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Olbermann Scott McClellan Speaks Out
He comes clean and Bush and friends try to dismiss what he says-
they try to characterize him as being just pissed off or mentally unhinged
Olbermann points out the use of spin and talking points repeated again and again by different people who knew him.
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Barack Obama says Democrats have caved into the Bush administration fearful of being seen as soft on terrorism and not loyal Americans not patriotic enough. What they should do is stand their ground. It is no wonder Democrats like Hillary have a real chip on their shoulder . Obama wants them to do what might be the impossible act as if they cared and that it was not just a political game .
Barack Obama On Iraq, Opposition from the start
Obama considers Iraq visit amid GOP criticism The Associated Press May 29/08
WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama — increasingly under fire from John McCain as he appears poised to win the Democratic nomination — said he is considering a trip to Iraq but dismissed as a "political stunt" an invitation by the Republican candidate to make the visit together.
These attacks on Obama are attempts to treat his campaign and him as if he were not a legitimate candidate to undermine him.As David Bromowich argues:
At Huffingto Post David Bromowich Assassination Chatter and the End of Legitimacy
May 27, 2008
Legitimacy is the most elemental and elusive of political goods; a gift which only a society can give its leaders, and only the same society can take away.
To deprive a politician of legitimacy is long and serious work. A good deal of the process has always taken place behind the scenes before the evidence comes into view.
Thus, from 1994 onward, a language of generalized insult and contempt was used by Republicans about Bill Clinton in order to deprive him of the claim to be recognized as the legitimate holder of the office of president. Newt Gingrich and the Contract-with-America wing of the party were deliberate in the tactics they deployed. They coolly decided to use the word "sick" to characterize the Clintons and their policies. Instructions regarding which words of contempt to use and when to use them, went out in memorandums and were put into practice on pundit shows and talk radio. This story is told by David Brock, an insider who came to regret the part he played, in his memoir Blinded by the Right.
..We have seen a return this year to the politics of delegitimation by the extreme Republican right. Yet what has been most surprising is the complicity, and then the open participation in that process by the Clinton campaign. Race was always going to be an element in this year's election. But the comparison of the front runner Barack Obama to the marginal candidate Jesse Jackson on the pretext that both had won South Carolina was a shocker when people heard it come out of the mouth of Bill Clinton. Again, the talk, by Hillary Clinton and her operatives after Ohio, of "the commander in chief test" which (it was said) she and John McCain had "passed" but Obama mysteriously could not pass, was a second stroke of the same kind. There was no scientific or political content to the statement. Its significance was gestural. It was an effort to delegitimate Obama, and its truth could only be shown by its success or failure.
Hillary Clinton's recent careless-careful mention of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, in answer to a question about why she would stay in the Democratic race when all the numbers are against her, raised the tactics of delegitimation to a pitch as weird as anything the Clintons can have seen in the years 1997-98.
And so it goes ,
GORD.
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