President Obama visited the West Village the other day. Apparently blogger Hi-Fi Bri lives on the same street as Anna Wintour, who hosted the president for dinner. So Bri has done a write-up about being in lockdown, including some photos, starting here and continuing in subsequent entries. Neato.
Tag Archives: obama
Dems, Attack!
I love this letter in the NY Times today:
To the Editor:
The Sherrod affair has unfortunately confirmed my suspicion of the Obama administration: it has no backbone.
The administration seems not to realize that American politics is a contact sport, not a cerebral exercise. An attack demands an immediate counterattack. Smearing Shirley Sherrod was an attack; firing her was not a counterattack, it was a misguided attempt at damage control.
The Democratic position on virtually every issue (including, or especially, the economy) is far stronger than the opposition’s, but the administration’s defense of its policies is tepid at best.
The Sherrod affair shows that the right keeps on attacking, even when it is wrong, and the left keeps on retreating, even when it is right. For this Democratic president and this Democratic Congress, this is not a formula for success.
Charles T. Grant
Minneapolis, July 22, 2010
A++++.
Obama and Blackness
Homer said in a comment on my last post, about why the tea-partiers don’t like Barack Obama:
You forgot to mention Obama is black. That is really the problem. All the rest of the crap is just sorta random whining and sound bites. The tea partiers “Want our Country Back†because they never, ever imagined one of the black guys would be running it.
Actually, I think it’s more complicated. They don’t dislike him because he’s black, or at least not just because he’s black. They dislike him because he defies categorization. He has a white mother but a black father. And his father wasn’t an American but a Kenyan. And he lived in Indonesia for much of his childhood. And his first name has origins in Swahili and (OMG) Arabic. And his middle name is Arabic and is the same as the last name of that guy who Bush said had WMDs. And his last name doesn’t sound ‘merican.
Kenyan father, Indonesian childhood, a name with multiple foreign origins. What do they do with all of that? At least “Jesse Jackson” is pronounceable, and his ancestors were American slaves. They know what box to put him in. They know all about black people — they have generations of stereotypes about black people to fall back on. But what about that Obama guy? What box do we put him in? How are we gonna stereotype him if we don’t know what box to put him in? Obviously he must be hiding something. Kinda shifty and suspicious! At least black people are American. This guy doesn’t even seem American!
That’s the mentality, as far as I see it.