"In His Own Words"

[Aceflyer]

Given all the recent discussion (and given all the discussion that is likely yet to come in the coming months) about the US 2008 Presidential campaign, I wanted to just point out a few facts about the famous misleading Obama email that's been circulating on the Web:

 

I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

 

That's a false quote. The actual quote is (along with the context, which is important for understanding the quote):

 

In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific !@#$%^&*urances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

 

As can be seen above, Obama did not say that he would "stand with the Muslims," rather, he stated that he would stand with 'them', referring back to his mention of "Arab and Pakistani Americans." Further, by "ugly direction" Obama clearly meant stuff like the internments of Japanese Americans during World War II.

 

There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.

 

Again this is a doctored quote. The actual quote is (along with the context, which is important for understanding the quote):

 

Now he was trying to pull urban blacks and suburban whites together around a plan to save manufacturing jobs in metropolitan Chicago. He needed somebody to work with him, he said. Somebody black. ...

 

He offered to start me off at ten thousand dollars the first year, with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car; the salary would go up if things worked out. After he was gone, I took the long way home, along the East River promenade, and tried to figure out what to make of the man. He was smart, I decided. He seemed committed to his work. Still, there was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white - he'd said himself that that was a problem.

 

The doctored quote makes it seem as if Obama was racist; the actual quote makes it clear that the race 'problem' was raised by "the man" himself, not by Obama.

[X`terrania]

Cool, so you took the initiative to google a quote by someone and then decided to copypasta it here for all of us. I think everyone that's smart enough to browse /wd/ knows enough to not trust every single quote that's out there, and probably had doubts about it in the first place.

[Aceflyer]

Cool, so you took the initiative to google a quote by someone and then decided to copypasta it here for all of us. I think everyone that's smart enough to browse /wd/ knows enough to not trust every single quote that's out there, and probably had doubts about it in the first place.

 

Since I saw one of those quotes in Aileron's signature, no offense to Aileron, but I figured not everyone was as skeptical about that email as they perhaps should have been.

Edited July 30, 2008 by Aceflyer

[FMBI]

Good job Ace, I had a link to the factcheck.org article about that in my sig for like 2 weeks and Aileron never did anything about it.

 

At least someone else smelled something fishy about it.

Edited July 30, 2008 by Finland My BorgInvasion

[SeVeR]

You can expect the right-wing, historically and ideologically, to use misleading propaganda.

 

And as for Aileron, well, i would expect him to buy into it.

Edited July 30, 2008 by SeVeR

[AstroProdigy]

Aileron probably thinks the quotes you pasted are liberal elitist propaganda made by gay transves!@#$%^&*e feminist professors at Yale and Harvard anyway since Obama is an Islamofascist black supremacist created from the mating of Osama bin Laden with a female member of the Black Panthers and raised in the mountains of Afghanistan for a while until he got his education in Zimbabwe where he was taught by Mugabe himself to come to America and destroy it as a Trojan Horse. Oh Osama you player you when did you get the jungle fever? Edited July 30, 2008 by AstroProdigy

[GameTime]

Cool, so you took the initiative to google a quote by someone and then decided to copypasta it here for all of us. I think everyone that's smart enough to browse /wd/ knows enough to not trust every single quote that's out there, and probably had doubts about it in the first place.

 

 

By your logic you would have to mistrust every quote, because how do you know when one is right or not?

 

[PaRa$iTe]

Aileron probably thinks the quotes you pasted are liberal elitist propaganda made by gay transves!@#$%^&*e feminist professors at Yale and Harvard anyway since Obama is an Islamofascist black supremacist created from the mating of Osama bin Laden with a female member of the Black Panthers and raised in the mountains of Afghanistan for a while until he got his education in Zimbabwe where he was taught by Mugabe himself to come to America and destroy it as a Trojan Horse. Oh Osama you player you when did you get the jungle fever?

This almost made me lol. Although it's probably too obvious a PA

 

Also, these aren't even quotes out of context anymore, just plain edited stuff.

[ThunderJam]

You can expect the right-wing, historically and ideologically, to use misleading propaganda.

 

And as for Aileron, well, i would expect him to buy into it.

Oh get over yourself, geez...

Lets just hoist every negative political trick upon the shoulders of the right-wingers and maintain that the left-wingers are spotless angels. (rolls eyes)

[Hoch]

 

I must confess to being surprised by some of the responses.

This is an election year people! So you should expect the odd

twisting of words or rewording. I am sure that if I bothered to

take the time that I would find similar messages or comments

about John McCain.

 

Although I expect things like this, and it can be quite effective,

I still do not agree with it. This is despite the fact that several

years ago when I spent some time working at the RNC I helped

to draft negative political ads. Unfortunately, it is the nature of

the beast that both sides participate in. Unless or until voters say

enough is enough it will continue.

 

Ah politics, the bane of sensibility

 

-Hoch

[SeVeR]

This is despite the fact that several

years ago when I spent some time working at the RNC I helped

to draft negative political ads.

..... Always used to think, what sort of no-conscience people do this sort of thing. Lol, can't say i'm surprised.

[AstroProdigy]

Well this explains why Obama hates the troops so much.

[Aileron]

Look, Astro, I never fell into the crowd that thinks Obama is a Islamic terrorist in disguise. I think Obama is an inexperienced idealist straight out of elitist academia. The thing is while he has good intentions, he still can do a lot of damage.

 

Yes, I do believe that Obama could sell out our country in favor of ideology. In the context of the rest of the paragraph, it isn't to much of a stretch to say that in a person like Obama's mind, the detention of honest-to-God terrorists could look to him like racial discrimination, and he might be liable to create a revolving door system where terrorists are caught and released. I mean, the paragraph is addressing an academic problem. I mean, that problem certainly could happen, but its not occurring right now. It takes an elitist academic to spend time solving purely academic problems.

 

In a more extreme example, the 'cling to their guns and religion' speech implies that if Obama could concoct an academic scenario in which removing the First Amendment would help create more jobs, and he'd act upon that scenario. (Actually the speech implies that he already has made the concoction.)

 

I mean, I don't want to imply a specific threat out of Obama. What I mean to say is that Obama is an academic, and he thinks about problems in an academic way; a way which can often lead to disastrous outcomes when applied to the real world.

 

 

This doesn't make him an antagonist nor a bad person. It is a sign that while Obama was at Harvard, he was fed a lot of academic thinking in debating theory. As top of their class, Obama really soaked the stuff in. Most people outgrow that stuff with time and experience, particularly executive experience where one has to actually make decisions and finds first hand that the academic solution often doesn't work. Obama simply doesn't have enough real-life experience to overcome the academic training, and it shows with his gaffs.

 

And the annoying thing is that people think that because he's black, he has street-smarts. He doesn't. No one can argue he doesn't have book-smarts, but he lacks common sense.

[Aceflyer]

Implications aside, clearly that quote in your signature is a fabricated quote. Obama never used those exact words.

 

Furthermore,

 

In the wake of 9/11' date=' my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific !@#$%^&*urances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.[/quote']

 

The above paragraph makes it clear that he merely wanted to re!@#$%^&*ure Arab and Pakistani Americans - not Muslims, but Arab and Pakistani Americans, and yes, not all Arab and Pakistani Americans are Muslims, so it isn't accurate to subs!@#$%^&*ute 'Muslims' in place of 'Arab and Pakistani Americans' - that he would stand against any notion to resurrect the WWII-era Japanese American internment camps now for Arab and Pakistani Americans, should such a notion be seriously considered.

[FMBI]

I notice that you haven't changed your sig, or even replied to the criticism. Apparently maintaining a lie is justified so long as you have bizarre, irrelevant reasons for it?

[SeVeR]

What Finland said.

 

Where is the evidence for comments like this: "he lacks common sense" and this: "Obama simply doesn't have enough real-life experience" ???

[»Ducky]

A lot of us don't believe Obama has the experience because theory and book related experience isn't as applicable as real life experience. You have to realize when people make the comparison they are comparing him to Clinton or McCain; both of which have far superior political experience.

 

Is he lacking in any experience at all? No, he just doesn't have the most and it obviously shows.

Experience counts for a lot whether you or I really care to examine it in such a way.

[Aceflyer]

A lot of us don't believe Obama has the experience because theory and book related experience isn't as applicable as real life experience. You have to realize when people make the comparison they are comparing him to Clinton or McCain; both of which have far superior political experience.

 

Is he lacking in any experience at all? No, he just doesn't have the most and it obviously shows.

Experience counts for a lot whether you or I really care to examine it in such a way.

 

Experience didn't stop Clinton from voting for the Iraq War. Experience didn't stop McCain from advocating a gas tax break.

 

While the fact that McCain has more political experience than Obama is indisputable, quite frankly I'd rather have a less experienced but sensible fellow in the White House than a more experienced but fanatical war hawk in there.

[Hoch]

..... Always used to think, what sort of no-conscience people do this sort of thing. Lol, can't say i'm surprised.

It must be nice to live in the land of black and white My con-

science was well intact.

 

It was a job. Come on! Besides, it helped to pay my way through

Cambridge.

 

In Obama's defence, Bill Clinton did not have a lot of experience

but many of his foreign policy decisions were successful. Much de-

pends on the members of the candidates or presidents foreign pol-

icy team. Nonetheless, the US does not need another ideologue. It

had plenty of that during the Bush years. Rather, it is time for a

man with practical ideas with practical solutions to the problems.

Out of the two, McCain fits that bill.

 

A propos, it is an operation of pedantry to keep suggesting that

not all Arabs or Pakistani are Muslim. The vast majority are and

it is perfectly clear how those comments were to be understood.

 

-Hoch

[Aceflyer]

A propos, it is an operation of pedantry to keep suggesting that

not all Arabs or Pakistani are Muslim. The vast majority are and

it is perfectly clear how those comments were to be understood.

 

No offense Hoch but it appears that you are attempting to overgeneralize. The fact that most Arab and Pakistani Americans are Muslims does not mean that all Arab and Pakistani Americans should be considered Muslims.

Edited July 31, 2008 by Aceflyer

[Aileron]

Finland, fine, I'll change my !@#$%^&* sig, Sig-nazi. (For reference, the motivating force for not changing my sig was 'laziness'.)

 

Ace, Hoch already countered your last post before you made it.

 

SeVeR, the 'cling to their guns' showed lack of common sense.

 

Another thing that showed a lack of common sense was when commenting upon why we don't have enough translators in Afghanistan, rather than give an honest 'I don't know', he concocted a story of how all of our English-Farsi translators are translating English-Arabic in Iraq. He was able to come up with a problem, a cause for that problem, and a solution for the problem, and would have acted on the solution to that problem all when in reality his problem doesn't exist outside of academic theory and the real problem is that Afghanistan speaks Farsi and very few other nations do.

[FMBI]

I feel compelled to throw in my 2 cents (which, if measured by 2000's currency values, are now actually 1.2 cents).

 

#1, thanks for changing the sig. Though I dislike the Nazi reference. If I were to go with any insane ideology, I'd probably pick Trotskyism, at least it has nice (as opposed to genocidal) ideals.

 

#2, Hoch was both right and wrong. Right in the sense that most are, wrong in the sense that 90% of the people (in the US, at least) use them interchangeably, often with a heavily racist tilt. I, personally, feel the distinction is necessary, because, though obvious, it helps pound it into your brain.

 

#3, it did not show a lack of common sense. As a rural Pennsylvanian who has lived 45 minutes from the interstate (which is !@#$%^&* hard to do in this state), I've seen more than my share of people who cling to guns and religion, merely because they're there. I do not have serious disagreements with either occupation when pursued logically*, but a very large number of those I have come into contact with are willing to throw reasoning out the window whenever it comes to their two twin passions. Besides, aren't we forgetting the rest of the speech? When you consider the context, he is actually sympathetic to the woes of the working class (of which I am a proud, if upward-aspiring, member), rather than some lofty elitist looking down upon the unwashed masses. Besides, Hillary jumped on the quote so she could !@#$%^&* her false populism all over it.. that should tell you something about the veracity of criticizing him over it.

Spoiler! --Click here to view--

OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.

 

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).

 

But -- so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.

 

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. 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. So 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.

 

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.

 

#4, I personally feel this was based less on a mistake than on a "Big Picture" view (and a clear one, at that). The army (and virtually all of our intelligence services) have ignored or ineffectively focused on training translators, leading to a chronic shortage. While you can't just take an English-Arabic translator and stick them in a country that speaks Dari, Obama likely meant that, if we're putting limited resources into training people, we should be training them for Afghanistan. He has personally focused more on that country, so that would be his logical conclusion. I hope.

 

And besides, he hasn't said anything about the "Iraq-Pakistan" border yet. So there.

 

 

 

* In the case of guns, logically, safely, and without a useless obsession with how "cool" they are. In the case of religion, with the acceptance that selective literalism is an exercise in stupidity, that there are people who disagree with you, and that mis-translations and deliberate killings-off (as in the case of the illuminating, if by definition non-canonical, Gnostic scriptures).

[PaRa$iTe]

I am using AceFlyer's quote here; I assume that it is correct. It seems that either my English sucks more than I thought, or there's something you've missed

 

In the wake of 9/11' date=' my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific !@#$%^&*urances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.[/quote']

 

Now, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure that if focusing on the LAST subclause (or part of a list, whatever you want to call it), the sentence would read like this:

they need specific !@#$%^&*urances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

 

That is: The Arab and Pakistani Americans want to make sure that if the mob starts hunting them, the president (if Obama wins) will attempt to protect them. Reading just this part of the whole quote doesn't even tell us if he GAVE them those aforementioned specific !@#$%^&*urances.

Edited August 1, 2008 by PaRa$iTe

[Hoch]

No offense Hoch but it appears that you are attempting to overgeneralize. The fact that most Arab and Pakistani Americans are Muslims does not mean that all Arab and Pakistani Americans should be considered Muslims.

I never denied that it was a generalisation. On the contrary, I

merely stated that it is an operation in pedantry when the com-

ment is viewed in context.

 

Although I dislike making comparisons for the sake of argument

I will. It is no different than saying Jews when referring to Israeli.

Most Israeli are Jews. Yet, some Israeli are Christian and others

are Muslim. Though, of course, we tend to refer to Muslim Israeli

as Palestinians, which strictly speaking is not correct (but that's a

separate matter).

 

I suspect that it was more politically correct to say Pakistani and

Arab Americans, rather than Muslims. This might also have been

done given the geographical connotations involved by using those

words. Nonetheless, the meaning is no less diminished if Muslims

is used instead.

 

-Hoch

[FMBI]

If I may interject a quibble here, your choice of Israel for comparison was a bad one. While it's almost always referred to as "The Jewish state," there have been estimates in the past that up to % of ethnic Jews are (were at time of study) atheists. See what happens when you let ethnicity and religion become interchangeable? Edited August 1, 2008 by Finland My BorgInvasion