Seminal Point

[Extra Stout]

Doc Jerome,

Would you agree that the underlying principle of Obama's campaign has been to take this struggle against the system/government/elites, and rather than formulating liberation through the perspective of a black man, he has assembled a framework for doing so through the perspective of a generic working American?

[DarrinS]

We all knew that it would ultimately come to this point. The moment when Americans would have to decide if they are indeed ready to embark on their exigent journey of reconciliation, forgiveness, and resolution, or sink back into the facileness of the status quo. Reconciliation can only begin with the acknowledgment that something has taken place which remains unresolved, and has been used to divide, and provoke fear and mistrust among Americans. Everyone, with no exceptions, must be willing to forgive and move forward. We must be resolute in resisting the temptation to descend into archaic, baneful patterns of paranoid thought that only serve to make this country weak and incongruous, unable to fulfill it's promise. Together, we must hold those that propagate misinformation as fact accountable to the spirit that is the promise of America. We are better than what this country's limitations have been. And now that we stand before the threshold of change, there is no need to suc b to fear, because we stand united in a cause that is much greater than ourselves. There is a sense of inspiration and hope not seen in a long time in America. It is time for American citizens to rise to the challenge set before us and seize this opportunity that too seldom visits. Then, and only then, can we heal this country and advance into the future with great promise. Vote for change.

Stop the misinformation and limited cognitivism.

Who talks like that?

"You'll rue the day!!!"

[fyatuk]

That is the conundrum that people in America must solve in order to bring a sense of propriety and fairness to every facet of the American experience. Eliminating the all too obvious biases in the media would be a perfect start. He who controls the image controls the perceptions of that image.

Which leads me to a question I've asked many others who proclaim similar concepts: What is your opinion on voting for a third/minor party or independent candidate?

Yes, the word cognitivism is derived from the word cognition. However, the word cognitivism is used in several ways. In a general sense, with respect to discourse, it is the position that sentences used in that discourse are meaningful and capable of being true or false. This concept can apply to many aspects of life, including ethics and many normative matters such as contests, music, and even the concept of democracy. All have norms (or rules), and while it would be difficult to accept that the candidate with the most delegates does not win the contest, or that C-E-G is not C Major (triad), or even that we have freedom of speech, the contrast in ethics can be true or false too. We may want ethical statements to be categorically true, while we only need statements about right action to be contingent on the acceptance of the rules of a situation. The choice to play the contest, compose or conceptualize music, pursue the lawful promise that is America according to the given set of rules are all legitimate transfers of application.

I admit, while it does not reflect an absolute, it does reflect an abated position or diminution which lies somewhere inbetween. Thus, limited cognitivism does not adhere to the rules, nor to the concept of absolutes. In short, artistic license.

If you do a web search for "limited cognitivism", your posts are the only entries of those two words being used together.

Why? Because they do not apply together. Cognitivism expresses a particular view on ethical sentences and propositions; all other uses of the term derived from this and express similar ideas applied to other areas such as art. Applying "limited" to it implies an impermanence of that view, basically making that view meaningless. The adjective is just not compatable with the noun.

It's a nonsensical phrase you have imbued with meaning to yourself, which is fine.

By your own meaning, "limited cognitivism" relates to the grey area between the absolutes, and towards not adhering to rules. Which means the last line of your original post "Stop the misinformation and limited cognitivism." is pushing for direct absolutes and clear stated facts that can be applied in a cognivitist view to obtain clear true/false values.

Which again, seems to make little sense with the rest of your posts.

[peewee's lovechild]

Reposting your flawed premise does very little to help your case. An answer has already been rendered.

I am not, have not, nor will I, accuse you of being racist unless it is merited. You continue to hide under the protective skirt of Kori in an attempt to hide your shortcomings. Perhaps this explains your support and defence of Sen. Clinton. You see the skirt of a woman to be a protective cloak with which you find comfort and protection from “The Force.” Well, Vader never showed such cowardice.

The fact that out of all the possible scenarios at your disposal, you selected from your vast reservoir of knowledge, an example that does not apply to Sen. Obama’s situation, to prove some phantom analogous connection. Rev. Wright has NEVER made any broad assertions of any kind regarding white people. He rails against the system/government/rich white folk.

1. System- A group of interrelated components or elements forming a complex whole. In his case, anyone or anything denying him an opportunity to pursue his American dream.

2. Government- Remember, he is a former marine who served his country (had to be out of love considering the times) and after having completed that service, allowed little opportunity.

3. Rich White Folk- Hyper elite's that control the flow of wealth and opportunity in this country and indeed the world. Not all white people, but the 1% in control.

His statements indicate that he identifies the above as a static presence in society. The gospel preached at the church (Trinity) is not one of hate, nor hating white people. Listen to Sen. Obama’s speech to get the rest, . . .

I am not seeking an apology from you, as I am not hurt by your choice of words, you are. After posting and reposting, you have successfully destroyed your credibility 8 times. I am certain that George Lucas did not intend Vader to be so uncouth.

You're a funny guy.

But, the first part of your post clearly reflects your sexist views.
Thanks for that.

at your Vader never showed such cowardice . . .

He killed little kids in Episode 3.
You know nothing about the Star Wars saga.

You make me laugh.
That's a good thing.

[Doc Jerome]

Extra Stout,

In a word, . . . yes. He is the first politician with broad appeal to realize that the struggles of all Americans will be aided by enlisting a genuine grass roots, broad coalition of average American citizens regardless of political, socio-economic, racial, and religious affiliations for the common good. He uses a fundamental common sense approach coupled with exceptional intelligence to help shape policies that will benefit the country and it’s people as a whole, not a privileged few.

The black man’s plight in this country is no different from the white man’s or the hispanic’s, latino’s, american indian’s, chinese, etc. or the immigrant's (wherever one immigrates from). All want to make a decent wage, contribute to society in some meaningful way, and leave some sort of legacy for their children. Everyone wants good educational opportunities, jobs that pay a decent wage, and safe streets for their children. No one group has any exclusive claim to this.

The problem has been that noone has had the courage nor the means to resist the power of special interest groups with enormous amounts of money and influence. He has that courage and opportunity by not accepting money from lobbyists and PACS. In effect, he does not have to cowtow because there are no strings attached. His obligation is to the million plus average citizens that donated, and the voters. That translates into doing the will of the people again, or at the very least, signalling the inauguration of a new type of politics and a new type of political leader.

It is a fact that in America, it’s citizens can be cajoled or bamboozled into voting against their own interests. I just hope that does not become the narrative of this election cycle, where the rarest of opportunities come by and we do not seize it.

[peewee's lovechild]

There is enough information out here to refute most of HRC's experience claims already.

Obama's Shallow Credentials on National Security Are Dangerous for the Country

by Joseph C. Wilson

Posted March 20, 2008 | 01:51 PM (EST)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Clinton campaign ad featuring a 3 a.m. telephone call as a metaphor for experienced leadership in foreign policy has generated considerable comment, but much of the reaction is from people who have never been involved in foreign policy and certainly never had to field such a call in a crisis situation. Some of the responses are from advisers to the Obama campaign who know better but are actively diminishing the importance and realities of presidential engagement for immediate political advantage.

To begin with, there are such 3 a.m. calls. During my long career as a diplomat, including crises and military actions in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, I have been on the receiving end, the sending end, and the development of options that led to some of those late night calls. The president's role in crisis management is direct, critical and reflects the exercise of leadership in its most fundamental and powerful form. That capability is not intuitive; rather, it comes from years of experience, training and exposure to the complexities that are in inherent in international relations.

On August 3, 1990, while serving as acting Ambassador to Iraq, I received a middle of the night call from then President George H.W. Bush's Middle East adviser, who informed me that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. While the president had not personally called me, it was clear to me from that moment on that he was directly responsible for every significant decision made and engaged in marshaling the forces of the U.S. government and the support of the international community in what ultimately became Desert Storm.

In 1995 and 1996, while serving as Political Adviser to the Commander in Chief of U.S. Armed Forces, I was directly involved in the diplomacy associated with the movement of troops from Western Europe to Bosnia in support of the efforts of President Clinton and his special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, to implement the Dayton Accords and bring an end to the Balkan genocide.

In 1998, as Senior Director for Africa in President Clinton's National Security Council, I helped orchestrate six phone calls, some late at night, directly from President Clinton, three each to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles, and Eritrean President Afwerki, to stop the air war between the two countries. Two of Barack Obama's senior advisers, Tony Lake and Susan Rice, were also involved in that effort, and could attest to the importance of presidential involvement if they would choose not to remain silent as a ploy to protect their candidate's slender credentials.

In each of the three cases, there was a critical common denominator: direct presidential engagement. During the Desert Shield part of the first Gulf War, then President Bush personally chaired many of the National Security Council meetings and made nonstop calls to foreign leaders to assemble the international coalition and secure the U.N. resolutions that provided the legal underpinning for the military action.

In former Yugoslavia, President Clinton played a similar role, reaching out to friends and allies, to adversaries and belligerents, in order to reach agreements that permitted the deployment of an international peacekeeping force.

And in the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, the aerial bombings of Addis Ababa and Asmara ceased thanks to the personal efforts of a President.

Contrast the above examples with the last seven plus years of George W. Bush and the conclusion is inescapable: presidential leadership is critical and should be tempered with experience and capability.

Senator Clinton has a long and well do ented history of involvement in many of critical foreign policy issues we have confronted and will continue to confront as a nation. Critics can quibble about the details of the health plan she fought for in the 1990s, or whether hers was the decisive or merely an important voice in the Northern Ireland peace efforts, but there can be no denying that she has been in the arena for a generation fighting for what she believes in, gaining experience and developing leadership skills. She has traveled the world and met with international leaders both as the First Lady and as a respected senator on the Senate Armed Services Committee. As NSC director on Africa I experienced her direct positive involvement in U.S.-African relations; it was she, as First Lady who advanced through her own travel, then urged and made possible President Clinton's historic trip. In the Senate, she has aggressively exercised her oversight responsibility and held the Pentagon's feet to the fire on plans related to withdrawal from Iraq, shaped legislation requiring reports to Congress, and cosponsored legislation with Senator Byrd to deauthorize the war with Iraq. She has exercised the levers of power because she knows how to do so. That is not a small thing; it is not a campaign theme. It is simply true and goes to the heart of whether she, or anyone, is prepared to be the president to manage at once two wars and a global economic crisis.

Senator Obama is clearly a gifted politician and orator. I disagree profoundly with his transparently political efforts to turn George Bush's war into Hillary Clinton's responsibility. I was present in that debate, in Washington, from beginning to end, and Obama was nowhere to be seen. His current campaign aides in foreign policy, Tony Lake and Susan Rice, were also in Washington, but they chose to remain silent during that debate, when it mattered.

Claims of superior intuitive judgment by his campaign and by him are self-evidently disingenuous, especially in light of disclosures about his long associations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko. But his assertions of advanced judgment are also ludicrous when the question of what Obama has accomplished in his four years in the Senate is considered.

As the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee on Europe, he has not chaired a single substantive oversight hearing, even though the breakdown in our relations with Europe and NATO is harming our operations in Afghanistan. Nor did he take a single official trip to Europe as chairman. This is the sum total of his actions in the most important responsibility he has had in the Senate. What are his actual experiences that reassure us that when the phone rings at 3 a.m. he will know what to do, which levers of power to pull, or which world leaders he can count on?

Obama has stated that he will rely upon his advisers. But how will he know which ones to depend upon and how will he be able to evaluate what they say? Already, one of his chief foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, has been compelled to resign for, among other indiscretions, honestly revealing on a British television program that Obama's public position on withdrawal from Iraq is not really his true position, nor does it reflect what he would do. Her gaffe exposed a vein of cynicism on national security. How confident can we be in his judgment? In fact, the hard truth is that he has no such experience.

Obama has tried to have it both ways on the issue of national security. On the one hand, he claims his intuition somehow would make him best equipped to handle the difficult challenges that face the next president. On the other hand, he tries to ridicule and dismiss as relatively insignificant the idea that actual experience with and intimate knowledge of foreign affairs and leaders, the U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the intricacies of diplomacy matter. He has even suggested that talking about the problems of national security amounts to exploitation of "fear." One of Obama's fervent supporters, a Harvard professor named Orlando Patterson, who has no expertise in foreign policy, wrote absurdly in a New York Times op-ed that the 3 a.m. ad wasn't about national security at all, but really a subliminal racist attack. Delusions aside, sometimes a discussion about national security is about national security.

There will, in fact, be 3 a.m. phone calls for the next president. They are not make believe. I have been there for such calls. The next president cannot be afraid or hesitant of handling the enormous national security crises that President Bush will leave behind. One thing is certain -- the calls will come. Obama has only an abdication of his chief senatorial responsibility as a basis for assessing what his judgment might be if and when the phone rings. Which of his shifting coterie of volatile advisers would he turn to? Will it be the one who repudiated his withdrawal plan, exposing his real intention, prior to being forced to resign? Or will it be those advisers who remained silent until politically convenient -- several years and several thousand lives after the shock and awe invasion, conquest and disastrous occupation of Iraq?

The calls are real and experience is real, too. The campaign might be treated as a game by the media, but those calls are serious, deadly serious.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-wi...a_b_92586.html

[PixelPusher]

Damn, was Joe Wilson promised Secretary of State or something?

[peewee's lovechild]

Damn, was Joe Wilson promised Secretary of State or something?

I'm not sure, but he did provide facts.

I can't wait to read the spin on this.

[101A]

It is a fact that in America, it’s citizens can be cajoled or bamboozled into voting against their own interests. I just hope that does not become the narrative of this election cycle, where the rarest of opportunities come by and we do not seize it.

The ultimate irony is that the biggest flaw of Democracy is specifically that people DO vote in their own SELF interest. The majority becomes tyranical; ultimately the republic becomes untenable. The "powerful", "elite" or simply "rich" do what they can within, and outside of legal means to stave off the ever-hungry and aware of their own power masses; which simply stews the pot of envy, and speeds up the inevitible.

your populist "policies which benefit all" rhetoric. Get Obamas brilliant policies the out of the way, and let this country be what it was designed to be, and guaranteed by that more and more worthless rag of a do ent the Consi ution!....FREEEEEEE!!!!

[clambake]

i'm just glad that whitey has convinced himself that there's good reason to beat down the blacks.

[Don Quixote]

Some have hope that inspiration can bring change.
Some have inspiration that change can bring hope.
And some have change that hope will bring inspiration.
We are inspired and hopeful and changed.
We need not fear what lies before us.
For before us lies the future, and the future will change unless it stays the same.
So we can hope in not fearing, and not fear in hoping.
If we stay divided, we cannot unite. And if we are not united, then we cannot be one.

GREAT STUFF! Have you given thought to writing speeches for one Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.?

Now let me try ...

Um, we should elect Obama because we believe in the ... future. And the future is coming. And the past was yesterday. And we ought to vote for him because we believe ... in hope. And hope for the future. And if we protect the future, we will have hope.

Let's not go back to the past, because the hope ... is in the future. Yeah, and we need, um, change.

Was it pretty good?

[Don Quixote]

I nominate this for "Postmodern Post of the Year."

You know ... I think the same thing when I listen to Obama. He's the first real postmodern candidate, maybe the second if you count Bill Clinton as one.

Also, it is interesting to note that, for all his rhetoric of bringing unity to Washington and America, his record and history show that he is a rather partisan liberal activist. If that's what you want in your President, then fine, but let's drop this charade that Obama is anything other than what he is, which is an old-school leftist.

If any of the three candidates is "guilty" of reaching across the aisle in the name of unity, bipartisanship, etc., it's McCain (e.g., McCain-Feingold, etc.).

Lastly, I'm highly su ious of any, and I mean ANY, political figure that promises peace and hope in exchange for my vote. Listening to some of the speeches (mostly Democratic, sometimes Rep.), I get the feeling that they're ashamed/embarrassed of America, or have this idea that America is a soup kitchen, or that there is generally no hope or opportunity in this country. The underlying assumption in all of this, of course, is that government can and will fix all these things, and finally give us hope.

I think most of us, conservative or otherwise, will recognize that this is a pretty darn great country, full of opportunities for success and wealth, no matter who is in office. So we would agree that some of this "hope" rhetoric is nonsense. But there is a bigger problem.

As a conservative evangelical, and a follower of Jesus, I confess that my hope cannot and will never come from gummint. I think you all know who I believe gives us our rights, hope, etc. So I will wake up every morning happy, even if Hillary or Barack gets elected. And I would recommend that secular non-religious types look at it the same way. This country is NOT falling apart, the sky is not falling, all is not wrong in the world. And I certainly don't need or want Obama to fix it.

[Doc Jerome]

You cannot fight, what is inevitable.