is the fault of someone other than the government that’s ignored them and the corporations that used them and then threw them away. In other words, they’re the people who receive nothing more than pandering and lip service from most politicians, who play on their fears to turn them into single-issue voters.

With that in mind, look at how Obama’s opponents and detractors have responded to what he said: they’ve denied that there’s any truth in his statement, and they’ve told the people he spoke of that they’re not bitter at all; that they’re proud, godly people with strong traditions. That is to say, they’ve pandered to them and blamed their troubles on someone else. Clinton in particular has tried to get their votes (most of which she already had) by pretending to be one of them and convincing them that people like Obama (the “elite”) are the enemy. She’s giving them one issue to override any other issue they may have been considering, hoping it will scare them enough to get them to vote for the alternative to the enemy she’s pointed out to them. And who is that alternative?

Atwater would be proud.

Tags: Bill Kristol, Obama, Politics, Propaganda

Just look at that weasel. Would you trust a word that slithered out of his mouth? Could there possibly be a smarmier smile in the world? That’s the same smile he displays on Fox when he’s saying utterly amoral, uncaring things about people whose lives mean nothing to him unless they serve to offer power or profit. This is the founder of the Project for a New American Century, for fuck’s sake — the people who a decade ago planned and promoted preemptively taking out Saddam Hussein as part of a plan to recreate the Middle East and further establish the US as the preeminent power in the world. That sure worked out well.

I don’t know why the New York Fucking Times hired Kristol to write a column. I guess David Brooks wasn’t enough of a right wing water carrying weasel to make them feel like their Op Ed section was sufficiently balanced. But I’m hoping that they’ll eventually come to the conclusion that any paper that carries Kristol’s propagandistic claptrap is a right wing paper. There’s no such thing as balance when it comes to this weasel.

Did you see the crap he spewed into today’s paper?

Last October, a reporter asked Barack Obama why he had stopped wearing the American flag lapel pin that he, like many other public officials, had been sporting since soon after Sept. 11. Obama could have responded that his new-found fashion minimalism was no big deal. What matters, obviously, is what you believe and do, not what you wear.

But Obama chose to present his flag-pin removal as a principled gesture. “You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.”

Leave aside the claim that “speaking out on issues” constitutes true patriotism. What’s striking is that Obama couldn’t resist a grandiose explanation. Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest.

Fuck you. Let’s go through his many salient points.

• Obama was asked why he wasn’t wearing the pin. It’s not as if he announced it himself.
• Yes, he could have said that it was no big deal — that it was just a fashion choice. But apparently, that would have been a lie. Besides, I have to wonder how the right wing propagandists would have responded to him treating Old Glory like it was nothing but a fashion statement.
• Why should we leave aside the idea that speaking out on issues is a sign or a form of patriotism? That was Obama’s whole point. He was asked why he didn’t wear the pin, and he said that, in his opinion (note that he said “I think”), wearing the pin had lost the meaning it was intended to carry, and that he saw patriotism as something you speak and act on rather than wear a symbol of. If you want to leave that aside, then there’s nothing worth discussing.
• Ah, but the weasel finds something else worthy of discussion: that Obama’s answer to the question was “grandiose”. What was that quote again?
  

  You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.

  That’s grandiose? Were there trumpets playing behind him? Did the people who heard him bow down in obeisance of his glorious pronouncement? Maybe somebody put an ermine cape over his shoulders and scattered rose petals at his feet. I don’t know. The words alone certainly don’t seem grandiose to me.

• Was he saying something about the people who choose to wear the pin? Not really. It seems to me he was saying that, if one wishes to demonstrate one’s patriotism, wearing a flag pin no longer accomplishes that because its meaning has been so diluted. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to wear the pin; it just doesn’t, in his opinion, say as much as actual words and deeds. Personally, I think the vast majority of the people who wear the pin do so out of a shallow desire to be seen as patriotic, whether they are or not, because they don’t want to have to actually prove their love of country. But that’s my opinion, not Obama’s.

The weasel goes on to quote Michelle Obama:

“Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”

But they can be repaired. Indeed, she had said a couple of weeks before, in Los Angeles: “Barack Obama … is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

So we don’t have to work to improve our souls. Our broken souls can be fixed — by our voting for Barack Obama. We don’t have to fight or sacrifice to help our country. Our uninvolved and uninformed lives can be changed — by our choosing Barack Obama. America can become a nation to be proud of — by letting ourselves be led by Barack Obama.

Fuck you, weasel. That has got to be the most ineffective effort at twisting someone’s words I’ve ever seen. She’s telling people that for the change Obama talks about to happen, we all have to work. We have to shed our cynicism, put down our divisions, come out of our isolation, move out of our comfort zones, push ourselves to be better and engage. The point was that we need to be involved, informed, and active. Weasel somehow wants us to take that to mean that she’s claiming we can all lay back and do nothing, and Saint Barack will take care of everything. Does he think the readers of the Times are at a second-grade level in reading comprehension? Does he think that starting to read one sentence requires us to clear the previous ones from our minds?

Fucking lying weasel.

By the way, CNN had a piece yesterday that included Obama’s response to some of the lies that people (and the weasel) are trying to spread about him.

Asked how he would fight the image of being unpatriotic, Obama said, “There’s always some nonsense going on in general elections. Right? If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. If you recall, first it was my name. Right? That was a problem. And then there was the Muslim e-mail thing and that hasn’t worked out so well, and now it’s the patriotism thing.

“The way I will respond to it is with the truth: that I owe everything I am to this country,” he said.

…

About not wearing an American flag lapel pin, Obama said Republicans have no lock on patriotism.

“A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?

“That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism.”

OK, weasel? Now shut the fuck up.

Tags: Bill Kristol, Obama, Patriotism