Fact or Fiction?
Submitted by pia1482 on February 10, 2007 - 5:36pm.
Abraham Lincoln | Ebony | Forced Into Glory | Lerone Bennett | Obama | politico | Tavis Smiley | Democratic politics | none
I've been watching
Tavis Smiley’s - “State of Black America”
which has been on C-Span all day today, both prior to, and after Obama’s speech. I was struck before Obama's speech, and have always been impressed with the enormous number of great orators the Black community have. They speak without written speeches, just off the cuff, and Obama pales in comparison to the majority of them.
I'm not dissing Obama, just rather bemused at the fuss over him.
Also, I would think that Republicans and certainly the Democrats who are supposed to be in the lead at the moment, are researching and analysing Obama's books. According to "The Politico" today:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0207/2694.html
"4. Disclosures in His Books
A little-noticed disclaimer at the front of his 442-page memoir of his youth, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” says: “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people that I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of their privacy.”
The disclosure calls into question the pages and pages of years-old dialogue that Obama recalled when he was writing the book, a frank and searching account of his effort to come to terms with issues of race in America, at age 33. Lynn Sweet, the dogged Washington reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, spotted the disclaimer in 2004 and wrote one of the few critical stories every printed about Obama. “I say in the book it is my remembrances of what happened,” he told her in an interview. “I don’t set it out as reportage … read the book for what it is worth.”'
It also seems, according to Lerone Bennett, who is Executive Editor of
“Ebony” magazine and author of:
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream
that Abraham Lincoln’s agenda was not to free the slaves, far from it. As you will see by reading some of the reviews, it seems he was a racist bigot.
So fact or fiction are going to be questions too.
at Tavis' Black SOTU forum.
Re: Obama, read recently that some blacks see his alignment with the abolitionist-president as somewhat disengenuous since he has no descendancy from Black American Slaves.
No "Roots" they claim. A bit of hypocrisy they
claim. (I don't know that I agree, but that is not for me to say) OTOH, he does have an alignment with Lincoln
in that they both served in the IL legislature. Is that enough? ...not for me to say.
I don't yet have a very good handle on Obama. At best,
he did oppose the war from the beginning. That's in his favor on my list of criteria.
btw pia, your politico link doesn't work for me
Watch and listen...
Thanks Sybil , I should've checked it.
What was interesting about Tavis' forum was that when questions were asked about Obama it was very obvious from the answers, also from the audience reaction that he is not viewed favorable. The audience seemed to be made up of middle class professional people.
He's a fantastic speaker. He really floored me at the DNC Winter Meeting.
But here's a problem. OF COURSE he was against the Iraq War from the start. He's a good old fashioned Democrat!
Oh... but wait, good old fashioned anti-war stereotypical Democrats are what got us into this mess. They left us open to the use of fear against us.
Fear can only work so long because the right wing is WRONG. They've created a mess because they're WRONG. And it's coming home to roost.
As a result, people are open to good old-fashioned Democrats again. But if we elect one of them, if we slip back into that Democrats Don't Do National Security mindset, what happens in 5-10 years when the failures of the Bush administration have faded in people's minds? What happens when -- not if-- there's another international crisis that makes it possible for the right wing to pull the fear card again? What happens? We'll be right back where we are today.
We cannot allow a little temporary success like we had in 2006, or rather than our success the Republican's complete and utter failure, to allow us to forget everything we've learned about how we got into the crisis that we're in. We were weak on national security--on purpose. The Republicans used that against us. That forced the old-fashioned Democrats to have to compromise or lose. And we wound up with a bunch of total wimps, an unfinished war we should have won, and a disaster of a war that we never should have entered. And some 3000+ dead soldiers, not to mention countless dead Iraqis and a Middle East that could implode upon itself at any moment.
We cannot be this unprepared again. We MUST be a full-service party. We MUST not fade back into the 70's. We MUST be the national security party. Senator Obama cannot do that for us. He's a flashback to what we used to be. It's nice to think we could go back to that. It's nice to think that "we were right and it's been accepted now and we can go back to what we were doing before" But it's just not true. If you think it is, if you think American's have "learned their lesson," I'd caution you to remember that we probably thought that in 1974 about the lessons we'd learned from Vietnam as well.
the lessons we should have learned about being ever vigilant of our rights and not just handing them off to our elected officials because we have better things to do with our time.
No, we can't go back. The only way is forward.
Add to that, we DO have control of Congress right now. It is going to take a very special Democrat running in 08 for the country to give us total control.
Repubs left a pretty sour taste in the peeps mouth for one party control right now.
I don't think they voted for us in 2006 so much as they voted against the status quo. We have no laurels to rest on, but it sure seems to me that's what we want to do. They've given us an inch, let's take a mile! We're like the driver that just got the suspended license back and goes out and does 90.
This war, this nightmare, does not belong only to the Republicans. We let it happen. We have DINO's all over--not just because DINO's are assholes but also because that was the only way to survive. We were supposed to be the opposition party. One party rule didn't just happen because we were out of power; it happened because we let ourselves be powerless.
Our offensive line laid down on the field and the fear-mongers blitzed us, and our quarterback broke his leg. Now that his leg is healed, we can't just go throw him back out there without a front line to protect him. OK, sorry, got carried away on the football analogy. I'm still grieving. Give me a break.
I Want To Believe by davidsirota http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/10/1427/83134
Follwoing is the Link in the diary. It's from Sirota's-archives... it's a good read if you didn't read it last June. I read it "back when", but it's also a really danmed good 'review'... on this day in American history.
Mr. Obama Goes to Washington The Nation - 6/7/06 (Permalink)
bottomline:
Obama wlill often be a reliable liberal vote, and he can give one hell of a speech. But we should believe him when he downplays our expectations. He says he’s “a work in progress,” but he’s in an institution that tends to stifle greatness. As comic Jon Stewart said, “Everybody thought Barack Obama was going to [inspire people] when he came to Washington, but, you know, the Senate seems like the place where smart people go to die.”
Watch and listen...
to answer fact or fiction :-)
AP don't reply to the comment box if you want I will delete as an edit